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

^{Chapter Four} REPATRIATED

On the evening of February 7, 1962, two inmates inside Vladimir Prison started their evening walk from the community toilet back to their tiny, 12´×8´ cell.¹ They were in no hurry. Every moment they were allowed to linger beyond the confining gray-and-white walls was precious, like a little whiff of freedom.

Inside the ancient penitentiary built during the reign of Catherine the Great, located about 150 miles east of Moscow, Francis Gary Powers, the world’s most famous spy, was just another lost soul who had to piss in a bucket and squat over a big open hole in the floor.

Transferred to Vladimir twenty-one days after his conviction, Powers was introduced to Zigurd Kruminsh shortly after he arrived from Moscow. The American pilot and the Latvian dissident, who said he had been betrayed while hiding out with members of the anti-Soviet underground and given a fifteen-year sentence after a sham trial, quickly became friends. Powers wondered if he was a KGB plant. It all seemed too convenient, especially since the man spoke five languages, including English, and espoused a virulent hatred of the Soviets. No matter. Powers realized his biggest enemy was loneliness and despair. Zigurd gave him someone to talk to. They made each other laugh and took turns looking through the little crack in the cabinet blocking the window, which offered a glimpse into the outside world. Little things. They shared the little things that kept them from going crazy inside. The Latvian taught Frank how to weave small burlap and wool rugs. They also passed the time playing chess.²

On the way back from the bathroom, Frank and Zigurd noticed the KGB colonel, who was the most powerful man at the prison, and his interpreter standing outside their cell, number 31, on the second floor of building two.

Stepping into the cell after the two inmates, he approached Powers and said, “How would you like to go to Moscow tomorrow morning?”³

Moscow?

He had been confined at Vladimir for seventeen months, so long that he was starting to forget how trees looked.

“Fine,” he said, unsure of what was happening.

Then the colonel added one bit of information.

“Without guards.”

This could only mean one thing, but he was almost afraid to think it. Several times during those seventeen months, he had gotten his hopes up about an early release, only to be disappointed. Just days earlier, the pilot’s wife told reporters in Milledgeville that Soviet officials had told him he had no chance of clemency because of the “seriousness and gravity of his crime.”⁴

Unlike any other man in Vladimir, he was truly a political prisoner.

The U-2 Incident was like a grenade tossed into the bitterly contested 1960 presidential election.

Khrushchev believed that releasing Powers before the election would boost the chances of Vice President Nixon against Democrat John F. Kennedy.⁵

Kennedy, who pushed the “missile gap” theme as a way of attacking Eisenhower from the right—relying on estimates that the Soviets would have as many as 500 first-strike-capable ICBMs by 1961, several times the US arsenal—benefited from the U-2 Incident as a potent symbol of the outgoing administration’s negligence in the face of a growing Soviet threat. Nixon would always blame Allen Dulles for failing to explain the truth gained by the four-year U-2 program, disproving the gap, although such revelations would have pushed the CIA director into the forbidden realm of domestic politics.

After the Powers shoot-down sent US-Soviet relations careening to a new low, Kennedy told a high-school student, during a rally in Oregon, that he might be willing to apologize to Khrushchev for the overflight. The resulting firestorm made him seem weak and naïve.⁶ Ultimately, this gaffe motivated him to become more overtly hawkish.

While Kennedy was an unknown quantity at the Kremlin, Khrushchev was inclined to oppose any continuation of the current American policy. He disliked Nixon, who wore his anti-communism like a beauty-pageant sash.

“Several top Soviets have indicated to me their opposition to you,” Ambassador Thompson wrote to the vice president. “I have always taken the line with them that you are a staunch and effective anti-communist just as they are staunch anti-capitalists, but that they made a mistake in assuming that you were opposed to negotiations or agreements with the Soviet Union.”⁷

Even with the bad blood stirred up by Powers and by the Kremlin’s cozying up to Fidel Castro, the Eisenhower administration quietly pressed for the release of Powers and the RB-47 crew.

But Khrushchev insisted the time was not right, believing any movement on the issue would reflect a tacit endorsement of Eisenhower’s handpicked successor. “We would never give Nixon such a present,” Khrushchev told his colleagues.⁸

After Kennedy captured the White House with one of the narrowest margins in American history, the Soviet Union released the two surviving members of the RB-47 crew as a goodwill gesture to the new administration. (“You can’t sit in a cell for 211 days without it affecting you,” Colonel Bruce Olmstead said. “You forgive, and you live with it.”⁹)

Powers thought for sure he was next. But the news never came.

In June 1961, the two leaders met in Vienna. “You know, Mr. Kennedy,” Khrushchev said, “we voted for you.”¹⁰ This was apparently meant as a joke, but it was impossible to deny that the U-2 Incident, the scuttling of the summit, and Powers’s continued imprisonment inured to Kennedy’s benefit. JFK declined to bring up Powers’s fate at the summit.

In another instance, Khrushchev said, “Relations deteriorated due to the U-2 and I consider that the American people’s vote for Mr. Kennedy was against Nixon, the U-2 and the Cold War policy.”¹¹

The CIA’s attempt to overthrow Castro in April 1961, a covert operation approved by Eisenhower, also worked against Powers’s case. The fiasco of the Bay of Pigs demonstrated the CIA’s hubris and the ineptitude of the early Kennedy administration, which pulled the plug rather than risk an overt confrontation with the Soviets. It was another very public black eye for an agency that was institutionally averse to sunlight. The axe fell on Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, leaving the CIA to be managed by a new man, John A. McCone, who was not personally invested in the cause of the U-2 program and Francis Gary Powers.

Four months later, the Soviet-backed East German government began constructing the Berlin Wall. The steady migration of East German citizens to the West—estimated at about 1,000 people per day by the late 1950s—ended overnight, except those souls brave enough to pursue freedom at the risk of a bullet.

The new fortification, which extended for 96 miles, protected by armed guards with orders to shoot to kill, immediately became the ultimate symbol of the Iron Curtain.

By early 1962, it was hard to deny the impact of Powers’s ill-fated flight—as if that bright flash of orange light had signaled the dawn of an ominous alternate reality. With the U-2 Incident, US-Soviet relations fell into a dangerous downward spiral.

Given all this disturbing news, Powers remained skeptical of his release—until a guard showed up with a suitcase and told him to start packing. He allowed himself to believe that he was finally going home.

