INITIALLY, THE PLIGHT of pilot Francis Gary Powers was a mystery to those in the U-2 program. The CIA’s Operations Center received information that Soviet radar had tracked his plane a couple hours earlier in the skies over Sverdlovsk, but for some unknown reason, the Russians had discontinued tracking. When Dick Bissell arrived at the Operations Center later that afternoon, his top personnel had plenty of questions but no answers. Did the U-2 crash somewhere in the Ural Mountains, or was it shot down? Regardless, Bissell and others believed there was no way the pilot could have survived the crash, so they developed a cover story. Two days later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a statement that one of its high-altitude weather planes had gone missing during a flight inside Turkey and that the pilot had reported experiencing oxygen difficulties. If the plane’s wreckage was discovered inside the Soviet Union, US government officials could simply claim that he had lost consciousness and drifted across the border before crashing.
The Soviets did not respond right away. Cunningly, Premier Nikita Khrushchev allowed the Americans’ claim to go unchallenged until May 5, 1960, when he announced that a US spy plane had gone down near Sverdlovsk. The State Department then received word from the US ambassador to Moscow that the pilot might have survived the crash. Still, the Eisenhower administration continued to deny that an American pilot had deliberately violated Soviet airspace. On Saturday, May 7, Khrushchev offered the world proof of the American deception. He showed reporters an aerial photograph taken from Powers’ U-2. After further examination analysts in Washington determined that the photograph had the same unique nine-by-eighteen-inch format used by the CIA’s high-performance B camera. The Soviet leader then stunned everyone with his announcement that the U-2 pilot was alive and in Russian hands.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s worst fears for the U-2 program had been realized. Dick Bissell and the CIA had failed to ensure the secrecy of the program. Now world leaders knew about America’s clandestine activities against the Soviet Union, and some called into question the president’s ongoing pledge to strengthen relations with Russia and bring lasting peace to the world.
In an attempt to cauterize the deepest wound to his presidential administration and his legacy, Eisenhower went before the American public on May 11 to explain the deception while also reinforcing the need for intelligence-gathering activities against the Soviets.
“No one wants another Pearl Harbor,” President Eisenhower said. “This means that we must have knowledge of military forces and preparations around the world, especially those capable of surprise attack.”1
Eisenhower recalled his proposal from 1955, written by Colonel Richard Leghorn, which would have called for both the United States and the Soviet Union to exchange maps pointing to the locations of all military installations in their respective countries. Khrushchev had rejected this so-called Open Skies plan. The president stressed that Russia’s “fetish of secrecy and concealment” made spying essential—in fact it was a “distasteful but vital necessity.”
The president showed no contrition and offered no apology.
Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev traveled to Paris later that month to attend the Four-Power Summit Conference along with French president Charles de Gaulle and British prime minister Harold Macmillan. Khrushchev used the opportunity to blast the United States for what he called its “inadmissible and provocative actions” in sending a spy plane over the Soviet Union. He also stated that President Eisenhower would not be welcome in Russia for his planned visit in June 1960, which had been postponed from the previous year, and demanded a formal apology from the American leader. Khrushchev then called upon Eisenhower to ban future surveillance flights over the Soviet Union and punish all those involved in the May 1 incident.
Following Khrushchev’s tirade, President Eisenhower told both Macmillan and de Gaulle, “I don’t care. My hands are clean. My soul is pure.”2
Again, Eisenhower refused to offer any apology or to punish any member of the U-2 program. He also stated that the United States would suspend spy plane flights over the Soviet Union but would not yield to an all-out ban on such missions. Outraged, Khrushchev and the Russian delegation walked out of the summit with no discussion of a nuclear test ban, disarmament, or growing tensions in Berlin. In 1958, Khrushchev publicly demanded that the United States, Great Britain, and France remove their forces from West Berlin in six months. When the Western powers did not comply, the Soviet premier threatened to cut off all access to West Berlin from West Germany, just as Russia had done during the Berlin Blockade a decade before. Although the Allies successfully airlifted much-needed supplies to the people of West Berlin, the city’s population had ballooned over ten years, and the Western powers could not sustain another effective campaign. Another blockade would lead to a humanitarian disaster. The Soviet leader proposed that the summit be suspended up to eight months, indicating that he would rather negotiate with the next administration.
