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- <text>
- <title>
- (56 Elect) U-2 Incident:Cold-War Candor
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1956 Election
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- May 16, 1960
- THE NATION
- Cold-War Candor
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> "It is certainly no secret," said the State Department
- last week, "that, given the state of the world today,
- intelligence collection activities are practiced by all
- countries...The necessity for such activities as measures for
- legitimate national defense is enhanced by the excessive secrecy
- practiced by the Soviet Union in contrast to the free world."
- </p>
- <p> With historic frankness, the statement went on to admit
- that "endeavoring to obtain information now concealed behind the
- Iron Curtain," an unarmed U.S. plane had flown over Soviet
- territory. Thus the U.S. told the world that a Lockheed U-2
- brought down over Russia on May 1 was flying an intelligence
- mission, just as Premier Nikita Khrushchev said.
- </p>
- <p> That admission stirred up a flurry of concern at home and
- abroad over the U.S.'s embarrassment." The admission was
- embarrassing to the U.S. for one reason: it reversed the
- Administration's earlier claim that the U.S. was engaged in
- high-altitude meteorological research over Turkey and the
- plane drifted into Russia by mistake.
- </p>
- <p> Open Skies. All the bored calm with which the world
- awaited an unproductive summit vanished in a new preoccupation:
- Would Khrushchev make use of his capture of the U.S. high-flying
- plane either to scuttle the summit or make unreasonable demands?
- Would allies be dismayed and neutrals angered?
- </p>
- <p> The apprehensions, as they so often are, were exaggerated.
- The incident, coupled with Khrushchev's recent intransigence,
- has certainly heated up the cold war. But people everywhere
- have accepted the reality of the cold war, which has its own
- kinds of maneuvers, battles, tactics and weapons.
- </p>
- <p> Faced with the unexpected, the State Department, after its
- manly candor, set out to make its own points about the U-2.
- </p>
- <p> "One of the things creating tension in the world today,"
- it said, "is apprehension over surprise attack with weapons of
- mass destruction. To reduce mutual suspicion and to get a
- measure of protection against surprise attack, the U.S. in 1955
- offered its `open skies' proposal--a proposal which was
- rejected out of hand by the Soviet Union. It is in relation to
- the danger of surprise attack that planes of the type of the
- unarmed civilian U-2 aircraft have made flights along the
- frontiers of the free world for the past four years."
- </p>
- <p> Cleared Air. If the U.S. felt embarrassed, perhaps rocket-
- rattling Nikita ("We will bury you") Khrushchev must have found
- it embarrassing, too, to have the world learn that unarmed,
- big- target U.S. planes had been flying missions over Soviet
- territory for four years before his armed forced finally managed
- to bring one down.
- </p>
- <p> For reasons of his own, Nikita Khrushchev chose to make a
- spectacular out of the U-2 incident. In Washington, there were
- some calls for a congressional investigation, and in both the
- U.S. and Britain some fears were expressed that the U.S., by
- risking the U-2 flight "at this time," had risked prospects for
- "agreements" at the summit. But if the shooting down of the U-2
- dimmed summit prospects, they could not have been very bright
- beforehand.
- </p>
- <p> Perhaps they were never very bright. President Eisenhower,
- Secretary of State Herter and Under Secretary of State Dillon
- have all made it clear in recent weeks that the U.S. will go to
- the summit determined to hold fast to its rights in Berlin, and
- Nikita Khrushchev has shown in tough-toned speeches that the
- U.S. firmness has undercut his hopes of making any headway at
- the summit.
- </p>
- <p> The talk of endangered agreements at the summit showed a
- short memory of what the cold war was all about and hoe it got
- that way. Under standard Communist terms no agreements of any
- substance or durability were likely to be possible at the
- summit, unless the U.S. and its allies would accede to Russian
- demands. By candidly admitting that the U.S. is flying
- intelligence missions over Russian, by vividly reminding the
- world that a cold war is going on, and by demonstrating that it
- reserves the right to defend itself in every way it can. the
- U.S. might have cleared the summit air for some hard talk on
- hard issues that could be a lot more worthwhile than vague,
- generalized agreements.
