Spy Pilot: Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident, and a Controversial Cold War Legacy

^{Chapter Two} OPEN SKIES

On May 1, 1954, Nikita Khrushchev assumed his position of authority outside Lenin’s and Stalin’s Mausoleum in the heart of Moscow, alongside many of his top generals and members of the politburo, as a large crowd of cheering citizens lined the streets. Eight months after rising to power as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, following the death of Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev carefully watched the traditional May Day parade of tanks, troops, antiaircraft guns, and airplanes. Included among the display of Soviet military might was the new Myasishchev M-4 Molot (“Hammer”) long-range bomber, which pleased him greatly. He knew the Americans were watching.

Even as the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, a massive eight-engine monster designed to deliver nuclear payloads and provide a new level of deterrent, moved toward operational status in 1955, many American military and political leaders believed the Soviet Union was closing the gap in the arms race, particularly in the deployment of long-range strategic bombers. The so-called bomber gap became a source of intense debate and a political burden for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, especially when word began to leak to the West about the M-4, which was seen as a significant leap forward in Soviet technology.

The possibility that the new weapon could pose risks to the US strategic arsenal created grave concern in certain circles in Washington. How many of these planes did the Soviets have? Where were they based? How would the United States know if it had suddenly fallen behind in the arms race?

While pushing for additional spending on bombers and other remedies to maintain American superiority, hawks in Congress, the Pentagon, and the media pressured Eisenhower to address what they saw as a gathering vulnerability. Some even suggested that by not acting decisively, the old general was risking the possibility of a communist sneak attack, tapping into the bitter memories of a generation shaped by Pearl Harbor.

By November 1954, Eisenhower knew what he had to do. It was the sort of risk only a president could authorize.

William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan understood the power of a secret. As the head of the Office of Special Services (OSS) during World War II, Donovan proved to be a formidable asset for the Allied cause. The former Justice Department official, who was greatly influenced by Great Britain’s MI6 spy agency, assembled a network of clandestine operatives, established training programs for espionage and sabotage, and coordinated once-disparate activities into a cohesive message to be consumed by the president and other decision makers. He also landed on Utah Beach on the day after D-day, defying orders from his superiors.

Moving inland with one of his agents, Donovan and the other man were suddenly pinned down by German machine-gun fire.

“David,” he said, turning to his colleague, “we mustn’t be captured. We know too much.”¹

“Yes, sir,” responded Colonel David K. E. Bruce.

Donovan then asked him a question that went straight to the heart of the matter.

“Have you the pill?”

At this, the OSS’s commander of European covert operations admitted that he had not brought the agency’s specially concocted suicide pill.

“Never mind,” Donovan said. “I have two of them.”

The man who practically invented American spying would one day be recognized as the father of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Two years after the war ended and the OSS was disbanded, the dawn of the Cold War convinced powerful members of Congress and the Truman administration that the country needed a permanent clandestine service, which led to the founding of the CIA. Many OSS veterans wound up with positions of importance and authority in the CIA, including one of Donovan’s most trusted operatives: former corporate lawyer Allen W. Dulles, who served as the agency’s director from 1953 to 1961 and profoundly shaped its culture.

The younger brother of the towering John Foster Dulles, who served as Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Allen was among the small group of Eastern intellectuals who helped shape postwar American foreign policy, especially with regard to what they perceived as the existential threat of communism. While John Foster, whom Eisenhower would eulogize as “one of the truly great men of our time,”² extended America’s dominance through the projection of the soft power of diplomacy, Allen represented not just the ultimate spy who trafficked in the exploitation of secrets but also the feared enforcer from democracy’s home office.

Largely invisible to the American public, the CIA emerged as one of the most powerful institutions in Washington, maneuvering in the shadows against the Soviets and frequently exceeding its intelligence-gathering mandate to become an instrument of covert foreign policy, staging coups in third-world countries including Iran, Guatemala, and the Congo. In an age when the epic clash between East and West trumped every other consideration, even the preservation of democracy, installing friendly governments was often justified as the price of blocking Soviet aggression and influence.

All too eager to cultivate his image as a power broker and that of the agency as an instrument of American will, Dulles once advised a journalist to think of the CIA as “the State Department for unfriendly countries.”³

The case of Iran demonstrated how the imperatives of the struggle for Cold War advantage sometimes produced unintended consequences. By working with the British to covertly undermine a democratically elected government and reaffirm Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the latest in a line of royals known as the Shah, as the country’s all-powerful leader in 1953, the United States gained a steadfast ally. The coup would pay huge dividends through the years, but the Shah’s hardline tactics eventually produced significant dissent, which helped foment the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

The battle for secrets was deeply embedded in the arc of the Cold War, starting with the act of espionage that enabled the Soviet Union to explode its first atomic device in August 1949, effectively launching the arms race. In 1953, American citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed for passing Manhattan Project secrets to the Soviets, providing a widely publicized object lesson about the power of acquired knowledge to tilt the international order.

When the Pentagon began to worry about the possibility of a “bomber gap,” the CIA was tasked with investigating the situation.

The resulting estimate was based on “knowledge of the Soviet aircraft-manufacturing industry and the types of aircraft under construction… and included projections concerning the future rate of build-up on the basis of existing production rates and expected expansion of industrial capacity,” Dulles recalled in his memoir.⁴ The CIA estimated that the Soviets would produce hundreds of M-4s in the coming years.

The large contingent of American agents scattered across the world, using fake names and awash in spy-craft, routinely risked their lives to obtain vital intelligence about Soviet assets, capabilities, and plans. But human intelligence was not the answer to every problem.

Harry Truman wrestled with this dilemma as far back as 1947, authorizing a series of border-skirting missions in modified fighters, bombers, and even balloons, with mixed results. Several aircraft were lost at sea, and a Navy plane went down over Siberia. His successor could see the stakes rising. Eisenhower needed to know what the Soviets had, before they surprised him with something big.

The possibility of building a series of reconnaissance airplanes and routinely flying over the heart of the Soviet Union to photograph military assets arrived in the Oval Office several days after the midterm elections. This idea was first proposed by James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who chaired a special commission that had been formed to consider the sort of weapons needed to protect the country from another Pearl Harbor, and Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid.

