Final Reckoning
In July 1960, at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, speaker after speaker decried the beatings American diplomacy had taken in Moscow, Paris, Ankara, Tokyo and Havana. Sam Rayburn boomed, “Would you have thought that Truman or Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson would have had the debacle that Eisenhower had at Paris?” Accepting the nomination, John Kennedy reminded delegates that the President “who began his career by going to Korea ends it by staying away from Japan.”
As Eisenhower took a summer’s rest at the naval air station in Newport, Rhode Island, he did not find his own party much more satisfactory. Since the failure of the Summit, Nelson Rockefeller had publicly demanded $3 billion more per year for defense, deplored the Missile Gap, announced that he would accept a Presidential draft, and threatened a floor fight against a Republican platform rubber-stamping the President’s policies.
Richard Nixon feared that a floor fight would harm prospects for victory in the fall. Three days before the Republican convention opened, he secretly went to Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue apartment. He vainly pressed the Governor to join his ticket; then the two men bargained over the platform until 3:20 A.M. Two hours later, the press received copies of the proclamation instantly known as the “Compact of Fifth Avenue,” suggesting that Nixon had come to endorse key elements of Rockefeller’s critique of the Eisenhower policies.
Barry Goldwater called it the “Munich of the Republican Party.” From Newport, an angry President called Nixon and said it would be difficult for him to support a platform which did not show “respect for the record of the Republican administration.” Platform language was found to appease all sides, but after addressing the delegates in Chicago, Eisenhower left town without waiting to witness Nixon’s nomination as his successor.
By July, Powers’s sixty-one days of interrogation were over. He was paid a call in Lubyanka by his newly appointed defense counsel, Mikhail Griniev, a balding, goateed expert in losing important Soviet state cases. Ironically, the U-2 pilot was a beneficiary of the Khrushchev reforms. Under Stalin, he would not have been granted defense counsel at such an early stage; he might have been physically or psychologically compelled to denounce his own government before an almost certain execution.
The criminal indictment charged Powers with breaking a Soviet law barring outsiders from gathering state secrets for foreign governments. It charged the U.S. with sending aggressive spy planes into Russia, lying about the provocation until proof was irrefutable, breaking international law on air sovereignty, espionage and using other nations’ bases and airspace without permission. Evidently the only matter for the judges to decide was the pilot’s sentence—a maximum of fifteen years in prison or death by shooting.
By Powers’s account, Griniev told him that the sentence might depend on whether he was sorry for his crime. As the prisoner later said, he thought about it and decided that he was sorry—sorry he had made the May Day flight, sorry he had been shot down, sorry he was a prisoner, sorry that the Summit had collapsed. If his life depended on it, he could say he was sorry, as long as he did not have to define exactly what he meant.
From Washington, the State Department still badgered the Soviets to allow someone from the Embassy to see the prisoner. But the Russians argued that during an interview, the pilot might give away some of the intelligence he had been sent to obtain. Thus the CIA secretly hired two Virginia lawyers, Alexander Parker and Frank Rogers, to “aid” Griniev and discreetly try to get some information from the prisoner. Officially they were being sent to Moscow by the Virginia Bar Association. If the Russians learned that the CIA was actually behind them, they would almost surely deny them visas.
In Washington hotel rooms and restaurants, CIA and State Department operatives briefed the two lawyers on what they wished to know from Powers. What had he seen while flying across the southern Soviet Union? What had brought down his plane? Why hadn’t he destroyed it?
In Milledgeville, it had been a bad summer for Barbara Powers. She later recorded that when the press revealed her husband’s handsome salary, her mother ran up large bills and demanded that her daughter pay. Barbara was eager to go to Moscow. The CIA was not delighted to have the irrepressible woman in the city while her husband was tried but, bowing to the inevitable, the Agency secretly footed the bill. Parker and his wife were appointed as chaperones.
The CIA also offered to fly Oliver and Ida Powers to Moscow, but the parents declined. Preferring independence, Oliver accepted Life’s offer of five thousand dollars plus expenses in exchange for the exclusive story of their adventures in Moscow. Before May Day, relations between daughter and parents-in-law had been chilly; since then, they had been glacial. The two camps refused to fly to Moscow aboard the same plane.
In New York, a CBS assignment editor called in one of his reporters, Sam Jaffe, and said, “You’re going to the Powers trial.”
Slight, electric, with russet hair and a russet mustache, Jaffe had been a young radio newswriter at the UN in 1952 when the FBI first asked him for confidential reports on Russians he encountered. Jaffe agreed: his namesake uncle, star of Gunga Din, had lately been blacklisted for refusal to cooperate with the government as a member of the Hollywood Ten. In 1955, Jaffe applied for a job with CBS. By his account, a CIA man told him that he could go to Moscow for CBS if he would also work for the Agency. Jaffe refused; CBS hired him anyway and based him in New York.
Assignment to the Powers trial was a prize: the Russians were issuing few visas to the American press. Jaffe notified the FBI office in New York that he was going. Over lunch, Jay Reeves, who was evidently the CIA’s New York station chief, and a CIA psychologist asked him to watch Powers closely to see whether he had been brainwashed. If Jaffe managed to interview Khrushchev, he should try to get the Soviet leader to “make some comment, no matter how much in passing, on China or Mao.” He should also “study Khrushchev carefully for any physical changes since his 1959 visit to the United States.” He was given data on Soviet espionage for rebuttal if Khrushchev denounced the U-2. In his reportage, Jaffe should refer to Powers not as a spy pilot but as a reconnaissance pilot.
On August 12, at Idlewild Airport, New York, Jaffe boarded a Sabena flight to Brussels that would connect with Aeroflot to Moscow. He was delighted to find that he had been assigned to the same flight and compartment as Barbara Powers, her mother, her doctor, the Parkers and the Rogerses. He sat down next to Barbara; the two hit it off and drank together as they flew east.
At Brussels, Jaffe was unnerved when the Aeroflot people treated him as a member of Barbara’s party and Barbara asked him for advice on dealing with the press. He was further puzzled when in Moscow, he was given a room in the Sovietskaya Hotel four doors down from Barbara. Other reporters had second-class lodgings. “How the hell can I stay away from her?” he said later. “I’m not in the role of reporter—I am but I’m not. And I know I can get stories from her.”
Jaffe later informed the FBI that he spent “almost every night in the company of Barbara Powers in her room drinking.” Barbara’s suite had been occupied by the Nixons a year before. Jaffe recalled the scene: “She’s drinking like hell. I’m carrying her bottles out at three, four o’clock in the morning. She wouldn’t go to bed.” He begged her to speak to other reporters to avoid suspicion that he was a CIA pet, but the access was irresistible.
