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

^{Chapter Three} MAYDAY

The warning signs were flashing.

In arguing for what became the April 9, 1960, flight, code named Square Deal, to originate from Pakistan, Air Force Colonel William Burke expressed the opinion that penetrating the USSR from this area presented “a reasonable chance of escaping detection by the Soviet air defense system.”¹ On this, Burke, the acting director of the Development Projects Division, was proven wrong. Soon after U-2 pilot Bob Ericson crossed into Soviet territory, he was tracked by Soviet radar, ringing alarm bells throughout the defense establishment.

Despite seeing contrails of MiGs beneath him, Ericson successfully completed his mission and secured evidence of Soviet ICBM deployment near Plesetsk, about 700 miles north of Moscow. The gamble paid off. Khrushchev was especially angered by the timing of the flight, since preparations for the summit were already underway. He watched with frustration, believing his military bungled several opportunities to shoot the U-2 out of the sky.² He said nothing, which emboldened the White House. “This was virtually inviting us to repeat the sortie,” recalled George Kistiakowsky, Eisenhower’s science advisor.³

For nearly four years, the CIA had prowled the skies above the USSR with impunity.

But the steady improvement in Soviet defenses was reaching critical mass.

“By the beginning of 1960,” Bissell conceded many years later, “we were all growing concerned about the U-2’s future and there was considerable discussion of how long it might be before the Soviets developed the capability to shoot one down.”⁴

Especially troubling was the technical progress embodied in the SA-2 missile, rapidly being deployed across the Soviet Union. In a confidential assessment dated March 14, 1960, Burke advised Bissell, “The SA-2 Guideline has a high probability of successful intercept at 70,000 feet providing that detection is made in sufficient time to alert the site.”⁵ This was a key proviso. While the SA-2 had apparently achieved the ability to reach the U-2’s maximum altitude, its effective firing zone and maneuverability remained unknown, turning the possibility of a direct hit into a complicated math problem. The CIA’s analysts remained skeptical of the Soviet guidance systems, which gave the pilots a measure of reassurance.

“Because of the speed of the missile and the extremely thin atmosphere, it was almost impossible to make a connection,” Powers said. “This did not eliminate the possibility of a lucky hit.”⁶

In the context of a clear linkage between early warning and missile danger, a memorandum written by Burke on April 26 reflected the elevated level of risk: “Experience gained as a result of Operation Square Deal indicates that penetration without detection from the Pakistan/Afghanistan area may not be as easy in the future as heretofore.”⁷

The policy makers in Washington knew they were playing a very dangerous game by sending Francis Gary Powers into this vortex.

Like the other pilots, Powers began to worry about the growing potential of Soviets defenses. Discussing the situation many years later, he said, “Four years is a long time…. They know you’ve been flying over their country for four years…. I figured [if the roles were reversed] we in this country would be working night and day to develop something to try to stop [such incursions]. It’s getting to about the point where you can expect things to happen.”⁸

One of the primary reasons the agency pushed for an additional flight before the deadline was to get another look at the Plesetsk facility, to judge the Soviet ICBM progress. Aware that the angle of the sun in the northern latitudes could distort the U-2 pictures starting in midsummer, Bissell feared, “If a flight could not be conducted [between April and July], the opportunity would be lost for an entire year.”⁹

Because telephone communications between Washington and Peshawar could not be secured, the White House arranged to transmit the president’s order through Morse code early on the morning of Sunday, May 1. While Powers sweated in his pressure suit, believing more strongly with each passing minute that the flight would be canceled, Colonel Shelton waited impatiently with an aide inside a radio van on the taxiway. Due to technical problems likely related to atmospherics, they were unable to retrieve the signal on the assigned frequency.

Eventually tuning to another channel, they picked up a message, slightly truncated from what they were expecting: HBJGO. Convinced that this was the signal they had been waiting for, even though several letters were missing, Shelton stepped out of the van and ran over to the U-2 to deliver the news: The White House had given Powers clearance to fly Mission 4154, code named Grand Slam, over the Soviet Union.¹⁰

It was around 6:20 when a member of the crew pulled the ladder away and slammed the canopy shut. The pilot then locked it from the inside. As Powers taxied on to the runway and carefully guided the U-2C, model 360, into the air, the J75/P13 engine roared with a distinctive whine. He never lost the thrill of hearing the familiar sound.

Quickly climbing toward his assigned altitude and switching into autopilot for his twenty-eighth reconnaissance mission, he headed toward Afghanistan and initiated a single click on the radio. Seconds later, he heard a single click as confirmation. This was his signal to proceed as scheduled, in radio silence.

Determined to pack as much surveillance as possible into one flight, Powers was scheduled to cross over the Hindu Kush range of the Himalayas and into the southern USSR, passing over a 2,900-mile swath of Soviet territory, from Dushambe and the Aral Sea, to the rocket center of Tyuratam, and on to Sverdlovsk, where he would head northwest, reaching the key target of Plesetsk before turning even farther northwest, toward the Barents Sea port of Murmansk. Exiting to the north, he was to land in Bodo, Norway, where a recovery team was waiting to transport the U-2 and secure the pilot. In the case of an emergency, such as running low on fuel, he was authorized to take a shortcut into the neutral nations of Sweden or Finland, which would be sure to cause complications for Washington. But as Shelton remarked, “Anyplace is preferable to going down in the Soviet Union.”¹¹

The Soviets were especially dangerous if they knew the U-2 was coming. According to an official protest subsequently lodged with the US government by the foreign minister of Afghanistan, for violating their sovereign airspace on the way north, the Soviets provided an early warning of the spy plane’s incursion.¹²

While Powers took flight, much of official Washington remained in weekend mode, including the president, who was at rainy Camp David. The inclement weather ruined his plan to play golf, although he eventually worked in some skeet shooting and bowling with his granddaughter.¹³

The Company man dispatched to welcome Powers to Norway, Stan Beerli, the chief of the operations section, expected to see him early in the evening, Bodo time. He assumed his phone was tapped and he was being watched. Like every operative in the field, he was provided a cover story and a way to communicate with the home office in code. When Powers arrived safely, Beerli was instructed to call a certain man in Oslo and tell him they had a great party the previous night.¹⁴

After flying into the thin, cold air of the stratosphere, Frank was no longer sweating in his pressure suit but he felt his pulse quicken. He always felt a bit uneasy crossing into the USSR. Nine hours was a long time to be in the air, nearly all of it over enemy territory, and the pilot realized he had never been more vulnerable.

Because his sextant—a device used to measure distance based on the angular width between two objects—had been set for a 6 a.m. departure, rendering all of the values off by nearly a half hour, Frank would have to rely heavily on his compass and clock to navigate. For about the first 90 minutes, he encountered heavy cloud cover, which made it more difficult to stay on course.

About the time the sky below turned into a blanket of blue, he saw something in the distance: the contrail of a single-engine jet aircraft, headed in the opposite direction, at supersonic speed. Soon he saw another contrail, heading toward him, at supersonic speed. He assumed it was the same plane, having turned around to follow him.

“I was sure now they were tracking me on radar,” he said, relieved by the enormous distance, which reflected the jet’s inability to approach the U-2’s altitude.¹⁵ “If this was the best they could do, I had nothing to worry about.”

The scramble to deal with the invader eventually reached the Kremlin. It was still early morning Moscow time when Premier Khrushchev’s telephone rang.

When Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet defense minister, told him about another American spy plane thundering through the skies and headed toward Sverdlovsk, he flashed back to the “white hot fury” he had experienced during the previous overflight.¹⁶

After much internal debate, particularly with Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko, who recommended a formal protest and even prepared a preliminary draft to send to the American ambassador, Khrushchev decided to remain quiet. In explaining his rationale to the Presidium of the Central Committee, he said, “What’s the sense of [protesting]? The Americans [are] acting this way to emphasize our powerlessness…. [Protesting] only encourages their arrogance. What we have to do is shoot those planes down!”¹⁷

Three weeks later, after forcing an internal investigation into the various failures that he believed had crippled the Soviet response, Khrushchev told Malinovsky: “You must do your very best! Give it everything you’ve got and bring that plane down!”

After telling his leader that a new SA-2 battery was stationed along the plane’s apparent route, Malinovsky said, “We have every possibility of shooting the plane down if our anti-aircraft people aren’t gawking at the crows!”¹⁸

After switching on the camera while flying over the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the launch site for Soviet space shots which had been confirmed and extensively photographed in previous U-2 missions, Powers worked through a slight course correction and proceeded north, eventually getting a nice view of the snow-capped Ural Mountains, the geographic dividing line between Europe and Asia, to his left. Passing various landmarks, he made notations for his debriefing. When his autopilot malfunctioned—a problem considered significant enough to consider aborting a mission—he switched it off and began flying the plane manually. The choice to head back or proceed was his, but since he was more than 1,300 miles into Soviet territory, he made the fateful decision to keep going. He had gone too far to turn back now.¹⁹

Almost four hours into the flight, just southeast of Sverdlovsk, while recording figures in his flight log, he felt a thump. A violent shockwave reverberated through the aircraft as a bright-orange flash lit up his world.

“My God,” he said to himself. “I’ve had it now.”²⁰

Project Aquatone had already endured a string of mishaps claiming several lives.

At the Ranch on August 31, 1956, CIA pilot Frank Grace crashed and died during a nighttime launch, after becoming disoriented in the dark.²¹ “He was seen using [a] flashlight in cockpit prior to take-off,” Johnson noted in his journal.²² “A definite no-no.”

On April 4, 1957, Lockheed test pilot Bob Sieker lost control of the U-2 prototype at a high altitude.²³ He tried to make it back to base but crashed in the desert, dying from wounds sustained while parachuting to the ground. The subsequent investigation determined that Sieker had experienced a flame-out and that his protective faceplate had blown off his mask, causing him to be “in a bad way from hypoxia.”²⁴

By pushing so far into the distant skies, toward a multitude of colliding dangers, the team behind the so-called Dragon Lady wrestled with various problems related to oxygen, including a strict adherence to the “pre-breathing” regimen, and experimenting with various changes to the life-support system. They eventually added an ejection seat, which increased weight but helped keep several pilots alive after high-altitude jumps.

Without a trainer or a simulator, catastrophic emergencies were accepted as the price of developing a cutting-edge aircraft. Some pilots managed to land wounded planes or bail out successfully. Others paid the ultimate price.

“It was a dangerous time,” said Tony Bevacqua, who worked as an instructor pilot at Laughlin. “You had a new aircraft and new pilots trying to learn how to fly it. Sometimes things went wrong. The U-2 wasn’t very tolerant of certain mistakes.”

The carnage was not limited to the U-2 pilots. It took a large team of Lockheed personnel, contractors, and spooks to bring Aquatone to life, necessitating a steady procession of C-54 transports between March Air Force Base, Burbank, and the Ranch. Many of the civilians lived in Southern California and commuted daily or weekly. During inclement weather on November 17, 1955, one of the flights failed to clear Mt. Charleston, near Las Vegas. “A very stupid weather crash,” Johnson said.²⁵ All fourteen project employees were lost—including Lockheed engineers Rod Kreimendahl and Dock Hruda—along with all five members of the flight crew. The CIA quickly dispatched a team to secure any top secret documents among the remains and concocted a cover story to protect the secrecy of the U-2 program.²⁶

Losing a U-2 over the Soviet Union was the nightmare scenario, and Francis Gary Powers was not dreaming.

Pulling tight on the throttle with his left hand while holding the wheel steady with his right, Powers checked his instruments. Everything looked normal. Then the wing tipped and the nose dropped. Suddenly realizing he had lost control of the aircraft, he felt a violent shudder, which jostled him from side to side in his seat. He believed the wings had broken off.²⁷

With what remained of his craft spinning out of control, Kelly Johnson’s once-powerful machine was now overpowered by immutable gravity, and Powers reached for the self-destruct button, which worked on a 70-second delay timer, and prepared to eject. Then he changed his mind, pulling his finger back. Slammed forward by the enormous g-forces, in a suit that had inflated when the cabin lost pressurization, he immediately reached a rather-disheartening conclusion: If he ejected from this awkward position, the impact of his legs on the canopy rail would sever both of his legs, because they were trapped underneath the front of the cockpit.

Quickly thinking through his options, as the plane descended below 35,000 feet, Frank jettisoned the canopy, which flew off toward the heavens, and decided to climb out of the cockpit. When he released his seat belt, the resulting force threw him out.

But this solution created another problem: Because he was still tethered to his oxygen supply, and because the g-forces were so severe, he could no longer reach the self-destruct buttons. Even as his faceplate frosted over in the extreme cold, he fumbled in the dark on a bright sunny day, extending his fingers as far as they would go. No luck. Now he had no way to destroy the plane, to keep it from falling into enemy hands.

Somehow he broke free from the oxygen hose and eventually felt a jerk, which yanked him forward. His parachute opened automatically at 15,000 feet and he descended slowly toward the countryside, near a small village.

“I was immediately struck by the silence,” he later recalled. “Everything was cold, quiet, serene…. There was no sensation of falling. It was as if I were hanging in the sky.”²⁸

Aware that he could breathe without his oxygen tank, he pulled off his faceplate and continued his descent.

On his way down, he took off his gloves, reached into his pocket, pulled out the map that showed alternate routes back to Pakistan, and ripped it into tiny pieces, which he tossed to the winds. He didn’t want such incriminating evidence to fall into the hands of the Soviets.²⁹

Then he reached for the silver dollar containing the poison pin. It was a regular-looking straight pin with grooves, which had been dipped in poison, certain to cause almost instantaneous death by asphyxiation. The device was covered by a sheath.

For a moment, he considered whether he should use it. One prick and he would be gone. “A minute or so later… a horrible minute,” he once surmised.³⁰ Washington could disavow him, although the wreckage of the plane would be difficult to explain.

With his life never more completely in his own hands, caught in a moment that would define him for the ages in many eyes, perhaps his mind brushed upon a twenty-year-old memory, when Oliver told him: “If you kill yourself, you kill a man…. A man who dies in sin, he can’t be saved.”³¹

Instead of using the device, he quickly dislodged it from the coin and the sheath, threw the dollar into the winds, and slipped the poison pin carefully into his pocket.

Looking down, he saw a landscape reminiscent of his native Virginia, including a lake and a forest. He tried to aim for the trees. Perhaps he could slip in unnoticed and plot his escape. But the wind shifted, and he landed in a plowed field on a collective farm instead, barely missing a power line and falling hard near a man on a tractor and another man working with his hands.

The two men ran up to assist him, one collapsing the chute, the other helping the stranger who fell from the sky to his feet.

His clothing contained no markings, so they assumed he was a Soviet pilot.

A car he had seen while floating to the ground pulled up nearby, and two men stepped out. One man was a chauffeur. They helped him take off his helmet and harness.

The locals could see he was dazed, especially as a crowd of children and adults from the nearby village surrounded him, peppering him with questions in Russian, questions he could not understand.

