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

^{Chapter Five} LOST IN A CROWD

It was early afternoon when Chris Conrad picked up the ringing telephone.

“Is your mom there?”

Chris did not recognize the woman’s voice and realized his mother didn’t want to be disturbed.

Because of Robert Conrad’s celebrity, the family was accustomed to crank calls and bizarre people showing up at the front door. Some insisted the tough guy take them up on his offer to knock the battery off his shoulder, echoing a well-known television commercial. For such nuts, Joan was always prepared, carrying a loaded .38-caliber pistol in her pocket.

Through the years, arriving at all hours of the day and night, unannounced, I learned to approach the Encino house with caution. Knowing Joan was packing, I always waved my arms in the air and yelled: “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! It’s Gary!”

The reply from the sweet-sounding voice was a confirmation that the human alarm system had been temporarily disabled. “Oh, Gary! Is that you, Gary?”

Mrs. Conrad spent most of her time locked in her room watching television, rarely cooking, and leaving the son and his friends with virtual free rein in his part of the house, which became the group’s clubhouse. When we were older, she sometimes bought us kegs of beer after extracting a promise that we would not drink and drive.

In this case, his mother happened to be standing nearby when the phone rang.

But Chris knew enough to lie when someone asked if his mother was available.

“Not really.”

He could hear a woman sobbing in the background.

“Uh… can we drop Gary off over there?”

“Oh, I don’t know….”

When Chris put his mother on the phone, he watched the anguish quickly rise across her face. She liked Frank and Sue very much. They were kind people. When she learned that Frank had died, along with cameraman George Spears, after his Channel 4 Telecopter crashed just a few miles from the Conrads’ home, Joan immediately felt compelled to do whatever she could to help.

Devastated, my mom struggled to deal with the situation. When word reached Dee, who was in the Air Force Reserve, our mother asked her to fly home—even though she was stationed at Norton Air Force base in San Bernardino, just a 75-mile freeway drive from Sherman Oaks. “Mom wasn’t making much sense, which was completely understandable,” Dee recalled.

Marvine Neff, one of Mom’s closest friends and part of the Rand McNally and Libby fruit family, decided she needed to remove twelve-year-old me from the scene for a while, so she could get a grip. Mrs. Neff dropped me off at the Conrads’, where Joan gave me a big hug. This is when I realized something was wrong, and I fought to hold back tears so that Chris would not see me cry.

“My mom took Gary and me to a toy store and bought us a bunch of toys,” Chris said. “That was her way of trying to deal with the situation. We just sat and played with trains and stuff.”

I remember the events of August 1, 1977, through a fog.

It was brush fire season in Southern California. In addition to his patrol of the freeways, which often included police chases, my father had been dispatched to the Santa Barbara area, north of Los Angeles, to capture footage of flames streaking ominously toward the sky.

“The helicopter was a real game changer for us in those days,” recalled longtime Channel 4 reporter Frank Cruz, who often worked with my father. “It made for some exciting television when you had something dramatic to shoot.”

Typically, the local news break during NBC’s Today program included a broad mix of news, sports, and weather. But on this morning, local anchor Cruz quickly tossed immediately to Dad, who offered a detailed report featuring some very captivating video, while hovering near the action. “It was all about the fire that day, and Frank did a great job of reporting, as he always did,” Cruz said.

A representative from KNBC told the media the pilot had checked in via radio around 12:25 p.m., reporting that he was flying to the Van Nuys Airport to gas up his Jet Bell Ranger and head back out on his next assignment. The copter crashed about 12:40, near a velodrome and a Little League baseball field at Balboa Park in Encino. One witness saw the tail rotor fly off as it plunged to the ground, though this was never confirmed. Dad died of blunt force trauma to the chest.

Police speculated that the pilot may have tried to put the aircraft down in the vacant lot to avoid the nearby playground. “Just south of there are single-family residences, to the west large apartments, and to the northeast there were kids playing ball,” reported Lieutenant Mel Melton of the Los Angeles Police. “I don’t know what was in his mind, but he didn’t hit any of them.”¹

Investigators determined that the helicopter ran out of fuel—impacted by a malfunctioning gauge that had been repaired. This fell into the realm of pilot error.

