Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

As if this weren’t gory enough, he went on to describe similar experiments with a white mouse, finally concluding: “In view of the extremely high toxicity and the nature of the effect of the poison on animals and also the relatively large amount of it on the needle, it can be considered that if a person is pricked with this needle, poisoning and death sets in just as quickly as in animals.”

With this they had their headlines for the second day. Shortly afterward, the court adjourned until the next morning.

The first sentences of Rudenko’s speech were typical of his whole oration: “Comrade Judges! I begin my speech for the prosecution in the present case fully conscious of its tremendous importance. The present trial of the American spy-pilot Powers exposes the crimes committed not only by Defendant Powers himself, but it completely unmasks the criminal aggressive actions of United States ruling circles, the actual inspirers and organizers of monstrous crimes directed against the peace and security of the peoples!”

And on it went. “The Soviet people, the builders of a communist society, are engaged in peaceful creative labor and abhor war.“ The ruling circles in the United States ”are stubbornly opposing measures for universal disarmament and the destruction of rockets and nuclear weapons….”

Peace v. War. The USSR v . the USA and Francis Gary Powers.

“Powers became a staff pilot, ready to commit any crime to further the interests of the American military who are in service of the monopoly capital…. Here we have the bestial, misanthropic morality of Mr. Dulles and company which for the sake of that yellow devil, the dollar, disregards human life…. If the assignments received by Powers had not been of a criminal nature, his masters would not have supplied him with a lethal pin….”

There were only two surprises in the early portions of Rudenko’s speech. One was that in May President Eisenhower had given assurances “that spy flights by American planes in the Soviet airspace would be stopped.”

But Rudenko immediately damned Eisenhower for going back on his word.

Had the overflights stopped or hadn’t they?

There was another brief and tantalizing reference. After tracing the history of the U-2 incident, Rudenko stated: “A great wave of indignation swept the world when it became known that new perfidious acts had been committed by the rulers of the United States who sent an RB-47 military reconnaissance bomber on a criminal provocative flight into the Soviet Union on July 1, 1960.”

This explained why shortly after July 11 had been quizzed again on the RB-47 flights. Obviously there had been another “incident,” but how serious? Rudenko gave no details.

“Defendant Powers, whose crimes the American intelligence service paid for so generously, is not an ordinary spy, but a specially and carefully trained criminal…. Such is the true face of Defendant Powers. And had his masters tried to unleash a new world war, it is precisely these Powerses, reared and bred by them in the conditions of the so-called free world, who would have been ready to be the first to drop atom and hydrogen bombs on the peaceful earth, as similar Powerses did when they threw the first atom bombs on the peaceful citizens of the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki….”

So I was to be blamed even for that.

Listening to him, I felt sick at heart, knowing I was at least in part responsible for giving him the opportunity to mount his harangue. Yet, as he continued—he had passed the two-hour mark by now—not only stating his case but overstating, magnifying, distorting, and exaggerating, raving rabidly about the “American aggressors” being “newly baked imitators of Hitler,” I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t going too far, carrying Soviet propaganda to such extremes it might backfire, precipitating a reverse reaction.

Suddenly the hall grew quiet. Rudenko was reaching the end.

“The hour when the criminal is to hear the sentence of the court is near.

“Let your sentence serve as a strict warning to all those who pursue an aggressive policy, criminally trample underfoot the generally recognized standards of international law and the sovereignty of states, who declare their state policy to be one of cold war and espionage. Let this sentence also be a strict warning to all other Powerses who, by orders of their masters, might try to undermine the cause of peace, to encroach upon the honor, dignity, and the inviolability of the great Soviet Union.

“Comrade Judges, in full support of the state indictment against Powers, in accordance with Article 2 of the Law of the USSR ‘On Criminal Responsibility for State Crimes,’ I have all grounds to ask the court to pass an exceptional sentence on the defendant….”

I had been right. They were going to make an example of me.

“But, taking into account Defendant Powers’ sincere repentance, before the Soviet court, of the crime which he committed, I do not insist on the death sentence being passed on him, and ask the court to sentence the defendant to fifteen years’ imprisonment.”

My immediate feeling was elation. It was as if I had been suffocating and was suddenly able to take a big, deep breath. I wasn’t going to be shot!

I looked for my family. There was a disturbance in their box, but because of the popping flash bulbs and crowds of reporters, I couldn’t see what was going on. Upon hearing the sentence, my father had stood up and angrily shouted, “Give me fifteen years here, I’d rather get death!”

The presiding judge declared a thirty-minute recess.

During the adjournment, Grinev tried again to persuade me to amend my statement. I didn’t even bother to answer him.

After the intermission Grinev began his summation for the defense.

At first I couldn’t believe I was hearing him right.

“I shall not conceal from you the exceptionally difficult, unusually complicated position in which the counsel for the defense finds himself in this case.

“Indeed, Defendant Powers is accused of a grave crime—intrusion into the airspace of the Soviet Union for the purpose of collection espionage information and photographing from the air industrial and defense installations and also of collecting other intelligence data….

“The Constitution of the Soviet Union, which, irrespective of the gravity of a crime, ensures every accused the right to defense, makes it our civil and professional duty to render help in exercising this right to those defendants who avail themselves of this right….”

He was defending himself for having to defend me!

But he didn’t stop there. He went on to observe that “the defense challenges neither facts of the charges preferred against Powers or the assessment of the crime given by the state prosecutor.”

Powers was guilty as charged, he emphasized. And then it became clear, for the first time, what his defense was to be: “I shall be right if I say that the Powers case is of international importance, inasmuch as besides Powers, one of the perpetrators of a perfidious and aggressive act against the Soviet Union, there should sit and invisibly be present here, in the prisoner’s dock, his masters, namely, the Central Intelligence Agency headed by Allen Dulles and the American military and with them all those sinister aggressive forces which strive to unleash another world war.”

Powers was, he stated, “only a pawn”; though “the direct perpetrator, he is not the main culprit.”

Since I had refused to denounce the United States, Grinev was doing it for me.

I could barely contain my disgust. On one thing I was determined: when the trial was over, by some manner or means, to make it clear I had no part in this.