As he later recalled, Barbara told him that she actually “hated” her husband and was only putting up with him: he was a “no-good bum” who had run around with women “all over Turkey.” She said that she had never really wanted to go to Moscow for the trial. Jaffe later told the FBI that Barbara’s lawyers were “disgusted with her” and thought she was “sex-crazy.”
Oliver and Ida Powers arrived in Moscow with their daughter Jessica, their family lawyer, a doctor and a friend from Pound. Oliver told his daughter-in-law, “I don’t know why you even bothered to come.” The two sides mended their differences long enough to call on Griniev. Parker and Rogers gave him material to use in the prisoner’s defense, but the counsel gave no sign that he intended to use it.
Tuesday, August 16, was the day before the trial. Barbara sent her husband a desperate telegram at Lubyanka but received no reply. She and Jaffe drank late into the night. Before dawn, she bade him take her to the prison. A taxi was found. Standing in front of Lubyanka, she wept. Then they returned to Barbara’s hotel room. The FBI later recorded,
There she told the informant that she was not in love with her husband and did not have any intention of staying in the Soviet Union. Barbara Powers grabbed the informant and started kissing him, but he repelled her. He told her that she could not talk that way and could not divorce her husband at this time. He told her that she would be accused of “deserting a sinking ship” and that she should not even mention this.
The informant said that on this occasion, he could have been intimate with Barbara Powers, but he was not. He said that on many occasions when he was in Barbara Powers’s company, she was in her pajamas, and he could probably have been intimate with her if he so desired, but at no time was he intimate with her.
Wednesday was cold and rainy. Crowds pushed against police barricades as the limousines arrived at the Hall of Trade Unions. Twenty-two hundred guests were ushered inside to the red plush seats of the Hall of Columns, the old white chamber where Tchaikovsky had played, victims of the Great Purge had been tried and Lenin and Stalin had lain in state. They included Khrushchev’s daughter Yelena, the British defector Guy Burgess, newsmen and diplomats including Richard Snyder and Vladimir Toumanoff of the American Embassy. Once again, Llewellyn Thompson had elected to deprive the Russians of the propoganda value of his presence.
Television lights shone upon a gleaming red-and-gold hammer and sickle, which hung above the stage. Relics of the U-2 were on display. A theater bell rang. The room hushed as the prisoner was brought in. Powers blinked and looked out into the audience for his family. Sitting with her in-laws in a box far back in the hall, Barbara covered her eyes and wept.
The presiding judge asked, “Accused Powers, do you plead guilty of the charge?” He did. The chief prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, ran through the essentials of the prison interrogation. He showed the pilot his flight maps and logbook. When had he been first assigned to fly into the Soviet Union? Powers lied and said on May Day morning: this removed a degree of premeditation.
As in Lubyanka, he posed as an airplane jockey who had barely known what he was doing. What missions had he flown before May Day 1960? “Several flights—I cannot remember how many—along the southern border of the Soviet Union.” What had he photographed? “I don’t know. I just turned on the switches.”
Throughout the cross-examination, Powers appeared so calm that Toumanoff realized that the U-2 pilots had been chosen as much as anything for their iron nerves. But as Powers recalled, by the end of those first four hours, he felt more distraught than at any time since May Day: several times he had been on the verge of screaming, “Sentence me to death and end this farce!”
That afternoon, Griniev portrayed Powers as a classic capitalist victim, driven by economic need to spy for political reasons of which he knew little and cared less. The defense counsel displayed photos of the Powers family’s modest home, supplied by Oliver’s lawyer. He asked the pilot if he had ever been interested in the Soviet Union. “No, political questions did not interest me.” Why did he take the job with the CIA? “It enabled me to pay my debts … and save money for the future in the hope of buying a house and setting up my own business to be independent of my parents.” Why had he once hesitated to renew his contract? “I had a feeling—I don’t know what it was—I just didn’t like what I was doing.”
Griniev prompted: “Why are you sorry now?”
“Well, the situation I’m in now is not too good. I haven’t heard much about the news of the world since I have been here, but I understand that as a direct result of my flight, the Summit Conference did not take place and President Eisenhower’s visit was called off. There was, I suppose, a great increase in tension in the world and I’m sincerely sorry that I had anything to do with this.”
When he first announced the U-2 downing in May, Khrushchev had declared that the plane had been stopped by a single rocket at over 20,000 meters (65,600 feet). This claim was at least partly inspired by the need to suggest Soviet military might at a moment the world was learning that Soviet territory had been successfully overflown for four years; it may also have been made to discourage Washington from trying to send the U-2 into Russia again.
Years later, Powers said that during his first interrogation at Lubyanka, he was asked his altitude before he was downed: having given the matter “a great deal of thought,” he replied, “At maximum altitude for the plane, 68,000 feet.” By Powers’s later account, 68,000 feet was neither the U-2’s maximum altitude nor his actual altitude. It was an “arbitrary figure”—close enough to his real altitude to be credible but far enough away, he hoped, that if future U-2 pilots entered Russia and the Soviets used it to aim their rockets, they would miss. According to Powers, the Russians had believed him.
Under questioning on the first day of his trial, Powers reiterated that he had been downed at the plane’s “maximum altitude” of 68,000 feet. He silently hoped that this would alert the CIA to his concealment of some vital information and that his bosses would not undermine him by releasing contradictory facts.
On Thursday morning, the second day of the trial, Griniev asked him if he had been struck by a rocket at 68,000 feet. Powers said, “At that altitude I was struck down by something.… I have no idea what it was. I didn’t see it.” Rudenko quickly produced a report from the Sverdlovsk anti-aircraft unit insisting that the U-2 had been struck at over 20,000 meters by a single rocket.
The presiding judge asked Powers if he had done his own country a good or bad service. “I would say a very bad service.” Had it occurred to him that he might wreck the Summit conference? “When I got my instructions, the Summit was furthest from my mind.”
After Thursday’s adjournment (by Powers’s later account), Griniev asked him why, despite ample opportunities, he had failed to disassociate himself from the reactionary militarists who had sent him into the Soviet Union. If he wished to avoid death, he had better tell the court that he was “deeply repentant and profoundly sorry” for his act and that he renounced the “aggressive, warmaking designs of the United States.”
Friday was the day of judgment. Rudenko declared that the trial had exposed not only Powers’s crimes but the “criminal, aggressive activities of the U.S. ruling circles and the actual inspirers and organizers of monstrous crimes directed against the peace and security of the peoples.” The U-2 program? “A graphic example of criminal collusion between a big American capitalist company, an espionage center and the U.S. military.”
