Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

Unexpectedly, the following day I was taken back to one of the interrogation rooms. Several KGB officials and an interpreter were present. Their faces were stern.

“On his return to the United States, your father told the American press that you did not believe you had been shot down at sixtyeight thousand feet.”

Oh, God! All through the trial I had wanted to get one message across: that I had been flying at my assigned altitude when knocked down, that if other pilots were sent over it would be at the risk of their lives. And I had, I felt, succeeded in conveying this.

Suddenly it was as if it had all been in vain.

The story, which appeared on the front page of The New York Times, quoted my father as telling the Overseas Press Club: “He (Francis) said ‘if I were shot down, there would have been an explosion behind me and an orange flash around me.’ He didn’t believe he was shot down.”

Had I told my father this?

No. Obviously he had been confused by the testimony in court: the orange flash and the acceleration from behind were what convinced me there had been an explosion.

Would I be willing to write a letter to The New York Times clarifying the matter?

I hesitated just long enough not to appear too anxious.

It was the first letter I had been allowed to write anyone other than my family. I spent some time on the draft, relating details of the crash; reemphasizing “I was at maximum altitude, as stated in the trial, at the time of the explosion. This altitude was sixty-eight thousand feet”; and observing that while my father apparently misunderstood me on this matter, he “did not misunderstand me when he stated that when this was all over that I was coming home. I do intend to come home, and I pray that I will not have to stay in prison for ten years.”

For reasons known only to the Russians, the letter, written September 6, was redated September 18, 1960, and mailed with a Moscow return address. By this time I was no longer in Moscow.

The reference to “maximum altitude” was not overlooked. On the contrary, it got too much attention, almost giving the show away. As I learned later, The New York Times, in printing the letter, observed: “Military experts here said that sixty-eight thousand feet—the altitude at which Soviet reports have consistently said the plane was downed—was substantially under the maximum altitude of the plane, a fact that should have been known to Mr. Powers.”

I couldn’t blame my father for being confused. Apparently a great many others were also.

By now it was obvious that I had become the pawn in some sort of top-level power play, that there were some highly placed people in the United States unwilling to admit that Russia now had an effective defensive surface-to-air missile.

If what the Russians had told me was true—and I could see no reason for them to deceive me on this—many newspapers and magazines in the United States, including aviation journals, had accepted the fiction that I had experienced oxygen and/or engine trouble, radioed my base, then descended to thirty thousand feet, at which point I was shot down.

One of the most influential in spreading this nonsense, I later learned, was Representative Clarence Cannon, Democrat, Missouri, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Cannon had told the press on May 11 that Khrushchev had lied when he said the U-2 was shot down, that its capture had resulted from either a mechanical defect of the plane or some “psychological defect of the pilot.”

I could only conclude the lower-altitude story was a “controlled leak,” something someone in a high position, either in the military or the government, wanted disseminated and believed.

Why?

There were a number of possible explanations. The information I had conveyed was important intelligence. And perhaps that was the trouble. It was too important: it wreaked havoc with preconceptions, its implications extending far beyond the U-2 program itself.

Accepting the hard fact that Russia’s defenses were much better than we had supposed meant reevaluating our own offensive capabilities, and, inevitably, spending more money for missiles, less for bombers. The United States was currently committed to the B-52 bomber. If the Soviets could down a high-flying U-2, the low-flying B-52 was a sitting duck.

Too, it was impossible to discount the human factor. Someone in our intelligence apparatus had goofed, maintaining that Russia did not have missile capability, while Russia obviously did; quite possibly, face-saving was involved. Or it could be plain stubbornness, the refusal to accept any information contrary to one’s fixed preconceptions.

Still another possibility occurred to me. While I didn’t like to think about it, I had to admit its existence—that this fiction was being told to bolster the self-confidence of other pilots and flight crews.

What was most frustrating was the knowledge that so long as I remained a captive of the Russians there was nothing I could do to dispel the lie. Anything I said—whether in my trial testimony or my letters—was suspect: Powers is a prisoner of the Communists, either by torture or drugs or brainwashing, they can make him say anything they want.

In time, I was sure, my story would be verified by other evidence. And the United States would have to face up to the unpleasant fact that Russia had effective SAMs. I could only hope the delay wouldn’t prove dangerous or that the supporting evidence didn’t consist of downed planes and dead pilots.

Early on the morning of Friday, September 9, 1960, accompanied by two guards, a lieutenant colonel, a major, a female interpreter, and a driver, I rode out the gates of Lubyanka Prison. A second car, containing three additional guards plus my few personal effects, followed.

In a short time we left “modern Russia” behind. The roads were narrow, primitive, and in bad repair, necessitating frequent detours. The occasional villages did not seem to have changed much since Tolstoy’s day, their inhabitants still living in log cabins. But, though the day was overcast, the countryside was green, the horizons vast, after so long between four walls, and I saw trees , the first in over four months. I wondered how long it would be before I saw them again.

It was a pleasant drive. I wished it could have gone on forever. But in a little more than three hours we reached our destination, Vladimir Prison, located near the Trans-Siberian railroad, about 150 miles east of Moscow.

The approach to Vladimir Prison was deceptive. All you saw was the large gray administration building, and no walls.

Once inside, I was turned over to prison officials. Whether a country is Communist or democratic, there are common denominators—bureaucracy and red tape. More than an hour of answering questions and filling out forms was required before my assignment to building number 2. Exiting from the other side of the administration building, I could have no doubt where I was: the walls were better than fifteen feet high, brick; guards with machine guns and searchlights were stationed in towers at the corners.

As we walked through the long empty courtyard, past several buildings, then through an arched gateway, they watched our every step.

Surrounded by its own walls, building number 2 was a prison within a prison. Four stories high, its outside red firebrick, it looked all too secure.

The building superintendent was a roly-poly little major named Dimitri. Quite jolly, he seemed an unlikely jailer. Shortly after my arrival in his office, another man entered. He was about my height, but fairly thin, with a gaunt face that made it difficult to guess his age. He wore a black beret. I thought perhaps he worked in the prison.