No one played a more critical role in advocating for the aerial surveillance than Allen Dulles, who recalled, “Without a better basis than we had for gauging the nature and extent of the threat to us from surprise nuclear attack, our very survival might be threatened.”⁵ The man who sent operatives into dangerous situations and routinely pushed third-world leaders around was never cavalier about the projection of American power. In fact, after it was all over, Khrushchev paid Dulles a telling compliment: “Despite all of Dulles’s blind hatred for communism, when it came to the possibility of war being unleashed, he remained a sober politician.”⁶

After carefully studying the proposal and determining that the potential rewards far outweighed the risks, Dulles told the president: “Difficulties might arise out of these flights but we can live with them.”⁷

For Eisenhower, a grandfatherly figure who reflected traditional America’s middle-of-the-road impulses, the need to gather information about the Soviet military buildup cast a large shadow across his presidency. The rivalry would largely define his years in the White House. Shortly after entering office in January 1953, he had used the veiled threat of nuclear weapons to bring North Korea and Red China to the bargaining table, which resulted in an end to the hostilities. Still, the man who managed the enormous military and political challenge of the D-day landings, one of the pivot points of the century, proved a reluctant warrior in the White House. During those tense years, Ike moved forward with modernizing the country’s nuclear forces, which led to a large number of tests in the Nevada desert and on isolated islands in the Pacific, and he partnered with Canada to form the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), to provide constant monitoring of the distant skies. But he understood the horrors of war and was determined to avoid overt confrontation at all costs, especially with the Soviets, realizing that any direct collision between the superpowers could quickly spin out of control.

Understandably concerned that the Soviets might see the provocation of an invading spy plane as an act of war, Eisenhower approved the plan with one big condition: No missions were to be flown by military pilots. This directive was supported enthusiastically by Killian and Land, who had encouraged the CIA to take the lead, but frustrated the Air Force generals who had shepherded the initiative. Ike was adamant. In the event that one of the planes was ever shot down, he wanted the White House to have plausible deniability.

As a boy in Michigan, Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson sometimes hiked to the top of a bluff with his younger brother, Clifford, to fly kites during a thunderstorm. “I think he thought he was Ben Franklin,” Clifford said with a smile many years later.⁸ “He learned a lot about how the wind worked.” In time he would learn to harness the forces of nature for more ambitious purposes.

Educated as an engineer at the University of Michigan, Johnson happily accepted a job as a tooler, earning $83 per month during the depths of the Great Depression, just to get his foot in the door at the still-nascent Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, which had been bought out of bankruptcy by a group headed by Robert Gross. He quickly rose through the ranks, solving a critical aerodynamic problem with the Electra, one of the most successful airliners of the first era of commercial aviation, and designing the Hudson bomber for the British, famously reworking the blueprint to satisfy his clients during a lost weekend in a London hotel.

“Kelly was very smart and very driven,” said Pete Law, one of his longtime engineers. “He was the sort of man who figured out a way to get things done, regardless of the obstacles.”

By 1943, his P-38 Lightning was playing a significant role in the Pacific War, demonstrated by US Army Air Force Major Richard Bong’s forty kills. With the military in desperate need of new and more powerful aircraft, the thirty-three-year-old Johnson cast a large shadow at the fast-growing aircraft company headquartered at the Burbank Airport.

With word leaking out about the Germans developing the world’s first jet-powered aircraft, the Messerschmitt ME 262, which everyone recognized as a potential game changer in the skies over occupied Europe, Johnson landed a contract with the Pentagon to build America’s answer. Understanding the stakes and the need for performance and secrecy, he convinced Robert Gross, the Lockheed chairman, to let him move into a new hangar, separated from the rest of the company. “I wanted a direct relationship between design engineer and mechanic and manufacturing… without the delays and complications of intermediate departments,” he said.⁹ With black-out drapes covering the windows and complete authority vested in one man, the Advanced Development Projects division, which initially included a lean staff of twenty-three engineers and a small number of technicians and mechanics, quickly grew into Kelly Johnson’s private empire. During a cryptic telephone conversation, a member of the staff made a joking reference to the rickety moonshine still in the popular Li’l Abner comic strip. Soon everyone in the know started referring to the secret hangar as the Skunk Works, which became the most fabled factory in aviation history.

Unencumbered by layers of management questioning his every decision, and mostly left alone by the Army Air Force, Johnson and his small team required only 143 days to design and manufacture the first XP-80, eventually to be known as the P-80 Shooting Star. It was a singular achievement, validated in the successful first flight by Tony LeVier, a onetime barnstormer from Minnesota who had dreamed of flying for one of the airlines but flunked his physical. He became a test pilot instead, destined to make twelve first flights for Lockheed, emerging as a legend in a shadowy world. “Tony was the greatest American test pilot of all time,” said his friend and protégé Bob Gilliland, who in 1964 became the first man to fly the SR-71 Blackbird.

The risks associated with testing an unproven machine, especially as aviation negotiated the treacherous transition from propellers to jet engines, could be seen during one of LeVier’s early flights. Moments after takeoff, the engine exploded and blew the tail off. “I thought I had bought the farm,” LeVier said.¹⁰ He somehow landed the craft but spent several weeks in the hospital, his spine severely injured. He was soon back at work, however, putting his life on the line in the next version of Johnson’s new jet.

Various problems needed to be solved to make the P-80 reliable, including the especially menacing threat of compressibility, which Johnson had first encountered while building the earlier P-38 Lighting fighter. The violent buildup of air ahead of the plane, which could overwhelm a pilot’s ability to maintain control or even break it into pieces, needed to be mitigated with various structural alterations and a strict adherence to flight procedures. Mastering air flow and the art of creating machines capable of sustaining such pressures represented foundational discoveries, building blocks to be applied in the design of more-sophisticated aircraft in the years ahead.

The F-104 Starfighter grew out of Johnson’s discussions with pilots and other Air Force officers during a trip to the warfront in Korea but would not be ready until after the conflict ended. The sleek machine, which looked like a silver bullet, was a quantum leap in fighter design. At a time when the early success of the Soviet-made MiGs led to a conventional wisdom that the future belonged entirely to swept-wing aircraft, the counterintuitive Starfighter featured very small trapezoidal wings—the perfect size determined during excessive model testing at Edwards Air Force Base—and a compact fuselage. The result was an extremely fast airplane, the first fighter capable of reaching Mach 2—two times the speed of sound. Although the F-104 would have a checkered safety record, it was embraced not only by the US Air Force but also by a long list of NATO and other Allied countries that made it their primary fighter in the middle years of the Cold War. While strengthening Johnson’s ties to the Pentagon, the Starfighter also demonstrated his ability to push right up to the edge of what was possible with innovative ideas.

By consistently producing planes that flew faster and higher, with increasingly more complex requirements—driven by patriotism and a sense of mission that he once explained as, “be quick, be quiet, and be on time”—Johnson and his engineers dealt with the various consequences of extending the frontier, which tested their ability to find creative solutions. Johnson was well on his way to widespread acclaim as one of the greatest aviation designers ever to wield a slide rule. “The Leonardo da Vinci of American aviation,” said Bob Gilliland, who tested the Starfighter. Hall Hibbard, one of his superiors, once admiringly said, “That damned Swede can actually see air!”¹¹

The CIA needed just such a visionary to build its first spy plane.