Powers must not be allowed to plead that he had only followed orders: “Having voluntarily sold his honor and his conscience, the whole of himself, for dollars, he carried out criminal acts … by a method fraught with danger for millions and millions of people.… And had his masters tried to start a new world war, it is precisely these Powerses, reared and bred by them in the conditions of the so-called Free World, who would have been ready to be the first to drop atom and hydrogen bombs on the peaceful earth.… But taking into account Defendant Powers’s sincere repentance … I do not insist on the death sentence … and ask the court to sentence him to fifteen years’ imprisonment.”
Far back in the hall, Oliver Powers sprang to his feet and shouted, “Give me fifteen years here! I’d rather get death!” (Barbara later said that she felt like saying, “Sit down and shut up.”)
Griniev replied that Powers was nothing but a “tool of the aggressive policy of the Eisenhower-Nixon-Herter administration.” Mass unemployment had driven him to join the Air Force. Like all Americans, he had been taught to worship the Almighty Dollar. He had not realized that his $2,500 per month had a “most foul stench.” When he signed his contract, Powers had not known what the CIA had planned for him. By testifying candidly, he had risked antagonizing his American masters. He deserved “a more lenient punishment.”
Now the U-2 pilot rose: “I realize that I have committed a grave crime and I realize that I must be punished for it.” He asked the court to consider that no secret information had reached its destination. “I realize the Russian people think of me as an enemy.… I plead to the court to judge me not as an enemy, but as a human being who is not a personal enemy of the Russian people, who has never had any charges brought against him in any court, and who is deeply repentant and profoundly sorry for what he has done.”
At 5:30 P.M., the three judges returned to the stage after almost five hours of deliberation. Powers stood and gripped the wooden rail of the prisoner’s dock. The presiding judge noted that Powers had been a long-time CIA agent performing spy missions against the Soviet Union. The May Day flight had been a “grave crime.” But the court was impressed by his confession and “sincere repentance.” In the interest of “socialist humaneness,” his sentence would be ten years’ “deprivation of liberty,” the first three to be served in prison.
The hall rocked with applause—thanks to the harshness or lenience of the sentence, no one could tell. Powers was taken to a room set out with sandwiches, caviar and tea. His family rushed into his arms; all wept together and spoke at once. Barbara proposed moving to Moscow and working at the American Embassy, but Powers explained that he might not be allowed visitors. Soon he would go to another prison outside the capital; after three years, he would probably be sent to a remote labor camp. Before his family left, Powers asked them to tell the press that he renounced Griniev’s attack on the American government.
In Washington, Jim Hagerty told reporters that the President regretted the severity of the sentence. Radio Moscow called this “monstrous hypocrisy”: “The U.S. leaders have begun to masquerade as humanitarians, shedding tears over the fate of the man who carried out their sordid wish.” Powers was merely the “bondsman of the Rockefellers and Morgans who turn the tears of the mothers of the world into gold.”
Many Americans denounced the bondsman for what they considered his “cooperation” with the Russians and his repentance. “A traitor to his country,” one New Yorker told the New York Times. The military historian S. L. A. Marshall could not tell whether Powers was “a man, a mouse or a long-tailed rat.” Robert Maynard Hutchins was alarmed by “the difference between the behavior of Airman Powers and of Nathan Hale.” William Faulkner thought the Russians might free him at once “in contemptuous implication that a nation so deeply reduced is not worth anyone’s respect or fear.”
After speaking with Allen Dulles, C. L. Sulzberger recorded that “Dulles left me with the impression that Powers should somehow have knocked himself off. He said Powers had been brainwashed or brain-conditioned prior to the trial.… I gather Dulles is unhappy with Powers’s behavior, but doesn’t like to say so.”
Others noted that Powers had refused to denounce his country. A country-and-western singer named Red River Dave borrowed the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and recorded “The Trial of Francis Gary Powers”:
In the stately Hall of Columns, 1960 was the year
When young Francis Gary Powers stood before the Russian bear.
They were trying him for spying, o’er the Soviets he flew
In the famous plane, U-2.
Glory, glory, he’s a hero! Glory, glory, he’s a hero!
Glory, glory, he’s a hero who flew for Uncle Sam.
Four days after the trial, Powers saw his sister and parents one more time; he wondered whether he would ever see Oliver and Ida again. After they left, Barbara walked in with a news bulletin: the State Department had declared in Washington that Powers had obeyed his instructions and would receive full salary while in prison. Parker and Rogers helped her draft a clemency appeal to President Brezhnev and Khrushchev.
Before Barbara left town, Powers was asked if he wished to see his wife once more, without guards. He said, “You know the answer to that!” He was taken to a cell in another Moscow prison furnished with an easy chair, sofa, sheets and blankets. When Barbara walked in, he noted the “strong smell of alcohol on her breath.” She later recorded what happened next:
Gary and I began to make mad love. In nothing flat … we were bouncing up and down on Gary’s cot, enjoying the true union of man and wife. We had intercourse three times in those three hours. Gary hadn’t been able to bathe for twelve days and he smelled like a billy goat! But I didn’t mind. I was swallowed up by our passion.…
Sam Jaffe never discovered who had placed him in Barbara Powers’s entourage or given him a seat among Soviet dignitaries at the front of the Hall of Columns during the trial. His royal treatment had fueled colleagues’ suspicions that he was working for the CIA, the KGB or both.
In 1961, he opened ABC’s first bureau in Moscow. The next year, after a late evening of drinking, he was driving with a Russian woman when the car ran into a ditch. She left for help. When she returned, she told him that she had been interrogated and beaten as a prostitute who consorted with Americans. By Jaffe’s account, he later lunched with a Russian “editor” who reported that he had kept the story out of the papers and could help Jaffe in other ways if the help were reciprocal. Jaffe later said that he informed the American Embassy, which told him to disengage gradually and report all conversations.
In 1964, the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko told the CIA that Jaffe had “collaborated” with the Soviet secret police. The Agency branded Jaffe “disapproved” and ordained that he “should not be used in any capacity.” In 1969, after a stint in Hong Kong, he was called to the FBI, where agents hammered him about his years abroad and accused him of being a sleeper agent. As he recalled, “They didn’t believe a word I told them. I left there crying.” ABC demoted him and he quit, unable to find another job in journalism.
In 1974, after an internal investigation, CIA Director William Colby conceded that Jaffe had not been a CIA agent, but the FBI refused to clear him of serving the Russians. Before his death of lung cancer in 1985, Jaffe called hundreds of friends and acquaintances trying to clear his name. One was Barbara Powers, but she told him that she did not wish to “rehash” the past.
Vacationing at the Black Sea, Khrushchev had watched the Powers trial on television. He decided to extend the Soviet propaganda offensive by going to New York to head the Soviet delegation at the opening session of the UN General Assembly. There he could hurl firecrackers and stink bombs at Western governments, woo the Third World and try to influence the American Presidential campaign.