One man held up two fingers, pointed to him and then pointed to the distant sky, where a single red-and-white parachute could be seen drifting gently toward an eventual landing. He was puzzled by the chute but knew it was not connected to his plane. He shook his head.

By this time, he could tell the people surrounding him were starting to grow suspicious, particularly when one of the men looked down and saw the pistol strapped to the outside of his suit.

The man grabbed the weapon, and the pilot made no attempt to stop him. He knew his silence was merely delaying the inevitable.

“Escape would have been hopeless,” he recalled, since he was in the middle of the vast USSR, “a long way from the border.”³²

After the Russians loaded his parachute and seat pack into the trunk of the small car, Powers was ushered into the front seat, between the driver and the man with the gun. He didn’t need to speak the language to know where they were headed.

After all those hours in the air, Frank enjoyed the cigarette they offered. He felt thirsty, using sign language to let them know he wanted something to drink, and the man behind the wheel pulled up to a house. One of the other men—one of the three or four piled into the back seat—ran inside and quickly returned with a glass of water. The pilot guzzled the water but was still thirsty. He head throbbed—as it often did after being exposed to the pure-oxygen environment for such a long period—and he could feel his heart racing as the car resumed its journey down the bumpy, muddy road.³³

At one point, the man with his gun began to examine it closely: running his fingers down the barrel, over the prominent letters carved into the metal. He then ran a single finger over the dusty dashboard and spelled out the same letters: U S A.³⁴

By the time Powers dropped out of the sky, Moscow was alive with communist pride. As the annual May Day parade of military hardware moved through Red Square, Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., the American ambassador, focused his eyes on Premier Khrushchev. As usual, Khrushchev was surrounded by key Communist Party and military leaders outside Lenin’s and Stalin’s Mausoleum as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians lined the streets, celebrating their most sacred holiday. The military men were all attired in their dress uniforms, with chests full ribbons, so when one Air Force man, wearing only a regular service jacket, moved through the back of the reviewing stand and approached Khrushchev, Thompson instinctively realized something important was being relayed to the Soviet leader. Only later would he put two and two together.³⁵

Leaning in close so he could be heard above the noise of the crowd, Marshall Sergei Biryuzov, the commander of Soviet antiaircraft defenses, whispered in Khrushchev’s ear: The U-2 pilot has been shot down and taken prisoner.³⁶

Reveling in what he would later recall as an “excellent surprise,” Khrushchev congratulated Biryuzov, shaking his hand enthusiastically.³⁷

While Khrushchev watched the parade move into its second hour and began plotting his next move, the vise tightened on the American pilot.

At the first stop, in a village with paved streets several miles from the state-owned farm, he was taken into a civic building and searched by a policeman. He was asked to undress. They confiscated some items, including his pressure suit, pack of Kent cigarettes, and lighter. A female doctor examined him, treating some scratches on his leg. She gave him two aspirin tablets.

When Powers was allowed to slip his flight suit back on, he casually patted his pocket. It was still there.

Someone tried to communicate with him in German, but he did not speak German, which was just as well. He still hadn’t figured out what he should say.

The CIA failed its pilots by not preparing them to be captured. When he landed on Soviet soil, Powers did not know how Washington planned to respond to his capture or what it would say about his mission. If he had been aware of the planned cover story, at least he could have given voice to the same narrative. Nor had he received any instruction about how he was to act during interrogation.

“I was completely unprepared,” he recalled.³⁸

Attuned to the details of his environment but unable to understand what was being said by the crowd around him, he noticed a steady stream of men walking through the door, presenting identification cards. Some carried artifacts from his downed plane, including a spool of 72-millimeter film.

The authorities eventually loaded him into a military vehicle featuring two mounted machine guns, and then transported him to the nearby city of Sverdlovsk, where they escorted him into a large government building, where he first encountered men he assumed were agents of the KGB, the Soviet secret police. He took a seat in a nondescript office. The solitary window contained no bars, but from the time he walked into the room, someone was always positioned between him and the window. One would leave; another would take his place. At no time was he ever left with a clear path to the window.

When the new team searched him, they discovered the poison pin, which one of the men carefully placed in his briefcase.

“Are you an American?”

He was shocked to hear English for the first time since leaving Pakistan.

“Yes,” he said, realizing it was pointless to deny his nationality.³⁹

Despite the lack of any formal training procedures for such a possibility, Powers had broached the subject with an intelligence officer several weeks earlier:

“Let’s say the worst happens and I get captured. What do we do? What can we tell these people?”

“You might as well tell them everything, because they’re going to get it out of you anyway,” the agency man advised.⁴⁰

He was unnerved by this answer, especially considering his knowledge of the way the communists tortured and brainwashed American prisoners during the Korean War.

Suddenly facing the fear of the unknown, but determined not to give up any classified information, he started telling an elaborate lie about flying near the border and somehow getting lost.

The KGB man knew better, but Powers kept spinning as they appeared determined to have him admit that he was a member of the American military.

Eventually, Powers learned that authorities had recovered a cache of personal items, including his wallet, which contained a card identifying him as a civilian employee of the Department of Defense, as well as a Social Security card and a significant amount of currency from several countries. Because he was not returning to base that night, he thought he would need a form of ID, cash, and a change of clothes in Norway. This was the act of a prepared pilot, not a clever spy.

“Someone should have stopped me from taking that,” Powers said. “I should have known better myself.”⁴¹

A couple of hours after he parachuted from the sky, he was on a commercial airliner bound for Moscow. He assumed it was only a matter of time before they killed him.

When Powers failed to show up in Bodo at the appointed time, Stan Beerli feared the worst. He relayed an alternate message, launching a chain reaction that eventually reached the Matomic Building in Washington, where the operation was based, at approximately 3:30 a.m. Sunday. Electronic intelligence indicated that Soviet radar tracking of Mission 4154 had ended about two hours earlier.⁴² Carmine Vito, the former U-2 pilot who now manned a desk, began trying to find Bissell, placing a call to the home of Bob King, one of his special assistants. “Bill Bailey didn’t come home,” Vito said. “You better find the man quick.”⁴³

Aware that his boss was visiting former student Walt Rostow, King struggled to obtain his number during the wee hours of the morning, encountering an uncooperative operator. He was not going to take no for an answer. “It’s a goddamned national emergency!” he thundered.⁴⁴ By the time King reached Rostow, Bissell had already left to catch a flight back to Washington, unaware of the unfolding situation. After arriving at the headquarters about 3:30 p.m., he began consulting with a small group including Colonel Leo Geary, the US Air Force project officer, and CIA official Richard Helms. They started discussing a cover story, as Bissell felt “a sense of disaster.”⁴⁵

General Andrew Goodpaster, the staff secretary to the president, who would one day rise to supreme commander of NATO, broke the news to Eisenhower, who was still at Camp David. “One of our reconnaissance planes on a scheduled flight from its base in Adana, Turkey, is overdue and possibly lost,” he said.⁴⁶

The news of the missing aircraft reached Adana early Monday morning, where the housing and administrative officer was dispatched to the Powers trailer. The knocking eventually rousted Barbara from her bed.⁴⁷ After hobbling to the door, she said, “This had better be good.”⁴⁸ Powers’s wife was so upset, she required sedation. (The CIA cable concerning the notification said her broken leg had resulted from a “skiing accident.”⁴⁹) The CIA arranged for her immediate return to the United States via a commercial airline, along with their German shepherd, Eck.

While Barbara hoped her husband had somehow survived and would eventually come back to her, key members of the Eisenhower administration hoped he was dead. It would be much more convenient for the American government if he were dead.