Around six o’clock the next morning, Frank said goodbye to Zigurd and walked out of the prison building and into a waiting car. Within a few minutes, he and the colonel and the interpreter stepped onto a train bound for Moscow. He tried to engage the colonel about the situation, but he refused to discuss it.

When they arrived in Moscow, a car drove them through familiar streets, finally reaching a familiar destination. Powers never thought he would see those iron gates of Lubyanka again. The sight stirred an unsettling feeling.

Once inside, the colonel led him to his old cellblock. This time, however, he was only visiting. The next morning, they were headed to East Germany.

Because his prison account had a balance of about one hundred dollars, but they were only authorized to distribute rubles, which were worthless in the outside world, the colonel asked him what he wanted to do with the money. He thought about it for a moment. Could they transfer the balance to his buddy Zigurd? No. Not allowed.

After some discussion, they allowed him to use the money on some Russian souvenirs, which the interpreter would buy for him, and on a meal brought in from a restaurant.

During his twenty-one months of captivity, he had lost more than twenty pounds, his diet consisting mostly of soup and potatoes. He desperately yearned for some meat and a stiff drink, so the two veal cutlets and the tin cup half-filled with brandy hit the spot.

When they arrived at the airport the next morning, a small plane was waiting, its two propellers already spinning.

“If you had to go from a car into a house or on a plane, you went fast,” Powers recalled. “They didn’t make you run, but they didn’t want you to be in public view very long.”¹²

After flying to East Berlin, the American and his two Soviet escorts wound up at a safe house, the sort of cozy, well-appointed place reserved for party big shots. He noticed a very visible security detail outside, which contrasted with his knowledge of CIA safe houses, where the first order of business was to remain invisible. Apparently, the KGB didn’t care so much about secrecy once they had their prisoner locked up tight.

When the colonel produced a bottle of brandy and poured the prisoner a drink, he took a sip. “Made me woozy,” he recalled with a laugh. The KGB man shook his head.

“No! No!” he said in Russian. “That’s not the way we drink in Russia. Chugalug!”¹³

The man proceeded to demonstrate by filling his cup and downing it in one gulp.

Frank nodded and killed his brandy in one swallow.

“If everything goes well,” he said, “you will be released tomorrow morning and will have a reason to celebrate.”¹⁴

Before dawn, when they shared a ceremonial brandy and headed out into the cool air, Frank remained in the dark about the specifics of his impending repatriation. In time he would learn that his father deserved part of the credit. At least Oliver was no longer contradicting him on the front page of the New York Times.

The week after his conviction, Oliver gave an interview to the Times in which he said, “[Francis] said, ‘If I had been shot down, there would have been an explosion behind me and an orange flash around me.’ He didn’t believe he was shot down.”¹⁵

Frank was stunned.

Clearly his father was confused.

He asked for permission to write a letter to the editor of the paper, carefully choosing his words…

From the earliest reports of the incident, American officials began trying to figure out how it had happened. Because many senior officials refused to believe the Soviets had advanced so far in their missile technology to be able to reach a U-2 flying at its operational ceiling, a theory emerged: Powers had descended to a lower altitude, allowing him to be felled by a surface-to-air missile.

No less a figure than Allen Dulles believed this, at least in the summer of 1960. The month after the incident, he privately told C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times, “We think Gary glided down to try and restart his motor. He was then shot down around 30,000–40,000 feet….”¹⁷ Kelly Johnson and President Eisenhower made similar statements.

With the pilot consistently insisting he had not experienced any mechanical problems and had been hit at “maximum altitude”—the definition of which reflected the cat-and-mouse game played by the CIA—such a scenario required an additional leap: He had purposely descended to a lower altitude, which meant he had sabotaged his own mission in order to defect. Even after his show trial and incarceration, the possibility of such an explanation lingered.

In this context, Oliver unwittingly contributed to the swirling doubts concerning his son. The American public was left to draw its own conclusion about the August 27 report, and many no doubt assumed the pilot had spoken in some sort of code to his father, letting him in on a secret. This was a bell that could not be un-rung.

And yet Oliver made the connection that eventually sent him home.

In the years after his unsuccessful defense of the KGB spy Rudolf Abel, James B. Donovan continued to press forward with an appeal. In this the onetime naval commander, OSS official, and associate counsel to the Nuremberg tribunals, who was now consigned to the much-less-glamorous life of a New York lawyer who specialized in insurance cases, believed he was doing his duty. He never doubted his client’s guilt. But because he believed in American justice and the message it sent to the rest of the world, Donovan believed Abel—who went by several different aliases and refused to give the government his real name—deserved the most vigorous defense possible, even if such high-mindedness in the age of the Red Scare struck some of his friends as unnecessarily noble. Anonymous phone calls and letters to his Brooklyn home branded him a “commie lover.”¹⁸

The publicity of the case helped Donovan land the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in 1962, but the baggage of representing a Soviet spy at the height of the Cold War was too much to overcome, especially against popular incumbent Jacob K. Javits, who beat him by more than 1 million votes.

Before the US Supreme Court, Donovan argued that the government violated Abel’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure when the Immigration and Naturalization Service, armed only with an administrative warrant, detained him and worked in concert with the FBI to search his room at Manhattan’s Latham Hotel. Even without the Cold War implications, the case emerged as a closely watched test of Fourth Amendment protections.

Abel, who eventually settled in for a long stay at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, once asked his attorney what would happen if his conviction was overturned and he was granted a new trial and an eventual acquittal. By this time the accused and his lawyer had developed a mutual respect, but Abel harbored no illusions about Donovan’s sympathies. He understood the representation was all about the larger principle, so he was not surprised by the answer. “If all my work is successful,” Donovan said, “I may have to shoot you myself.”¹⁹

On March 28, 1960, the US Supreme Court upheld Abel’s conviction. The vote was 5 to 4. “The nature of the case, the fact that it was a prosecution for espionage, has no bearing whatever upon the legal considerations relevant to the admissibility of the evidence,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in the majority opinion.²⁰

None of the justices could yet understand how the narrow margin would enable a defining moment of the Cold War.

By the time Powers tumbled out of the sky thirty-four days later, and with Abel staring at another twenty-seven years of hard time, Donovan’s suggestion of a future spy trade was mostly forgotten.