From Washington, Richard Nixon wrote Llewellyn Thompson, “We shall be looking forward to Khrushchev’s visit with interest. I was wondering if he might decide to take the trip in one of their rockets. He isn’t, of course, a dog, but most people think he is a son of a—!” At a Moscow reception before departure, Khrushchev encountered Thompson and loudly berated him for the U-2. He stamped on Thompson’s foot and cried, “If you do that, you should say, ‘Excuse me!’”
Only a year had passed since Khrushchev’s first trip to the United States. The great plane he had taken to Washington in 1959 was in disrepair. Rather than use a smaller one, he boarded a Soviet passenger ship abruptly renamed after the Anti-Party Coup from the Molotov to the Baltika. When the liner pulled in at the Port of New York, longshoremen shouted, “Drop dead, you scum!” and refused to moor it. Russian diplomats reputedly had to tug on the ropes with their own hands. Apprised of possible assassination plots, Eisenhower restricted Khrushchev, Castro and Hungary’s Janos Kadar to Manhattan Island.
Khrushchev gave shirtsleeve interviews from the Park Avenue balcony of the Soviet mission, called on Castro at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, and dined at the Plaza, where dowagers booed him and he booed back. On September 22, the General Assembly session opened with the most glittering array of world leaders since 1945—Macmillan, Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno, Nkrumah. Fourteen new nations sat in the chamber for the first time. Eisenhower spoke on opening day. The Economist reported that he “let himself be whisked on and off the podium, like a piece of property on a revolving stage, lest he come into physical contact with Mr. Khrushchev.”
The next day, Khrushchev delivered a searing three-hour attack on Western governments, demanding that UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold be ousted in favor of an East-West-neutral troika. Third World leaders proposed a new summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev. Chip Bohlen advised the President to say no unless Khrushchev gave some sign of good faith like releasing the RB-47 fliers: otherwise the world would think that the Soviets were so powerful that they could treat the U.S. with contempt and then return to the Spirit of Camp David at the drop of a hat.
Khrushchev announced that he would see Eisenhower only if he apologized for the U-2 and the RB-47; he vainly demanded a General Assembly debate on the U-2 and immediate independence for all colonial territories. From the rostrum, he denounced the Security Council as a “spittoon,” castigated Eisenhower for “lying” about spy flights and charged that a U.S. submarine had trailed the Baltika in hopes of sinking it. America was a “disgrace to civilization.”
In Washington, the President told Herter, “Khrushchev is trying to promote chaos and bewilderment in the world to find out which nations are weakening under this attack and to pick what he can by fishing in troubled waters.” He said he was a “long sufferer,” but if he were a dictator, he would “launch an attack on Russia” while Khrushchev was in New York.
During his formal UN speech, Macmillan mentioned Khrushchev’s destruction of the Paris Summit. From the audience, Khrushchev wagged his finger and shouted, “Yes, let us talk about Powers. Don’t send your spy planes to our country!” Macmillan said, “I should like it translated, if you would.” Later, in an imperishable gesture, Khrushchev beat his fist and his shoe on his desk. The presiding officer pounded his gavel so hard that it broke. Pravda called Macmillan the prisoner of obsolete views which filled the air “with the musty odor of the Victorian Age.”
On the campaign trail, John Kennedy noted that the Khrushchev confined to Manhattan was the same man who had been asked to Camp David: “The Spirit of Camp David is gone.… The Soviets have made a spectacle before the world of the U-2 flight and the trial of our pilot and have treated this nation with hostility and contempt.” Citing the Missile Gap, the U-2 affair, Cuba, the Congo, space and other setbacks, Kennedy cast Eisenhower’s and Nixon’s America as a nation whose political and military might was eroding.
Eisenhower wanted Kennedy to tone down his criticism of American defense policies. In August, before Allen Dulles flew to Hyannis Port to brief the Democrat on intelligence aspects of America’s world position, the President asked him to stress America’s commanding military strength. Given the lack of more conclusive evidence like satellite photography and the intelligence he had hoped to gain on May Day, Dulles would not affirm without reservation that there was no Missile Gap. Hence when Kennedy asked him how America stood in the missile race, Dulles cautiously replied that only the Pentagon could properly answer the question.
Late that month, Kennedy flew to SAC headquarters in Omaha for another briefing. As his aide Theodore Sorensen recalled, it soon became obvious that the candidate was not to be given a full-scale top-secret fill-in on American-Soviet bomber and missile strength. Kennedy carped that he had had more access to information as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: if the Air Force was that complacent, he would remember next year at budget time. In September, General Earle Wheeler briefed Kennedy in Washington on behalf of the Joint Chiefs. After the slide projector was turned off, Kennedy questioned Wheeler’s assurances about the Missile Gap: “General, don’t you have any doubting Thomases in the Pentagon?”
The failure of Dulles, Wheeler and SAC to foreclose any possibility of a Missile Gap allowed Kennedy to use the issue in the fall campaign. For the most part, he referred to the Soviet missile “advantage,” avoiding dates and numbers, citing nonpartisan experts: “I say only that the evidence is strong … that we cannot be certain of our security in the future any more than we can be certain of disaster.” More than once he branded his opponents as “the party which gave us the Missile Gap.”
Before May Day, Richard Nixon had expected to be able to exploit Eisenhower’s foreign policy record. Now he had to fend off Kennedy’s attacks. He warned voters that Kennedy was “the kind of man Mr. Khrushchev will make mincemeat of.” Asked again and again to defend the President’s handling of the U-2 episode, he said, “Any of us as Sunday morning quarterbacks might have done things differently.”
Had Kennedy asked the President to “express regrets” to Khrushchev? “That shows such a naïve attitude.… An apology or expressing regrets without getting something in return wouldn’t have satisfied him. It wouldn’t have saved the Conference. It would only have whetted his appetite. There was another reason too why the President of the United States could not and should not have done that. I say that that reason is that no President of this country must ever apologize or express regrets for attempting to defend the security of the United States against attack by somebody else!”
Kennedy replied by noting that the Eisenhower Administration had expressed regrets for the plane that had strayed across southern Russia in 1958: “That is the accepted practice between nations.… If that would have kept the Summit going, in my judgment, it was a proper action. It’s not appeasement. It’s not soft.… It would have been far better for us to follow the common diplomatic procedure of expressing regrets and then try to move on.”
Khrushchev watched the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on television before going back to Moscow. As always, he saw the American campaign as a “circus wrestling match.” He told reporters that the candidates were a pair of boots: “Which is better, the right boot or the left boot?” Pressed on his choice, he said, “Roosevelt!”