Long before the solution to the problem arrived at the White House, Johnson was pushing his friends at the Pentagon to give him a crack at such a project. As Chris Pocock noted in his book The U-2 Spyplane, nearly one year before Eisenhower gave the go-ahead, on November 30, 1953, Jack Carter, a recently retired US Air Force colonel who worked in the planning department at Lockheed, addressed an “eyes only”¹² memo to his boss, Gene Root, a prominent figure who would eventually lead Lockheed’s missile and space division. Outlining the sort of aircraft he believed the military needed to overfly the Soviet Union, he said he believed that a single-seat plane capable of attaining altitudes of between 65,000 and 70,000 feet would be able to avoid Soviet defenses until about 1960. This, as it turns out, was a rather-astute and prescient estimate. Urging his company to design and build such an aircraft, Carter told his superior, “The corporation would be directly contributing to the solution of one of the most vital and difficult problems” facing America’s strategic defense.¹³

In December, according to the once-classified program logs he maintained, Johnson began discussions with the Air Force about modifying the F-104 design to “get the maximum possible altitude for reconnaissance purposes.”¹⁴ The final design, known as CL-282, retained some semblance of the Starfighter fuselage but looked like a very different airplane.

After Johnson’s design was initially rejected as too radical by the Air Force, authority over the program passed to the CIA (although the Air Force would supply the engine), which was more receptive to the proposal. The key meeting took place over lunch in Washington on November 19, 1954, twelve days after Eisenhower’s tentative approval of the project, with Johnson being grilled by Allen Dulles; one of his longtime deputies, Lawrence Houston; Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott; and Air Force General Donald Putt.

The discussion was frank. At one point, someone asked Johnson why he thought he could get such a cutting-edge airplane in the air within nine months when other defense contractors insisted such a timetable was too ambitious.

“He has proven it three times already!” Putt interjected, referring to the P-80, P-80A, and F-104.¹⁵

When the five men shook hands, Lockheed took a step into the shadowy world of espionage.

“I was impressed with the secrecy aspect and was told that I was essentially being drafted for the project,” Johnson wrote in his diary.¹⁶

As the CIA took over security of the Skunk Works, sealing the perimeter with serious-looking plainclothes men carrying automatic weapons, and arranged to fund Lockheed’s $35 million contract through a dummy company, Kelly selected a special team and finalized his blueprints for a revolutionary aircraft. He started searching for an isolated place to test it.

The CIA refused to consider Edwards Air Force Base, the massive facility in California’s high desert where Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier in 1947, which transformed the once-dusty outpost into a center of test pilot activity; or the nearby Lockheed facility in Palmdale known as Plant 42. Both were secure, but not secure enough. The Company, as the CIA was known, wanted a new base where its new plane and new pilots could disappear.

LeVier suggested an isolated patch of dirt in Nevada. At the controls of a small plane on April 12, 1955, he gave the decision makers, including Johnson and the CIA’s Richard “Dick” Bissell Jr., their first glimpse of the area around a dry lakebed that was wide and straight enough for takeoffs and landings. “We didn’t even get clearance,” he said, “but flew over it, and within 30 seconds, we knew it was the place.”¹⁷

Since it was located adjacent to the Nevada Test Site, where many of the early atomic bombs were exploded, with ominous mushroom clouds visible from the distant horizon, the land was not exactly prime real estate for civilian development. “Site was a dandy,” Johnson wrote, “but will take much red tape to get cleared.”¹⁸ This was Bissell’s problem, and he wasn’t worried. The proximity to the nuclear proving ground would make it easy for the government to deem the land off limits without too many questions being asked.

Several weeks later, the base, located at an altitude of about 5,000 feet, began to take shape with a 6,000-foot runway, two large hangars, a control tower, several mobile homes, and a mess hall. Because everyone involved with the project needed a top secret security clearance and was forbidden to even acknowledge its existence, the place became known in the shorthand of the pilots, engineers, and spooks as the Ranch, Watertown, Groom Lake, or, Kelly’s personal preference, Paradise Ranch. Only years later would it acquire its more mythical name, derived from the government grid system: Area 51.

“Whatever you called it, it was a pretty bleak place,” recalled Jake Kratt, one of the first CIA pilots brought into the program.

Bissell knew very little about airplanes, but he now had his own very special air base. A Connecticut-born aristocrat who had taught economics at Yale, his alma mater, Bissell was pulled into government service just before Pearl Harbor. Near the end of the war, he was part of the American delegation to the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, where a dying President Franklin Roosevelt, looking very frail, ceded domination over much of Eastern Europe to the communists. In time, historians would mark the spoils party as the prelude to the Cold War. Bissell came away understanding, long before the blockade of Berlin and the Soviet Union’s first atomic blast, that the wartime cooperation with the USSR was transactional and temporary. “I left Yalta knowing I would never believe Stalin to be an ally,” he said.¹⁹

Work with the postwar Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe eventually led him to the CIA, where he became one of Dulles’s most trusted aides, slipping easily into a covert world where he was expected to fight a war in the shadows while keeping the country’s secrets. “There had to be a piece of him that was cold to do what he did,” said his son, Richard Bissell III, who learned about his father’s most famous accomplishments much later in life.²⁰ “When you are in the business of getting a foreign leader out of a job—or killed—you have to be.” A devoted family man, he nevertheless compartmentalized his world, never letting his wife or children know exactly what he was up to when he was gone for weeks at a time. Like the rest of America, they had no clue about the U-2.

Headquartered at a front company operating out of a civilian office building on E Street near the Lincoln Memorial, and with complete authority over the CIA’s first foray into aerial reconnaissance and the clout to pull whatever strings Johnson needed yanked, Bissell did not need to be told that the White House expected him to produce with the aircraft, working under the code name Aquatone. His career was riding on Johnson’s ability to deliver on his bold promise.

Feeling enormous urgency, Johnson pushed his team relentlessly and leaned on contractors he saw falling behind schedule, especially the Pratt & Whitney people, who struggled to get the engine performing properly. “Terrifically long hours,” he said in one of his program log entries.²¹ “Everybody almost dead.”

While working through various problems with the power plant, tooling, electronics, pressure suits, aerodynamics, part fabrication, and wind-tunnel testing, the Skunk Works team negotiated the long road from the start of design to first experimental flight in just 243 days. The confidence Bissell and his closest associates—the Air Force liaison officer, Colonel Ozzie Ritland, and the CIA’s expert on the Soviet atomic program, Herbert Miller—gained in Johnson, which grew out of their close working relationship, allowed the agency to cede many details to him without micromanaging the Skunk Works, which significantly sped up the aircraft’s development. They hit what Bissell once considered an “almost unrealistic date” for the first flight.²²

Disassembled and loaded into a Douglas C-124 cargo plane for the short flight to the Ranch, the first U-2 was then reassembled in one of the new hangars. Some of the men involved with the program saw it up close for the first time on the runway.

