Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

There were extenuating circumstances, he asserted: the poverty of Powers’ family; “mass unemployment in the United States”; Powers, “as every other American, was taught to worship the almighty dollar”; “influenced by these ethics, Powers lived under the delusion that money does not stink….”

Interspersed among justifications were more denunciations: “The ruling monopoly circles of the United States could not reconcile themselves to the existence of a socialist country in which the social system is based upon the principles of social justice, on love and respect for the dignity of man.”

Grinev was trying his best to outdo Rudenko. It was as if each time he defended me he had to backtrack, to prove again he was only doing his job, that his feelings and sympathy were with the prosecution.

To those mitigating circumstances we had discussed, he added others: Powers was still young, he had just turned thirty-one; when signing his contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, he did not know the real purpose of the task set before him; poisoned by the lies in the American press, he had been misinformed about the USSR.

With these considerations in mind, Grinev asked the court “to mitigate his punishment” and “to apply to Powers a more lenient measure of punishment than that demanded by the state prosecutor.”

“Your verdict,” he concluded, “will add one more example to the numerous instances of the humaneness of the Soviet court, and will offer a sharp contrast to the attitude to man on the part of the masters of Powers—the Central Intelligence Agency, the ruling reactionary forces of the United States who sent him to certain death and wanted his death.”

Grinev was done. There remained only my final statement and the verdict.

PRESIDING JUDGE: Defendant Powers, you have the word for the last plea.

I stood, facing the judges. The lights of the television cameras were so bright that I had trouble reading the statement. But we had gone over it so often that I knew the words. Some went against the grain; some were deeply felt. I could only hope that in reading them the American people could distinguish among them.

“You have heard all the evidence of the case, and you must decide what my punishment is to be.

“I realize that I have committed a grave crime, and I realize that I must be punished for it.

“I ask the court to weigh all the evidence and take into consideration not only the fact that I committed the crime but also the circumstances which led me to do so.

“I also ask the court to take into consideration the fact that no secret information reached its destination.

“It all fell into the hands of the Soviet authorities.

“I realize the Russian people think of me as an enemy. I can understand that, but I would like to stress the fact that I do not feel nor have I ever felt any enmity whatsoever for the Russian people.

“I plead the court to judge me not as an enemy but as a human being who is not a personal enemy of the Russian people, who has never had any charges brought against him in any court, and who is deeply repentant and profoundly sorry for what he has done.

“Thank you.”

PRESIDING JUDGE: The court retires to determine the verdict.

It was 12:50 P.M. I was taken directly to lunch, but couldn’t eat. Learning that I would see my family directly after the verdict gave me something to look forward to. But my anger with Grinev remained, overwhelming any sense of relief I otherwise would have felt about knowing I wasn’t going to die.

Grinev had gone out of his way to “make” the state’s case. What Rudenko couldn’t prove, Grinev had freely conceded.

Several times he had negated my own testimony. With great care I had thwarted each attempt to extract a so-called “admission” I had been ordered to kill myself. Ignoring this, Grinev had stated that I had been so ordered as if it were an established fact.

He had gone further, implying in closing that the CIA knew I would be shot down, thus setting the stage for the Summit’s collapse.

He had introduced into evidence statements never made. One—“I was deceived by my bosses; I never expected to find such a good treatment here”—wasn’t even the way I talked. Bothering me even more, however, was one statement I had made which, taken out of context of the interrogations, gave an entirely false impression. At one point I had indicated that if I returned to the United States I would probably be tried there also, for revealing the details of my CIA contract. I didn’t really believe this, but had said it to make my answers and my hesitations about answering appear more believable. However, I had gone on to add, “But this worries me little, because I am not likely to return home.”

By this I had meant I was sure of being executed.

Grinev made it sound as if I intended to remain in the Soviet Union.

But worst of all, speaking as my representative, he had given the impression that I authorized and agreed with his attack against the United States.

But I was not without a voice now. I would be seeing my family. And they could convey to the press my entire repudiation of my “defense counsel” and his charges.

Should I go beyond that, try to give them a verbal message for the agency?

Though hopeful we would be left alone, I doubted that we would be. I had managed to get across, in my trial testimony, most of the things I wanted the agency to know. And, no matter how carefully worded, such a message could place my family in jeopardy. That was the last thing I wanted. I decided against it.

My anger with Grinev had at least one positive effect. It helped pass the time. At 5:30 P.M., four hours and forty minutes after the judges went out, I was summoned back into the courtroom.

While I stood, my hands gripping the wooden railings on either side of the prisoner’s dock, the presiding judge read the verdict. It was a lengthy document, so long in fact that I suspected it had been written well in advance and not during the few hours the judges were out. That it was available to reporters, in printed form, immediately upon conclusion of the trial, would appear to confirm this. Again there was a recitation of the charges, during which it became obvious that the judges had not only accepted the prosecution’s case in its entirety, including the testimony of the “expert witnesses,” but that they had, in some instances, even gone beyond Rudenko, as when they stated that “subsequent events confirmed that the aggressive intrusion of the U-2 intelligence plane into the airspace of the Soviet Union on May 1 was deliberately prepared by the reactionary quarters of the United States of America in order to torpedo the Paris Summit meeting, to prevent the easing of international tension, to breathe new life into the senile cold-war policy….”

I was guilty not only of espionage but all this too.

As, in absentia, was my co-defendant, the United States of America.

The judge was now nearing the end. It came across in his tone, and was communicated to the whole auditorium, which became very still.

Having heard all the testimony, and having examined all material evidence, the judge said, “the military division of the USSR Supreme Court holds established that Defendant Powers was for a long time an active secret agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, directly fulfilling spy missions of this agency against the Soviet Union, and on May 1, 1960, with the knowledge of the government of the United States of America, in a specially equipped U-2 intelligence plane, intruded into Soviet airspace and with the help of special radio and photographic equipment collected information of strategical importance, which constitutes a state and military secret of the Soviet state, thereby committing a grave crime covered by Article 2 of the Soviet Union’s law ‘On Criminal Responsibility for State Crimes.’”