As grief enveloped the Channel 4 news team, where my father had been employed for ten months, a former colleague at radio station KGIL spoke of her sadness at the loss of the “sweetest, gentlest man I’ve ever met.”²

“This station is devastated up and down the halls,” said Joann Larson, a controller at KGIL.³

Some members of the family back in Virginia suspected foul play, reflecting the level of distrust and bitterness many harbored for the government. The difficult-to-accept truth was colored by an overwhelming irony: A man who had once survived a violent crash in the stratosphere followed by twenty-one months in a Soviet prison died because he ran out of gas less than five miles from his Sherman Oaks home.

Family friend Gregg Anderson arrived to help my mother work through various decisions she needed to make, including scheduling the memorial service at First Christian Church in North Hollywood.

Mom relied on Gregg very heavily because she was going squirrely.

Moving through the list, Anderson asked Sue where she wanted Frank to be buried.

“Arlington.”

To Mom, the decision was simple. Her husband had risked his life for his country and deserved to be buried among heroes.

The widow was walking around the house, with Gregg following closely behind, pressing the subject.

“Yes, I understand,” Anderson said, “but what if we can’t get him into Arlington?”

Sue was adamant. “Gregg, there’s no alternate plan. Frank will be buried in Arlington.”

Even at the most heart-wrenching moment of her life, she was focused on securing her husband’s legacy.

This was something my father and mother argued about when he was still alive. Dad told her, “They [the government] don’t want me at Arlington. Don’t waste your time. It will never happen.”

But Mom was stubborn. Understanding that the country was divided into two camps about her husband, she was determined to achieve the public validation that burial at Arlington National Cemetery conferred.

While working the problem, Gregg was provided with a telephone number to reach a certain figure at the CIA. He called the number and was greeted by silence. He would have to start speaking without any acknowledgment from the other party, which offered the real-estate developer—who built Westlake Village in the San Fernando Valley and other high-end properties—a window into that mysterious world. Gregg later told me it was the weirdest thing he’d ever done.

The family and several friends in the government, including Air Force General Leo Geary, successfully maneuvered through the system and secured Dad’s burial rights at Arlington, which ultimately required the authorization of President Jimmy Carter.

Before boarding the jet at Los Angeles International Airport, Mom insisted on visiting the cargo bay, where she lifted the lid on the casket to make sure it was indeed her beloved Frank. (In DC, she became embroiled in an argument with some of his sisters, who wanted him to have an open casket at the ceremony. “No fucking way!” she said. Aware that the event would attract press photographers, she was determined to deny them a picture of his cold, dead body.)

On the morning of the interment, with various members of the family gathered at my mom’s parents’ home in Fairfax, Virginia, Mom was standing at the kitchen sink when suddenly something outside the window caught her eye.

“There’s Daddy!”

Dee was startled. “What are you talking about?”

Sue pointed to a white dove fluttering beyond the glass, which she took as some sort of sign.

“A great calm came over her at that point,” Dee recalled.

Before the limousine pulled up to Section 11, Lot 685-2 of the massive graveyard, Mom handed me half of a sedative to steady my nerves. It was hot and humid, and I fidgeted in my suit. I was seated between my mother and grandmother Ida, who looked very frail as they lowered her boy into the ground with a twenty-one-gun salute.

Surrounded by a sea of simple white markers stretching into the horizon, commemorating thousands of others who had served their country honorably, a gathering of friends, including many spooks, shielded our family from the media and anyone else who might want to intrude on our privacy.

“A lot of people were concerned Barbara might show up and cause a scene,” Joe Murphy recalled.

At the church services, three days after the crash, Barbara had made an appearance. Everyone felt uncomfortable. This was the only time I was ever to catch a glimpse of my father’s first wife.

At the burial, Barbara stood in the distance, silently paying her respects. She had remarried and apparently had transcended her troubled past, which gave Murphy a good feeling on a sad day.

When the enormity of my father’s passing began to sink in, I welled up with emotion. My very masculine father had always taught me that big boys don’t cry. And my mother had made me aware of all the photographers who were waiting like vultures to capture the family’s weakness in a time of stress. So I fought against the emotion of the moment, determined to honor both my father and my mother, at one point biting my lower lip. I was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me cry.