The two men vying to succeed Dwight Eisenhower in the Oval Office were Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator Jack Kennedy, who was now just weeks away from officially accepting the Democratic nomination for president.
After the summit collapsed, Kennedy expressed deep concern about Eisenhower’s handling of the situation. He told reporters in Oregon that the president should have offered some kind of apology for or regret over the U-2 incident to get Khrushchev back to the negotiating table.
Kennedy’s opponents seized on the comments and tried to spin them as proof that the Massachusetts senator was soft on communism. He tried to explain his stance on the issue during the second televised presidential debate against Nixon, the Republican nominee.
“The U-2 flights were proper from the point of view of protecting our security but they were not in accordance with international law,” Kennedy stated. “Rather than tell the lie which we told, rather than indicate that the flights would continue… it would have been far better… if we had expressed regrets, if that would have saved the summit.”3
If elected president, Kennedy said, when dealing with the Russians he would take a page from Teddy Roosevelt’s playbook: be strong; maintain a strong position; but also speak softly.
Global criticism of the U-2 program spread not through gentle murmur but with a thunderous echo. Britain pulled back the bulk of its support for the clandestine project, and surveillance flights were suspended in Turkey and Japan, where the U-2s were dismantled and returned to the United States. Even NASA, which had been instrumental in the overall concealment of the program, refused to allow the CIA to use the space agency in its cover story.
Morale among the pilots and their families hit an all-time low. Francis Gary Powers’s fellow U-2 pilots and their wives read in the daily newspaper and watched on small black-and-white television screens as he was paraded before the world press and the public and labeled both a spy and a traitor during a dramatic show trial.
A pall had been cast over Laughlin Air Force Base as pilots whispered among themselves, wondering what they would have done in Powers’s boots. Would they have stuck themselves with the poison pin? Each man had resigned himself to the risk of being shot down and killed or dying under the unmerciful duress of physical torture. But the pilots prayed they would never face the decision to give up their own lives freely and without last resort. Chuck Maultsby understood what Powers was going through, as he had also ejected from his plane and been captured behind enemy lines. Maultsby prayed that the Soviets would treat Powers more humanely than the Chinese had treated him.
Most pilots did not see Powers as a traitor at all for simply wanting to live. The hawkish military personnel in high-ranking positions at Strategic Air Command headquarters in Nebraska did not share these feelings, however. Some considered Powers a traitor deserving of death for the embarrassment he had caused the United States and for the secrets they believed he would reveal to the Soviets in a desperate attempt to save his own skin.
When interviewed in the fall of 2016 at his Cape Cod home, more than fifty years after the incident, legendary Cold Warrior Richard Leghorn said he had no sympathy for Francis Gary Powers.
“He should’ve killed himself,” said the ninety-seven-year-old Leghorn without hesitation. “His death would have saved us and the program from a lot of problems.”4
Powers insisted that he only revealed trivial information to his Soviet captors during hundreds of hours of interrogation at Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka Prison. Sitting in his dank cell and subsisting only on yogurt and foul-smelling fish soup, Powers lost up to fifteen pounds during the initial weeks of his imprisonment. He was alone, unarmed, and very afraid. His initial hope that he would be handed back over to the US government as a show of Soviet compassion and goodwill soon gave way to the dark reality that he would remain a prisoner behind enemy lines.
In mid-August 1960, a military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR convicted Powers of espionage and sentenced him to ten years, three to be served in a Russian prison and the remaining time to be served in a Soviet labor camp.