- </p>
- <list>
- <l>DEFENSE</l>
- <l>Flight to Sverdlovsk</l>
- </list>
- <p> The low black plane with the high tail looked out of place
- among the shiny military jets crowding the U.S. Air Force base
- at Incirlik, near Adana, Turkey. Its wide wing drooped with
- delicate languor--like a squatting seagull, too spent to fly.
- Its pilot seemed equally odd: a dark, aloof young man who wore
- a regulation flying suit and helmet but no markings, and had a
- revolver on his hip. Pilot Francis Gary Powers, 30, climbed into
- the one-man cockpit, gunned the black ship's single engine, and
- as the plane climbed toward take-off speed, the wide wings
- stiffened and the awkward outrigger wheels that had served as
- ground support dropped away.
- </p>
- <p> Steadily the plane climbed--beyond the ceiling of
- transports, beyond the ceiling of bombers and interceptors, up
- through 60,000 ft., beyond the reach of any other operational
- craft and, as far as the pilot knew, of antiaircraft fire as
- well. Back at Incirlik, an operations officer tersely logged
- the take-off of the high-altitude U-2 weather research flight.
- If all went well, that was all the official records would ever
- have to say. Meanwhile, Pilot Powers banked to a course that
- took him north and east--arcing toward the border of Soviet
- Russia.
- </p>
- <p> As the world found out last week, Francis Powers, one time
- U.S. Air Force first lieutenant, was off on an intrepid flight
- that would ultimately carry him up the spine of the Soviet
- Union. From south to north, his high-flying instruments would
- record the effectiveness of Russian radar, sample the air for
- radioactive evidence of illicit nuclear tests. The U-2's
- sensitive infra-red cameras could sweep vast arcs of landscape,
- spot tall, thin smokestacks or rocket blasts--if there were
- any--on pads far below.
- </p>
- <p> Francis Powers was on an intelligence mission, like many
- unsung pilots before him. As such, he was as much a part of the
- long thin line of U.S. defense as G.I.s on duty in Berlin,
- technicians manning missile-tracking stations behind him in
- Turkey, shivering weather watchers drifting through a winter on
- ice islands in the Arctic. As such, he and they, were engaged
- in giving the free world the warning it must have if it is to
- protect itself from Russian attack, and the shield of
- intelligence it must have if it is to seek peace without the
- danger of being lured into a fatal trap.
- </p>
- <p> Cloak & Dagger. But Pilot Powers had bad luck: he got
- caught, and Society Premier Nikita Khrushchev says that he
- talked. Thus Khrushchev had the chance to tell the world about
- the U-2's mission last week--with all the embellishment and
- distortion that best suited his case.
- </p>
- <p> After taking off from his base in Turkey on April 27, said
- Khrushchev, Powers flew across the southern boundary of the
- U.S.S.R. to ]K in Pakistan. From there, on May 1, he took off
- on a : flight that was supposed to take him up the Ural
- Mountains to Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula to a landing in
- Norway. Soviet radar tracked him all the way, and over
- Sverdlovsk, on Khrushchev's personal order, he was shot down at
- 65,00 ft. by a Soviet ground-to-air rocket. Pilot Powers, said
- Khrushchev, declined to fire his ejection seat because that
- would have blown up his plane, its instrumentation and possibly
- Powers himself. Instead, he climbed out of his cockpit,
- parachuted to earth and was captured, while his plane crashed
- near by.
- </p>
- <p> Khrushchev spared no cloak-and-dagger touches. He
- brandished what he called a poisoned suicide needle that Powers
- was supposed to use to kill himself to avoid capture. Said
- Khrushchev: Powers refused to use it--"Everything alive wants
- to live." Khrushchev displayed high-altitude, infra-red pictures
- of Soviet targets, which he said had been reclaimed from the
- U-2's cameras ("The pictures are quite clear. But I must say
- ours are better"). No one explained how so much could be
- salvaged from a plane purportedly destroyed by a rocket.
- Khrushchev waxed in sarcasm as he reported that Powers had
- carried a conglomeration of French francs, Italian lire and
- Russian rubles, plus two gold watches and seven gold rings.
- "What was he going to do?" asked Khrushchev scornfully. "Fly to
- Mars and seduce Martian women?"