Privately he was less indifferent. He told aides that Nixon was “a typical product of McCarthyism, a puppet of the most reactionary circles in the United States. We’ll never be able to find a common language with him.” John Kennedy seemed less problematic. But mixing in American politics, as he had vainly tried with Stevenson in January, was a risky game. Embracing candidates too warmly was poison; fierce denunciations scared American voters seeking a President who could deal with the Kremlin.
The Eisenhower government was pressing for the release of Powers and the RB-47 fliers. As Khrushchev later said, “We had nothing against doing this. There was no need for us to keep Powers in prison. But the question was, when?” He told colleagues, “If we release Powers now, it will be to Nixon’s advantage. Judging from the press, I think the two candidates are at a stalemate. If we give the slightest boost to Nixon, it will be interpreted as an expression of our willingness to see him in the White House.” Khrushchev kept Powers in prison and, as he later boasted, cast the “deciding ballot” in Kennedy’s election “over that son-of-a-bitch Richard Nixon.”
To Eisenhower, the 1960 election was “the biggest defeat of my life, a repudiation of everything I’ve done for eight years.” More than once, Nixon blamed his defeat in part on the CIA. Not only was the Agency responsible for the U-2 failure, but he suspected that CIA “liberals” (perhaps led by Allen Dulles at Hyannis Port) had deliberately withheld evidence disproving the Missile Gap in order to give Kennedy a powerful campaign issue.
Almost anything could have tipped the scales in a contest decided by one-tenth of one percent of the vote. Had the U-2 not plunged on May Day, had Eisenhower gone without incident to Paris, Moscow and Tokyo, had Powers not been tried and Khrushchev not made his angry trip to the UN, Nixon might have campaigned as the heir to a triumphant diplomacy. Kennedy would have had a difficult time persuading Americans that their world position was in decline.
Shortly after the election, the first satellite photos of the Soviet Union were studied in Washington. They showed that had Francis Gary Powers reached Plesetsk on May Day, he might have seen the first four operational Soviet ICBMs. These and later pictures showed no evidence of other long-range missiles deployed anywhere in the Soviet Union. The public did not know it yet, but the myth of the Missile Gap was being shattered.
During the fall of 1960, NBC News completed a documentary called The U-2 Affair. Airing was delayed until late November to avoid charges of influencing the election. The program began with the scream of an aircraft engine and Chet Huntley’s introduction: “You are listening to the sound of a jet. It is not an ordinary jet. This is a U-2. This is the incredible plane that projected our country into a crisis that shook the world.”
Using newsreel film and interviews with Kelly Johnson, Ida Powers, Jim Hagerty and others, the program reconstructed what was publicly known about the project, the May Day flight and its aftermath. Asked by Ray Scherer about what could be learned from the episode, Hagerty snapped, “Don’t get caught.” In his benediction, Huntley recalled that when asked the same question, Christian Herter had said, “Not to have accidents”:
“We leave it to the American public to decide whether ‘Don’t get caught’ and ‘Not to have accidents’ are the only lessons to be learned from the U-2.… This is not a matter for the history books but vitally affects our ability to survive as a nation.… In the world as it is today, we cannot afford another U-2 affair. Good night.”
Watching in the family quarters of the White House, Eisenhower was so angry about the show that he complained to his friend David Sarnoff, founder and chairman of NBC. Sarnoff explained that he had not known about the program until its airing: his son, the network’s president, would be called on the carpet. He would do all in his power “to correct any unpleasantness or embarrassment.” In fact, he would order NBC News to run a televised tribute to the President in January before he left office.
When Nixon was asked to participate in the tribute, he replied that he did not wish to be in the public eye now and was “furious about the U-2 show.” He told his staff that the “only way” to change the press was “not to cooperate with them.” Leonard Hall found Nixon “completely irrational” about the program, but when the Republican chairman explained that absence from the tribute would be an insult to the President, Nixon said he would “do anything.”
On New Year’s 1961, the Soviet government and guests gathered in the Great Hall of the Kremlin for the annual celebration. With Orwellian rhetoric, Khrushchev raised his glass and declared, “No matter how good the old year has been, the new year 1961 will be better still.” He said it was “well known” that relations with America had been damaged—especially by the spy plane incident and President Eisenhower’s declaration that such flights were his deliberate policy toward the Soviet Union. “We would like our bad relations with the U.S.A. to become a thing of the past with the departure of the old year and the old President.”
On January 20, 1961, John Kennedy took the oath of office. The old President and First Lady drove through the snow to Gettysburg, “where we expected to spend the remainder of our lives,” as Eisenhower later wrote. “I had to admit to little success in making progress in global disarmament or in reducing the bitterness of the East-West struggle.… It seems incomprehensible that the men in the Kremlin can be ready to risk the destruction of their entire industrial fabric, their cities, their society and their ambitions rather than to enter into practical treaties, including systems of mutual inspection, that would immeasurably enrich their lives and those of all nations in the world.
“But though, in this, I suffered my greatest disappointment, it has not destroyed my faith that in the next generation, the next century, the next millennium, these things will come to pass.”
On the day after the Kennedy inauguration, Khrushchev summoned Ambassador Thompson to the Kremlin and told him that he was releasing the RB-47 fliers as a step toward warmer relations with the United States. The new President greeted the airmen at Andrews Air Force Base. He declared that flights into Soviet airspace had been suspended since May 1960 and, as he had pledged during the campaign, would not be renewed.
Powers learned of the release while listening to Radio Moscow in his cell: he was “happy for the RB-47 boys,” but could not help thinking that if they had not been downed, he might have been the one freed. In September 1960, he had been brought to Vladimir Prison, 150 miles east of Moscow. Lonely after months of solitude in Lubyanka, he had asked for a cellmate. Zigurd Kruminsh was a young Latvian who had been working in Latvia for the British Secret Service when the Soviets caught him, tried and failed to force him to name names, then sent him to Vladimir, where he taught Powers to weave Latvian carpets and speak some Russian.
As the months passed, Powers was deeply depressed by the paucity and diffidence of letters from Barbara. In February 1961, he wrote in his diary, “I can never have a future with her, because the past will always be between us. There seems no other way than a divorce when I return to the States. It should have been done in 1957.… I thought at the time I loved her too much to let her go, that I wouldn’t admit failure, but now I don’t know.… I am at my wit’s end as to what to do.”
That month in Washington, Ambassador Menshikov appealed to Chester Bowles, the new Under Secretary of State, for the release of Igor Melekh, a Russian in the UN Secretariat arrested for espionage in October 1960. Bowles said the request might be granted if the Soviets released Powers. Menshikov argued that Melekh should be freed without condition, like the RB-47 fliers.
Melekh was released; the State Department suspected that Powers’s liberation might be the next step toward better relations. But when Tommy Thompson brought up the matter in Moscow, Andrei Gromyko merely said he was “glad” Thompson understood that the Melekh and Powers cases were “entirely different.”