Somehow Oliver learned about the idea, resurrecting it in a letter to Abel:

Such a trade was complicated by various factors, including one rather big problem: Although an East German woman who purported to be his wife was anxious to get him back, the Soviets insisted they had never heard of Abel. But Oliver started the dominos tumbling. One thing led to another… and twenty-one months later, Washington dispatched Donovan to East Germany to negotiate an exchange, which required several days of back-and-forth with Alexandrovich Schischkin, a high-ranking KGB official; Abel’s “wife”; his lawyer; and the East Germany attorney general.

At 8:20 a.m. local time on Saturday, February 10, 1962, the American pilot walked toward the middle of the Glienicker Bridge, which spanned Lake Wannsee, separating Potsdam, part of East Germany, from West Berlin. He was accompanied by two Soviet officials. In his hands he carried the suitcase, containing some clothes, his diary, a rug he made in prison, and the souvenirs purchased on his behalf. It was cold, and he was wearing a heavy coat. Approaching from the opposite direction was an American delegation leading Rudolf Abel.

Joe Murphy took a long look at Powers.

About two weeks earlier, inside the new CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, John McMahon, who eventually became deputy director, stopped by Murphy’s office. They were getting Powers out, and they needed someone to identify him. “You’re it.” Murphy arrived in West Berlin via Frankfurt the previous Monday and helped make the preparations, including how and where to hide Abel.

Washington feared the news leaking out. While the bureau of prisons prepared to fly Abel to West Germany, Murphy went to work arranging to keep him overnight at a nearby US Army base while awaiting the exchange. Because the base employed a large number of German civilians, the commander picked up the phone and ordered a subordinate to give all the Germans Friday off. He didn’t say why. With the circle closed, the secret held and the small party convened at the bridge without drawing any attention.

Murphy knew Powers well.

“Right away, I knew it was Frank,” he said.

Before he could say anything, Powers called him by the wrong name. “Oh, hey, Charley!”

“Nope. Try again.”

Recalling the scene, Murphy said, “I knew what he was thinking. The guy who replaced me [as the security officer at Incirlik] was named Charley. Frank got confused, which was understandable. There was no reaction from the others. They were relying on me, and I had no doubts.”

Looking back on the moment, Powers said, “I knew that I knew the man, but I called him by the wrong name.”²²

After going through several security questions—including the name of his dog—the trade was delayed while Donovan waited for a phone call about Frederic Pryor.

Pryor, a twenty-eight-year-old American who was pursuing a doctorate at Yale, spent about two years freely moving between West Berlin and East Berlin while studying economics at the Free University of West Berlin. One day in September 1961, after the wall went up, he crossed into the eastern zone to attend a speech and visit a colleague. He could see the border crossing was becoming too dangerous. Being a foreigner allowed him to move between the zones, but the show of force and the fear of the unknown unnerved him. He decided to tell his friend that they needed to abandon their joint project, which concerned the textile industry.

When he arrived at the woman’s house and learned that she had escaped to the West, Pryor was seized by the Stasi, the East Germany secret police. They searched his car, found his dissertation, and were convinced he was a spy. The Stasi spent more than four months interrogating him, threatening him with the death penalty unless he confessed. They never tortured him, but in his cell, he often heard men screaming.

“Once you’re arrested, you’re always convicted,” he recalled many years later. “I expected five or 10 years in prison. I made peace with that.”²³

Pryor’s luck turned when Donovan began negotiating the trade of actual spies and was able to convince the East Germans to throw the student in as a goodwill gesture.

He was to be released at the same time at Checkpoint Charlie, in the center of bustling Berlin. But the notification did not arrive at the appointed time, which left the two sides waiting on the bridge.

Powers had already decided, if something happened to prevent the exchange, he would make a run for it. “Even if it meant a bullet, I’m wasn’t coming back.”²⁴

While waiting for word, Powers and Murphy walked to the side of the bridge and casually chatted.

“That’s Abel over there,” Murphy said, pointing toward the thin man standing near the middle of the bridge. (In contrast to the warm welcome Powers received from Murphy, Donovan, and State Department official Alan Lightner, the Soviets did not seem particularly happy to see their long-lost spy.)

“Who?”

“Rudolf Abel!”

“Oh…”

Until this point, Powers did not know he was released as part of a trade.

Over the course of the previous two days, he had repeatedly asked the Soviets why he was suddenly being released. “They said, ‘We just want to show the world how humane the Soviet Union is,’” he recalled. “Right up to the last minute… even though 10 minutes [later], I would find out [the truth]. This was… an insight into their psychology.”²⁵

Soon the two Americans were joined at the edge of the bridge by Schischkin, a tall, friendly man who spoke fluent English.

“Goodbye, Mr. Powers,” he said. “Come see us again sometime.”

Frank smiled. “Yes sir, I’ll come as a tourist.”

“Not as a tourist. As a friend.”

Several minutes later, a member of the American delegation yelled out that Pryor was safely in the West, signaling the two sides to move across opposite sides of the bridge.

On the drive to the local airport Tempelhof, Frank learned about Donovan’s role as the driving force behind the exchange, destined to remain an iconic moment of Cold War intrigue.

While strapped into the back of a military plane for the short flight to the massive Rhein-Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt, where they would board a Lockheed C-121 Super Constellation for the six-hour flight back to the States, Powers was examined by a military doctor. The air was choppy and the doctor had a hard time planting the needle to obtain a blood sample.

One thing bothered Murphy about the first leg of their journey back to the United States: “You would have thought the Air Force guys flying the plane would have been very welcoming to Frank… but for whatever reason, they weren’t,” Murphy said. “They were very cool toward him.”

This was a preview of coming attractions.

After twenty-one months of captivity, Frank was happy to be a free man.

But the doubts followed him home.

News of the exchange filtered out in time for some of the Saturday-afternoon newspapers back in the United States, including the Washington Daily News, where the headline and headshots of Powers and Abel dominated the front page:

The release remained top-of-the-fold news across the country the next day, as Americans hungered for details of a real-life spy story with a happy ending.

“Francis Gary Powers is now in the United States and is meeting privately with members of his family,” the White House said in a statement. “Mr. Powers appears to be in good physical condition.”²⁷

The reunion with his parents at the CIA safe house in Maryland was emotional.

“My wife and I were asleep when the big word came,” Oliver told reporters before boarding a flight to the secret location.²⁸ “But it’s not very hard to keep awake now. His mother and I thought it would probably be a much longer time—at least four or five years.”