When Monday morning dawned at the White House without any word, Eisenhower was given every assurance that the plane was likely destroyed and the pilot had perished. Time after time, Dulles and Bissell and several others had insisted he would never have to worry about a live pilot leaving a trail of bread crumbs all the way back to Washington. This belief factored heavily into his decision to undertake such risky provocations, especially with the summit fast approaching. Eisenhower decided to say nothing just yet, waiting for Khrushchev to play his card.

In Islamabad, General Ayub Khan, the strongman leader who had granted broad approval of American aviation activity but had been shielded from direct knowledge of the overflights, received a visit from a CIA operative, who assured him that the United States would make “every effort to minimize any Soviet pressure growing out of the incident.”⁵⁰ Khan played it cool, asking that a confidential message be passed along to Director Dulles, in which he pledged to “stand by our friends and not let them down on this.” Proving he understood Western-style political leverage, he asked for help acquiring an F-104 and upgrading his radar network, to thwart Soviet aggression.

After two days of discussion and fine-tuning, NASA released a cover story approved at the highest level:

A stranger wearing a dark suit walked into Oliver Powers’s shoe shop in Norton, Virginia. He asked to speak with the father alone, and the two of them stepped out the back door and into the alley, where the man from Washington broke the news. Francis was missing. Walton Meade, Oliver’s son-in-law, happened to be in the shop, and he overheard part of the conversation, which included reference to the cover story. Weather plane. Off course. Walton wasn’t buying it, which was a bad sign for the whole plan.

“So just how far over Russia was Francis when he was shot down?” he demanded with a sneer.

The Company man glared at him and walked out the door.

Around this time, Joe Murphy, now stationed in New York City and assigned to another covert project, was driving to Philadelphia for an appointment. He heard the news about a U-2 going down on his car radio and immediately wondered which pilot had been at the controls, thinking whoever it was, he was likely dead. One of the few people in the world who knew the weather-reconnaissance business was a lie, he was “really skeptical about the cover story holding up.”

For four days, Khrushchev considered his options. When a session of the Supreme Soviet opened, the various leaders began discussing how to best use the leverage they now enjoyed. “What we had in mind,” Khrushchev recalled, “was to confuse and mislead the U.S. government.”⁵²

At the climax of a long speech to the Supreme Soviet on May 5, Khrushchev paused to great theatrical effect and then announced that his military had shot down an American spy plane, which had invaded Soviet airspace. Defiant and angry, he railed against what he called “aggressive imperialist forces in the United States” who wanted to “undermine” the approaching summit, and he warned of “severe consequences” to East-West relations.

Ambassador Thompson, who had been invited to the session without any explanation and was seated in the balcony of the parliament, unwittingly became a prop in Khrushchev’s show. Turning toward the diplomat, Khrushchev asked: “Who sent the plane off? Was it sent without the chiefs of the American armed forces? Was it sent by the Pentagon without the president’s knowledge? If it was done without the president’s knowledge, the people should know about it!”⁵³

He made no reference to the fact that he had been aware of such overflights for nearly four years.

After meeting with his senior advisors, including Allen Dulles, Andrew Goodpaster, Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, and National Security Advisor Gordon Gray, Eisenhower decided to remain silent and stay with the cover story. “It was agreed by the group that the president should not be personally involved,” according to the minutes of the meeting.⁵⁴ Instead, the State Department would take the lead. Later in the day, it issued a press release:

The narrative was given voice by White House Press Secretary James Haggerty and Lincoln White, the State Department spokesman, who replied to a question by asserting that there had “never been” any deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace.⁵⁶

As long as the pilot was dead and the plane’s self-destruct mechanism had worked properly, the White House believed the story would hold up.

Late in the day on May 1, a black sedan with windows concealed by curtains cruised through the streets of downtown Moscow. The driver pulled up to a massive yellow-brick building, stopping in front of two large iron doors. He honked his horn and a guard appeared at a peephole. In a matter of moments the doors opened, allowing the car to enter a courtyard, and quickly slammed shut.

Ushered out of the car, Powers was led onto a pitch-black elevator and eventually into a small room, where he was searched again and ordered to disrobe. He was presented with some old, worn-out clothes, including an oversized, double-breasted black suit and loafers, standard issue for enemies of the state at Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB.

The three-hour flight from Sverdlovsk gave Frank time to develop the beginnings of a strategy. When the interrogations began, he decided to tell his Soviet captors what he believed they could easily learn elsewhere, including through the media.

“I’d go ahead and tell them the absolute truth, be just as truthful as I could be, on those things,” he explained, “so that when I got to a point that was sensitive and they couldn’t know anything about it, I could lie—and they would believe me. Would be willing to believe me, because I’d been truthful in everything else they could prove.”⁵⁷

In addition to various questions falling into the realm of biography—such as, “Where were you born?”—the Soviets wanted to know whether he had previously traveled to Norway.

“I told ’em ‘yes,’ because I assumed they could figure this out [from] passport records and such,” he said.⁵⁸

Only later would he learn that this particular confession led to a political backlash in Norway, where the government’s participation with American espionage became controversial.

The Norwegians quickly ran scared. Deciding that the Americans “were so inept and unwise” in their handling of the incident, the government decided to fully cooperate with the Soviet investigation into their country’s involvement “no matter how much this might offend the State Department.”⁵⁹ The Pakistani ambassador to Moscow reported to his own government that the Norwegians believed it was fruitless to deny anything to the Soviets because Powers “had made a clean breast of all he knew to the Russians.”⁶⁰

The interrogators repeatedly asked him if he had made other overflights, and he repeatedly lied.

He asked to see someone from the US embassy or the Red Cross, but they turned him down, deepening his feelings of isolation and tightening the noose.

While his most persuasive KGB agents worked the US pilot, in a dark place known throughout the Soviet Union for torture and execution, Khrushchev ordered his military to find the wreckage of the plane near Sverdlovsk. In time, Eisenhower felt blindsided with the news that the self-destruct mechanism needed to be activated by the pilot, and that the charge was not sufficient to destroy the entire plane or even the incriminating film. “It was scattered over a wide area,” reported Colonel Aleksandrovich Mikahlilov, one of the officers tasked with the important duty of locating the aircraft.⁶¹ “We made sure it was collected and brought to Moscow.” (Within weeks, the evidence would be displayed in Gorky Park for all to see, where it drew lines that rivaled the steady procession of visitors to Lenin’s and Stalin’s tomb. One of the few Americans to see the wreckage was the father of future filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who happened to be in Moscow on business.)

On May 7, while addressing a special session of the Supreme Soviet, Khrushchev sprang his trap. “We have parts of the plane and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking and confessed to spying for the CIA,” he said, before holding up a large print produced from some of the reconnaissance film.⁶²

The news found President Eisenhower at his home in Gettysburg, which looked out onto the Civil War battlefield. He wrestled with the dilemma wrought by his instinct to engage in a cover-up, even as Allen Dulles offered to resign, in order to shield the president. Some of his colleagues thought this sounded like a good idea, but Eisenhower, as Goodpaster said, “isn’t in the business of using scapegoats.”⁶³

Now that the whole world knew the American government had repeatedly lied about the U-2 business, the White House came clean, releasing a statement acknowledging the reconnaissance program had been pursued under “a very broad directive from the president given at the earliest point of his administration to protect us from surprise attack.”⁶⁴

When Eisenhower finally acknowledged his direct approval of the overflights, he called the program a “distasteful but vital necessity” to prevent the next Pearl Harbor.⁶⁵

Condemnation was swift. Time magazine called Washington’s handling of the affair “clumsy and inept.”⁶⁶ James “Scotty” Reston, the esteemed Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, criticized the White House for “bad judgment and bad faith” in issuing “a series of misleading official statements.”⁶⁷ The Toledo Blade called it “the most colossal diplomatic blunder in the nation’s history.”⁶⁸

To most diplomats and journalists, it was not the least bit problematic that Washington had spied. Both sides spied, after all. But as the Times said, “In the Cold War, the guilty person is the one who gets caught.”⁶⁹

The trust most Americans placed in their government in 1960 made Eisenhower’s duplicity—rooted in what biographer Stephen E. Ambrose called the president’s “fetish about keeping the U-2 a secret,”⁷⁰ even from key members of Congress—difficult to shoulder, especially when the truth was delivered by the Soviets. The stature Ike enjoyed as an American hero and the personal warmth the vast majority of the country felt for him tempered the feelings of betrayal, but it was a still shock to the whole system.

