Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

Debriefings started the next afternoon. Present in addition to agency representatives was Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, designer of the U-2. I had seen Johnson on one previous occasion, at Lockheed early in the program, but had never met him.

“Before we start,” Johnson said, “I want to tell Mr. Powers something. No matter what happens as a result of this investigation, I want you to know that if you ever need a job, you have one at Lockheed.”

That vote of confidence meant more to me than I could ever say.

With that the debriefings began. Johnson had the first question:

“What happened to my plane?”

I told him, describing the orange flash, the slight acceleration, and the erratic manner in which the aircraft behaved after that. He asked a number of technical questions. After I had answered, he stated his satisfaction with my explanation.

From Johnson I learned of another Khrushchev trap. Following his announcement that he had the pilot and the plane, the Soviet premier had released a photograph of “the captured U-2,” a mass of twisted wreckage. To the casual viewer, it seemed inconceivable that the pilot could have survived the crash. But Johnson was not a casual viewer. He knew every rivet in the U-2, and after studying the photograph, announced that the plane just wasn’t made right, a judgment confirmed when the real wreckage was put on display in Gorky Park.

What had Khrushchev intended with the fake photo? The most likely possibility was that he hoped to convince Eisenhower the pilot was dead, meaning there could be little actual proof of espionage, and thereby baiting him into yet another public lie.

The Russians had set still another trap, I later learned from people in the agency. Immediately after my disappearance, there was a report of a strange plane with an incredibly long wingspan being seen parked off the runway at Svedlovsk, undamaged and intact. Still later, there were reports that a man resembling me had been seen drinking, carousing with assorted females, and otherwise living it up in various Communist cities. The purpose, apparently, was to make the United States think I had landed my plane and defected.

When Johnson had finished his questions, the agency men began asking theirs. The first session lasted several hours.

At night, after the debriefings, I’d read the papers and watch TV. I didn’t want to. Yet I had to know what was going on.

“Powers served his country badly,” Martin B. McKneally, national commander of the American Legion, told the press. “We are left with the impression that there was more of the mercenary in him than the patriot.”

John Wickers, another American Legion official, said: “I view the exchange with astonishment and disgust. Powers was a cowardly American who evidently valued his own skin far more than the welfare of the nation that was paying him so handsomely.”

It was easy to dismiss such statements as the product of ignorance, which they were, for none of these people was aware of what my orders were, or that I had, on my own initiative, gone far beyond them. But it didn’t make such remarks sting any the less.

Led by Tompkins, the lynching bee ranged from a syndicated sob sister who described me as a “tower of jelly… who will, when the chips are down, go to any length to save his own neck” and who offered the unsolicited advice that Powers should “save his money and find a nice, pleasant spot outside the U.S. in which eventually to live and spend it,” to Senator Stephen Young, Democrat , Ohio, who said, “I wish that this pilot—who was being paid thirty thousand dollars a year—had shown only ten percent of the spirit and courage of Nathan Hale. If it is up to me, I am going to make sure that he never flies for the U.S. government again.”

Much of the criticism focused on the amount of my pay, the argument apparently being that I had been paid this “fantastically high amount” to kill myself before capture, which I had failed to do. Under the subhead “Mercenary,” one paper reported, authoritatively, that in addition to my twenty-five-hundred-dollar monthly salary, I had received a ten-thousand-dollar tax-free bonus for every flight. Had this been true, and had my major concern been money, I would have been quite happily retired long before May 1, 1960.

None of the accounts mentioned that twenty-five hundred dollars per month was less than the captain of a commercial airliner received for considerably less hazardous work; that the mechanics in the U-2 project and the technical representatives of the various companies which supplied cameras, film, and so forth ended up earning nearly as much, and in some cases more, than the pilots. The pilots were government employees, and as such subject to both federal and state income taxes. The mechanics and technical representatives were not federal employees. If they remained outside the country eighteen months or more, as most of them did, they paid no taxes, greatly increasing their take-home pay. Nor did they mention that the pilots who never made an overflight were paid exactly the same amount as those who did.

It was my “fifty-thousand-dollar” back pay that concerned them most, however. Should I be allowed to receive it?

“Our recommendation would be no,” Newsday editorialized. “He was hired to do a job, and he flopped at that job. He left his U-2 behind, substantially undamaged, so the Reds could copy or improve upon it. Under the circumstances, back pay would be laughable. He is lucky to be home again. Anything he can contribute about the Russians will be willingly received. But he is no hero, and he should not be regarded as one. The White House is eminently right in not bringing him in for a meeting with the President….”

Actually, to set the record straight, the amount of my back pay was not $50,000, but approximately $52,500, or $2,500 per month for twenty-one months.

Again unmentioned was that a total of $10,500 or five hundred dollars per month, had already been paid to Barbara while I was in prison. And that the walloping tax bite would further reduce the amount to less than half the total—or about twenty-two thousand dollars.

In addition, because there was no provision for accumulating it in my contract, I also lost the money ordinarily paid for unused leave time. Fortunately I still had my savings, from the earlier portion of the program.

According to newspapers, one of the major reasons for holding the board of inquiry was to determine whether I should receive my back pay. This was not true. Arrangements regarding payments had been made in my contract, and no one from the agency had indicated differently.

The papers didn’t stop at twisting the “facts” to make their case. In more than one instance, they manufactured them.

“The life of pilot Powers is important,” said an editorial in the Dallas Morning News , which I saw sometime later, “but so are the many lives which may have been lost as a result of his failure to follow orders.”

As far as I knew, no deaths had resulted from the U-2 incident.

“It has been reported,” the editorial continued, “that at least two U-2 pilots blew themselves and their planes up when they ran into trouble. These are the real U-2 heroes, and Powers should not be allowed to join them until he has given a good explanation of why he failed to do the same.”

This too was a complete lie. A number of pilots—including close personal friends—had lost their lives in U-2 crashes. But not one had involved the destruct device, which was carried only on missions over hostile territory. To this date—and over the years I have remained in contact with several people involved with the U-2—the destruct device, for all the publicity it has received, has never been used. Not once.