Frank had feared he would never see Oliver and Ida again. They had harbored the same anxiety. Getting to see them and hug them and talk with them about the ordeal was an incredibly cathartic experience.

When the early-morning call from the White House reached Milledgeville, Barbara was equally stunned, telling reporters, “I can’t sleep. I’m too excited!”²⁹

“How can I express my reaction to the happiness I feel when I had no idea I would see him for 10 years?”

The newspapers said Barbara rushed off to her hairdresser so she would look good for her husband. But after flying to Maryland, accompanied by her brother Jack, now a chaplain in the Air Force, she showed up smelling of alcohol. She had put on about thirty pounds. She expressed irritation that she had not been given prior notice of the release, which puzzled her husband. She kept saying she needed a drink but insisted she didn’t have a drinking problem.

“Barbara looked terrible, like she had not been taking good care of herself,” Murphy said. “I never saw her look so bad.”

Even as he enjoyed the long-denied comforts of home—a bed with a full mattress and springs, a toilet with a seat, good food, the freedom to walk around the house and across the large yard—Frank gradually began to feel like a prisoner of the CIA.

During a walk across the snow-covered grounds, he turned to Murphy and asked, “If I wanted to leave right now, could I?”³⁰

“Well, I really don’t think you could.”

When a reporter located the safe house, the CIA moved Powers to another location near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the agency specialists spent the next three weeks questioning him in exacting detail about every aspect of his shoot-down, interrogation, and imprisonment.

After reading the debrief and studying various evidence, Dulles changed his original assessment about Powers descending to a lower altitude. “We are proud of what you have done,” he told the pilot during a meeting in his government office.³¹

The new director of the CIA, John A. McCone, remained skeptical. Feeling pressure to assess the failure, McCone appointed a Board of Inquiry chaired by E. Barrett Prettyman, a retired chief judge of the US Court of Appeals’ DC circuit.

Among the speculation to hit the media was the question of whether the pilot’s employment contract obligated him to destroy the plane if it was downed in Soviet territory.

After eight days of closed-door hearings, the Prettyman commission concluded that Powers was “inherently and by practice a truthful man” who had “complied with his obligations as an American citizen during this period.”³² It ordered his back pay, which amounted to $52,500, to be awarded, and cleared him to return to work at the CIA.

However, the board did not offer a definitive opinion on how the U-2 was felled, which enhanced the murkiness surrounding the incident.

Some within the intelligence community quietly continued to doubt the pilot, including McCone. The agency knew much more about what happened than it was willing to tell, and no one paid a higher price for this silence than Francis Gary Powers.

“In my opinion, Francis Gary Powers handled himself perfectly under the circumstances,” argued longtime military and intelligence writer Norman Polmar, who also worked inside the defense establishment. “But the agency could not defend him. The agency did what it should have done at that time. It had the right and responsibility to protect itself…. [The CIA] didn’t know that they weren’t going to have to send another U-2 back over the Soviet Union, and they had to protect those secrets.”

During his time in prison, Powers was allowed no access to Western news sources, except for the American socialist publication the Nation. So when he returned to the United States and began to be inundated by articles questioning his patriotism, he was shocked.

In one article, John Wickers, a onetime Virginia politician and longtime member of the American Legion, told a reporter, “I view the exchange with astonishment and disgust. Powers was a cowardly American who evidently valued his own skin far more than the welfare of the nation that was paying him so handsomely.”³³

US Senator Stephen Young, a Democrat from Ohio, said, “I wish this pilot… had shown only ten percent of the spirit and courage of Nathan Hale.”³⁴

Immediately after hearing his apology, Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilworth blasted the “disgraceful performance” as a “terrible example to the rest of the world.”³⁵

Each negative article was like a gut punch to a man who had been deprived of his liberty for nearly two years but returned an ambivalent figure, repatriated as something less than a hero.

One of the most devastating blows was delivered by President Kennedy. On March 6, Powers was waiting for a car to take him to the White House for a personal meeting with the president. At the last minute, however, someone from the White House called to say the meeting had been postponed. In fact, it had been canceled. No explanation was ever offered. Previously, the pilot had been told that Attorney General Robert Kennedy favored trying him for treason. “Bobby Kennedy made the initial judgment that the guy was a traitor,” said longtime CIA man Kenneth Bradt. Clearly, some within the administration considered him too politically toxic to be seen with the president, in sharp contrast to the RB-47 survivors, who had been welcomed into the Oval Office.

Frank would be haunted by the snub for the rest of his life.

The controversy surrounding him was somewhat analogous to the situation faced by Mercury astronaut Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, who on July 21, 1961, became the second American in space. After splashing down, explosive bolts fired for some reason, flooding the capsule and eventually sending it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Grissom was rescued but widely blamed for the mishap. Kennedy shunned him. Long after he died in the January 27, 1967, launch-pad test fire of Apollo 1 that also claimed the lives of fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee, Grissom’s memory remained clouded by the mysterious loss of Liberty Bell 7.

About two hours after his White House meeting was called off, while testifying in a public hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Powers discussed the fateful day in great detail, telling the senators: “I can remember hearing, feeling, and sensing an explosion…. I felt that the explosion was external to the aircraft and behind me.” At one point he employed a model of the plane, demonstrating how the right wing “dropped slightly, not very much. I used the controls. The wing came back up level[,] just before or after it got level, the nose started going down, very slowly. So I applied back pressure to the control column and felt no resistance to the movement of the control column[,] and it kept going faster and faster. So I immediately assumed at that time the tail section of the aircraft had come off, because it—a very violent maneuver happened in here….”³⁶

After listening to his testimony, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts commended Powers as a “courageous, fine, young American citizen.”³⁷

Like the CIA panel, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee determined that Powers acted appropriately. But the details of the reports remained secret, ostensibly for national-security concerns, and therefore exerted virtually no impact on public opinion, which was being shaped to a great degree by negative media reports.