- </p>
- <p> "For the time being," said Khrushchev after threatening a
- trial for Powers and a press conference at which the remains of
- the U-2 would be put on public display, "we qualify this
- aggressive act by an American aircraft...as one aimed at nerve-
- racking, rekindling the cold war and reviving the dead rat
- while it is not yet prepared for war. Imagine what would happen
- if a Soviet plane appeared over new York or Chicago," he went
- on. "U.S. official spokesmen have repeatedly declared that they
- have duty atomic bombers which, on the approach of a foreign
- plane, can take to the air and head for assigned targets...We
- do not have duty bombers, but we do have duty rockets, which
- accurately and inevitably will arrive at their appointed targets
- and do their job more surely and efficiently."
- </p>
- <p> Intelligence Gap. As Khrushchev's scathing statement hit
- Washington, officials broke their Saturday calm for a day-long
- series of huddles and telephone calls to the President at his
- Gettysburg farm. In the end, a week of confusion was washed out
- with one eminently sensible decision: to tell the truth. With
- the President's approval, hapless Lincoln White, the same State
- Department spokesman who had the day before denied any U.S.
- overflight of Russia, dictated the statement that a U.S. jet
- had indeed been snooping for Soviet secrets--as U.S. planes
- have been doing for the past four years. "The necessity for
- such activities as measures for legitimate national defense,"
- said White, "is enhanced by the excessive secrecy practiced by
- the Soviet Union in contrast to the free world.
- </p>
- <p> Such cold-war candor gave the U.S. a chance to discuss
- with equal candor the massive problem of getting adequate
- intelligence about the vast Communist nations. The Soviet
- dictatorship keeps its secrets--even from its own citizens--by the classic techniques of a police state. Travel is
- restricted, and foreigners off the beaten path are spied on. No
- news of even an air crash ever appears in the Soviet press
- unless the Kremlin wants it there; no stories of new weapons or
- defense plants are ever told by Moscow's radio commentators
- unless there is a propaganda motive. Secrecy not only enables
- Khrushchev & Co. to hide what they have but to hide what they
- don't have as well.
- </p>
- <p> Early in the high-stakes cold-war game, the U.S. knew that
- it was appallingly weak on its intelligence of the U.S.S.R.
- This meant that the U.S. had no real basis for shaping its own
- deterrent force. The U.S. Air Force thought for years that it
- had to defend itself against a big Russian bomber force when
- the Soviets actually had switched to missiles. In the dawning
- age of ICBMs, the U.S. itself became a certain target with all
- major defense installations well known; yet U.S. forces did not
- know of any military targets except major Soviet cities, and
- precious little about the new ones that were behind the Urals.
- No gap in weapons was ever so serious to U.S. security as the
- intelligence gap.
- </p>
- <p> Fringe of Space. Soon after the cold war began, heavily
- loaded U.S. patrol bombers began lugging cameras and electronic
- gear around the rim of Russia to scout out Soviet radar
- defenses. As they fought their ill-equipped, cold-war
- intelligence battles, they counted their casualties form Siberia
- to Armenia. Some five years ago the Central Intelligence Agency
- asked California's Lockheed Aircraft Corp. to design an almost
- incredible plane. It must be capable of deep penetration of the
- Society land mass; it must be able to fly far above the
- possibility of interception--out on the fringes of space. And
- it must manage its lofty missions while burdened with a maximum
- of intricate electronic and camera gear. In an astonishing one
- year later, Lockheed's most expert design team delivered the
- U-2.
- </p>
- <p> By 1956, U.S. pilots at far-flung airstrips--England,
- Japan, Turkey, Alaska--began to see the strange, gliderlike
- jet come and go on its errands. But details of its mission and
- its performance were hard to come by. Whenever a U-2 landed,
- military police swarmed around. Its pilots were civilians, and
- when an airman would nudge up close at the officers' club bar
- to swap plane lore, the U-2 pilot would smile and move along.
- </p>
- <p> Inevitably, though, there were a few crashes, and,
- inevitably, world got around. In 1957 the Pentagon officially
- acknowledged the U-2, described it as a high-altitude, single-
- engined weather research plane--which it surely is. But the
- public rarely got a look at it. Then one day last September
- members of the Japanese glider club were shooting landings at
- a light-plane strip 40 miles southwest of Tokyo. In midafternoon
- a black jet, its engine dead, wobbled down on the strip.
