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

The past sometimes assaulted me in unexpected ways.

One night I was out to dinner with my college girlfriend, her parents, and the headmaster of a prestigious prep school at the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica. Someone asked an intriguing question: What would you have for your last meal?

Apparently I said the wrong thing.

“A salad.”

At this, the headmaster snapped: “You, my friend, are a liar!”

Caught completely off guard, and still uncomfortable with talking back to an adult, I said nothing in response. I just let it go.

But privately I seethed at how a nice, friendly conversation had taken such a nasty turn and thought to myself, “And you, my friend, are a bad judge of character.”

That moment affected me more than I realized at the time. The guy didn’t even know me, and he was calling me a liar? The only thing I could figure was that he thought my dad had lied. So, naturally, I must be a liar? That really got under my skin. It was part of this resolve bubbling up inside me, to find out the truth about my dad.

Of course, in this, my most powerful ally was my mother. Mom always believed Dad got a raw deal out of the U-2 Incident. Her bitterness on the subject profoundly influenced me, planting the seeds for me to see my father as a victim of an injustice, which motivated my effort to learn all I could about him and his controversial flight into the history books. She encouraged me to dig and learn, even as I began to confront her over her excessive drinking.

During one family Thanksgiving at Dee’s house in Minnesota, I told mom, “You’ve turned into what Dad hated most: Barbara!”

This was a hard thing for me to say, and hard for Mom to hear.

She was stunned and hurt, and she stopped drinking for a week or two. Eventually, however, she started again. I felt powerless.

Whenever I called her on the phone—no matter the time of the day or night—I could always hear the ice cubes clinking in her glass. This was a sound I grew to dread.

Yet, even as her alcohol problem emerged as a point of tension, the search for truth and justice kept us close.

As my curiosity began to bubble up, while visiting Mom in 1986, I flashed back to the night of Dad’s wake: to a conversation with General Leo Geary while we stood next to a little bookcase in the living room.

Geary, the Air Force’s liaison officer on the U-2 project, spoke admiringly of Francis Gary Powers’s service to his country and revealed that he had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1959, along with the other CIA U-2 pilots—but that it had not been released, because of the clandestine nature of their work. “I’ll make sure we get it to you,” the general said.

For some reason, nine years later, I wondered: “Whatever happened to that medal?”

No use wondering, Mom insisted. “Call Leo,” she said.

After finding his number, I placed a fateful telephone call to the retired general’s Colorado home.

“Oh,” Geary said, before I could bring up the question of the medal. “You’re calling about the U-2 unveiling tomorrow night!”

U-2 unveiling? What U-2 unveiling?

Mom was sitting nearby, listening to my side of the conversation, learning that an exhibit of the U-2 was being dedicated at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC the following night. No one from the family of the most famous of all the U-2 pilots had been invited or even advised of the special event.

Mom was hurt, but more than anything else, she was pissed. She felt it was par for the course. It was yet another case of the Powers family being snubbed because of preconceived ideas about what Dad did or didn’t do.

After hastily making travel arrangements, Dee and I caught a flight to the East Coast several hours later, around midnight. Mom was determined for us to crash the party. It was early morning when we arrived in Washington and checked into one of the nicest hotels in DC, the Mayflower, after catching a ride from family friend Jeannie Popovich Walls.

Walking up the stairs at the Air and Space Museum that evening, I recognized Kelly Johnson, the aging icon now confined to a wheelchair. I noticed representatives from all of the government entities and contractors who played a role in the U-2, including Lockheed, the CIA, Pratt & Whitney, and Kodak. I chatted with my parents’ friends Edith “Eddie” Costello and Joe Giraudo, longtime agency spooks who served as the matron of honor and best man, respectively, for Frank and Sue’s wedding.

Someone came up to me and asked where my mother was. “She couldn’t make it on such short notice,” I said.

A few minutes later, Dee leaned in to me. “Good job with what you said. You weren’t rude to them, but you gave them an idea of what happened….”

Like my mother, I saw the situation as yet another slap at my father’s memory. No one was willing to accept responsibility. Lockheed blamed the CIA for not inviting us; the CIA blamed the Smithsonian; the Smithsonian blamed Lockheed. I was thinking, Yeah, right. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

While shaking hands with other U-2 pilots, fighter pilots, spies, and government officials, I proudly, if tentatively, embraced my role as “son of…” This was an important passage, the start of something I did not fully understand.

I would hate to think how this story might have turned out if not for that unlikely sequence of events.

All I wanted was to procure Dad’s Distinguished Flying Cross medal. I didn’t know this trip would become the catalyst to a much broader and more ambitious quest, which would consume the better part of my life.

With new urgency, I began to follow my mounting curiosity, pestering my mother and other relatives with questions, reading whatever I could find about the U-2 Incident, and confronting a provocative question: Did Francis Gary Powers betray his country?

At the start, I didn’t know what I would find. I really didn’t. I didn’t start out trying to vindicate my father. I wanted to find out the truth of what took place so I would be able to answer the questions I was being asked, as candidly as possible. I saw it as a mystery to be solved.

Even as I tried to remain objective, determined not to let my personal feelings color any facts, it was impossible to completely neutralize the familial connection that filled my journey with such urgency. After all, I was trying to make sense of a man who shared my name, a man who had always been my hero.

What if my father really was a traitor? How would this alter the way I viewed him? How would it change me?

During my fourth year at Northridge, my grade point average plummeted. The truth is, I was focusing most of my energy on the fraternity and the Thursday-to-Sunday construction job that helped me pay the bills. School was the last thing on my mind, and I flunked out.

After receiving a letter from the dean advising me to take some time off and figure out what I was going to do with my life, I organized a gala commemorating the SAE chapter’s twentieth anniversary. Among the alumni I met that night was Vance T. Meyer, one of the fraternity’s first Eminent Archons, who was now vice president of Los Angeles–based Pardee Construction. One thing led to another and I landed a job in the human resources department at the company headquarters in Westwood.

Happy to have a job in corporate America, while living in a tiny cinderblock basement apartment in the Hollywood Hills—where the only separation between the bathroom and the adjoining room was a dilapidated swinging door, reminiscent of a Western saloon—I began to think I could work my way up the company ladder. I figured I didn’t need a college degree.