In June 1961, John Kennedy met Khrushchev at Vienna. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had advised him to let a member of his party raise the Powers case with a member of Khrushchev’s party: it had been the American understanding that the Soviets would not have pressed for Melekh’s release without a similar gesture in mind.
Over lunch with Kennedy at the American Embassy, Khrushchev recalled the last Soviet-American summit: he had respected Eisenhower and regretted the unhappy culmination of their relations. He was still “almost certain” that Eisenhower hadn’t known about the May Day flight and had chivalrously taken responsibility for it. He was sorry to have missed receiving Eisenhower in the Soviet Union and hoped to welcome Kennedy when the time was ripe. Nixon had hoped to convert the Soviet people to capitalism with a dream kitchen that did not exist and would never exist. He apologized for mentioning Nixon, but “only Nixon could have thought of such nonsense.”
Khrushchev told the President that he had “voted” for him in 1960 by postponing the RB-47 release, and Kennedy agreed. But the two-day talks in Vienna did not advance the U-2 pilot’s freedom. Asked by newsmen about the Powers case, Kennedy said, “The matter wasn’t even discussed.” When Powers heard of this, he wrote in his diary, “I don’t expect him to go out of his way to help me, but I feel that I would have been released long before now if he had made the slightest effort when he met with Khrushchev.”
In Milledgeville, Barbara Powers took a job as a bookkeeper at the Log Cabin restaurant: “I didn’t know that a vicious gossip network already was weaving a scarlet robe around my shoulders. Some of the wicked tongues had even renamed the Log Cabin ‘the U-2’! It was darkly rumored that … one night, during a wild bash, I was supposed to have performed a ‘naughty strip tease’ in the party room upstairs.”
In September 1961, Barbara’s mother, brother and sister had her legally declared incompetent and committed to a psychiatric clinic in Atlanta, where she was assigned to Dr. Corbett Thigpen, author of The Three Faces of Eve, the famous account of split personality whose film version starred Joanne Woodward. Barbara’s mother and sister wrote Powers in Vladimir that it “pained” them to report the bad news.
He wrote in his diary, “I am becoming more and more afraid of what the future holds for me.”
Unbeknownst to Powers, the CIA was now trying to win his release in exchange for one of the highest-ranking Soviet agents ever captured in the United States. Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was a hawkfaced, pop-eyed, ascetic KGB colonel who had a weakness for Panama hats with hatbands in dazzling colors. He spoke Russian, German, Polish, Yiddish and English, the last in Scottish, Irish, Oxford and Brooklyn accents.
Abel claimed that he was born to a prominent family in Moscow in 1902. As far as the CIA knew, he was slipped into a German displaced persons camp after the Second World War and sent to North America. In 1950, he settled in Brooklyn and posed as a painter and photographer under the alias of Emil Goldfus. He relaxed by reading Einstein, working out mathematical problems and writing a pamphlet called You Cannot Mix Art and Politics. At the same time, he performed minor operational chores for the KGB, receiving instructions from Moscow on codes and ciphers evidently while waiting for the recruitment of an American spy of sufficient stature for assignment to him.
In 1957, his assistant, Reino Hayhayen, defected and exposed him. At the detention center in McAllen, Texas, federal agents could not break him: Abel refused even to admit that he was a Soviet citizen. As defense counsel, he was assigned James Donovan, a snow-haired Harvard Law graduate who had been an OSS general counsel and planner of the Nuremberg trials. Ordinarily condescending, Abel treated Donovan “like an understanding colleague” after learning of his OSS background.
The lawyer argued in court that Abel’s room had been searched unconstitutionally. Stoical as ever, Abel did not utter a word in his own defense and got thirty years in federal prison in Atlanta. Donovan vainly fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
In June 1960, Oliver Powers wrote Abel in prison, offering to ask the American government to trade him for his son. Abel contacted Donovan: having consistently claimed to be an East German, he asked the lawyer to correspond with his “wife” in Leipzig. In the summer of 1961, she wrote him that she had gone to the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin and found the Soviets sympathetic to a Powers-for-Abel exchange. Donovan and the CIA’s Lawrence Houston suspected that “Hellen Abel” was actually a KGB agent: the Russians probably were worried that, faced with prison until 1987, Abel might break down and tell all. Snatching back a captured agent would lift KGB morale all over the world. And Abel might be useful working on the American desk in Moscow.
Donovan wrote Mrs. Abel that the Soviets should release Powers unilaterally, as with the Melekh case. Then she could appeal to President Kennedy for her husband’s clemency. She replied that the Embassy in East Berlin felt there must be a simultaneous exchange.
In November 1961, the CIA cleared the way. Pearre Cabell wrote Dean Rusk that while the Russians may have felt that they had learned everything from Powers worth knowing, the CIA believed that he had not revealed information that could embarrass the United States, such as details of U-2 flights without permission over nations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The CIA wished to know the “precise events” leading to his capture, and about his treatment and interrogation. Powers’s letters from prison suggested that he was worried about his wife and Washington’s failure to get him freed. Soon he might give away the secrets he had been holding back. Returned to Moscow, Abel would never be fully trusted again. Any American secrets he brought back would be at least five years out of date.
J. Edgar Hoover angrily opposed an exchange. He reminded Attorney General Robert Kennedy that Abel was a far more valuable agent than Powers—and that “it would be catastrophic if the United States arranged for Powers’s release and he then refused to come home.”
But in January 1962, Donovan was called to Washington and told that an exchange had been approved at the “highest level.” Donovan wrote Mrs. Abel of “significant developments” and proposed a meeting at the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin at noon on February third. As requested, she cabled back the affirmative signal, “HAPPY NEW YEAR.”
The CIA informed Donovan that the East Germans were also holding a Yale graduate student named Frederick Pryor, who had been arrested for espionage while researching a dissertation, and Marvin Makinen, a Fulbright scholar sentenced to eight years in prison for photographing Soviet military installations. Donovan should try to free all three Americans, but his principal objective should be Powers.
At the Embassy in East Berlin, he was greeted by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Abel. Donovan thought she looked more like a German character actress. Sobbing, she asked for details about Abel’s prison life.
Then Ivan Schischkin walked into the room. Officially he was the Embassy’s second secretary, but the CIA knew him as chief of Soviet espionage in Western Europe. He told Donovan, “Over a year ago, these Abel people came to my office … because they are East Germans. I heard their story and told them I would intercede with the Soviet government to see whether Powers might be exchanged for Abel. I later received a favorable reply from Moscow because certain fascist factions in the United States have sought to link this East German Abel with the Soviet Union.”