In his prepared remarks to the committee, McCone struck a legalistic tone when explaining one aspect of the Prettyman board’s finding:

On the same day Powers appeared in a public session with the Armed Services Committee, Senator John J. Williams, a Republican from Delaware, asked McCone, during his executive-session testimony to Foreign Relations: “Don’t you think he is being left with just a little bit of a cloud hanging over him? If he did everything he is supposed to do, why leave it hanging?”³⁹

When Frank returned to Pound to see the family, the town held a celebration in his honor, including two high-school bands and a large crowd of locals. His father was recognized for starting the ball rolling on the trade. Many welcomed Powers home, willing to accept the shades of gray he was forced to negotiate; but in others, Walton Meade, Powers’s brother-in-law, saw the subtle signs of disapproval. “Some people said he was a traitor,” he said. “‘He didn’t do what he should’ve done. He ought’ve killed himself.’ That’s how a lot of people felt.”

The Pound was a proud place, teaming with patriotism, full of veterans who had served in both world wars. Francis Gary Powers was their sort of man. Until he got caught up in something they didn’t fully understand.

“There’s people here, some of ’em would’ve killed him, if they’d gotten a chance,” Meade said.

The talk wounded Powers deeply. Spending all that time in a Soviet prison was a kind of torture, but returning to his own country and having his patriotism questioned was the most hurtful blow of all. The infamy now attached to his name represented a special kind of confinement from which he could never hope to escape.

Why did he not use the poison pin?

Why didn’t he destroy the plane?

Is it true he descended to a lower altitude?

What secrets did he reveal to the Soviets?

Why did he say what he said?

The people who were willing to believe Powers betrayed his country hated him for how his failure made them feel.

At the triumphant height of the American Century, when the country was unaccustomed to foreign-policy debacles and unwilling to concede its limitations, the profound humiliation of hearing him apologize to the Soviets was not something they would soon forget.

They needed someone to blame for their shame.

In a world tantalized by James Bond and other fictional spies, the lore of the poison pin captured the public’s imagination, playing into preconceived ideas about the shadowy world of espionage. It was easy to believe such a man, shouldering the risk of flying into denied territory for the nefarious purpose of taking photographs of sensitive military sites, would be ordered to prick himself and be done with it—taking one for the team and denying the enemy the opportunity to gain information, leverage, and propaganda points.

At his wedding in the summer of 1962, Joe Murphy could see that some of his friends disapproved of Powers’s presence. “Nothing was said to him, but I knew how some felt,” he said. “I could never understand that way of thinking.”

Even before his parachute tumbled to the ground, the narrative of his life was established in the eyes of many: By allowing himself to be captured alive, Francis Gary Powers was a traitor.

Some didn’t know the truth of the poison pin: that it was optional and completely within his discretion. He was under no orders to kill himself.

Some didn’t care, believing he should have taken his own life—regardless of what he was obligated to do.

The lack of a definitive public explanation by Washington on this matter and others related to the U-2 Incident enabled various conspiracy theories to swirl, even pulling in the celebrated Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who said:

Like many others, Fleming believed Washington should have disavowed Powers—“throwing [him] cold-bloodedly to the dogs”—and that the pilot should have accepted the consequences of his job, which warranted such a handsome salary primarily because it was fraught with such risks. “He was expendable. Expend him!”

Of course, his family and friends and various others thought differently. They saw him as a good man who did his best under trying circumstances and loved his country but was not required to sacrifice his life to prove his patriotism.

“I knew my brother was no traitor,” Joan said. “He did his duty. Some people just didn’t understand.”

Some of the people in the office at Langley enjoyed teasing Jeannie Popovich. Young and impressionable, the wide-eyed eighteen-year-old had recently migrated from a coal-mining community in western Pennsylvania to take a job as a clerk-typist at the agency. Sometimes the others told her outlandish stories just to test her level of gullibility, invariably sealing the ritual with an admission of the lie and a good-natured laugh shared by all. She took it all in stride and never considered it mean-spirited. But she was determined not to believe the next tall tale.

One day in the spring of 1962, about three months after she joined the CIA, Popovich heard a knock at the department door. Their office did not have a receptionist, but since her desk was located nearest the door, she got up and answered the knock. The man said he was there to see the gentleman in charge of the section. “My name is Powers,” he said.

When Jeannie ushered the man into her boss’s office and returned to her desk, one of her coworkers approached and said, “Do you know who that was?”

“The man said his name was Powers.”

“That was Francis Gary Powers. Do you know who Francis Gary Powers is?”

Of course she knew.

But she assumed her colleague was trying to tell her another whopper, and she wasn’t going to fall for it.

Soon others joined in, trying to convince her. One even went to the office safe and retrieved a file, which showed that the famous spy was scheduled to start work in their office that very day.

“Read this!”

She began to believe it might be true.

A while later, when the boss opened his door and began introducing Powers to the staff, Popovich accepted a different kind of grief from her friends, negotiating an important milestone in her evolution to skeptical CIA veteran.

Soon after the shoot-down, the agency recognized a glaring vulnerability by creating a program to train pilots to deal with being captured and interrogated. Simulated prison experiences, which benefited from knowledge gained about Soviet and Chinese methods, taught pilots how to recognize and deal with their own vulnerabilities while maneuvering in an environment without Geneva Convention protections.

“Our people would have a cover story, flimsy as it may be… and they can’t simply clam up and refuse to say anything,” said Kenneth Bradt, one of the psychologists who administered the program. “What can you say and what do you need to protect? That was a big part of the training.”

Unable to put Powers back in the air, and not knowing what else to do with him, the CIA leadership assigned him to the training program, where his experience became a closely examined case study.

Studying Powers’s incarceration, Bradt admired the way the pilot handled the situation. “Considering what he had [to deal with], the guy did a remarkable job,” Bradt said. “His whole focus was on not revealing secret information. And he did a good job of that… not realizing the main focus of the Soviets was to use him for propaganda.”

“The pressure on him was twofold,” Bradt said. “In addition to waking up every morning and wondering if this is the day they’re going to take him out and shoot him, he had to deal with… what was going on with his wife. The Soviets were most happy to let all the letters through… to let him know his wife was becoming an alcoholic and sleeping with other men.”

Even as he dealt with the complications of his ambivalent repatriation, Powers learned in greater detail about his wife’s activities while he was away.

Increasingly out of control, Barbara was seen at all hours of the day and night at the bars in Milledgeville, where she often caused a scene. She made no attempt to conceal romantic liaisons with several different married men around town.

