Francy Powers Jr. - Spy Pilot - Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident, and a Controversial Cold War Legacy

When he arrived at the woman’s house and learned that she had escaped to the West, Pryor was seized by the Stasi, the East Germany secret police. They searched his car, found his dissertation, and were convinced he was a spy. The Stasi spent more than four months interrogating him, threatening him with the death penalty unless he confessed. They never tortured him, but in his cell, he often heard men screaming.

“Once you’re arrested, you’re always convicted,” he recalled many years later. “I expected five or 10 years in prison. I made peace with that.” 23

Pryor’s luck turned when Donovan began negotiating the trade of actual spies and was able to convince the East Germans to throw the student in as a goodwill gesture.

He was to be released at the same time at Checkpoint Charlie, in the center of bustling Berlin. But the notification did not arrive at the appointed time, which left the two sides waiting on the bridge.

Powers had already decided, if something happened to prevent the exchange, he would make a run for it. “Even if it meant a bullet, I’m wasn’t coming back.” 24

While waiting for word, Powers and Murphy walked to the side of the bridge and casually chatted.

“That’s Abel over there,” Murphy said, pointing toward the thin man standing near the middle of the bridge. (In contrast to the warm welcome Powers received from Murphy, Donovan, and State Department official Alan Lightner, the Soviets did not seem particularly happy to see their long-lost spy.)

“Who?”

“Rudolf Abel!”

“Oh…”

Until this point, Powers did not know he was released as part of a trade.

Over the course of the previous two days, he had repeatedly asked the Soviets why he was suddenly being released. “They said, ‘We just want to show the world how humane the Soviet Union is,’” he recalled. “Right up to the last minute… even though 10 minutes [later], I would find out [the truth]. This was… an insight into their psychology.” 25

Soon the two Americans were joined at the edge of the bridge by Schischkin, a tall, friendly man who spoke fluent English.

“Goodbye, Mr. Powers,” he said. “Come see us again sometime.”

Frank smiled. “Yes sir, I’ll come as a tourist.”

“Not as a tourist. As a friend.”

Several minutes later, a member of the American delegation yelled out that Pryor was safely in the West, signaling the two sides to move across opposite sides of the bridge.

On the drive to the local airport Tempelhof, Frank learned about Donovan’s role as the driving force behind the exchange, destined to remain an iconic moment of Cold War intrigue.

While strapped into the back of a military plane for the short flight to the massive Rhein-Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt, where they would board a Lockheed C-121 Super Constellation for the six-hour flight back to the States, Powers was examined by a military doctor. The air was choppy and the doctor had a hard time planting the needle to obtain a blood sample.

One thing bothered Murphy about the first leg of their journey back to the United States: “You would have thought the Air Force guys flying the plane would have been very welcoming to Frank… but for whatever reason, they weren’t,” Murphy said. “They were very cool toward him.”

This was a preview of coming attractions.

After twenty-one months of captivity, Frank was happy to be a free man.

But the doubts followed him home.

News of the exchange filtered out in time for some of the Saturday-afternoon newspapers back in the United States, including the Washington Daily News , where the headline and headshots of Powers and Abel dominated the front page:

The release remained top-of-the-fold news across the country the next day, as Americans hungered for details of a real-life spy story with a happy ending.

“Francis Gary Powers is now in the United States and is meeting privately with members of his family,” the White House said in a statement. “Mr. Powers appears to be in good physical condition.” 27

The reunion with his parents at the CIA safe house in Maryland was emotional.

“My wife and I were asleep when the big word came,” Oliver told reporters before boarding a flight to the secret location. 28“But it’s not very hard to keep awake now. His mother and I thought it would probably be a much longer time—at least four or five years.”

Frank had feared he would never see Oliver and Ida again. They had harbored the same anxiety. Getting to see them and hug them and talk with them about the ordeal was an incredibly cathartic experience.

When the early-morning call from the White House reached Milledgeville, Barbara was equally stunned, telling reporters, “I can’t sleep. I’m too excited!” 29

“How can I express my reaction to the happiness I feel when I had no idea I would see him for 10 years?”

The newspapers said Barbara rushed off to her hairdresser so she would look good for her husband. But after flying to Maryland, accompanied by her brother Jack, now a chaplain in the Air Force, she showed up smelling of alcohol. She had put on about thirty pounds. She expressed irritation that she had not been given prior notice of the release, which puzzled her husband. She kept saying she needed a drink but insisted she didn’t have a drinking problem.

“Barbara looked terrible, like she had not been taking good care of herself,” Murphy said. “I never saw her look so bad.”

Even as he enjoyed the long-denied comforts of home—a bed with a full mattress and springs, a toilet with a seat, good food, the freedom to walk around the house and across the large yard—Frank gradually began to feel like a prisoner of the CIA.

During a walk across the snow-covered grounds, he turned to Murphy and asked, “If I wanted to leave right now, could I?” 30

“Well, I really don’t think you could.”

When a reporter located the safe house, the CIA moved Powers to another location near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the agency specialists spent the next three weeks questioning him in exacting detail about every aspect of his shoot-down, interrogation, and imprisonment.

After reading the debrief and studying various evidence, Dulles changed his original assessment about Powers descending to a lower altitude. “We are proud of what you have done,” he told the pilot during a meeting in his government office. 31

The new director of the CIA, John A. McCone, remained skeptical. Feeling pressure to assess the failure, McCone appointed a Board of Inquiry chaired by E. Barrett Prettyman, a retired chief judge of the US Court of Appeals’ DC circuit.

Among the speculation to hit the media was the question of whether the pilot’s employment contract obligated him to destroy the plane if it was downed in Soviet territory.

After eight days of closed-door hearings, the Prettyman commission concluded that Powers was “inherently and by practice a truthful man” who had “complied with his obligations as an American citizen during this period.” 32It ordered his back pay, which amounted to $52,500, to be awarded, and cleared him to return to work at the CIA.

However, the board did not offer a definitive opinion on how the U-2 was felled, which enhanced the murkiness surrounding the incident.

Some within the intelligence community quietly continued to doubt the pilot, including McCone. The agency knew much more about what happened than it was willing to tell, and no one paid a higher price for this silence than Francis Gary Powers.