- </p>
- <p> Fifteen minutes later a U.S. Navy helicopter arrived,
- disgorged a squad of Americans in civilian clothes. For the
- first time the pilot opened his canopy, called, "I'm O.K.," and
- climbed out. The Japanese noted that he carried a pistol at his
- waist, that his flight suit bore no markings. Moments later more
- U.S. civilians arrived, drew pistols and ordered the Japanese
- away form the plane. But not before Eiichiro Sekigawa, editor
- of Tokyo's Air Views, got a meticulous description.
- </p>
- <p> Last Inch. The tapered, square-tipped wings, reaching for
- 45 ft. to either side of a slim 40-ft. fuselage, gave the U-2
- the look of a high-performance sailplane. They suggest a range
- far beyond that circumscribed by the fuel supply. Editor
- Sekigawa, a glider pilot himself, speculated that the U-2 was
- built to climb under its own power, soar with its engine cut,
- for long, valuable miles in the thin upper atmosphere. Its Pratt
- & Whitney J57 turbojet engine could kick it along at speeds just
- under the speed of sound, and its light frame could almost
- surely be coaxed to altitudes close to 100,000 ft.
- </p>
- <p> Everything about the U-2 seemed tailored to obtain the
- last inch of range, the last moment of endurance. The thin
- straight wings were a model of aerodynamic cleanliness; the
- raked, razorlike tail added a minimum of drag. Even the landing
- gear was pared to the final ounce. Light bicycle-type main
- wheels were aided by wing-tip wheels that were dropped
- immediately after take-off. Between gliding and plain powered
- flight, Sekigawa guessed that the U-2 could stay aloft as long
- as nine hours on a single trip.
- </p>
- <p> "Undoubtedly the plane's activity is largely weather
- reconnaissance," wrote Sekigawa. "Still it would be idle to
- think it is not being used for other reconnaissance while it
- goes about researching air conditions. Otherwise, why was it
- necessary to threaten Japanese with guns to get them away form
- the crippled plane? And why did the plane have no identification
- marks? Why did the pilot have no identifying marks on his
- clothes?"
- </p>
- <p> Plane-Happy. Editor Sekigawa guessed more than most brass
- in Washington. Once the U-2 was test-flown, the National
- Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) set up a pilot
- training unit ostensibly under control of Lockheed--but most
- of Lockheed's top officials made it a point to know very little
- about it. Everything was turned over to Vice President Clarence
- L. ("Kelly") Johnson, who is in charge of Advanced Development
- Projects. The training unit recruited select U.S. pilots, and
- presumably they were drilled in the same rigorous survival
- training as Strategic Air Command pilots. Presumably they got
- long special training in high-altitude work.
- </p>
- <p> In 1956 Lockheed recruited Air Force 1st Lieut. Francis
- Powers. Powers was a plane-happy youngster born in the
- Cumberland mountain country in Kentucky, near the Virginia
- border. His father, Oliver Powers, 55, who owns a shoe-repair
- shop in Norton, Va., reveled in telling callers last week that
- Francis for his first plane ride at the age of 14, came back to
- announce: "I left my hear up there, Pap, and I'm going' back to
- git it."
- </p>
- <p> On the way to git it, Francis Powers finished high school
- in Grundy, Va., got a B.A. at Milligan College in Tennessee,
- and enlisted in the Air Force. In 1951 he was accepted for
- aviation cadet training, got his wings a year later. But even
- during the Korean war, when he was a full-fledged jet fighter
- pilot, Powers never saw service overseas. The Air Force did not
- seem to hold enough excitement for him, and in 1956 he resigned
- "to seek employment with civilian industry."
- </p>
- <p> That employment meant the U-2 program at Lockheed. It
- meant the rigorous training of a modern-day espionage
- intelligence agent who had first of all to be a fine pilot,
- whose intricate instruments would do the actual work for him.
- Powers learned the tight-lipped, laconic line of the secret
- agent. After he and his wife moved to Turkey, he convinced his
- parents that he was doing only weather work, that he never flew
- closer than 100 miles to the borders of Russia, that life in
- Adana was long repetitious periods of boredom between infrequent
- flights.
- </p>
- <p> Grim Gamesmanship. U.S. intelligence officers believer
- that the Russians have long known of U-2 surveillance flights.