The U-2 was a very different sort of aircraft. Powered at first by a J57 Pratt & Whitney engine, it featured very long wings, stretching more than 80 feet—nearly twice as long as the fuselage—which proved crucial in achieving the proper amount of lift to sustain flight at such a high altitude. When it was parked, the wings tended to droop, a feature exacerbated by a scaled-down set of landing gear—a so-called bicycle configuration, aided on takeoff with an extension known as a pogo, which dropped off as the plane left the ground. No one knew if the engine would operate effectively at such a high ceiling, or if it could cruise steadily enough to provide clear pictures from such an altitude. The whole project represented a step into the unknown.

To achieve the CIA’s objectives, including carrying enough fuel to reach the necessary range, Johnson had been forced to sacrifice significant strength and maneuverability. Realizing that every pound saved on the structure represented another pound of fuel, they built the craft out of an ultra-light aluminum, which gave it the feel of a flying tin can, helping it rise to previously unattained heights. The wings sometimes vibrated during turbulence, one of the attributes that could make it difficult to handle. Landing could be tricky, because of the enormous drag caused by the unusual design. “Very light, very fragile, very flimsy,” was LeVier’s initial observation.²³

On August 1, the team assembled for the unofficial first flight, which was scheduled as merely a taxi test, with LeVier at the controls to check the engine and the breaks. They experienced some last-minute trouble with the fuel, and after the pilot followed his boss’s instructions to rev the engine to 70 knots, the plane leapt off of the dry lakebed and into the air, about 35 feet off the ground. It wanted to fly. LeVier had never known an aircraft capable of gaining flight at such a low speed, and he was simultaneously impressed and unnerved. “The lakebed was so smooth, I couldn’t feel when the wheels were no longer touching,” he recalled, adding, “I almost crapped.”²⁴ When he touched down and slammed the breaks, both tires blew and the breaks caught fire, which brought out the fire truck.

Now fully acquainted with the lightness of the airplane, LeVier piloted the official first flight three days later, taking the U-2 to 8,000 feet in a driving rainstorm. On the radio with the boss, who was chasing in a C-47, he said the plane flew “like a baby buggy.”²⁵

Given the inclement weather, they decided to cut the flight short, but when he tried to land it nose first, it began porpoising, or bouncing violently, because of the unusual aerodynamics at play, and he pulled up. Johnson began to sweat, concerned about losing his precious prototype. It took LeVier two more passes, but he finally stuck the landing. He could see the U-2 was not going to be an easy plane to learn how to fly. (Ben Rich, one of Johnson’s engineers and the man who would one day succeed him as the head of the Skunk Works, called the U-2 “a stern taskmaster [that was] unforgiving of pilot error or lack of concentration.”²⁶) But they were in business. That night, huddled in one of the hangars in a place that did not exist, they all drank themselves silly and took turns arm wrestling, celebrating their new baby.

A few weeks after committing to stay in the Air Force, Powers returned from a routine training flight in his F-84 and noticed his name typed onto a sheet of paper on the squadron bulletin board, ordering him to report to a certain major the next morning. His was one of several names. Naturally, he was curious, thinking, What could this be about?

The meeting left him with more questions than answers. He learned only that he and the other officers had been identified because they had all achieved exceptional pilot ratings and had been granted top secret security clearances; amassed a certain number of hours in a single-engine plane; and signed up for an indefinite period of service.

Like his colleagues, Powers was offered the chance to take another meeting, if he was interested. He was interested, although he found the whole business rather strange: “The Air Force was not in the habit of arranging outside job interviews for its officers.”²⁷

The next meeting took place at night, far from the base.

Arriving at the Radium Springs Inn, a motel on the outskirts of town, he knocked on the appropriate cottage door at the appointed time. A dark-haired, medium-build man who appeared to be in his thirties answered the door. He was wearing civilian clothes and was flanked by two other men similarly attired.

Feeling unsure of what he was walking into, the First Lieutenant said, “I was told to ask for a Mr. William Collins.”

“I’m Bill Collins. You must be…”

Collins paused.

Finally, the Air Force man answered, “Lieutenant Powers.”²⁸

During the meeting, Powers learned that the men, who never said who they worked for, were recruiting pilots for a special mission that was “risky” but “important for your country.”

Immediately intrigued by the opportunity, which stirred his patriotism and his sense of adventure, Frank was disappointed to learn that the assignment would require him to be overseas for eighteen months, without the ability to take his wife. He knew this would never work.

Nine months into his marriage, he was increasingly concerned about Barbara’s state of mind. The behavior that had concerned him before their wedding day had not improved. His relatives had already been exposed to her excessive drinking.

Standing in the motel room, Frank doubted they could survive such an extended separation.

To his surprise, however, when Frank went home that night and told his wife what he was allowed to tell her, she was enthusiastic about the opportunity for her husband’s advancement, especially when she learned it would pay him, while overseas, the incredible sum of $2,500 per month, about five times the median American income at the time. They talked about what they could do with the money, including buying a house and providing for the children surely to come in the years ahead.

Convinced by Barbara’s assurances, Powers took another meeting at the motel, where Collins—not his real name—pulled back the veil on his operation: If the lieutenant passed the various tests, he would be working for the CIA, flying a brand-new top secret airplane that flew higher than any airplane ever produced. At the end of his assignment, he would be allowed to reenter the Air Force at a rank comparable to his peers, his time with the agency counting toward his military service.

His heart racing with excitement, Powers then heard the sentence that would define the rest of his life:

“Your main mission will be to fly over Russia.”²⁹

Not long after this meeting, he packed up his clothes and other belongings and moved out of the Albany house. After completing some paperwork, he was honorably separated from the Air Force, becoming a civilian once more. No one could know exactly what he was up to—not even his wife, although he was allowed to tell her that he was to make reconnaissance flights near the Russian border—and the boys at Turner were left to wonder, too caught up in their own lives to linger too much on one pilot’s sudden vanishing act.

Toward the end of January 1956, Frank flew to Washington under an assumed name, complete with a fake identification card, and checked into the DuPont Plaza Hotel, feeling the full weight of his career choice. He was now entering the realm of spies.

By this time, Kelly Johnson and his dedicated team of skunks had routinely taken the U-2, code named Angel, above 70,000 feet, higher than any other aircraft in the world, which the experts believed made it invisible to Soviet radar and invulnerable to Soviet defenses. (Their various altitude records remained secret for years.) They had demonstrated a range of roughly 4,000 miles, which meant it could fly deep into the USSR and out again without needing to refuel.

With four versions of the plane in the air, nine more being assembled, and seven more on the drawing board, Lockheed and the CIA continued to work through various problems, including achieving the proper calibrations to ensure the engine, updated through several versions, and fuel pump worked effectively at such a high ceiling. The engine problems persisted and would take time to solve.