Like many people, my mother drank alcohol to unwind. She and Dad typically shared a cocktail or two when he arrived home from a stressful day of flying. They laughed and talked and enjoyed each other’s company while gathering a little buzz. Drinking was part of the context of Mom’s daily life. She loved to tell the story about how she and her beloved Frank spent the hours before the cameras rolled on a pivotal, late-night scene of NBC’s movie about the U-2 pilot on location in Long Beach: Sipping martinis with Lee Majors in his trailer. As a result, Majors was drunk when they shot the scene of him walking across the bridge.

Sometimes, she stumbled over the line.

“Every single year, my dad would take my mom out to dinner on her birthday, and every single year they would get into a fight,” Dee said. “I’m sure it was her drinking. She was not a good drinker. She could get really nasty when she drank.”

When Mom got drunk and abusive during a party at the Andersons’ house, Dad politely said his goodbyes and led me out the front door. We walked home more than two miles through darkened streets, leaving Mom to sleep it off.

When Dad died, Mom’s drinking became much worse.

“She crawled inside a bottle, and that’s where she lived her life till she died,” Dee said.

One night, when she was falling down drunk in the house, I had to help her to bed.

You never forget that.

After watching her spiral into a dark place, I made a call to an alcoholic support group. I wanted to get my mother some help and learn how to deal with her problem. But I wound up not attending any meetings, because I was sure they would want to know my name.

This was a conversation I didn’t want to have—not at an age when I just wanted to fade into the wallpaper.

I knew I couldn’t go there. My own anxiety trapped me into not doing anything.

Left without a father at the most critical time of any young man’s development, and forced to deal with a mother who abused alcohol as a way of coping, I headed into my teens riddled by insecurity.

My closest friends witnessed my struggle.

“Gary’s life was turned upside down overnight,” Chris Conrad said. “His dad had been the center of his universe, his hero, his role model. Boom. He’s gone. And his mom is dealing with her own pain. So Gary sort of felt like he was on his own, which must have been a pretty lonely feeling.”

The summer after Dad died, I flew to Virginia by myself to visit my family. It was the same farm where I had once delighted in shooting targets and handling chores with my father. But something was different. Separated from the fast pace of Los Angeles, I quickly grew bored. At one point, I placed a long-distance call to a friend back in California, whining about how much I disliked the Pound.

I was miserable and couldn’t wait to go home. Without my father, it felt like a totally different place. Without my father, I felt lost.

Even though Dad’s passing left us in a much more difficult financial situation, Mom somehow managed to keep sending me to Montclair Prep, a prestigious private school in the San Fernando Valley, where I was surrounded by the sons and daughters of the rich and famous. Sometimes, in that rarified air, I felt invisible. Earning spending money by working at a pizza place and a video arcade after school and on weekends, I eventually drove to school in a Chevy Citation, which I parked alongside the Mercedes, BMWs, and Porches that filled the school parking lot.

I felt very out of place. I was trying to figure out who I was without my dad, and being in a school where I never felt like I fit in made it worse.

I tried to convince Mom to let me enroll in a nearby public school. She would not hear of it. We often argued about the subject, cutting straight to the heart of my struggle for identity and a sense of belonging.

Joe Patterson, who has been my friend since second grade, saw me begin to withdraw into a shell. “You could tell he was struggling with the situation,” Patterson said. “He was devastated by his dad’s death, which made the usual teenage problems much worse.”

Jon Teperson, who became my friend in the seventh grade, recalled: “Word got around that the morose giant kid’s father had just died. That’s all. Just a kid with a dead father. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just a kid going through hell. And he looked it. No one knew his dad was a star in the first few weeks of seventh grade. No one knew his dad was also a villain. Gary would walk around the school with a blank expression. Looking distant.”