One night she caused a stir in the parking lot of a drinking establishment while partying with her African American maid in the front seat of Powers’s Mercedes. Authorities were dispatched to the scene. “The Ku Klux Klan got into the act,” Baugh said, “and it was only the timely intervention of Chief of Police, Eugene Ellis, that [prevented] every newspaper in the country [from writing] about the wife of the U-2 pilot… being placed in jail for violating the race mixing laws.”⁴¹

During a trip to Jacksonville, Florida, accompanied by the wife of another pilot, a drunk Barbara drove off from her beachside hotel and ran a car into someone’s yard. She was arrested and spent the night in jail, cursing and threatening the officers, revealing her identity as the wife of the world-famous pilot. The FBI and CIA smoothed things over, and her mother bailed her out of jail. Nothing ever wound up in the papers.

“All of these incidents simply pointed to the completely amoral state that Mrs. Barbara Powers had descended,” Baugh wrote.⁴² “Surely no sane person would endanger her husband with such irresponsibility and disgraceful conduct.”

Especially while Frank was in prison, the Powers clan in Pound saw how whiskey ruled Barbara’s life. It was an eye-opening experience for a bunch of teetotalers.

“She’d come in here, swear she’d never drink another drop, and by ten o’clock the next morning, she wouldn’t know where she was,” Jack Goff recalled.

When she ran out of liquor while staying at Goff’s house, his brother-in-law Walton reluctantly replenished her supply.

“She would get it one way or another,” Goff said. “It was sad.”

When she left, they found empty bottles hidden throughout the back bedroom.

“It was very awkward for the family to deal with,” Jan said. “She was clearly a very troubled girl, and none of us really knew how to handle it. She didn’t seem to like the family, which made it even worse.”

Barbara often directed her anger at her mother, who also drank heavily.

On Christmas night in 1960, Baugh’s home telephone rang. On the line was Mrs. Brown’s maid, who breathlessly said, “Something terrible [is] about to happen.”

When Baugh arrived at the Brown home, he discovered both the mother and the daughter in a state of inebriation and the house strewn with furniture and belongings. Barbara, bruised and with her clothes torn, came out of the bathroom, where she had taken refuge, and told the doctor that she had been beaten with a broomstick by her mother. Monteen, who was employed at the Milledgeville State Hospital, Georgia’s primary facility for mentally disturbed patients, insisted that she would not take any more of her daughter’s insults and curses. Barbara began relating how her mother had fallen asleep drunk while smoking and set her mattress afire—awakened just in time by the Powers’s dog, Eck.⁴³

“Tragedy with a sensational overtone could be clearly seen in this most difficult family conflict,” Baugh wrote.⁴⁴ “Publicity of the antics of this household could prove as a reflection on us nationally and provide the Soviets with excellent propaganda.”

In the spring and summer of 1961, the issue reached a boiling point, as Baugh confronted Barbara about her behavior; one of her boyfriends threatened the doctor for meddling into their private affairs; and the wife experienced two run-ins with the law. On June 10, she was in the passenger seat when a male companion was charged with drunken driving near Dublin, Georgia. On June 22, Milledgeville police arrested her for drunk driving.

In September, with the backing of Monteen as well as Barbara’s sister, Mrs. Neil Findley, and brother, Baugh successfully petitioned the court to involuntarily commit Mrs. Powers at the University Hospital Psychiatric Center in Augusta, Georgia.

“Her brother and her sister really worked with Jimmy to try to get some help for Barbara,” Betty Baugh said.

While being treated by Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen—the acclaimed psychiatrist known for the multiple-personalities case that spawned the motion picture Three Faces of Eve—she told of hearing voices, including the dulcet tones of the singer Tennessee Ernie Ford.

In a letter to Powers, Baugh tried to put the best spin on the situation:

After returning from captivity, Frank wanted to believe he could save his marriage.

When he was assigned to CIA headquarters, Jan took Barbara shopping for groceries for their new apartment in Alexandria. “She was drinking quite heavily,” Jan recalled.

As proof that she was able to control her drinking, Barbara left a full vodka bottle in the kitchen. Eventually Frank discovered it had been emptied and filled up with water.

In August, Powers took a trip to Pound alone to see the family and contemplate his future, feeling only pity for the women he had once loved. “In continuing the marriage I was only holding onto the shell of what was and what might have been,” he said.⁴⁶

Frank filed for divorce, which was granted in January 1963 and made national news. The court ordered him to pay Barbara a settlement of $5,000 and $500 in attorney’s fees.

“I found [Francis] to be a very nice man who deserved better,” Betty Baugh said. “It was a shame he had to deal with all this mess when he got back from such a traumatic experience.”

Even as the marriage was breaking up, it was affecting CIA policy. With new pilots being recruited for the A-12 Oxcart program—eventually to evolve into the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird—the CIA began placing much greater emphasis on a pilot’s family situation. The agency overruled any candidate whose wife appeared unstable or otherwise potentially problematic. “We didn’t want to inherit another Barbara,” Bradt said.

The next chapter of Powers’s life began with a spilled cup of coffee.

The pretty young woman who bumped into him at CIA headquarters, causing him to splatter her with the hot liquid, worked for Ken Bradt as a secretary/office manager. Her duties as a psychometrist included administering psychological tests to those agents who came back from abroad so that the CIA doctors could check the answers against their profiles.

Claudia Edwards Downey, known to one and all as Sue, had been married to a CIA operative who was stationed in Greece. She arrived home one day to find the husband in a compromising position with the Greek maid, which ended the marriage.

“Sue was a great gal,” Bradt recalled. “She was very personable and outgoing, and everybody liked her.”

Especially Frank.

The romance began quickly, while the pilot waited for his divorce to become final.

When he returned from the Soviet Union, Powers expected to be able to return to the Air Force. This was part of the deal he struck in 1955. But his commission was blocked, for reasons that were never fully explained to him. A decade later, he lamented to a reporter, “I guess they didn’t want to have a known spy in the Air Force.” ⁴⁷

With no flying available to him in the CIA, he began looking around for an opportunity to get back in the air, which led to an interview with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson in October.

While he was in California, the world learned that the Soviets had stationed offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba.

The U-2 Incident.

The Berlin Crisis.

The Bay of Pigs.

The Cuban Missile Crisis.

It all connected.

The hope invested in the Paris summit had devolved into the missiles of October, pushing the superpowers to the brink of thermonuclear war.

Photographic intelligence gleaned by U-2 flights confirmed the presence of the missiles, which President Kennedy and his United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, were able to use to great effect in proving the case to the world.