During one flight near the Mississippi River, Jake Kratt experienced a flame-out. Learning on the spot, he descended to around 30,000 feet—aware that trying to light in the thin air at maximum altitude could burn it out—and eventually he reignited the burner, only to suffer another engine failure. This time he had no luck getting the burner to start. Leaning on the plane’s glider-mimicking characteristics, he allowed it to sail through the air for several hundred miles while heading toward the Ranch, before landing at an Air Force Base in New Mexico. Never one to leave a thing to chance, Dick Bissell, when informed of the impending touchdown, placed an urgent telephone call to the commander of the base, carefully instructing him to move the special aircraft to a remote part of the base and to secure it with a tarpaulin and an armed guard. No one was to see it.³⁰

Unaware that six other pilots were already training at the Ranch, Powers was called to Collins’s hotel room in Washington, where he joined several others for the big reveal. The agency man reached into his briefcase and pulled out a black-and-white photograph as the pilots moved in to study it closely. “It was a strange-looking aircraft, unlike any I had ever seen… [with a] remarkably long wingspan…. A jet, but with the body of a glider,” Powers recalled.³¹

As Collins answered various questions, a table-top radio blared. Frustrated that he could not hear clearly, Powers reached over and turned it off. He was surprised when Collins, too, stopped making noise. At that time, Powers was still unaware of even the most basic spy-craft—until it dawned on him that the radio was filling the room with noise for a reason. Embarrassed, he reached over and turned the radio back on, and the spook continued his briefing.

Looking closely at the photograph, Powers liked one thing about the aircraft immediately. It was a single-seater, and like most fighter pilots, he preferred to fly alone.

Utilizing the fake name Francis G. Palmer, and a phony address, he flew all over the country for several months, undergoing extensive physicals at Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as well as psychological tests, security clearances, and pressure-suit fittings. They tested him in the suit in a high-altitude chamber, attached various probes to his body, and stimulated a wide variety of physical reactions to make sure he was not prone to seizures, blacking out, or panic. None of the activities took place in a government building, because it was a completely black operation, and none of it could be traced back to Washington, in case they were being watched by the Soviets. They made him take a lie-detector test. They introduced him to various aspects of spy-craft, including the importance of avoiding noticeable patterns, to make it difficult for an operative to be tailed, which is the reason why a particular Company trip flew him and several others from Washington, DC, to St. Louis, Missouri, to Omaha, Nebraska, and back to St. Louis, before arriving in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Eventually Frank wound up at the Ranch, where he was finally introduced to the airplane and began developing the skills he would need in the dangerous days ahead. He learned the U-2’s various limits and idiosyncrasies, including the delicate hand required to land it, while carefully managing the wing angles, especially when confronted with high crosswinds. He saw how the plane kept climbing as the fuel burned off, and how at a certain altitude, he could pull the throttle all the way back to idle and it would remain at 100 percent power. He became acquainted with the dangerous intersection known as the “coffin corner.”

“Down at sea level, you had a huge margin between the fastest the airplane could fly and the slowest it could fly, around 200 miles per hour,” he said.³² “But when you are at max altitude… your fastest and slowest speed come to a point where, you’re flying it as slow as you possibly can without stalling and you’re going almost as fast as you can without getting into severe buffeting. If you speed up, you’re in trouble. If you slow down, you’re in trouble. Takes a lot of attention and personal control.”

Harry Andonian, who tested the plane for the Air Force, said, “That was one of the most difficult aspects of flying the U-2. The coffin corner could be very tricky. You had very little margin for error.”

As part of the need to reduce weight, the Skunks Works had opted not to include an ejection seat, which meant if a pilot decided to abandon the aircraft, he would need to bail out.

High-altitude flight required the same sort of nylon pressure suits then being worn by the test pilots heading for the edge of space in experimental craft at Edwards; these suits were designed as a black project by the David Clark Company, maker of women’s braziers. Because of the peculiarities of such high-altitude flight, pilots spent significant time learning to deal with the confinement.

Among the various features of the aircraft Powers learned to master was the self-destruct mechanism. In the event he ever felt the need to bail out, he knew exactly which two buttons to push to activate the explosive charge designed to destroy the camera. The secret of the U-2 needed to be protected at all costs.

During his training, Powers took several days off and traveled to Virginia to see the family. Stopping by to visit his new brother-in-law Jack Goff, he suggested they go hunting for rabbits.

“Found that kinda strange,” Jack said. “I don’t hunt rabbits and I never know of him to hunt rabbits.”

Jack wondered if this was a desperate effort for his friend to reconnect to the place he had escaped.

Still, Jack grabbed two rifles and they headed out across the field behind his house, bound for the nearby woods.

At one point, when they were far from the house, all alone in the woods, Francis turned to him and said, “Jack, I want you to know something. If anything happens to me, I want you to know, I was doing what I thought was best for the most people….”

Was he talking about his decision to leave Pound? Was he talking about something he had done?

Jack just nodded. “Okay,” he said, perplexed but somehow understanding that his friend was speaking purposely in a riddle.

They stepped carefully through the tall grass, keeping a sharp eye out for rabbits.

About two weeks before LeVier began testing the U-2, in late July 1955, President Eisenhower traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, for a summit conference with Anthony Eden, the prime minister of the United Kingdom; Edgar Faure, the prime minister of France; and Nikolai Bulganin, the premier of the Soviet Union, who appeared on behalf of Khrushchev. (At this time, in the Soviet system, Khrushchev was not officially the head of state, but no one doubted who called the shots.) During the meeting, Eisenhower presented a radical proposal, calling on the world’s two superpowers to exchange detailed maps of all military installations and to allow reconnaissance flights of each other’s territory. The meeting was cordial, widely interpreted as the beginning of a thaw in the Cold War, but the so-called Open Skies policy was immediately dismissed by Khrushchev, who branded it nothing more than an “espionage plot.”³³

If the Soviets had taken up the White House on this idea, the U-2 might never have been needed and Francis Gary Powers’s life most certainly would have taken a very different turn.

Eleven months later, the CIA was prepared to open the skies without Khrushchev’s permission.

Not content to simply be invisible, someone in Washington decided it would be better for the U-2 to hide in plain sight. When the first detachment of planes and pilots were deployed to the joint US Air Force and Royal Air Force base Lakenheath in England in May, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), issued a press release announcing a program to conduct weather research with the new plane, whose existence had been a secret. The U-2 was now the center, instead, of an elaborate lie. When he heard the news, Johnson was livid, writing in his journal, “A stupid shambles!”³⁴ Fortunately the release generated no attention.

Despite the British initially agreeing to host the first operational U-2 wing, known as Detachment A, the deal became a casualty of an embarrassing attempt at espionage when a British frogman was caught spying on a Soviet ship. Prime Minister Eden and his cabinet got cold feet about the American espionage about to commence from their airspace, and retracted their approval, necessitating a hasty relocation to the NATO base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, where Chancellor Konrad Adenauer gave his stamp of approval.