When I was fifteen, after my mother went to bed, I started running the streets of the San Fernando Valley with my friends, including Conrad, Patterson, Teperson, and Bob Kallos. We rode bikes through the darkness; slipped into bars with fake IDs—produced by printers we bribed, sealed with the lamination machine in Conrad’s room—so we could drink and party; drag-raced on Mulholland Drive, often using cars from the fleet of Robert Conrad’s production company; and played gorilla golf with balls dipped in a glow-in-the-dark substance… until somebody invariably heard the commotion and called the cops. We usually made it home around 4 or 5 a.m., time enough to grab a couple hours’ sleep before heading off to school, where we fought the power structure by testing the strict dress code, sometimes sporting Hawaiian shirts and prescription sunglasses to stand out from the crowd.

We were not out to cause any harm. We were just out having fun—pushing the edge, when our parents thought we were asleep.

Late one night, after they discovered the pillows I had carefully arranged to make it appear that I was sleeping under the covers, Mom and her boyfriend went looking for me. Finally, she saw me walking out of an arcade and began embarrassing me in front of several buddies.

“What are you doing here? We were so worried! You come with me! You are grounded!”

Eventually Mom realized she was powerless to prevent me from sneaking out.

One night after playing a round of gorilla golf, we got hungry. With no restaurants open, we broke into a Mediterranean place on Sunset Boulevard and cooked our own breakfast. After doing the dishes, we left a wad of money on the counter and walked off into the darkness.

“We were just bunch of drunk guys who got hungry after playing some golf,” Conrad recalled. “The way we looked at it, no harm, no foul.”

Many times during high school, a bunch of us guys would drive off to the California mountain resort of Mammoth Lakes on a Thursday night—which required skipping school Friday, protected by a series of carefully crafted lies. After skiing and partying all weekend, we drove home Sunday night, arriving back all bleary-eyed in time for the first bell at Montclair on Monday morning. “The teachers kept trying to catch us but never did,” said Conrad, who often pulled up to school with snow still covering parts of his car.

During those days, I started experimenting with marijuana, often joining fellow employees from the pizza place to share a joint in a nearby park. One of the first times I smoked pot at a friend’s house, Mom and my sister arrived to pick me up.

Trying to hide the smell, the friend sprayed me with disinfectant. When I got into the car, they started teasing me about the overpowering smell of disinfectant, and as I tried to make light of it, attributing the odor to horseplay, I was overwhelmed with a powerful thought: “Can they tell I’m stoned?”

Dee suspected it, but she didn’t give me away.

Some of my friends worried when I appeared to be using more and more illicit drugs.

They were right to be concerned. I was looking for a way to escape. Smoking pot was just another way to avoid the depressing and complicated realities of my life. It was just another way for me to test the boundaries. Looking back on those days from the vantage point of a middle-aged man, I can see where the teenage me was heading in a dangerous direction and could have ended up in jail or, worse, dead.

Always one of the biggest guys in my age group, I slowly matured into a good athlete. At my mother’s suggestion, I joined the Blizzard Ski Club and became a very good skier, winning a long list of competitions and having a pipe dream of someday participating in the Olympic trials. Eventually I blew out my knee, but the success I enjoyed on the slopes gave me a jolt of self-esteem.

I yearned for a positive male role model, someone to show me how to be a man.

Would I have rebelled less—or more—with a dominant former military man looking over my shoulder? I don’t know the answer to this question. I know I needed guidance that I wasn’t getting.

When I was in the seventh grade, Robert Conrad showed up at Montclair and announced he was going to coach the school’s flag football team. He was a big star, so no one argued. Soon his friend Red West, onetime bodyguard to Elvis and a co-star on Conrad’s TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep, joined the effort.

Instilling a sense of discipline, toughness, and ambition, and teaching sound techniques, Conrad and West pushed the guys relentlessly. The first year, we posted a winning season. The second year, we were undefeated.

“Mr. Conrad was the epitome of macho, this very dominant male figure,” Joe Patterson said. “He was a great influence on all of us—an inspirational figure. Those two guys were out there teaching us how to be men.”

It mattered not that Conrad had been largely absent in his son’s life, which caused resentment to bubble up on the practice field when Chris suddenly found himself interacting with his father as a coach, or that he often walked the sidelines drinking a beer. Sometimes, he would hand me an empty beer can during the middle of drills and tell me to dispose of it in “the wall,” our code for a hole in the concrete wall adjacent to the athletic field.