- But the U-2, flying at least as high as 80,000 ft., was beyond
- the reach of their antiaircraft weapons. To have accused the
- U.S. of overflights would have been to admit an inability to
- defend the country against U.S. planes. Whether Khrushchev
- indeed got himself an accurate new antiaircraft rocket, or
- whether--as first U.S. stories had it--Pilot Powers came
- dangerously low with trouble in his oxygen system, the U.S., at
- week's end, did not know. In any event the bagging of a U-2 was
- a moment Russia's bosses had long looked forward to, and
- Khrushchev understandably made the most of it.
- </p>
- <p> In the grim gamesmanship of the cold war, Khrushchev
- scored the U-2 missions as omens of aggression. But as long as
- U.S. forces need to seek out the sources of possible attack,
- such flights will continue. Until improved reconnaissance
- satellites swing into orbit, bold pilots will continue their
- crossing of a hostile continent. The oxygen mask will continue
- to put a new face on the secret agent of tradition, marking his
- release from the hole-and-corner, back-alley deals of history.
- </p>
- <p> The State Department's blunt admission that it was engaged
- in aerial intelligence may have surprised sophisticates who
- felt the U.S. would never admit such activity. It may have
- shocked the innocent who were sure the U.S. would never indulge.
- But at this late hour of the nuclear age, it is inconceivable
- that any reasonable government would not accept all risks in the
- race for such military intelligence. The chance of exposure in
- not trying is far greater; the probable penalty would be more
- than mere embarrassment.
- </p>
- <list>
- <l>August 29, 1960</l>
- <l>RUSSIA</l>
- <l>The Boy from Virginia</l>
- </list>
- <p> Q. What is your profession?
- </p>
- <p> A. Pilot.
- </p>
- <p> Q. What place of work?
- </p>
- <p> A. Detachment 10-10 at Adana, Turkey.
- </p>
- <p> Q. When did you receive the order to fly over Soviet
- territory?
- </p>
- <p> A. In the morning on May 1.
- </p>
- <p> Q. Where did you receive the order to fly to the Soviet
- Union?
- </p>
- <p> A. In the town of Peshawar in Pakistan.
- </p>
- <p> Thus, in the flat accents of Pound, Va., U-2 pilot Francis
- Gary Powers began to describe his part in one of history's most
- celebrated--and, until his mishap, most successful--espionage operations.
- </p>
- <p> The many-columned courtroom where Powers was brought to
- trial after 108 days in solitary confinement had seen history
- made before; in the days when it was still the Noblemen's Club,
- Pushkin and Tolstoy relaxed there, later the bodies of Lenin
- and Stalin lay there in state. But Powers seemed unmindful of
- history, and the faraway cities of which he talked were
- apparently little more than dots on the map to him. A man who
- by his testimony belonged to no political party and had never
- voted, Powers was simply an expert airplane chauffeur describing
- his trade. "I don't know," he said when asked about the workings
- of the U-2's phenomenal electronic brain. "I just turned on the
- switches." How did he get into the spy game? "I felt lucky to
- get such a good job--flying service with a big salary."
- </p>
- <p> Showpiece. To demonstrate to the world through this
- uncomplicated flyer the "insane aggressiveness" of the U.S.,
- Nikita Khrushchev had set up a show trial that evoked memories
- of Stalin's purge productions of the 1930s. All morning long in
- the cold Moscow rain, the black ZIM limousines rolled up to the
- court to disgorge Soviet Russia's Reddest-blooded aristocrats,
- including Khrushchev's daughter Elena. Out of the unaccustomed
- luxury of one of the ZIMs stepped Powers' wife, Barbara, 25,
- poised and cool in black, flanked by her mother and two
- lawyers. From another emerged her father-in-law, Oliver Powers,
- a 55-year-old cobbler whose last trip out of his hill country
- had been a visit to Atlanta and Washington in 1935. Hopelessly,
- Powers tried to comfort his wife Ida. "They'll know he's a good
- boy like he's always been, " he sid. "We'll have him back real
- soon."