The country was not quite ready for the cynical age just over the horizon, but in time, the backlash of May 1960 would look like a harbinger.

The debate raging in various quarters could be seen in an essay question placed on a final exam ending the spring term at the Citadel, the South Carolina military college. “I argued that Eisenhower should have told the truth from the beginning,” recalled graduating senior David Boyd, who was headed for a commission in the US Army. “He should have said, ‘Yes, we did it. What are you going to do about it? We spy on you and you spy on us.’ It was the not telling the truth that got him in trouble.”

Around 7 a.m. on the morning after Francis Gary Powers became world-famous, his name flashed across newspaper front pages and broadcasts on every continent, Lieutenant Michael Betterton heard a doorbell at his South Florida home. He was getting ready for work. After leaving the CIA, he had returned to regular Air Force duty, flying a KC-97 while attached to the 19th Air Refueling Squadron at Homestead Air Force Base. When he opened the door, he saw two earnest-looking young men in dark suits with skinny neckties and short haircuts. He immediately knew who they were. “They were there to remind me not to talk to anybody, not to tell anybody that I even knew who Francis Gary Powers was,” Betterton said. “Well, of course, I knew that without being told. I couldn’t even tell my wife.” It would be another four decades before he could inform her that he had once worked for the CIA.

Even as key members of the Eisenhower administration believed it was likely Powers had defected, perhaps sabotaging his own mission, the vigorous interrogations continued at Lubyanka, where, completely isolated from the outside world, he began to spiral into a fatalistic despair, especially about his wife and his parents. His mother suffered from a heart condition, and he worried about how she must be suffering with his disappearance.

“No one knows I’m here,” he told his captors. “You can just take me out and shoot me and no one will know the difference.”⁷¹

They brought in Western newspapers, including the New York Times, and started reading passages to him, to prove that the outside world knew he had been captured. He doubted them at first, especially when they refused to let him hold the papers. “You could have had those printed somewhere in Moscow, and I wouldn’t know the difference,” he said. Eventually he accepted the news, when they read statements from his parents. The wording sounded like something they would say.⁷²

In the moment of realization, he broke down in tears, shocking his captors. “It was just such a relief to know that someone in the world knew I was alive.”⁷³

Usually facing a five-member team, led at times by a man he later learned to be Roman Andreyevich Rudenko, onetime lead Soviet prosecutor in the Nazi war crime tribunals at Nuremberg, Powers was questioned for nineteen days straight. They discussed the U-2 and his surveillance activities in great detail. The interrogations lasted as long as eleven hours per day, pushing him to the physical and emotional brink. He longed for the opportunity to sleep, to escape the badgering, but rest in his tiny 12´×5´ cell, on an uncomfortable cot, featuring what he recalled as “two pieces of cloth with lumps placed on top of a welded iron grid,” came fitfully.⁷⁴ He tossed and turned, thinking of home, worrying about his wife. He assumed it was only a matter of time before he was lined up against a wall and shot. Or perhaps worse.

“The possibility of torture stayed with me until trial,” he said. “I expected them to pull my fingernails or other terrible things. And I think it was the indefiniteness of it all that bothered me the most. Not knowing what or when. If a man knows he is going to be shot at a certain time, then it is settled…. They make you uncomfortable and you don’t know what is coming.”⁷⁵

As Powers embarked on an uncertain road, fearing the worst, he had plenty of time to think about the choices he had made up to this point in his life. He had escaped the dead-end existence of the coal miners but now was learning that following one’s dream could come at a high price. Perhaps he reconsidered his decision not to become a doctor.

The pilot could not fully appreciate the impact of his capture.

Eisenhower saw the Paris summit as an opportunity to pursue long-term peace with the Soviets and perhaps achieve some very concrete steps to end the arms race.

“There is no place on this earth to which I would not travel, there is no chore I would not undertake,” he said in 1955, before deciding to seek re-election, “if I had the faintest hope that, by so doing, I would promote the general cause of world peace.”⁷⁶

The U-2 program had demonstrated the fallacy of the “bomber gap” and was beginning to disprove the “missile gap,” despite the hype associated with Sputnik and its successors. The White House had been able to use the intelligence gathered by the spy plane to more wisely allocate finite tax dollars. Now, as Ike began to think about his legacy, he wanted to engage in dialogue to ratchet down the tension.

Khrushchev was driven by a different agenda. American officials believed he was less interested in peace than in finding a way to bully the three Allied powers out of Berlin. Determined to use the U-2 Incident to his advantage—with the hard-liners in his own country who bristled at some of his modernization impulses, as well as the impressionable minds of the third world—the Soviet leader traveled to Paris for the Summit Conference with Eisenhower, French president Charles de Gaulle, and British prime minister Harold Macmillan. He quickly used the opportunity of focused world attention to lambaste the United States; officially rescind the invitation he had extended to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union; and demand an apology from the president, who refused. Then he stormed out, ending any hopes of a thaw in the Cold War.

Boarding his plane to Moscow the next morning Khrushchev make sure reporters heard an exchange with Foreign Minister Gromyko, who was headed to New York to denounce the American spying before the United Nations. “When you get to the United States,” he said, “be careful of those imperialists. Be careful to cover your back, don’t expose your back to them.”⁷⁷

Watching the communist leader seize the moral high ground was a painful experience for American officials.

Khrushchev “used the U-2 as a good excuse for torpedoing both the trip and the conference,” Dulles said many years later.⁷⁸

In this Francis Gary Powers emerged as a Cold War pawn.

The KGB interrogators played many different cards to try to pump him for information and break him down, including guilt. Around the time he learned he would be tried for espionage, his captors asked him how it felt to be the cause of scuttling the summit, escalating tensions between the two superpowers.

Up to this point, he had not considered a linkage between his flight and the summit. At least for the moment, the Soviets succeeded in making him feel some level of remorse.

“They told me I had wrecked the summit conference,” he said years later.⁷⁹ “They put the whole burden on me. It made me feel terrible.”

Around nine o’clock on the evening of May 9, a telephone rang at 1650 Pine Valley Road, a spacious, modern-style three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Milledgeville, Georgia.

“Is this Dr. Baugh?”

“It is.”

The man on the other end of the line seemed nervous. He requested that James Baugh make a house call to 1626 Marion Street.⁸⁰

Like most small-town doctors of the day, Baugh, known to his friends as Jimmy, was accustomed to phone calls at all hours of the day and night. The beloved general practitioner routinely interrupted family meals and favorite television programs to head out the front door with his bag. “House calls were part of a doctor’s life; Jimmy was very committed to his patients,” recalled his wife, Betty George, known around town as BeeGee.

