Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

With the Bay of Pigs disaster, I gave up any hopes for clemency.

It snowed a little on May 1, the uncelebrated anniversary of my first year in Russia, but spring was very much on my mind. I remembered how one year ago, flying over the Urals, I’d looked down and noticed first signs of the changing season. Even more poignant were thoughts of home. “Everything is getting green now around the place,” my mother had written. “The apple tree isn’t in bloom yet, but you can begin to see a little of the green leaves around the bloom buds. The peach blossoms have about gone.”

“I certainly do miss grass and trees,” I wrote in one letter. “I haven’t seen a tree since last September, when I came here from Moscow. Sometimes, when the wind is blowing right, it seems we can smell the forests, but it may be only imagination. I have no idea how far it is to the nearest woods.”

Zigurd felt the change as much as I. Often now he talked of Latvia.

During the long dark period of receiving no mail from Barbara, I had been obsessed with my problems to the point that I never considered the possibility of Zigurd having his own. But he did. Only now did he bring out some of the things bothering him.

His parents were old, at an age when he felt he should be supporting them. Instead they were helping him. This worried him a great deal. Each package was a reminder of his obligation. To do what he could to make up for their sacrifices, he had vowed that following his release he would return home and take care of them as long as they lived.

He was the most unselfish person I had ever met, a trait that came across in a thousand big and little ways. At Christmas my parents had sent me a box of homemade candy. I offered it to him. After taking one or two pieces, he refused more, implying he really didn’t like it. But I could tell he did. He simply wanted me to have it. Only by threatening to throw the candy away, and then by dividing it into equal portions, could I persuade him to eat more.

When he had moved to our cell a few days before my arrival, he had taken the bed on the right. On moving in, I presumed he had done so because the bed was more comfortable. Only after a time did it occur to me he had chosen the least pleasant side, that near the bucket.

Realizing that I would be facing a difficult time, not only as a prisoner but as a foreigner, he had done this—just as he did many other things, without comment or fuss—to make the adjustment easier.

That was the kind of person he was.

Though his parents were elderly, they had to carry all their water into the house from a well in the yard. This was something Zigurd hoped someday to remedy, although he was not sure how.

We set to work solving the problem. Our cell was littered with drawings of rejected ideas, some of which would have done Rube Goldberg proud. Finally, after many hours of debate, we came up with one which seemed workable: a thousand-gallon tank in the attic, to be filled from the well by a simple pump arrangement. We even planned to position it next to the chimney, in order that the water not freeze in winter.

Across the back of the envelope my father had printed in large letters: REMEMBER WHAT PATRICK HENRY SAID!

Inside was a clipping from the Washington Post , dated April 12, 1961:

LONDON, April 12 [Wednesday]—The London Daily Mail said today U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers will be freed from a Soviet prison in the next few weeks and will choose to stay in Russia.

The Mails Moscow correspondent, John Mossman, said Powers probably will be freed May 1—exactly a year after his reconnaissance plane was shot down.

And the newspaper quoted Mrs. Powers as saying in New York:

“I would love to go to Moscow to join my husband. I will go out to him if possible even if he decided to stay on after his release.”

Mossman quoted no Russian source for his story, but reported:

“He [Powers] is believed to be in Vladimir Prison, near Moscow. His release is planned as a demonstration of increased goodwill between the Soviet Union and America.”

In Washington, a State Department spokesman said “We haven’t heard anything about it.”

I read it several times, with increasing anger.

Who was this Mossman, and why would he print such a lie? Had he made it up, just to have a story to write, or, if he had a source, who was it, and what did he and they hope to accomplish?

My father claimed he didn’t believe the story. Yet the message on the envelope seemed to indicate otherwise. And if my own father gave it credence, what about others?

“I am a citizen of the United States and am proud to be one,” I wrote him. “Don’t worry about my doing anything or giving any cause for my country to doubt me. It looks as if this British correspondent is trying, for reasons I can’t guess, to make people believe I have renounced my country. I would never do this. Even if I were offered an immediate release on condition that I remain in the Soviet Union. I would refuse. Not because I don’t think I could live here, but because I am an American and will always be an American.

“I cannot imagine where this Mossman got his information unless he invented it himself. You may rest assured that I will return home, where I belong and where I want to be, as soon as I am released. Remaining here has never entered my mind.

“If I were free, I would demand that his sources be revealed, and if it was his own fabrication, then I would sue him (the only way to make him realize that there are other people who may be hurt by his lies). I am sure that he has not even considered how his lies will affect my reputation in the future.

“One thing that bothers me very much is that many people who read it will believe the article. To some of them I will appear a traitor even though there is no truth to the article whatsoever.”

In reference to my father’s remark about Patrick Henry, I observed, “He is remembered, much to his credit, for what he said. It looks as if I will be remembered, much to my discredit, for what some correspondent writes, even though there is not a word of truth in what he wrote.

“I was born an American and intend to die an American. In the States, I hope.”

As for the reliability of another portion of Mossman’s story, I noted that it was now May 3, two days after my promised release, and I was “still occupying the same cell in the same prison.”

I wrote a similar letter to Barbara, also asking what she had been doing in New York City, “or is that a lie also?”

It was a lie, according to a letter from her on the eighth. Enclosing a clipping of the Mossman story, she explained that he had not talked to her—nor had she been in New York. The article, however, had been given wide circulation by the news services, as a result of which her phone had been ringing constantly with interview requests.

Barbara’s affinity for publicity bothered me. Earlier she had released several of my letters to a magazine, not even bothering to inform me she had done so. She had explained that interviews were the only way to keep the case in public consciousness, and while I couldn’t disagree with that, I did wish she would devote just a portion of the time thus expended to letter writing.

When Zigurd and I went to the office to receive my monthly embassy package, there was a new man on duty. Unfamiliar with the rules, he let me have the magazines, including four copies of Time . This was the first time since being in Russia that I had been allowed an American news magazine, and I read each issue avidly, trying to form a picture of the world outside.