- </p>
- <p> Inside, under brilliant chandeliers, a theater bell called
- the audience to their seats, just as for the concerts that
- often fill the hall. As Powers mounted the six steps to the
- stage and stood gripping the wooden slats of the defendant's
- box, his wife, at the opposite end of the hall, buried her face
- in her hands. But Powers, despite his baggy, Russian-made
- double-breasted suit, looked fit and to all appearances
- unbrainwashed. When newsmen murmured about a bruise on his neck,
- Ida Powers set the record straight. "It's a birthmark," she
- said. "Yes, indeed, that's the first thing we saw about him when
- they brought him to the bed in Burdine, Kentucky, 31 years ago
- today."
- </p>
- <p> With Regrets. Powers began his birthday by pleading "Yes,
- I am guilty" to a 4,000 word indictment. Acknowledged as a spy
- by his own Government, he obviously saw cooperation with his
- captors as the only path to survival and dutifully professed
- his penitence. In jail, he had been allowed to talk to no one
- but his captors, had seen no Americans. "I understand that as
- a direct result of my flight, the summit conference did not take
- place," he said, "and President Eisenhower's visit was called
- off. I am sincerely sorry I had anything to do with this."
- Insistently, Lieut. General Viktor Borisoglebsky, presiding
- judge of the three-man military tribunal, hammered at the point:
- </p>
- <p> Q. Did you not think your flight might provoke armed
- conflict?
- </p>
- <p> A. The people who sent me should think of these things.
- </p>
- <p> Q. Did you do your country a good service or an ill
- service?
- </p>
- <p> A. I would say a very ill service.
- </p>
- <p> Along with his mea culpa, Powers calmly described the
- making of a U.S. aerial spy--a process so casual as to shock
- British intelligence experts who followed the trial. Toward the
- end of his Air Force hitch as a first lieutenant in 1956, he
- was "approached and interviewed" by Central Intelligence agents.
- He passed medical exams. "A special high-altitude suit was made
- for me and tested at a special chamber. My pay was to be $2,500
- monthly...approximately the same as the captain of an
- airliner." (From the Russian audience came gasps of
- astonishment.) About "six or seven months after the contract was
- signed," Powers learned that his duties might entail flights
- over Russia.
- </p>
- <p> When Prosecutor Roman A. Rudenko (who was chief Soviet
- prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials) asked the size
- of his unit at Adana. Powers hesitated briefly before
- answering. "There are six civilian pilots." But he freely gave
- the name of the unit's commander, Colonel William Shelton, and
- equally freely confessed that, soaring far above the range of
- Russian fighters, he made "one or two" trips along the Soviet
- border in 1956, "six or eight" in 1957, "ten or fifteen" in 1958
- and in 1959, and "one or two" in 1960. When the big order
- finally came, Powers picked up a sack of sandwiches from his
- wife and flew southeast with Colonel Shelton to Pakistan,
- stopping once to refuel along the way. ("I do not remember the
- name of the airfield. I think it could have been Bahrain.") His
- briefing from Shelton was short--an hour and a half in which
- "I barely had time to study my maps." Powers claimed no
- knowledge of two unmarked survivor maps and the plea in 14
- languages ("I need food and shelter; you will be rewarded") that
- the Russians claimed to have found in his flight suit. Said he:"
- Someone must have stuck them in my pockets."
- </p>
- <p> The Black Cloth. To some of his countrymen, Powers seemed
- all too ready to name names and divulge secrets. But not all
- the victories in the trial went to Prosecutor Rudenko. Powers,
- wrote British Reporter James Morris in Manchester's Guardian,
- "presented himself as a poor deluded jerk from Virginia, a part
- that I suspect did not require much playing. But there are
- moments when he is suddenly master of the court, summoning from
- some unsuspected source of strength a remnant of good old-
- fashioned, down-to-earth American guts."
- </p>
- <p> With unexpected wisdom, Powers avoided the worst sin a
- witness can commit: getting smart with the court. But when
- Prosecutor Rudenko seized on the fact that Cardinal Spellman
- had visited Adana to sneer "So Cardinal Spellman is interested
- in military bases." Powers replied quietly: "I would say
- Cardinal Spellman was interested in military personnel, not
- military bases." Despite all Rudenko's pressure, Powers refused
- to agree than his U-2 had no U.S. markings. And when Rudenko
- suggested that a mysterious piece of black cloth found in
- Powers' plane had been intended to serve as a kind of password
- when he reached the Norwegian airport of Bodo, Powers said
- dryly: "My plane was password enough."