Around this time, twenty-year-old pilot Michael Betterton found himself volunteered into a classified assignment. Young, unattached, and eager to chase some adventure, he didn’t ask many questions. When he reported to Wiesbaden, the colonel in charge said, “Nice to meet you, lieutenant. Welcome to the CIA!”

Betterton flashed a puzzled look. “What’s the CIA?”

Growing up in the agricultural community of Visalia, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Betterton had never heard of America’s spy agency. Over the next seventeen months, as a support pilot mostly flying the U-2 pilots and agency leaders around the continent in a C-54, he became deeply involved in his country’s biggest secret.

“It was unbelievable to me that I was being swept up in this life,” Betterton said. “Of course, I couldn’t tell my family or friends.”

On June 20, 1956, Carl Overstreet, a Virginia native who had been stationed at Turner, took off from Wiesbaden and headed east. Within minutes he was flying a surveillance mission through East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, testing the new camera and electronic intelligence systems. Twelve days later, Jake Kratt and Glen Dunaway flew similar missions through Iron Curtain countries. All returned safely without incident.

Overflying the Soviet Union would require presidential approval, and as the Company men waited for the “go” signal, the delay was colored in irony.

In the wake of the Open Skies rebuff, General Nathan Twining, the US Air Force chief of staff, who would later be appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, happened to be in Moscow as a guest of the Soviet military. During an air show, he was allowed to witness a formation of M-4 bombers, whose existence had launched the chain reaction leading to the U-2 overflights.

On July 4, when Hervey Stockman soared toward the stratosphere and headed into the rising sun, eventually crossing the border into the USSR, the Cold War veered off in a dangerous new direction. No one could predict the end game with any certainty.

This was somehow a step beyond covert agents utilizing phony documents, tiny cameras, bugging devices, blackmail, and propaganda in the perpetual search for secrets and leverage.

One operative could easily be disavowed, but if anything should go wrong, it would be difficult for Washington to explain an aircraft so clearly designed for high-altitude reconnaissance, especially in the event that the plane and its high-tech spy pilot, wielding a camera like a bayonet, were ever blasted out of the sky. Often displaying ambivalence about the program, which on one level violated his beliefs about the way civilized nations should act toward one another during peacetime, Eisenhower once conceded, “Nothing would make me ask Congress to declare war more quickly than a violation of our airspace by Soviet aircraft.”³⁵

Stockman, a native of New Jersey who had flown P-51 Mustangs in World War II, penetrated deep into Soviet territory on his first flight. The resulting photographic intelligence, which began to lay a foundation for a deeper understanding of Soviet capabilities, was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by Eisenhower and Dulles. Stockman landed safely. But one thing did not go according to plan, and Johnson was not happy.

“Well, boys,” he told senior members of his Skunk Works team. “Ike got his first picture postcard…. But goddamn it, we were spotted about as soon as we took off….”³⁶

Contrary to CIA assurances, the U-2 was not invisible to Soviet radar at 70,000 feet. From the earliest flights, the Soviets carefully tracked the incursions. Sometimes MiGs were dispatched. “You could see the contrails beneath,” Kratt recalled. “But we felt reasonably safe, because we didn’t think they could reach us.” The latest model, the MiG-19, could climb no higher than about 55,000 feet, well below the U-2’s maximum ceiling.

Enraged, Khrushchev launched a protest with the American government, but he was powerless to prevent such violations of his territory. He said nothing publicly.

In August, before shipping out for his overseas deployment as part of the Detachment B, or Detachment 10-10, to the Incirlik Air Force Base in Adana, Turkey, Powers made a trip to see the family in Pound. Following orders, he said he would be conducting weather experiments, which his sister Jan thought odd. “Why do you have to go all the way over there to study the weather?” she asked, teasing him. “We have weather here.”

Beyond the thrill of handling such an innovative aircraft and flying off to the edge of the sky, Powers was driven by the desire to do something patriotic for his country. Profoundly marked by the experience of living through World War II, he understood how fragile freedom could be. It had always bugged him that he had not made it to combat in Korea. Now he saw the struggle with the Soviets in the starkest terms and felt fortunate to be a part of an effort considered so vital to the nation’s security.

Sometimes he flashed back to those early meetings with William Collins and how his life pivoted toward another reality.

“All my life I’ve wanted to do something like this,” he had told the agency man.³⁷

All his life he would live with the consequences.

While stationed in Turkey, Powers and the other pilots in the “weather detachment” lived in small trailers on a corner of the base, far from the regular US Air Force flight line. Some enterprising aviators attached lean-tos, which they called camel bars. Security was tight. They often wandered into town and rubbed elbows with the local Turks, sometimes venturing off into the countryside and on toward the pristine Mediterranean beaches on motorcycles. They hunted ducks, snorkeled, drank beer. “Frank was a real outgoing guy… happy-go-lucky when he wasn’t flying,” recalled camera technician John Birdseye, who sometimes bowled with Powers and his wife at a primitive bowling alley in a modified Quonset hut. “Like all those pilots, [when it was time for a flight] he was a businessman with a mission.”

In the fall of 1956, Detachment A was reassigned to Giebelstadt Air Force Base in Bavaria. Unlike bustling Wiesbaden, the tiny base at Giebelstadt, which had housed one of the few squadrons of ME 262 jets at the end of World War II, was isolated and easy to camouflage. It became a perfect hiding place for the U-2.

At the start of Powers’s overseas assignment, Barbara moved in with her mother in Georgia, following through on their original plan, so they could save money for a house. But she became restless and eventually moved to Europe to be closer to him, in violation of CIA wishes, apparently living for a time in Paris. Michael Betterton liked Frank and could see his wife exerting influence that undermined him with his superiors. “[Powers] spent a lot of time with us because he would come up for a while and then go on to see her,” Betterton said. “I know [the agency security people] were not happy about [her presence in Europe] and talked to him about it.” Barbara eventually moved to Athens, landing an office job at an Air Force base, which allowed Frank to visit frequently.

With Soviet agents prowling around looking for details on the program, Barbara’s personal weakness represented a glaring vulnerability.

“Barbara was a security risk,” said Joe Murphy, who worked as a security specialist for the CIA, and had known Frank since the early days at the Ranch. “The fear was that she would lose control of herself out in public… draw attention to herself… blow the whole operation.”

During a trip back to the United States with her husband, when they visited Pound, Barbara got drunk and starting spouting off about her frustration at not being able to live with her husband. “They don’t want me telling what I know,” she said, which sounded like a threat to members of the family, who didn’t know what they didn’t know.

Struggling to control his wife, Frank began thinking about divorce.