When US Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. returned for his sixth mission over the island nation and was blasted out of the sky by an SA-2 missile, some in the White House and the Pentagon saw the hostile action as the first shot of a war. But Kennedy kept his cool and eventually forced the Soviets to withdraw the missiles.

For those in Washington who continued to insist that the Soviets did not possess the capability to reach a U-2 at maximum altitude, the Anderson mission was definitive proof that they did, and it supported Powers’s claim that he had not descended to a lower altitude over Sverdlovsk.

When she heard about the U-2 going down over Cuba, Sue Downey immediately thought that it must have been piloted by Powers, thinking the trip to the West Coast was just another agency cover story. But Frank really was in California.

He was back in the air, far from danger.

After landing a job as a U-2 test pilot at Lockheed, Frank began a long-distance relationship with Sue. They both thought it felt right, but since they had each failed the first time they were married, they wanted to take the time to be sure.

The wedding took place in a little chapel in Catlett, Virginia, on October 26, 1963. Frank quickly began the process of adopting Sue’s daughter, Dee. The family lived for a while in the pilot’s penthouse bachelor apartment before moving to a house near the Burbank airport and eventually to the San Fernando Valley town of Sherman Oaks.

In contrast to his relationship with Barbara, which was always full of doubts and suspicions, Frank found true happiness with Sue. They argued like any couple, usually when Sue had too much to drink. But Frank never doubted his second wife’s devotion.

“Our mother was smart, kind, and sassy, with a fabulous personality,” said Dee, who turned six the month after the wedding, “and she loved our father beyond belief.”

When they found out they were going to have a child of their own, Frank and Sue started saving their loose change, so they could afford a private hospital room.

During her pregnancy, Sue experienced a particularly memorable dream: Seeing their baby on a bear-skin rug. Determined to make his wife’s dream come true, Frank bought her a bear-skin rug.

This is where I, Francis Gary Powers Jr., enter the story.

According to Mom and Dad, not long after I came into the world at Burbank’s St. Joseph’s Hospital on June 5, 1965, one month premature, they took me home and placed me on the rug for a memorable picture.

By this time, my father was feeling increasingly alienated from the CIA. In April 1963, every U-2 pilot was presented with the prestigious Intelligence Star—except the man who spent twenty-one months in a Soviet prison. Not until two years later—when John McCone was on his way out—would the slight be rectified. It was not the last time some high-ranking officials of the agency found it more convenient to pretend Francis Gary Powers had never existed.

Not everyone felt conflicted. Frank was attending a function for Lockheed employees at the posh Beverly Hilton in 1964 when Allen Dulles took the opportunity to praise him from the podium. It was unexpected and incredibly gratifying. “Embarrassed the devil out of me,” he later recalled.⁴⁸

Happy to be back in the air, Powers struck a “quiet, introspective” vibe at social gatherings, according to Mary Finch, then the wife of fellow Lockheed test pilot Bob Gilliland.

“Frank was a warm, kind, decent man,” said Jeannie Popovich, Sue’s friend from the agency, who saved up her money to make several visits to California.

During her first trip west, in 1965, Popovich was on the freeway with Sue, heading out to do some shopping, when they heard an announcement on the radio that a U-2 had crashed in the California desert.

“Sue nearly wrecked the car,” she recalled. “Awful thoughts were going through my head. What if Frank had been hurt, or worse, killed?”

They were all relieved to soon learn that my father was fine, but they were saddened by the death of another U-2 pilot, Buster Edens. They had even considered naming me in his honor.

I enjoyed a special connection with Jeannie. As a four- or five-year-old, I often sat in her lap with my arms around her neck, soaking up every ounce of her attention.

“I love you, Jeannie Popovich! Will you please wait for me until I grow up so I can marry you?”

The man I knew growing up was not mad at the world. He was a good and loving father and husband who enjoyed his life and was determined to move on and make the best of the cards he had been dealt.

But the echoes of 1960 haunted him.

Too many people believed what they wanted to believe.

“I still feel like a scapegoat,” he told one reporter.⁴⁹

It hurt him to think anyone could actually believe he would betray his country.

Dad and I were very close. As a little boy of three or four, I sometimes visited him at the Burbank Airport, his home base as a Lockheed test pilot, and I would carefully walk on the wings of his U-2 as he held my hand.

“His dad always had a smile on his face,” recalled my childhood friend Joe Patterson.

Chris Conrad, the son of actor Robert Conrad and one of my closest friends, envied the father-son connection he witnessed between us.

“My father was famous and all that, but he was a guy who was mostly not around for me growing up,” the younger Conrad said. “It was completely different for Gary. Mr. Powers was really about Gary and spending time with Gary. He really loved his son. They had a relationship that I didn’t have with my dad.”

I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was to have a dad who wanted to spend time with me and involve me in things. I looked up to him. He was my role model.

My mother was a widely liked figure among my circle of friends, who appreciated her Southern hospitality. “She was very charming and welcoming,” Patterson said.

Several years after the CIA denied his request to write a book about the U-2 Incident, Dad moved forward with the project, working with author Curt Gentry on Operation Overflight, which was published in 1970. It was a cathartic experience. For the first time, he felt a measure of power over his own story.

However, soon after the book was submitted to the CIA for review, Lockheed dismissed him, and he became convinced that the order came down from Washington.

Around this time, Dee was sitting in her fifth-grade history class when the teacher began talking about the U-2 Incident, telling the class that Francis Gary Powers should have killed himself to avoid capture by the Soviets. His little girl was stunned. Her father? Her father was a bad man because he hadn’t killed himself?

“I was crying when I got home that afternoon, and Mom wanted to know why,” she said.

Mom promptly drove to the school and got in the face of the teacher and the principal.

“It was a very traumatic moment for me,” Dee said.

After leaving Lockheed, Dad landed a job flying a Cessna 170 traffic airplane for Los Angeles radio station KGIL. When I became old enough, I sometimes flew with him during the summer, soaking up the experience as Dad patrolled high above the freeways.

In the beginning, the onetime U-2 pilot conceded a certain amount of “stage fright,”⁵⁰ but in a short amount of time, he became a radio veteran, typically reporting four times each hour while flying at an altitude of 1,000 to 3,000 feet.