The man was vague about the patient’s symptoms, but Baugh dutifully walked out to his car and drove to the address. Two men met him at the curb, including the one who had called him, and escorted him into the house, where they were joined by Mrs. Monteen Brown, who had been his patient for several years. Mrs. Brown was not ill, but she explained that her daughter needed medical attention.

This all struck Baugh as quite odd, until Mrs. Brown led him to one of the bedrooms to meet Barbara Powers.

The doctor kept up with the news and had heard all about the fallen airplane and the captured pilot with connections to Georgia.

Understanding that reporters from all over the country were trying to locate and interview the wife of the man who was suddenly among the most famous individuals in the world, the middle-aged doctor agreed to be discreet.

In addition to her fractured leg, which had been placed in a walking cast by a physician in Turkey, Barbara suffered from a bronchial infection. The other doctor had also prescribed a tranquilizer for nerves. Baugh gave her a thorough examination, administered a shot for pain, and arranged for her to have some tests the next day, including an EKG.

Baugh, who grew up on a farm near Milledgeville and attended the University of Georgia, where he studied political science and history, was profoundly shaped by Pearl Harbor, like many men of his generation. Bright and ambitious, he interrupted his plans—he dreamed of a career in the foreign service—and immediately entered the US Army, becoming a platoon leader of the 82nd Airborne Division, a remarkable unit which proved crucial to the Allied victory. He fought in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, and Holland, participating in D-day, the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Market Garden. He watched many of his friends die, so he felt lucky to survive the war.

Baugh returned to the United States no longer so eager to spend his life traveling the world. He had seen liberated Paris and defeated Germany. Now he felt driven to build a regular life, so he enrolled in medical school and eventually moved back to his hometown, becoming a pillar of the community who was so admired, he eventually served eighteen years as mayor. He delivered more than 4,000 babies. Patients often showed up at his house to be treated in a little converted study, and sometimes they paid him in eggs, meat, and vegetables.

“Jimmy was an old-fashioned country doctor, and he worked all the time,” Betty said.

Among his close friends was a man from Milledgeville who worked for the CIA. Only a select few people in his life were allowed to know he was employed by the intelligence agency, and no one knew exactly what he did. But after learning that his friend Jimmy was treating Barbara Powers, he telephoned and recruited him for a special mission: Keep a close eye on the troubled wife, with special attention to her “emotional state” and “other related problems.”⁸¹ Jimmy was provided a contact and a number to call in Washington. No one knew that the kindly small-town doctor was performing a special service for his government.

“Due to things already known about the weaknesses of Mrs. Powers,” Baugh wrote in 1960, in a never-published manuscript concerning his involvement with the case, “[the CIA] believed she could be influenced by the wrong people…. It was implied that she naturally knew a lot about the set-up of the 10-10 Detachment and much of the intelligence program.”⁸²

Various business related to Barbara wound up on Baugh’s desk, including her eagerness to visit Moscow for the trial. At first, the government opposed her attendance, deeming it too risky. However, the CIA changed its mind, apparently influenced by the opinion of Columbia University law professor Dr. John M. Hazard, an expert on Soviet jurisprudence. The CIA asked Baugh to escort her, which required the doctor without a partner to take critical time away from his medical practice.

In the early days after the shoot-down, media outlets were still buying the Company line that Powers worked for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Among other things, Baugh was tasked with making sure Barbara did not say anything to the press that betrayed the approved message. When the doctor organized a press conference for the wife on her mother’s front lawn, he was able to convince the assembled newsmen to submit their questions in writing.

In a clear attempt to rally support for a trip, Barbara, one of the few people who called her husband Gary, read selected portions from a letter from him urging her to travel to Moscow for the trial. “He is getting plenty of food and has been treated well,” said Barbara, who started talking about the tour they gave him of Moscow, including the exhibit of his plane’s wreckage.⁸³

She talked about her fear that the pilot could spend years in prison or be put to death.

“My husband is not a spy,” she insisted.⁸⁴

While he was facing an uncertain fate, his wife was causing much distress for a small circle in Milledgeville. Baugh quickly became disturbed by “the vast amount of evidence pointing to Barbara Powers being a very mentally unpredictable person and judging from some of her recently acquired acquaintances, a very unwise person.”⁸⁵ She was frequently seen out on the town drinking heavily, in the company of people who were regarded as shady, especially men.

One bizarre incident gave him great pause about her state of mind. About 3 a.m. on June 22, Barbara knocked on someone’s front door, demanding some papers and bonds from a man she identified as “Jack Dempsey.” When the puzzled lady who answered the door found out who she was, she invited Barbara in, but Barbara “ran down the steps to a waiting car and disappeared in the night.”⁸⁶

Baugh’s contact in Washington was disturbed but not surprised, “regarding it as consistent with what they had expected.”⁸⁷

“It didn’t take Jimmy long to figure out Barbara was a mess,” Betty said. “She was a very troubled young woman.”

After consulting with Washington, he enlisted the help of his friend Eugene Ellis, the Milledgeville chief of police, to closely monitor her activities and interactions.

While the pressure of the ordeal exacerbated Barbara’s issues, the family back in rural southwest Virginia was shocked to learn that Francis was involved in spying on the Soviets.

After learning about the shoot-down, Jan Powers Melvin, who was married, with two small children, and was living in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, immediately called her sister Jean, who still resided in Pound. Jan knew their mother watched soap operas in the afternoon, and she asked Jean to go over and break the news, so she would not hear it on television.

“We were all just shocked, because we had no idea what Francis was doing over in Turkey,” Jan said. “Once the initial shock started to wear off, we were all scared to death what they were going to do to him.”

Pulled into the spotlight, Pound and the surrounding area became a magnet for reporters from across the globe, all trying to trace the background of the infamous spy. “You got the impression that some of those people were coming here to find out something embarrassing about Francis or the family,” said his sister Joan. “Or they wanted to look down on us country folks.”

Oliver happily answered questions about his son, expressing his pride that the boy was doing something important for his country. But the father’s frustration was frequently evident. “What can I do?” he once said.⁸⁸ “I’m just a little man out here in the coal country and my son’s life is at stake.”

Several days after his son’s capture, Oliver penned a letter to the Soviet leader:

Khrushchev responded in a telegram, offering to allow Oliver to visit his son but dashing his hopes of an early release. “The law is the law,” he wrote, “and I am not in a position to interfere.”⁹⁰

When news of the U-2 Incident hit the papers, sixteen-year-old high school junior Rosa Anne Speranza was standing in the kitchen of her house in Richmond, Virginia, near her mother, when her father pointed at the story he had just finished reading on the front page of his morning newspaper.

“If that were my son, I would want to be there,” he said.

An Italian immigrant who had built a successful life in Virginia’s capital city—developing Richmond’s first shopping center and owning a popular nightclub and restaurant—Jimmy Speranza loved his adopted country and appreciated the importance of family. Aware that the pilot’s family were Appalachian people of modest means, he worked with three friends to quietly initiate contact and offer to pay the father’s way to the upcoming summit in Paris. Oliver wanted to plead his case directly to the Soviet leader, telling reporters he was willing to offer himself in place of his son. When the summit collapsed, Speranza arranged to pay Oliver and Ida’s expenses to Moscow for the trial.

“The United States has been good to me so now I want to do something good for this boy who has done his best for his country,” he told a reporter when news of the gesture leaked.⁹¹

Out of the difficult circumstance, a special friendship developed between the Speranzas and the Powerses, who spent several nights at the Speranza home in Richmond. “They were the sweetest, dearest, most down-to-earth people,” recalled Rosa Anne. “My mom and dad felt a real connection to them. The situation was awful, but we were blessed to get to know them.”