Less than two months into Powers’s deployment, Egyptian President Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, sparking a major confrontation with Britain, France, and Israel, with the Soviets threatening to intervene on the side of the Egyptians. In his first mission, Powers was dispatched to the area. His trip revealed a rapid buildup of British and French forces around the island nation of Cypress, confirming Paris’s duplicity. President Eisenhower felt blindsided.³⁸

A succession of U-2 flights out of Incirlik gave the White House a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding invasion, though only a select circle knew the source of the intelligence. Saber-rattling by Khrushchev threatened to spilt the Western alliance over the issue, but, ultimately, Washington believed that the desire by two colonial powers to assert their dominion was not worth risking World War III. Eisenhower pressured his allies to withdraw, a capitulation which greatly diminished Britain and France.

The U-2’s role would not be declassified for years, but the CIA’s ability to look down from the top of the world and see through the fog of war was rife with symbolism.

Some weeks later in November 1956, Powers made his first flight over the Soviet Union.

Reflecting on the experience many years later, he said, “You were apprehensive of the unknown. It was the not knowing that got to you. Were they even aware that I was up there?”³⁹

He did not see any signs of jets or missiles.

Even though it was sent out infrequently, the U-2 was quickly winning big fans at the CIA and the Pentagon.

In early 1957, General Curtis LeMay, the firebrand head of Strategic Air Command (SAC), decided to deactivate his F-84 wing, which left Tony Bevacqua, Powers’s onetime roommate, open for a new assignment. A superior asked him, “How’d you like to fly something I can’t tell you a darned thing about?” Intrigued, he immediately replied in the affirmative, thinking that if he rejected the opportunity, he might face a fate worse than death for a fighter pilot: transfer to a bomber squadron.

After several weeks of physical and psychological tests at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and being fitted for a pressure suit in New Haven, Connecticut, he remained in the dark about his new aircraft. “With the suit, I knew it was going to be a high flier,” he recalled.

Minutes after stepping out of an Air Force transport plane at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California, he was directed onto another plane with civilian markings, joining several other Air Force pilots. About an hour later, the plane, piloted by Lockheed test pilot Ray Goudy, landed in a remote area. A member of the ground’s crew yelled, “Welcome to Groom Lake.”

Emboldened by the CIA’s success with the U-2, the Air Force was forming its own squadron.

“Holy cow,” Bevacqua thought when he saw the U-2 for the first time, starting the training that would have him soloing in a matter of weeks. “What is that?”

“It sure looked odd,” he recalled.

At this time, he was completely unaware that his friend who had disappeared was flying the same aircraft.

In his proposal to the president, Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, had spoken very optimistically about the potential of the reconnaissance program to peel back the veil shrouding Soviet capabilities. Within a few months, he was proven correct. The photographs taken by the U-2 allowed the CIA to map vast areas of the USSR, bringing many once-hidden military installations into view.

Like various other aspects of the aircraft, the cameras were designed especially for the project. They were meticulously honed to reduce weight and keep working throughout a long flight, and they utilized a Mylar film recently perfected by Kodak. “The cameras required a lot of attention, especially the shutters, which often stuck shut,” explained Birdseye, who learned the peculiarities produced by dramatic changes in temperature and other influences and how to work the problem. Once the film was rushed into the hands of the skilled interpreters, a wealth of previously hidden knowledge about the closed society informed the president, whose desk was often overflowing with large black-and-white prints, demonstrating another important discovery.

Once the evidence began to accumulate, the agency reached an important conclusion: There was no “bomber gap.”

The Cold War took an unexpected turn when Jimmy Bozart dropped his change.

While making his collections one day in the summer of 1953, the paperboy fumbled his money onto a staircase. When he reached down to pick it up, he noticed one of the nickels was split in half, revealing a hollow opening. Upon closer inspection, he found what was later determined to be a tiny piece of microfilm, containing a coded message, which his father turned over to a New York City police officer. Eventually the nickel wound up in the possession of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which determined that Bozart had stumbled onto a Soviet spy ring.⁴⁰

Four years later, the clue helped lead the FBI to a Brooklyn artist who was in actuality a KGB agent engaged in espionage concerning America’s nuclear arsenal.

Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, the most important Soviet spy to be apprehended since the Rosenbergs, denied everything. He was quickly convicted and sentenced to thirty years in a federal penitentiary. He might have been executed, if not for the clever defense waged by his attorney, James B. Donovan, who argued: “It is possible that in the foreseeable future an American of equivalent rank will be captured by Soviet Russia or an ally…. At such time an exchange of prisoners through diplomatic channels could be considered to be in the best interests of the United States….”⁴¹

The intense media coverage of the trial scarcely mentioned the possibility of an exchange, which seemed far-fetched.

Even as the Abel case cast a temporary spotlight on the battle for secrets, giving Americans another reason to be distrustful and fearful of the Soviets, a tiny aluminum ball emitting an ominous beep proved even more alarming. On October 4, 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, the technological superiority it demonstrated made Americans feel vulnerable. Soon the United States would join the space race, but it was the anxiety regarding a potential military application of the rocketry that cast such a distressing pall upon one of the century’s greatest scientific achievements.

Within months, the Soviets announced the development of their first intercontinental ballistic missiles, which were capable of delivering nuclear weapons launched from the USSR by remote control. “Now the bomber and fighter can go into museums,” Khrushchev crowed.⁴² American politicians began talking about a “missile gap,” which eventually signaled new activity for the U-2.

The Soviets were desperate to learn about the U-2.

The same month Sputnik was launched, while driving to work at Giebelstadt, where his cover job was overseeing the base gym, First Lieutenant Betterton saw a suspicious car parked on the side of the road near the end of the runway. With a U-2 surveillance mission scheduled to launch later that morning, on a flight path that would take it right over the car, and aware that the KGB was snooping around trying to find their secret base, the agency pilot, dressed in his US Air Force uniform, turned right and headed for trouble.

Pulling up next to sedan, where he saw two burly men wearing heavy overcoats, he tried to engage them in conversation.

“Are you lost?” he said in English.

They grunted but didn’t answer, so he pressed on.

“This is a dead-end road. It doesn’t go anywhere….”

“Can I guide you back to the highway?”

It was possible the mystery men were there to commit an act of sabotage, but, more likely, they were stationed near the end of the runway to take photographs of the secret plane.

Concerned about what the Soviet agents might do if he left them alone long enough to alert agency security, Betterton, who was unarmed, decided the best course of action was to annoy them. So he kept talking. Finally, after about ten minutes, they gave up and drove away.

Not long after, the security chief thanked him for his actions and chided him for taking such a foolish chance with two men who might have killed him. The CIA was starting to make arrangements to shut down its operation at Giebelstadt and transfer most of the pilots to Incirlik. (Some eventually wound up with the new Detachment C in Atsugi, Japan.) The risk of KGB surveillance in West Germany was now too great. The disbandment of Detachment A would make it much more difficult for the Company to reach the interior of the Soviet Union, which significantly increased the risks associated with the overflights.

