Francis Powers - Operation Overflight

Some weeks later I received the return receipt I had requested. The handwriting was familiar; it was signed by Zigurd. Although to date there has been no reply, I am immensely relieved to know that he is alive and apparently no longer in prison.

Asked during a television interview what lessons for the future could be drawn from the U-2 crisis, James Hagerty, President Eisenhower’s press secretary, replied, “Don’t get caught.” Similarly questioned during an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Christian Herter phrased his response only slightly differently, “Not to have accidents.”

While not wishing to contradict such eminent spokesmen, I would like to respectfully submit that if these are the only lessons we’ve learned, we’re in trouble.

On May 1, 1970, a decade will have passed since “the incident over Sverdlovsk.” Ten years. That’s a long time to avoid facing the truth. For better or worse, the decade has been one of change, sometimes peacefully effected, often otherwise. Scarcely a government in the world remains the same as in 1960. During this period the national administration of the United States has changed four times, the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency an equal number. It is no longer possible to suppress the facts of the U-2 episode with the excuse that they are still classified, not when time has made it all too apparent that in this case “classified” is only a synonym for “politically embarrassing,” and even that excuse has lost validity.

Hopefully, the passage of time has given us some perspective. Hopefully, too, we’ve matured enough in our attitudes to accept a few hard realities.

One is that we blundered, and badly, not only during the U-2 “crisis,” but long before it became a crisis.

We were unprepared for the possibility that a plane might go down in Russia. Yet that possibility had existed from the start of the program. A rocket wasn’t needed. A simple malfunction could have done it. That possibility should have been taken into consideration. It wasn’t.

We used a plane of which almost every part carried some indication of national identity. We loaded it with equipment which, should even a portion be discovered, would constitute conclusive proof of espionage intent. And we placed aboard it an explosive device insufficient to the task of destroying all evidence.

If the intention was simply to render inoperative certain parts of the equipment, fine. But in this case the agency should have kept those limitations in mind. It should also have considered the possibility that in some situations even this might not be possible. Instead, if President Eisenhower’s memoirs are correct, even the President was led to believe that “in the event of mishap the plane would virtually disintegrate.”

A lesson learned? According to accounts of the Pueblo’s seizure, it carried “hundreds of pounds” of classified documents, with no simple means of destroying them in an emergency. In the case of the Pueblo, however, there was at least the excuse of a reason for complacency—that the ship was to remain supposedly invulnerable in international waters. With the U-2, we lacked that excuse.

We manned the U-2 with pilots who had never been adequately briefed on what to do if captured. The word “capture” did not appear in their contracts, it did not come up in their discussions. As for me, it was mentioned only once in a briefing, and then only after I had made a number of flights over Russia and only because I had brought it up. We should have talked about it, planned for it as for any other possible eventuality. Ignoring a problem does not solve it.

Perhaps it was felt best, psychologically, that such fears never arise. If so, apparently both the occupant of the White House and many in the upper echelons of the CIA succumbed to this psychological conditioning also, inasmuch as they were as unprepared as the pilots.

And remained so, even while evidence accumulated that the day was rapidly approaching when we would no longer be invulnerable to missiles at our altitude.

It is a bad intelligence practice to fail to consider all available evidence. Yet, throughout the U-2 crisis, there are indications that this is exactly what happened, not once, but again and again.

If the pilots were under orders to kill themselves to evade capture—as so many, including even the President, apparently believed—then the pilots should have been apprised of this fact. In which case, we should have been required to carry the needle, not given a choice in the matter; and use should have been declared mandatory, not optional, the briefing officer making definite exactly what was expected of us. While I can only speak for one of the pilots, I know that had I been told this I would have been ready to obey those orders, or never taken the flight.

As pilots, we were not only unprepared for capture, we were ill -prepared, in many ways a much worse situation. The advice “You may as well tell them everything, because they’re going to get it out of you anyway” was, under the circumstances, bad. Perhaps the agency couldn’t have foreseen this. Brainwashing, drugs, and torture having been the lot of prisoners in the past, it may have been wise to prepare us for the worst. All I know, however, is that had I followed these instructions, the damage to the United States would have been monumental.

Even more serious, in many ways, were the misconceptions I carried with me. From the American press, from my Air Force indoctrinations, from the attitude adopted by the agency, I had been led to believe that Russian intelligence was nearly omnipotent, that the KGB had agents everywhere, that “they probably know more about you than you know about yourself.”

These misconceptions, as it turned out, were far more dangerous than the advice I had been given. Because I believed the Russians knew a great deal more than they probably did, I may well have told them far more than was necessary. That it was a great deal less than our orders called for does not minimize its seriousness. Overrating an enemy can be as much a mistake as underrating him.

At no point in my agency training was I instructed on how to handle myself during an interrogation. In my CIA “clearance” the agency justified this with the explanation that we were hired as pilots, not espionage agents. This was true. But it ignores the fact that, though pilots, we were potentially in as much danger of capture as any covert agent. We should have been briefed—as to what tricks to expect, as to tricks we could in turn use to avoid answering a question, as to how best to withstand hour after hour of continuous interrogation. While such briefings, I realize, wouldn’t have prepared me for all eventualities, they would have helped immensely, if only to give me a realistic idea of what was possible under the right conditions. Instead, I had to improvise. It worked out better than I expected. But it could have gone very badly.

Much has been written about the mistakes made in pulling from the files a cover story which did not fit the facts, then maintaining it even when it was obviously discredited. In all this criticism, one very serious error has never been brought out. And that is that the pilots themselves were never informed as to what the cover story would be. I not only hadn’t been briefed, I wasn’t even sure a cover story would be issued. It may well be that no cover story would have been adequate to the situation; the one I improvised fell apart the moment my maps and rolls of film were brought in. But it would have helped to have some idea about the story being told in the world outside.