To make matters worse, another American plane fell out of the sky on July 1, 1960. An RB-47 reconnaissance plane was on a secret mission over the Arctic Ocean when it was shot down by the Soviets. Two members of the crew survived and were shipped to Lubyanka, where the KGB began four months of intense interrogations.

If there was one thing that connected the family members to Francis so far away, it was the shared sense of powerlessness.

While his wife and parents worked through various complications with the visa process, Frank was informed that the investigation was finished at the end of June. He had endured sixty-one days of interrogations, while confined to a tiny cell, with only a few censored letters connecting him to the outside world.

When the indictment was announced, he learned that he would be tried for espionage according to Article 2 of the Soviet criminal code. The law provided punishment ranging from seven years’ imprisonment to death.

During the summer, a rift developed between Barbara and Frank’s parents, starting with their decision to hire separate lawyers. The Virginia Bar Association, believed to be a front for the CIA, stepped forward to fund the legal defense, although Frank would not be allowed to engage an American attorney in his defense.

The real fireworks started when Oliver brokered a deal to sell his exclusive story to Life magazine. The figure was never revealed, although speculation ranged from $5,000 to $20,000. Henry Luce, the magazine tycoon who controlled the Time Life empire and happened to be a close friend of Allen Dulles, was well known for such arrangements. For instance, the $500,000 contract he signed with the Mercury Seven astronauts in 1958 was approved by NASA and contributed mightily to the mythology of America’s pioneering spacemen.

But the impression that Oliver was eager to profit from his son’s tragedy disturbed many, including his daughter-in-law.

“Barbara became infuriated at the commercialization of her husband’s ordeal,” Baugh wrote. “Oliver dropped a few hints to various people questioning Barbara’s fitness in view of the reputation she had acquired from various escapades.”⁹²

The father suggested that his daughter-in-law was responsible for not giving him any grandchildren—she had experienced a miscarriage the year before—and that his son had only renewed his contract with the overseas assignment so he could continue accommodating Barbara’s lavish lifestyle.

The simmering feud eventually reached the media.

“All I can say is that Mrs. Barbara Powers turned down several offers of such a nature,” said William P. Dickson, the president of the Virginia Bar Association. “I don’t know whether Powers’ parents followed the same line of conduct. But I am truly delighted that the wife of a man fighting for his life refused to turn a profit from his plight.”⁹³

Tensions were so high, Barbara refused to fly to Moscow with Oliver and Ida, so she and her entourage traveled separately from Georgia.

When he was escorted into the ornate Hall of Columns inside the House of Unions on the morning of August 17, which happened to be his thirty-first birthday, Powers was temporarily blinded by the television lights and flashbulbs. This was appropriate symbolism, because the defendant, dressed in a blue pinstripe suit with a white shirt and blue tie, was a made-for-TV villain.

He looked around for his family but could not locate them, which was just as well. Barbara, seated with the rest of the family, broke down in tears at the shock of seeing her husband paraded onto the stage as a criminal.

With a history of hosting classical music performances as well as some of the Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s, the Hall of Columns featured several dozen chandeliers, plush red seats, and a large red-and-gold hammer-and-sickle banner draped above the stage. It looked like a theater, not a courtroom. About 2,000 invited guests, including Khrushchev’s daughter, Elena, showed up for the show trial, which for three days focused worldwide attention on what Radio Moscow called “a premeditated and carefully prepared act of aggression against the Soviet Union.”⁹⁴

It was clear for all to see that the prosecution was using Powers as a propaganda tool to convict American policy, American leaders, and the American system in the eyes of the world.

Soon after entering the room, Frank struggled with nerves and took a seat when he was expected to stand, causing him to be admonished by the presiding judge, Lieutenant General of Justice V. V. Borisoglebsky, whose Russian pronouncements included an English translation.

Like their son, Oliver and Ida felt very out of place.

Prior to leaving Richmond several days earlier with his party, which included their grown daughter, Jessica Hileman; attorney Carl MacAfee; family friend Sol Curry; and physician Lewis K. Ingram, Oliver told a reporter: “We are doing all we can to help our son and know he will find some comfort from our being in Moscow.”⁹⁵

He said he was still willing to trade his life for his son’s, if only he could get a chance to appeal to Khrushchev. But the premier would not see him.

Angered by the way many people in his own country were talking about his son, Oliver said he believed the American people had already convicted Francis and “the sentence will be passed by Khrushchev.”⁹⁶

While the CIA underwrote the costs of the trip for Barbara, her mother, their attorneys, and Baugh, who provided regular updates concerning the trial and Barbara’s activities—his notes scribbled at the end of the day while sitting on the toilet in his hotel room—the rest of the family was essentially cut off from government “direct contact and control.”⁹⁷ The deal with Life angered officials in Washington, who believed they could not trust Oliver.

Despite her health problems, which left her frail, gaunt, and needing help moving in and out of vehicles and seats, the gray-haired Ida—looking very much like the grandmother she was—had been determined to make the trip.

“Talk about culture shock,” said their daughter Jan. “They [her parents] didn’t know how to act in a country that was so totally different.”

During a tour of Moscow, Ida was amazed to see women performing manual labor on the streets.

“It was very nerve-wracking for them to sit there during the trial,” Jan said, “especially feeling like the end result was a foregone conclusion.”

When the Soviets announced nine days before the trial that Powers had “confessed” to spying, the State Department issued a carefully worded statement noting that the pilot “has been in the exclusive control of the Soviet authorities for 101 days…. Despite all efforts of this government, no one other than his jailers and captors had had any access to him, and anything he says should be judged in light of these circumstances and Soviet past practices in matters of this kind.”⁹⁸

Even before the trial began, Barbara made news by essentially conceding the argument, which undermined Washington’s point. During a press conference, she refused to take issue with the prosecution’s charge that her husband had admitted to the central crime in question. “The fact that he pleaded guilty of being the pilot of the plane whose wreckage they found in the Soviet Union—I only feel that it was normal to admit it,” she said. “What else could he say?”⁹⁹

Yet she told reporters he should not be held responsible for his actions. “My husband’s work and service was all part of a program which required orders from the President,” she said. “Therefore, I would term him a reconnaissance scout—not a spy—under orders from his own government.”¹⁰⁰

Handling Barbara during the trip proved to be a tremendous challenge for Baugh.

For weeks, Washington had worried that the Soviets were brainwashing Powers. The CIA asked to examine the letters the pilot had written home, and Barbara complied with the request.

First the correspondence was checked for “evidence of the prisoner’s use of the simple code in which he had been instructed during his training.”¹⁰¹ No clue was found.

Further examination of his handwriting led the CIA doctors to believe “more than likely some type or organic psychiatric change”¹⁰² had taken place. The State Department pushed back against the suggestion that Washington should introduce the possibility that he had been brainwashed.

Frank would insist he had not been brainwashed.

At a time when most Americans still relied heavily on daily newspapers, television news remained in its adolescence. The evening newscasts on the three commercial networks lasted a mere fifteen minutes—it would be another three years before Walter Cronkite’s broadcast on CBS consumed an entire half hour—and were constricted by various technical barriers. The first communication satellite would not be launched until 1961, which meant that the still-new marvel of video tape represented the cutting edge of broadcast technology. The networks went all out to provide coverage of the trial, including NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report, which featured the reporting of John Chancellor, on one of his first big overseas assignments.

Radio coverage helped shape public opinion around the world as well. In a report for the BBC, correspondent Ian McDougall painted a vivid picture:

The pilot understood the fine line he was required to walk. He was willing to appear remorseful, which his court-appointed Soviet attorney, Michael I. Grinyov, insisted was necessary to prevent him from being executed. But he was unwilling to cross the line and denounce his own country.