Jake Kratt wound up in Incirlik, where he lived two trailers down from Powers. “That’s when I first met Frank,” said Kratt, who never became a close friend but remembered him as a “a good pilot… [who was] like the rest of us, focused on doing his job.”

In 1958, at the end of his first eighteen-month deployment, Powers signed a new contract with the CIA and obtained permission to move his wife to Turkey. They decided to give it another try.

As the space race emerged as yet another proxy for the Cold War, the leaders of the superpowers were at least starting to communicate. During a visit to a model American home exhibit in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon, while lingering in the kitchen, engaged in an impromptu televised debate with Premier Khrushchev about the relative merits of capitalism and communism. The two politicians were equally forceful but pleasant.

Not once did Khrushchev talk about “burying” the West, avoiding the violent verb that had caused a walkout of US-allied ambassadors in 1956. (The leader was talking about industrial progress, not military action, but the distinction was largely lost in translation.) Around this time, during an address to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev angered hard-liners in his own country by denouncing some of Stalin’s more brutal tactics, which he characterized as a “deviation” from Marxism-Leninism. But 1956 was also the year of the Hungarian Revolution. When an uprising ignited by student protesters threatened the communist government in Budapest, Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed the revolt, demonstrating Moscow’s determination to maintain its iron grip on the Eastern bloc.

Two months after the so-called Kitchen Debate, in September 1959, the Soviet leader visited the United States. He was alternately charming (while riding on a train; chatting with supermarket shoppers; visiting factory workers; schmoozing with Hollywood stars, including Frank Sinatra; full of smiles and back-slapping) and confrontational (when he felt he had been insulted by an anti-communist civic leader at a banquet in Los Angeles).

“Our rockets are on the assembly lines already!” he thundered from the dais, as the room of dignitaries turned deadly quiet. “Our rockets are on the launching pads! It is a question of war or peace.”⁴³

He was not smiling.

When security concerns caused him to be turned away at Disneyland, he started cracking jokes but was clearly enraged at the thought that he could be locked out of the home of Mickey Mouse.

The first state visit to the United States by a Soviet leader helped set the stage for a planned summit meeting in Paris in May 1960. Khrushchev also invited Eisenhower to Moscow later in his final full year in the White House. Hopes for achieving a new era of harmony were tempered, however, by a brewing crisis in Berlin.

Increasingly concerned about the Soviets’ progress in developing and deploying their ICBMs, which had escaped the view of the U-2s, several key advisors, including Dulles and Bissell, encouraged Eisenhower to approve additional overflights in the winter and spring of 1960. As usual, he was conflicted. By this point, the U-2 had secured a treasure trove of intelligence, making Washington incredibly knowledgeable about Soviet capabilities. Why push their luck? The CIA and Kelly Johnson were already at work on a new spy plane, a strange-looking bird offering the promise of much-faster speeds and higher altitude, along with a vastly reduced radar cross-section. The age of the spy satellite was also dawning, offering reconnaissance photographs from the edge of space. Perhaps they should wait until these next-generation vehicles became operational.

With Paris looming, and with many experts believing it was only a matter of time before Soviet fighters and surface-to-air missiles achieved the range to shoot a U-2 out of the sky, Eisenhower worried about the potential impact of a lost aircraft “when we were engaged in apparently sincere deliberations.”⁴⁴ What if the Soviets got lucky, he wondered, and made him look duplicitous?

Khrushchev’s recent silence concerning the incursions may have contributed to a false state of security, but as Dulles later said, “Since he had been unable to do anything about the U-2, he did not wish to advertise the fact of his impotence to his own people.”⁴⁵

Ultimately, Eisenhower, believing the need to gather the intelligence and gain leverage for the summit trumped the potential risks, approved additional overflights to work the missile problem. After a successful mission on April 9, which the Soviets tracked and tried to shoot down, and with the Paris summit scheduled to commence on May 16, the president ordered a final deadline: One last flight, but under no circumstances was an incursion to take place after May 1.

When the agency determined the objectives and decided to conduct the flight out of the Incirlik-based detachment, Frank Powers was selected to fly the mission and began making preparations.

Because he would be flying deeper than ever into denied air space—totaling about nine hours—Washington had arranged to launch the mission out of a base in Peshawar, Pakistan, roughly 2,000 miles closer to the Soviet border.

While packing for the trip during the last week of April, Frank struggled to put Barbara out of his mind. Living in the same trailer had not affected her drinking. Several days earlier, while partying with some of the other pilots and wives, she had stumbled on the dance floor and broken her leg, necessitating a cast. It was just the latest indication that his wife suffered from a serious problem, which he did not know how to handle. He tried to put it out of his mind. He would deal with her when he got back.

After he arrived in Pakistan, the flight was scrubbed twice—once because of intense cloud cover over the target zones, which would have rendered the U-2 camera useless—leaving him to kill time in the hangar reading and playing poker with members of the large support crew that had traveled from Incirlik. It concerned him to learn that his usual plane was being temporarily grounded because of routine maintenance issues. This caused him to use an aircraft with a history of mechanical problems, one of which had previously necessitated an emergency landing in Japan.

With the deadline looming, “everybody was eager to get in the air, including Frank,” said Jake Kratt, one of the backup pilots on hand in case Powers became ill.

On the night before the flight, Frank slept fitfully on a hangar cot. Not long after his 2 a.m. wake-up call on May 1, he started discussing the weather and his variety of landing options with his commanding officer, Air Force Colonel William M. Shelton, who surprised him with a question. “Do you want the silver dollar?”⁴⁶

Since the early days of the program, U-2 pilots had been given the option to carry along a specially designed poison pin hidden inside a silver dollar. Once dislodged from the coin, the pin could be used to prick the skin, causing death by asphyxiation. Like many of his contemporaries, Powers routinely declined to carry the suicide device. This time, however, facing the longest flight so far over the Soviet Union, Frank made a snap decision and slipped the dollar into the pocket of his outer flight suit.

After going through his two-hour preflight breathing ritual, isolation in a pure oxygen environment to prepare for the long flight and prevent the debilitating ailment known as “the bends,” Powers, wearing his pressure suit and helmet, carefully stepped up the ladder with the assistance of a colleague and into the plane, locking into his seat around 5:20 a.m., with departure scheduled for 6. The sun had been up for nearly an hour, and it was already very hot. To try to give his friend a little shade, one of the other pilots took off his shirt and held it over the cockpit.

Because of the unusual situation, President Eisenhower needed to personally approve the flight. As six o’clock came and went without word from the White House, and the morning sun turned the open cockpit into an oven, sweat soaked through Frank’s long johns and rolled down his face.