Even though it was not quite the same as the thrill of flying off into the stratosphere, Dad enjoyed the job because it allowed him to make a living in the sky. Trying to explain the special feeling that had captivated him for nearly his entire life, all the way back to that day at the fair in West Virginia, he told a reporter, “The higher you get, the greater the sense of detachment. It’s indescribable, but it’s the detachment.”⁵¹

Many of my most powerful memories occurred at my father’s side.

Over the course of writing the book about his life, my father became good friends with Curt Gentry. Not long after their book was published, Curt arrived in Los Angeles. He was already at work on his next nonfiction work, the blockbuster Helter Skelter, about the Tate-LaBianca murders, which rocked America in the summer of 1969. One day in 1970, I rode along as Dad picked up Curt at the downtown courthouse where Charles Manson and his gang were being prosecuted. While being transported away from the courthouse, the three young female followers of Manson who would soon be convicted of the gruesome crimes saw me, an innocent child amid the circus atmosphere.

“Look, Daddy,” I said. “They’re waving at me and blowing me kisses.”

“Well, wave back,” he said.

So I did.

I was about five, unable to fully appreciate my momentary brush with history.

The closeness between father and son was forever evident, as I grew big enough to follow in my dad’s footsteps. We played golf, rode bikes, bowled, and played in the snow during family trips to the California mountains. On a vacation in Hawaii, Dad taught me to body surf. He also got me excited about solving puzzles and other logic problems and collecting coins.

One time, when I was about eight or nine, I got up way before dawn and we headed off for a deep-sea fishing adventure off the Pacific Coast. I became very sick and spent much of the day throwing up at the side of the boat. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that smell. But at least I caught a fish.

Several family trips to “the Pound,” as we called it, formed powerful memories of a world very different than our suburban California life, including one holiday in the summer of 1976.

I will always remember helping my father paint the big heating-oil container out behind the house and running a string tied to a bunch of tin cans between two trees in the backyard.

Getting to shoot his .22 rifle was a great thrill. What a rush to pull the trigger and hear the distant ping of the bullet penetrating tin!

The man everyone back there still called Francis regaled me with stories of his childhood hunting, fishing, and spelunking in the surrounding countryside. One particular tale made a big impression. When they were young boys, he and Jack Goff were climbing through a nearby cave. At one point, while crawling through a very tight passage in the pitch dark, Francis got stuck. Jack was ahead of him and could not turn around. Francis was on his own.

After several tense moments, when he thought he might not make it out, he finally realized that his belt had gotten twisted up on a rock, and he started moving back and forth, side to side… until he finally worked his way free. Imagine the feeling of relief. The two friends then continued their exploration, only to realize they had gotten confused and lost their way out. After more than an hour of going around in circles, Francis finally noticed a candy-bar wrapper that had fallen out of his pocket on the way in. This little piece of litter showed them the way home.

“When you get in a tough spot like that, son,” Dad told me, “always remain calm. If you can keep from panicking, you can work the problem and solve it.”

It was impossible for me to know at that point, before my world shattered, but such moments would loom large in my life. I would cherish every thread of a recollection, remembering my father through the stories he told me; the advice he offered; the little rituals we shared.

In 1976, NBC aired the two-hour TV movie Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident. Starring Lee Majors, it was based largely on Dad’s book, which gave him yet another opportunity to tell his side of the story.

I was cast in the small part of a young Russian boy being warned not to touch a poisonous coin.

I thought it was cool to be in a movie with the Six Million Dollar Man, but I didn’t know until many years later that the scene had never happened in real life. It was pure Hollywood.

In a small, seemingly innocuous way, I was drawn into the mythology surrounding my father’s real-life drama, which set me on the circuitous road to someday understanding how fact and fiction could be melded in ways that undermined true history. Sometimes a stubborn fact is no match for a juicy lie.

In a city filled with movie stars and other celebrities, Francis Gary Powers was a rather-unique figure in Los Angeles in the 1970s, especially as he settled into his high-profile job as a traffic helicopter pilot for Channel 4.

Dad and Mom were included in many things and given various opportunities because of the fame forever attached to his name. Still, wherever he went, he was shadowed by those pervasive doubts. Everyone who encountered him wondered what really happened over there. This was his particular burden, and he was never able to escape it. Even his friends invariably felt compelled to ask.

After their sons’ sixth-grade graduation, Dad and Robert Conrad headed for the bar at the Van Nuys Airport, sidling into a booth while the boys played in the parking lot. Eventually the conversation turned to a familiar topic.

“Did they want you to kill yourself?” Conrad asked.

Dad shook his head. “No. They never told me to do that.” Then he smiled and pointed toward his son in the distance. “If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have Gary, wouldn’t have this life.”

Recalling the scene, Conrad said, “He was used to the question, and he knew I didn’t buy any of that stuff about him being a traitor.”

All those years after the wide-eyed young man earned his Air Force wings, Dad remained a flag-waving patriot. But he was struggling with a certain amount of creeping cynicism and resentment concerning the CIA.

In 1975, the whole country started getting an education about the agency, thanks to the efforts of Senator Frank Church, who chaired a select committee charged with investigating alleged abuses of power by the CIA. Like the U-2 Incident, the very public hearings drew unwanted attention to a part of the government unaccustomed to the spotlight.

The Church Committee exposed many of the agency’s darkest secrets, including various assassinations and coups. Dad watched the proceedings with great interest and took the opportunity to compose letters to Church and his colleagues, trying to plead his case. Complaining of the agency’s impact on his dismissal from Lockheed, he said, “I am a living example of that misuse of power.”⁵² He added, “In retrospect, my two years in a Russian prison was easy when compared to my treatment by the CIA.”

This must have been a very difficult thing for my father to do, but, ultimately, he was making the same sort of distinction that permeated the Church Committee report. He believed it was his patriotic duty to challenge the CIA’s behavior—taking issue with the weaknesses of an organization that had grown increasingly powerful and unaccountable.

The Church Committee decided not to investigate his case, but two years later, another congressional committee invited him to speak. The hearing was scheduled for September 1977, and he was planning to take me with him. He believed it was time for his son to start learning about his complicated history.

On July 31, Dad called his sister Jan to wish her a happy birthday. Because Jan worked for the National Park Service, he asked if she could arrange a private tour of the White House for their upcoming trip. She said she would work on it the next day.

“I’m going to reopen my case, and they’re either going to brand me a traitor or clear me,” he told his sister.