Out of that experience I learned a lot about teamwork and competition. It also helped me get my mind off Dad. It was a good distraction at a time when, as Teperson said, I was like “a guy in a giant whirlpool grabbing at little pieces of flotation devices.”

“Gary was still lost all through high school,” Jon added. “He didn’t know what he was searching for. He couldn’t articulate it.”

A couple of years after Dad died, Mom started to date a man named Bob, who worked on black ops programs at Area 51. Many times, she corrected and disciplined me in front of Bob, but he never got involved. Nobody was ever going to take my father’s place, and Mom never allowed Bob or anyone else to cross that line.

It might have been different if she had decided to remarry. But she never did. As much as she grieved for my father, I always got the impression that Mom never wanted to stop being Mrs. Francis Gary Powers. This was a role that was deeply imbedded in her identity… even as I viewed my name with mounting ambivalence.

Often, while hanging out in the basement, my friends would ask questions about my father. “Everybody now forgets that no one knew what happened back then,” Teperson said, recalling our late-night conversations, usually while Mom was passed out upstairs. “Did he not pull the ejection because he thought it was wired to blow? Was he supposed to use the poison pin and didn’t? Gary grew up surrounded by this, smothered by this.”

This extended conversation was the beginning of something. I could not imagine what. Not just yet.

Mom didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the ways her son dealt with the loss of his father was by becoming a spy.

As part of my fascination with puzzles and ciphers, I taught myself how to pick locks. It started out with me wanting to get into Mom’s drawer or Dad’s desk, just to prove I could. I became pretty good with a paper clip.

It eventually evolved beyond picking locks. Bored and irritated by what I thought was unfair grading by some of my teachers, I developed a routine of writing tiny crib notes on a pen, which I repeatedly clicked to reveal answers during tests.

“We had a signal,” Conrad said. “I’d say, ‘Ah, my pen ran out of ink… and he’d say, ‘Oh, I have a pen’ and throw it to me.”

Increasingly frustrated by his inability to score well in his Spanish class despite working hard, Conrad started bellyaching about the situation one day, as the final approached. “Well,” I said, “I can get the test.”

The planning resembled a CIA covert operation.

For several days, I arrived at school early and stationed myself in a distant area of the parking lot. Armed with binoculars, I closely watched the teacher, who approached the front door and keyed in the security code. “By this time, we knew which four numbers it was; we could tell by the condition of the keys,” Conrad recalled. “But Gary had to figure out the sequence.”

Having the security code allowed the small team of burglars, dressed in black and wielding penlights, to penetrate the building.

During class, I had closely studied the movements of my teacher and knew exactly which folder contained the test, and which drawer.

Using my lock-picking skills, I quickly opened the file cabinet. We retrieved the test and rushed to a nearby post office, where we utilized a copy machine located in the 24-hour lobby. Soon we returned the test to the appropriate folder and exited the premises without detection.

The school featured several security cameras, and, obsessed with every possible detail, I suggested we paste a still picture of the appropriate scene onto the camera lens. But the other guys decided this was unnecessary. The day before, we went around the school slightly adjusting the aim of the cameras. No one noticed. No evidence was captured.

To prevent suspicion, we all agreed to purposely miss a few questions.

Emboldened by the experience, during our senior year, we acquired the final exam for every one of our classes. After learning that one of our teachers kept the all-important document in his briefcase and took it home, we bribed the son. A wad of cash did the trick. We all scored well and gained admission to good colleges. No one outside our tight little circle ever knew.

Am I proud of that all these years later? No, I’m not. I’m also not ashamed, but did I learn from it? Yes, I did. Fortunately, we never got caught.

If the cloak-and-dagger operations satisfied some powerful desire for me to feel closer to my father, I remained dubious about probing too deep into an existential question.

Ever since Mr. Conrad tried to buck me up by telling me to be proud of my father “no matter what you might hear,” I had been haunted by the mystery swirling around his memory. This idea was deeply engrained in my teenage insecurity. It filled me with doubts about who my father was and how this might affect me.

But this was one secret I was not quite ready to unlock.