“I’ve been treated much better than I expected,” he told the court while recounting the circumstances of his capture.¹⁰⁴

Roman A. Rudenko, the Soviet prosecutor general, began his questioning of the defendant by establishing certain basic facts.

For the small task force huddled at the Matomic Building and parsing every word, bracing for the worst, this answer was a signal.

Often frustrated that his attorney never objected and seemed reluctant to question witnesses, Powers at one point took it upon himself to challenge experts who contended that the fact that his plane contained no official markings suggested it was on a spy mission. Determined to find some way to fight back, even if it was on a technical point, he convinced one expert to concede the possibility that markings could have been removed.

“Why I asked this,” Powers said, “is that I have seen all of the planes at Incirlik. This plane was at Incirlik for some months and every plane I saw there had some sort of markings. I cannot agree that there never has been identity markings on the plane.”¹⁰⁷

The prosecution spent significant time trying to establish the poison pin—displayed in the courtroom—as a weapon Powers planned to use against unsuspecting Soviet citizens, along with some other items in his survival pack and his .22-caliber pistol, “intended for silent firing at human beings at short rage.”¹⁰⁸

“On the pistol,” he said, “it was given to me and I took it strictly for hunting. Unfortunately, nobody knows that I couldn’t kill a person, even to save my own life.”¹⁰⁹

Borisoglebsky interrupted him. “You are aware no doubt that at 68,000 feet it is difficult to hunt for game.”¹¹⁰

The coverage by state media was predictably dripping with familiar propaganda themes, including one Radio Moscow broadcast, which noted his roots as the son of a Virginia cobbler: “Does an American cobbler, an American farmer, an American worker have any need of war? Can a genuine son of a man of labor voluntarily devote himself to the cause of preparing and unleashing nuclear war? Can he of his own free will, without any compulsion, become an accomplice and hireling of the inveterate spy Allen Dulles? No, you are not the son of a man of labor, Francis Gary Powers. You are the bondsman of the Rockefellers and the Morgans.”¹¹¹

Another broadcast spoke of the base in Turkey as a place where “young bloods are trained for the purpose of committing villainous, provocative flights into the skies of foreign countries, and in particular the airspace of the Soviet Union.”¹¹²

Moving toward establishing the crime on the second day of the trial, Rudenko began asking Powers about his May 1 flight.

When Rudenko completed his cross-examination, Borisoglebsky asked several questions.

In mounting a defense for his client, Grinyov felt compelled to do the bidding of his government, which included a complete refusal to challenge the allegations. He introduced statements that Powers later insisted he never made, including the suggestion that he had been “deceived” by his superiors. After condemning the behavior of the Eisenhower administration in great detail, he told the court, “Ruling reactionary forces of the United States had sent Powers to sure death and wanted him to die.”¹¹⁴

Powers bristled at such talk, which made him angry at Grinyov. “Since I had refused to denounce the United States,” Frank said, “Grinyov was doing it for me.”¹¹⁵ He bit his tongue.

As Grinyov predicted leniency for his client in the final verdict, Radio Moscow softened its tone, telling listeners that the spy pilot had made “a clear distinction between him and those who sent him.”¹¹⁶

Virtually every night during their twelve-day stay in Moscow, Barbara retreated to her room at the Sovietskaya Hotel and got sloppy drunk. She was often accompanied by journalist Sam Jaffe, who covered the trial for CBS television. Whether Jaffe was merely pumping her for information or engaged in an illicit affair has been debated by certain parties for more than half a century. Baugh suspected they were doing something more than drinking, but Jaffe, a onetime FBI informant who later struggled to combat charges of a collaboration with the KGB, which led him to sue the American government, ultimately winning a federal judgment that cleared his name, told the FBI “at no time was I intimate with her.”¹¹⁷

By the third day, Frank was visibly tired. He often squinted in the intense lights and no doubt felt the burden of his circumstances, wondering whether he had gone too far down the road to cooperation while trying to save his own neck.

In his closing argument, Rudenko carefully laid out the details of the aircraft, the violation of the Soviet airspace, the mission, and Powers’s motivation, as a man who grew up of modest means, having “voluntarily sold his honor and his conscience… for dollars.”¹¹⁸

When the prosecutor asked for fifteen years instead of death, Frank immediately felt relieved.

But Oliver leapt to his feet. “Give me 15 years here! I’d rather get death!”¹¹⁹

After Grinyov conceded the facts of the case but asked the court for leniency, Powers was given an opportunity to make a statement:

Baugh could understand the pressure the defendant felt, and the way the message sounded back home. It was a humiliating moment for America. Even before his conviction, newspapers had printed banner headlines such as “Powers Pleads Guilty.” His carefully worded statement after his conviction hit the papers in the context of three months of swirling doubts. The indignity of a US serviceman apologizing to the Soviets was difficult for many of Powers’s fellow citizens to accept.

Writing about the situation, Baugh said, “Clearly there had been some coaching… that [this approach] would be the only way to save his life…. I’m sure he was sorry to have been responsible for creating the incident that worsened the Cold War… [but] he certainly didn’t impress us as having defected. He did not criticize or disavow our government.”¹²¹

After a deliberation lasting four hours and forty minutes, the court reconvened and the defendant was ordered to rise. He stood in the dock, his hands holding onto the wooden railings. The three judges began reciting the charges and went further, effectively indicting Powers as complicit in an American scheme to destroy the Paris summit as a means to deepen the Cold War.

In the family section, Ida leaned in and whispered to her husband and daughter. “Don’t shed a tear. Don’t show any emotion.”

When Borisoglebsky announced the sentence of ten years’ confinement, including three years in prison, the room erupted in cheers as the defendant tried to keep his cool. He looked for his family but could not see them. He later wrote, “Only as I was being led from the courtroom did the full impact of the sentence hit me.”¹²²

Escorted into a small room with the assembled members of his family, where a spread of food and wine was laid out on a table, Frank broke down into tears while embracing his wife and mother, father, and sister. A well-armed six-man security team guarded the door. Frank told them he was relieved he did not receive the death penalty but wondered aloud if he had done the right thing by displaying such remorse. It did not take him long to become aware of the friction between Barbara and the rest of the family. This bothered him, and he asked them to try to get along.

Still stinging from Grinyov’s harsh words about his country, Powers told his wife he wanted her to make a statement to the press on his behalf. The next day, the two lawyers appointed by the Virginia Bar Association, Andrew W. Parker and Frank W. Rogers, relayed the message to reporters, repudiating much of what Grinyov said.

“I’m an American and I don’t want any part of it,” Powers told his wife.¹²³

The Soviet lawyer had quoted Powers as saying he believed he would be prosecuted if he ever returned to the United States, but not long after word of the verdict reached Washington, President Eisenhower said the government had no intention of prosecuting the pilot, “because it sees nothing in his conduct to warrant such prosecution.”¹²⁴

While extending his “sincere sympathy” to members of the pilot’s family and pledging to “provide for his wife” while he was confined to a Soviet prison, Eisenhower expressed his disappointment at the way Powers had been used to further Soviet propaganda.

Four days after the trial, as the family prepared to return to the United States, Frank visited with his mother and father one last time, wondering if it would be the last time he would ever see them. Ten years was a long time.

The Soviets allowed Barbara to visit with him alone in a secluded room at the prison, where the husband and wife had intercourse. Afterward, Barbara told her family and other members of the travel party about their intimacy. In case she became pregnant, she wanted people to know.¹²⁵