Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

For the first time since my capture more than two weeks before, they raised the Iron Curtain, giving me a glimpse at what had happened outside Russia.

It was much too good a story to keep to themselves. They had to brag about it. Thus I finally learned from my interrogators what the rest of the world had long known.

On May 2 the public information officer at Incirlik AFB, Adana, Turkey, had released the news that an unarmed weather reconnaissance aircraft, of the U-2 type, had vanished during a routine flight over the Lake Van area of Turkey and that a search for the missing plane was in progress. During his last radio communication, the pilot—a civilian employee of Lockheed on loan to NASA—had reported trouble with his oxygen equipment.

This was the cover story the CIA had prepared for such an eventuality.

Nobody had ever bothered to share it with the pilots.

The next several days brought further details from NASA, including information that all U-2s had been grounded to have their oxygen equipment checked.

On May 5, in a speech before the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, Premier Khrushchev had announced that on May Day an American plane, in “an aggressive provocation aimed at wrecking the Summit Conference,” had invaded Soviet territory and, on his personal orders, been shot down by a missile.

Just that. Nothing more.

The trap had been baited.

The same day NASA announced that the U-2 previously reported missing from Incirlik might have strayed across the border on automatic pilot while its pilot—now identified as thirty-year-old Francis G. Powers, of Pound, Virginia—was unconscious from lack of oxygen.

On May 6 a U.S. State Department spokesman uncategorically stated to reporters that “There was no—N-O—deliberate attempt to violate Soviet air space, and there has never been.” The suggestion that the United States would try to fool the world about the real purpose of the flight was “monstrous.”

While a formal note of inquiry was sent to the Soviet government, requesting additional information as to the fate of the pilot, various U.S. senators and congressmen waxed indignant over the shooting down of the unarmed weather plane. That Khrushchev could order such action so close to the Summit was a clear indication of bad faith.

Apparently it was presumed by almost everyone, including the agency, that I had not survived the crash.

On May 7 Premier Khrushchev sprang his trap. “Comrades, I must tell you a secret,” he confided to the Supreme Soviet, and the world.”When I was making my report, I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and in good health and that we have got parts of the plane. We did so deliberately, because had we told everything at once, the Americans would have invented another version.”

The pilot was “quite alive and kicking,” he had confessed that he was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, and, acting on orders of his detachment commander, a United States Air Force colonel, had flown on a spying mission over Russia, taking off from Peshawar, Pakistan, intending to land at Bodö, Norway. Only en route, when over Sverdlovsk, he had been brought down by a Soviet rocket. Flying at twenty thousand meters (65,000 feet), he had thought himself to be safe from rockets. But his capture had proven otherwise.

With great glee Khrushchev debunked “official” U.S. statements about the plane:

“If one believes the version that the pilot lost consciousness owing to oxygen trouble and that the aircraft was subsequently controlled by the automatic pilot, one must also believe that the aircraft controlled by the automatic pilot flew from Turkey to Pakistan, touched down at Peshawar Airport, stayed there three days, took off early in the morning of May 1, flew more than two thousand kilometers over our territory for a total of some four hours.”

Nor was Khrushchev finished setting traps. He noted it was possible President Eisenhower was unaware of the flight. But if so, that meant the militarists in his country were actually “bossing the show.”

Thus Eisenhower was left with two choices, neither pleasant: to admit he had authorized espionage, an unprecedented admission for a President to make, or to deny knowledge of the flights, with the clear implication that he wasn’t in charge.

In reaction, the U.S. State Department then admitted that the U-2 had probably made an information-gathering flight over Soviet territory, but stressed that “there was no authorization for any such flight” from authorities in Washington.

What happened behind the scenes—the setting up of a scapegoat to be blamed for the whole incident; CIA head Allen Dulles’ offer to resign and take responsibility for the flight; President Eisenhower’s vacillation, finally culminating in his unprecedented decision—I was not to learn until much later.

What I was told, however, was that on May 11, two days after Secretary of State Christian Herter stated that specific U-2 missions were not subject to Presidential authorization, the President of the United States himself admitted he had personally approved the flights. Espionage was, he said, “a distasteful but vital necessity,” mandatory because of Soviet secrecy, the rejection of his Open Skies Plan of 1955, and to avert “another Pearl Harbor.”

The President of the United States had pleaded guilty for me.

Yet, because I had no doubt as to my ultimate fate, this concerned me far less than one other thing my interrogators told me.

Both Secretary of State Herter and Vice-President Nixon had stated publicly that the flights over Russia would continue.

To me this was the most incredible thing of all. They now knew I had been shot down, that Russia did indeed have missile capability, yet other pilots were to be sent on overflights anyway!

I was still reacting from the shock of this, when, on May 16, I received some news more current.

The Summit talks had collapsed. And I was responsible.

Lacking a meeting point on the Berlin question, no one had anticipated much from the Summit. But there had been a slim chance something would come of it, that the world might move just a little bit closer to peace.

That I was responsible for destroying this possibility shook me, hard. It still does.

With this revelation, the Iron Curtain again descended. Whatever was happening beyond the borders of my very small world, I wasn’t told about.

But I had been left with more than enough to think of.

Although greatly depressed by the news, at least one portion of it was encouraging. I now knew that by May 7, the day on which Khrushchev announced my capture and details of my flight, my interrogators had bought my story, believed I was telling the truth, even to altitude, Khrushchev’s use of twenty thousand meters being the closest approximation to the sixty-eight-thousand-feet figure I had used.

From this alone the CIA should know I hadn’t told everything.

The problem, however, was that the Iron Curtain worked both ways. It not only denied me knowledge of what was happening in the rest of the world; it also kept the agency from knowing exactly how much I had told the Russians.

There were things I knew which, if revealed, would create a far greater incident than had taken place. That this hadn’t happened should indicate to them I was still withholding the most important information. Yet, in consideration of Khrushchev’s trap, they couldn’t be sure. Maybe I had told everything, with Khrushchev only awaiting a more opportune time to reveal it.

There were at this moment, I was sure, some very nervous people in the United States government.

There was no way I could set their fears at rest.

On Sunday, May 22,1 awoke with a bad cold, so hoarse I could barely speak. Interrogation was canceled.