Mrs. Abel’s attorney, Wolfgang Vogel, had told the American mission in West Berlin that she was “confident” Pryor and Makinen would be freed if the U.S. exchanged Abel for Powers. But now when Donovan mentioned the other two prisoners, Schischkin claimed that he had never heard of them. Donovan said that if Schischkin wouldn’t discuss them, he would have returned home. On the other hand, President Kennedy had already signed a commutation of Abel’s sentence for the event of an exchange. If they made a deal, Abel could be in East Berlin within forty-eight hours.
The talks lasted four days. Each evening, Donovan went back to West Berlin, dialed a special number, said, “Jim D. is back,” and met his CIA contact at the bar of the Berlin Hilton. Reports were cabled directly to the White House. On Thursday, February 9, Donovan and Schischkin cut their deal: Powers would be traded for Abel. The East Germans would release Pryor at the same moment at a separate place. If Soviet-American relations improved, there was “every expectation” that Makinen would be freed. Adamant against confessing that the Soviets practiced espionage, Schischkin demanded that Abel not be publicly connected to the Soviet government.
At the White House, John Kennedy was concerned about Hoover’s obstinacy. He asked aides to make sure that the FBI Director was “fully informed and in agreement with what is going on.”
Saturday, February 10, 1962. Over the Havel River, spanning East Germany and West Berlin, the Glienicker Bridge had been prematurely named in 1945 “the bridge of unity.”
It was altogether fitting for the old veteran of human intelligence to be surrendered for the most famous symbol of the new age of technology. Abel had been flown to West Berlin and housed in a maximum-security cell in the U.S. military compound. Powers was being kept in a luxurious, well-guarded safe house in East Berlin. Schischkin told him that if anything went wrong at the bridge, he must return to the East, but Powers later said that he had silently resolved to run for it—even if it meant dodging bullets.
At 8:20 A.M., the quadrille began. Through a chilly mist, Donovan walked to the center of the green bridge, escorted by an American diplomat and a U-2 alumnus named Joseph Murphy. Schischkin and two colleagues arrived from the opposite end. The principals shook hands and beckoned. From the West came Abel in sunglasses, carrying overstuffed bags, manacled to a guard. Powers arrived in fur hat and heavy coat, shackled to two Russian Goliaths. Abel was identified by a KGB man, Powers by his old friend Murphy.
As they waited for the Americans to confirm Pryor’s release at Friedrichstrasse, Schischkin told Powers, “Next time you come to see us, come as a friend.” Powers pledged to come as a tourist. Schischkin replied, “I didn’t say as a tourist. I said as a friend.”
Someone shouted, “Pryor’s been released!” Schischkin cried, “The document! The document!” Kennedy’s official pardon was countersigned and handed to Abel.
At the instant the two prisoners passed each other at the center line, the sun came out. Murphy slapped his U-2 colleague on the back: “You know who that was, don’t you?” Powers shook his head: he had not been told that his liberation was part of a trade.
Abel returned to Moscow. The KGB would not trust him and few in the West really believed he was an East German, so the Russians turned necessity into virtue by making him a hero. He was reportedly granted the Order of Lenin, a chauffeured car and dacha, and enough Lucky Strikes to support his three-pack-a-day habit. In the mid-1960s, the Soviet press claimed that he had been a far more vital cog than the Americans had ever known and that he had destroyed crucial evidence in front of his FBI captors.
In 1971, after his death of lung cancer, the KGB stuck a finger in the CIA’s eye one more time by revealing that Abel had actually been born in Britain to Russian emigré parents in 1903. Western newsmen were taken to his grave, where they discovered that his actual name had never even been Rudolf Abel but William Fischer.
While the Americans and Russians went through their paces at the Glienicker Bridge, the John Kennedys were holding a White House dinner for the Stephen Smiths: the President’s brother-in-law was leaving his post in the State Department. At 11:30 P.M., Kennedy crossed the dance floor and ascertained from his friend Benjamin Bradlee of Newsweek that it was too late to change the magazine’s next cover.
An hour later, he told him about Powers and Abel. Bradlee called the news in to Newsweek’s sister publication, the Washington Post, and later marveled, “Imagine a reporter dictating an exclusive story from the best of all possible sources to the strains of a dance orchestra playing inside the White House!”
At two in the morning, on an open telephone line from Berlin, the President learned that the exchange had taken place. At three, his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, made the public announcement. By Bradlee’s recollection, Salinger was flustered to find that the Post had had the story for two hours.
Flying from West Berlin, a doctor examined Powers and drew blood samples to establish that the Russians had not drugged him. At Wiesbaden, Powers, Donovan and Murphy boarded the plush Super-constellation assigned to the U.S. Air Force’s commanding general in Europe. Powers said, “You know, a couple of weeks ago in my cell, I dreamed one night about a martini.” As they dined on steak and potatoes, Donovan related the events that had led to his freedom.
In 1960, Donovan had publicly criticized Powers for cooperation with the Russians during the Moscow trial. Now as they spoke, he concluded that the pilot was just the kind of man CIA would want to sail a shaky espionage glider over the heart of Russia: “Powers was a man who, for adequate pay, would do it and as he passed over Minsk, would calmly reach for a salami sandwich.”
The plane landed secretly in Delaware. Powers was rushed to a fourteen-room Georgian house owned by the CIA on a hundred snowy acres in Oxford, Maryland. After a large breakfast and a session with a CIA psychiatrist, he was jubilantly reunited with Ida and Oliver. Then Barbara arrived, three months out of the Atlanta clinic and thirty pounds heavier than when he had last seen her. She burst into tears and he said, “Barbara honey, I swore in prison that the first tree I saw after I was released I would name after you.”
Reporters discovered the safe house. The Powerses ducked down as a convoy sped them to a new location, of all places, near the Eisenhower farm in Gettysburg. Kelly Johnson arrived by helicopter in a snowstorm: “Before we start, 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.” Then: “What happened to my plane?”
After Johnson had his turn, CIA men debriefed Powers for eight days. The press once again learned their whereabouts and they moved to another safe house near the Agency’s new headquarters in Langley. Powers was dissatisfied with the questions. Years later, he said, “I couldn’t help discerning an obvious pattern behind them—that the Agency was not really interested in what I had to tell them. Their primary concern was to get the CIA off the hook.”
The U-2 pilot’s return renewed the national controversy over his performance on May Day and during the Moscow trial. “A HERO OR A MAN WHO FAILED HIS MISSION?” asked the New York Herald Tribune. John Wickers of the American Legion told reporters that 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.” Senator Stephen Young 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.” Newsday said that he should be denied his $52,500 in back pay: “He was hired to do a job and he flopped.”