- </p>
- <p> When Rudenko tried to establish Khrushchev's boast that a
- Soviet rocket had scored a direct hit on the U-2 at 68,000 feet
- over Sverdlovsk, Powers did not dare to contradict the Russian
- claim directly, but stubbornly insisted that he had "no idea"
- what hit him. All he would say was "I heard and felt a hollow-
- sounding explosion. It seemed to be behind me and I could see an
- orange-colored light. " To U.S. officials, who had heard Soviet
- radar stations track Powers' plane on a leisurely descent to
- 40,000 ft., this sounded like a guarded description of a jet
- flame-out, which is often accompanied by a jolting explosion of
- escaping gases at the plane's tail. It was noteworthy, too,
- that the prosecutor never brought up another sore point with
- Khrushchev & Co.: how many flights Powers' fellow U-2 pilots at
- Adana had made over the Russian heartland.
- </p>
- <p> Socialist Humanitarianism. The summing up was the
- predictable set propaganda piece--one that the London Times
- dismissed as "crude stuff" and a "characteristic mistake by the
- Russians." To Prosecutor Rudenko, the trial "unmasked
- completely the criminal aggressive actions of the U.S. ruling
- quarters" and the "savage, man-hating ethics of Allen Dulles &
- Co., placing the dollar, this yellow devil, higher than human
- life." By way of defense, Powers' court-appointed attorney,
- Mikhail Grinev, who makes a good living losing cases he is
- expected to, tried to outdo the prosecution in attacking the
- U.S. Powers, he said, "should be joined in the dock by his
- masters, who attend this trial invisibly." Grinev in friendly
- fashion had told Powers' parents that "social factors are very
- important with our judiciary" and in his argument he stressed
- the family's hardscrabble hill-country life. Powers, he said,
- went to work for the CIA only because of "mass unemployment" in
- the U.S. Against Rudenko's suggested sentence of 15 years,
- Grinev asked for the minimum sentence, seven years. At the end
- Powers himself got a brief chance to plead, and said that he had
- never felt "any enmity whatsoever toward the Russian people."
- His voice was clear and strong. He did not join in his counsel's
- attack on the U.S., but neither did he disavow it. Apparently
- not aware that in Russia his defense attorney was as much the
- agent of the state as the prosecutor, he had let himself be
- persuaded to be pictured as a helpless tool of forces beyond
- him.
- </p>
- <p> Having made its case, having denounced the act while
- seemingly showing its charity to the defendant, the court
- quickly sentenced Powers to ten years, which it called an
- example of "socialist humanitarianism." By no coincidence, the
- trial wound up in exactly the three days for which the hall had
- been leased by the court.
- </p>
- <p> Only then did Francis Powers get to meet his family. They
- sat about a small room behind the court for an hour, and though
- the Russians had laid tea and caviar sandwiches, nobody had
- much appetite. Powers cried as he kissed Barbara. They talked
- glumly about mundane things: how to ship the furniture from
- Turkey to the U.S., whether to sell their car. For the next
- three years, Oliver Powers explained afterward, his son "will
- be working in a factory and confined to prison. After that he
- will serve seven years in a work camp studying the Communist
- system." But, deep in his heart, Oliver Powers clearly still
- hoped that an appeal to Nikita Khrushchev, off vacationing in
- the Crimea, might get Francis off much earlier.
- </p>
- <p> No Nathan. What kind of welcome would Pilot Powers get
- when he finally makes it back home? "He's no Nathan Hale,"
- grumped one U.S. official.
- </p>
- <p> But the State Department quickly announced that it saw
- "nothing in his conduct to warrant prosecution," and President
- Eisenhower publicly "regretted the severity of the sentence."
- </p>
- <p> As for Oliver Powers, he got fighting made when his son's
- patriotism was even questioned. "I never wanted him to be a
- flyer," snapped Powers. "If he had told me the kind of work he
- was going to do in all those foreign countries, I'd have
- hallooed, `Don't do it.'" Francis himself was apparently
- nervous about the nature of his defense and particularly about
- his lawyer's attacks on the U.S. "After all, I'm still an
- American," he told his family unhappily. But to Oliver Powers,
- such considerations seemed irrelevant. Breaking down at last,
- the father of the most notable U.S. spy since the Revolution
- sobbed bitterly: "God knows, I don't want to leave my boy in
- this country."
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-