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

About eighteen months later, after proving myself in human resources, I applied for a job in land acquisition, which seemed like a perfect fit for a guy who aspired to become a real-estate developer. The interview went well—until the very end. “I can’t hire you,” the man said, “because you don’t have a college degree.”

I was stunned.

Disappointed but starting to feel the tug of ambition, I gave my two weeks’ notice and enrolled at nearby Cal State–Los Angeles, determining that I could combine my Northridge transcript to obtain a philosophy degree in about a year. By then, I knew it didn’t matter what the degree was in. I just needed to acquire that all-important sheepskin, so I decided to go for the easiest route. To reduce the financial burden, I moved back in with Mom, who was supportive of my finishing college but demanded I follow her rules, which caused tension.

Soon I was enrolled in a speech class, which required me to craft and deliver lectures about various topics.

There was a time when I would have recoiled at the thought of making a speech about my dad. It was not that I was ever ashamed of him or wanted to deny being his son. But I wanted to be my own person and didn’t want to deal with all that baggage, especially since I felt so inadequate concerning what happened to him. But as I started to learn more about him and felt more comfortable about the facts and controversies, my reticence started to recede. At the age of twenty-four, I was ready to take a big step in my personal development.

I talked to my teacher, who knew who Dad was, and she helped me put together a speech. I didn’t know how to give one. And she understood that this was a pretty unusual presentation I wanted to deliver.

Ignoring my butterflies, I began talking about a man who grew up in Virginia, joined the Air Force, and eventually was recruited by the CIA to fly a special aircraft. I talked about the day the plane crashed. The trial. The imprisonment. The exchange.

Bringing it in for a landing, I paused and looked out into the audience of students. “What I haven’t said about this individual yet is that this pilot is my father.”

My classmates clapped enthusiastically as I felt the greatest satisfaction of my young life. It was as if a lead weight had been lifted off of me.

Several months later, one night in November 1989, in a world being rapidly reshaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall, I happened to be watching a KNBC newscast featuring a broadcaster on loan from a Soviet news agency, named Svetlana Starodomskaya. Brainstorm.

With Glasnost and Perestroika in full swing, I called family friend Jess Marlow and arranged to meet with the Soviet reporter to pitch my idea: Wouldn’t it be great for me to travel to the Soviet Union to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the U-2 Incident on May 1, 1990? Starodomskaya loved it and immediately began pushing the visit with government officials in Moscow, while I placed a telephone call to family friend Gregg Anderson, the man who had spearheaded the effort to bury my father at Arlington.

“There’s this opportunity for me to go to Moscow… and I’d like to invite you to go with me.”

For a moment, silence filled the line.

“Oh, wow,” Anderson said. “Let me call you back.”

In 1990, travel between the United States and the Soviet Union remained relatively rare. Visas were still difficult to procure. But things were changing.

About five minutes later, Anderson called me back. He had thought it over.

“Gary, I’ll be delighted to go with you,” he said. “And I’ll pay for the trip.”

“Now, Gregg, I wasn’t asking for you to pay—”

“Gary,” he said, interrupting me in midsentence. “Stop. I’m hosting you. It’s the least I can do.”

After spending a night in London—where I was interviewed for the first time about my father, and the lingering impact of May 1, 1960, by a British newspaperman—I joined Gregg on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, noticing how the Soviet flight attendants felt no need to secure the overhead compartments or announce safety procedures.

It was surreal. I remember thinking: Wow, I’m flying the same airspace my dad flew in. I’m retracing his footsteps. It was a soul-searching moment for me.

While going through customs, I witnessed a memorable scene. I presented my passport to the Soviet attendant, who carefully looked it over and shared it with a colleague. They looked at me. They looked at the passport. They looked at each other. Then they looked back at me.

I didn’t need to speak Russian to see what was going through the minds of these young guys. It’s not every day that the namesake of an American spy comes walking through customs.

The man who picked us up at the airport drove a BMW, which looked out of place amid the vast army of Soviet-made sedans filling the streets. It was a sign of the changing times. The car did not have any hubcaps; the driver explained that they kept getting stolen.

After settling into a high-end Soviet-era hotel and sitting for a series of interviews, I went off to dinner with my sponsor and our Soviet interpreter, enjoying a nice meal at one of Moscow’s newly privatized restaurants. Eventually the interpreter pulled me out onto the dance floor. We all had fun.

Still, I could not help wondering if my room was bugged.

The next night, bored and feeling the need to connect to some ordinary Soviet citizens, I took a bottle of vodka someone had given me down to the lobby and began drinking shots with the bellmen. They didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak any Russian, but we tried to communicate through the language barrier. One of the bellhops eventually boiled some hot dogs, and we finished off the bottle before I stumbled back upstairs to my bed.

The next thing I knew, someone was banging on my door.

It was morning and Gregg had been knocking vigorously for a good ten minutes until he finally woke me from a deep sleep.

My head was pounding from a severe hangover. I was young and while I could hold my own drinking beer at an SAE party, I wasn’t used to drinking vodka like that.

Gregg shook his head, seeing that I was in bad shape, and told me he would stall the people downstairs until I could hurry up and get ready for our big day.

While being driven to a dacha far from the city, I was seated in the back seat next to Gregg. I felt horrible. At one point I whispered, “I’m not going to make it.” Fearing an international incident if we needed to pull over for the son of the famous spy to get sick on the side of a Moscow street, Gregg said, “Gary, got to maintain.” Eventually we ate some food, which helped the hangover, and we enjoyed a nice day in the countryside before returning to Moscow.

I desperately wanted to see the wreckage from my father’s plane. But no one seemed to know where it was. I wanted to see the Hall of Columns, but the closest we got was having someone point it out from inside a moving car.

It was an interesting time to visit Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev was opening things up, and everyone was friendly, but I got the impression that they didn’t quite know what to do with me or how to deal with my desire to learn about what happened to my father.

I especially wanted to watch the May Day parade, to experience the Communist celebration in Red Square, where Khrushchev had once learned of my father’s shoot-down. But our handlers insisted that this was impossible. Only later would we learn that Soviet officials were determined to keep us Americans as far as possible from the parade, because they were expecting a crowd of protesters, reflecting the revolution just starting to gather strength. We had our first insight that the Soviet Union would disintegrate—as happened nineteen months later—and I remember Gregg making this prediction on the plane ride home.