Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

Like imagining what Barbara was doing now.

Or, subtracting eight hours, picturing what was happening at home in Virginia.

Or, worse, I would visualize the base, and see a pilot, someone I knew, being awakened by the message center and getting ready to report to Prebreathing to prepare for a flight. Unaware that the Russians now had missile capability.

Convincing the Russians that the U-2s flew at sixty-eight thousand feet wasn’t enough, I realized. It might save someone from flying into a preset trap. But I had been shot down, and I had been at my assigned altitude.

Some way I had to get word back to the agency that Russia did have a rocket capable of reaching us.

From what I had been taught about brainwashing, I had anticipated certain things: I would be lectured about Communism, given only propaganda to read. Food would be doled out on a reward-punishment basis: if I cooperated, I would be fed; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t. Interrogation would be at odd hours, under bright lights. No sooner would I fall asleep than I would be awakened, and it would start all over again, until eventually I lost all track of time, place, identity. And I would be tortured and beaten until, finally, I would beg for the privilege of being allowed to confess to any crime they desired.

None of this had happened. And yet, more than anything else, the loneliness began to get to me. When in the cell. Even in the interrogation room, surrounded by people.

Later, after having asked some questions about Communism as a stalling tactic during an interrogation, I was given a book on the subject. It was a Penguin paperback, published in England, and written by a British M.P.

One day in the midst of questioning I suddenly interrupted myself in mid-sentence and said, “Why should I talk to you? You’re going to kill me anyway. Why should I bother answering your questions, when, as soon as you have everything you want, you’re going to take me out and shoot me? Why should I even open my mouth when there’s no way out of this for me?”

“There may be a way,” one of the majors said.

“If there is, I can’t see it,” I replied. “As far as I can see, my situation is hopeless.”

“There may be a way.”

“Then tell me what it is!”

“You just think about it.”

“I have, for hours at a time. And I can’t see any way out except death.”

“There may be another way. You go back to your cell and think about it.”

I did. And I knew it had to be one of two things. That I defect to Russia or that I become a double agent.

At our next session the major asked me if I had thought about the matter we had discussed. I said I had, and that I still couldn’t figure out what he meant.

With that the subject was dropped.

Obviously they didn’t want to make the suggestion themselves. If made, it would have to be my idea.

I hoped they were holding their breaths.

Torture, I decided, would be better than not knowing.

On Tuesday, May 10, on being taken to the morning interrogation, I told my inquisitors that I would refuse to answer further questions, on any subject, until I had proof the American government had been informed I was alive.

Refusing to back down, I was returned to my cell. That afternoon, when the guard unlocked the door and motioned me out, I had the feeling this might be my last walk.

Instead I was taken to a larger interrogation room. Rudenko and a number of other people were present. The interpreter had a copy of The New York Times , dated Sunday, May 8, only two days ago. He then read from a speech purportedly made by Khrushchev in which he said: “We have parts of the plane, and we also have the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking. The pilot is in Moscow, and so are the parts of the plane.”

“Can I see the paper?” I asked.

“Not permitted.”

“You could be making that up. Or you could have had that paper printed right here in Moscow.”

They brought out other U.S. papers, quoting from interviews giving the reactions of my wife and both my parents to the news. My wife, the articles said, had been flown back to Milledgeville, Georgia, where her mother lived. The comments of my mother and father were so typical that I couldn’t doubt their veracity. “I’m going to appeal to Mr. Khrushchev personally,” my father said, “to be fair to my boy. As one old coal miner to another, I’m sure he’ll listen to me.”

I couldn’t help it. I broke down and cried.

My interrogators didn’t know what to make of this. But they weren’t experiencing the relief I felt.

Just knowing that my family knew I was alive and thinking of me, I was suddenly no longer as alone.

Back in my cell, realizing that Khrushchev had released the news of my capture, that it had appeared on the front page of The New York Times and other papers, I began to sense for the first time that in the outside world this was not being treated as just another instance of a plane being shot down. That this was to be no ordinary case.

The release of news of my capture marked a turning point in the interrogations: they became tougher. Now I had to try to outguess not one adversary but two: Russian intelligence, and the American press.

“You lied to us!”

The blunt accusation stunned me. “What do you mean?”

They had caught me at something, but what? The actual altitude of the U-2, the number of overflights I’d made? These and a dozen other possibilities ran through my mind as I waited for the interpreter to translate the reply.

“You told us you had never taken a lie-detector test. But it says right here, in The New York Times , that you did!”

I hadlied about that: I didn’t want them suggesting that inasmuch as I had already taken one such test, I certainly couldn’t object to another.

At the time it had seemed a safe lie. It was the kind of information I felt sure they would have no way of checking. I hadn’t counted on a newspaper giving it to them, for ten cents.

“It says here that all the CIA job applicants are required to take polygraph tests.”

“That may be true of the agents,” I replied. “But we were pilots. Hired to fly airplanes.”

From then on each familiar question became charged with a hidden meaning. Why were they asking that again? Did it mean they had learned something?

Often it did.

“You told us the U-2’s maximum altitude is sixty-eight thousand feet. Yet this newspaper says the plane ‘can actually rise to close to one hundred thousand feet’! How do you explain that?”

“The writer of that article has never flown a U-2. I have.”

There was one saving grace. Given two contradictory statements, they had to make a choice. Although I couldn’t be sure, I felt they were often inclined toward accepting my version, since I had proven truthful on the things they could verify. Nor was this particular contradiction a dangerous one: other newspapers and magazines gave the U-2’s maximum altitude as ninety, eighty, seventy, sixtyfive, sixty, and fifty-five thousand feet.

Yet, in my particular situation, the incorrect information was often as dangerous as the correct, especially since it was often attributed to “an authoritative government source.” If they were getting their questions from the newspapers, a fantastic amount of misinformation was being published. While much of it was undoubtedly conjecture, I wondered whether some of it might have been intentionally “leaked” by the agency. But from the way they quizzed me, in bits and pieces, never letting me see the papers themselves, it was impossible to discern the background pattern. All I knew was that the U-2 had become world news.