Unexposed to the original public attack in 1960, Powers was stunned by what he now heard and read. Americans did not seem to grasp that he had not been required to kill himself if his plane went down. They did not know that he had withheld information from the Russians about earlier intrusions, flights over other nations without permission, CIA personnel, American missiles in Turkey, the U-2’s actual ceiling and British involvement in the U-2 operation. He had resisted pressure to denounce the United States at his trial and confirm absolutely that his plane had been downed by a Soviet rocket. He had resisted the charge that the flight had been sent to sabotage the Paris Summit.
During and after the trial, Powers had been lampooned in the West as merely “an airplane driver—simple, half-educated, nonpolitical, deliberately chosen for his lumpish lack of curiosity,” as James Morris described the conventional wisdom in the Manchester Guardian. In fact, the pilot had worked hard to create this image to justify his professed ignorance about huge areas of the U-2 program. Especially given the fact that he had had minimal instruction on behavior if captured, Powers had displayed subtlety, shrewdness and boldness throughout his ordeal.
But what Americans would always remember was his confession that he was “deeply repentant and profoundly sorry” for what he had done—words that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
At the end of his debriefing, Powers was taken to Washington to be introduced to Allen Dulles. After the failed Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy had decided to ease out Dulles and Bissell. At the old CIA headquarters in Foggy Bottom, Dulles was packing up his belongings. Bemused by the irony of their meeting, he shook the pilot’s hand and told him that he had heard quite a bit about him. He said he had been reading Powers’s debriefing reports: “We are proud of what you have done.”
Dulles’s successor, John McCone, was not so sure. As Lawrence Houston recalled, during the course of the investigation, they “were getting slightly different stories.”
On Houston’s suggestion, McCone set up a Board of Inquiry: members included retired Federal Judge E. Barrett Prettyman, John Bross, a lawyer and veteran CIA covert operator and Lieutenant General Harold Roe “Pinky” Bull of the CIA’s Office of National Estimates, who had been General Eisenhower’s wartime operations chief in Europe. They watched a Soviet film of the Moscow trial and questioned U-2 fliers and technicians, a National Security Agency analyst, a CIA counterintelligence man and Powers himself.
Powers disliked the whole process. The formal hearings reminded him of his interrogation and trial by the Soviets. At one point, he was so annoyed by Prettyman’s “accusatory” manner that he cried, “If you don’t believe me, I’ll be glad to take a lie detector test!” The offer was accepted so quickly that he suspected he had been goaded to make it so that the CIA could tell the press that he had “volunteered” for a polygraph test.
The Board was under the gun to end the public controversy over Powers’s performance in Russia with a prompt report. On March 3, after a twelve-day inquiry, McCone gave it to the President. Cautiously worded, the fourteen pages said that the Board’s findings on what had really happened between Powers’s takeoff from Peshawar and his Moscow trial had to be based mainly on his own testimony: “If his account is correct, the Board is of the opinion that in light of the circumstances, he acted in accordance with the terms of his employment and his instructions and briefings … and complied with his obligations as an American citizen during this period.”
The report found Powers “inherently and by practice a truthful man.” He had not been brainwashed. He had made “reasonable” efforts to destroy his plane and equipment when downed. He had complied with orders to tell the full truth about his mission, if captured, except for certain specifics of the plane. His public repentance in Moscow must be considered “trial tactics.” He was entitled to back pay.
An expurgated version of the report was issued to the press. Powers thought it equivocal and evasive. Why couldn’t the Board have told the country that he had withheld information from the Russians that was vital to national security?
After noon on March 6, 1962, spectators crammed into the Senate Caucus Room, where Joseph McCarthy had once pursued Communists and where John Glenn had been feted as the first American to orbit the earth two weeks before. The doors burst open. Shouting cameramen backed into the room. “One of the finest pieces of theater we’ve ever seen,” wrote Richard Strout in the New Republic. “Center of the commotion was a calm, young man fresh from Soviet prison and CIA hideaway who wrecked a Summit, colored a campaign and shook the world.”
The press had noted that the President had welcomed the RB-47 fliers at Andrews Air Force Base but snubbed Powers. The U-2 pilot himself had heard that Robert Kennedy thought he should be tried for treason. The morning of his trip to the Senate, by Powers’s account, he was told that Kennedy wished to see him but, as he waited for his limousine, the White House called and canceled the appointment.
William Fulbright had bid to reopen the Foreign Relations Committee’s U-2 hearings, but CIA officials recalled what they considered Fulbright’s harsh treatment in 1960: Richard Russell’s Armed Services Committee was a warmer ally of American intelligence. Now as Powers sat down at the witness table, someone thrust a U-2 model into his hands. Flashbulbs went off, and every paper in the United States had its page one photo.
For nearly two years, the world had speculated on what had brought down the U-2 on May Day. Soviet missile fire? Malfunction? Pilot error? Pilot defection? Sabotage? The Board of Inquiry had not provided an official explanation; that had not been its assignment. Presumably certain that it would leak, John McCone privately told congressmen that CIA experts had concluded that the U-2 was disabled at 68,000 feet by the near-miss of a Soviet missile. Soon this hit the newspapers.
Now the Caucus Room was silent as Powers told the senators of the dull noise, the bright orange light and the plane spinning out of control: “My first reaction was to reach for the destruct switches … but I thought that I had better see if I can get out of here before using this.… I was being thrown forward, and if I had used the ejection seat at that time, I would have probably lost both legs.…
“I kept glancing at the altimeter as the aircraft was falling and it was going around very fast.… I tried to get back into the aircraft so that I could activate these destructor switches.… I couldn’t get back in the airplane. I didn’t know whether I could get those oxygen hoses loose or not. I couldn’t activate the destruct switches, so then I decided just to try and get out.…”
He described the poison pin, his capture, incarceration and apology in Moscow: “I made this statement on the advice of my defense counsel.… My main sorrow was that the mission failed.”
Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts asked about the parachute and survival kit, and praised him as a “courageous, fine, young American citizen.” Powers choked up: except for his talk with Allen Dulles, this was his first commendation by a high government official. John Stennis of Mississippi noted that Powers had been “exonerated by the men who must know how to judge what you did.… I know it makes you feel mighty good.”
Powers replied, “There was one thing that I always remembered while I was there—and that was that I am an American.”
“And proud of it?”
“Right.” The room resounded. One reporter noted that at that instant, Powers seemed almost as beloved as Colonel Glenn. Other senators praised the witness, but Barry Goldwater was uncommonly silent: during the hearing, he sent Powers a penciled note (“You did a good job for your country—Thanks”), but he did not believe that the pilot’s version of his downing was the way it had happened at all.
After ninety minutes, the star witness left the chamber. Reporters asked Powers what he planned to do with his back pay, and he cried, “Spend it!”
How?
“Slowly!”
Then, as Time reported, the U-2 pilot “disappeared into a waiting government car, leaving behind a persistent feeling that some of his story remained untold.”