The CIA had even considered the advantages of suicide for a downed pilot. Apparently the agency hadn’t been able to make up its mind. The decision had been left with the fliers themselves. Cyanide tablets were available for those who wished them, and later they were shown a small device that looked like a good-luck charm. It was a silver dollar with a metal loop that permitted it to be fastened to a key chain or a chain around the neck. The loop unscrewed. Inside there was a straight pin, which in turn was a sheath that could be removed to expose a thin needle. Toward the end of the needle were tiny grooves. In the grooves was a sticky brown substance—curare, one prick of which brought instant death. Most of the pilots, including Powers, had decided against carrying either cyanide or curare, but when Colonel Shelton asked him during preparations for his last flight, “Do you want the silver dollar?” he changed his mind. He thought the deadly needle might make an effective weapon. “O.K.,” he said, and slipped it into the pocket of his outer flight suit. He also carried a shaving kit, civilian clothes, a half-smoked packet of filter cigarettes, pictures of his wife, some German marks, Turkish liras, and Russian rubles; some gold coins, watches, and rings (to be used for bribery or barter if in need of help); about a hundred dollars in U.S. currency, some U.S. postage stamps, a Defense Department I.D. card, a NASA certificate, instrument rating cards, U.S. and international driver’s licenses, a Selective Service card, a social security card, and an American flag poster that had “I am an American” printed on it in fourteen languages, including Russian. Long afterward Powers recalled that when he got into trouble he was asked whether he was an American. “It seemed,” he said, “pointless to deny it.”
The CIA facilities in Pakistan were surprisingly primitive; the airmen slept on folding cots and cooked their own food from rations. But they weren’t there much. Most of the time they played poker and loafed at the U.S. Air Force base near Adana, Turkey. (A favorite topic in bull sessions was the coming summit meeting and how it could dispel world tension.) By March of 1960 they were champing at the bit. The number of flights had been drastically reduced now for nearly two years, and the fewer there were, the more apprehensive they became over the next one. Then, after a long pause, the two 1960 flights had been scheduled for April. Powers was the backup pilot for the first, April 9. It went smoothly. The second was to be his.
Things started to go wrong when, on arriving in Pakistan, he was told that the U-2 which had been reserved for this flight—it was the best they had—would be unavailable, having been grounded for a maintenance check. In its place he would fly a substitute, U-2 No. 360. This was bad news; No. 360 was a lemon; a “dog,” they called it. There was always something going wrong with it. Its most recent malfunction was in the fuel tanks. Sometimes they wouldn’t feed fuel to the engine. Colonel Shelton had them in mind when he authorized Powers to land in Finland or Sweden if necessary.
If the tanks behaved, and everything else went well, Powers’s course would resemble a huge zigzag. Taking off from Peshawar, he would cross Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush, an extension of the Himalayas, and enter the Soviet Union near Stalinabad. Then he would pass over the Aral Sea, the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Archangel, Kandalaksha and Murmansk on the Kola peninsula; after Russia would come the Barents Sea and the northern coast of Norway to Bodo—some of the bleakest land in the world. The flight would take about nine hours. Three-fourths of it, 2,900 miles, would be inside the USSR. After the takeoff he would break radio contact with the Mobile Control Officer. The rest of the trip would be made in complete silence. It was, Powers said, “a lonely feeling.”
For three agonizing days it seemed that the flight would never get off the ground. Washington was hemming and hawing over last-minute instructions. Thursday, April 28, was fixed as the departure date when Colonel Shelton, Powers, and eighteen other specialists and crew members flew down to Peshawar from Turkey. Powers went to bed at 4 P.M. Wednesday. At 2 A.M. Thursday he was awakened and told that the takeoff had been postponed twenty-four hours. The next night was the same. This time he was up and “on the house”—breathing oxygen—when word came of another twenty-four-hour wait. Saturday there was a third twenty-four-hour delay. Somebody at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue couldn’t make up his mind.
At last, at 5:30 A.M. Sunday, May 1, Powers climbed into the plane for the preflight check. There the delay continued. The scheduled departure time was 6 A.M. It came and went without the signal to go. The cockpit was fiercely hot; his long underwear was drenched with perspiration when Colonel Shelton came out to explain. They were awaiting final approval from the White House. This had never happened before. Presidential approval had always come through before the pilot was locked in his seat and ready to go. The wait lasted twenty excruciating minutes. Then Powers was given the green light. He roared off and, once up, completed his flight log entries: the aircraft number, 360; the sortie number, 4154; and the time. It was 6:26 A.M. local time, 1:26 Greenwich mean time, and 8:26 P.M. in Washington. In Moscow it was 3:26 A.M.
Crossing into Russia the cloud cover was solid. That didn’t matter here; the CIA wasn’t interested in this area. The sky cleared over the Aral Sea, and glancing down he glimpsed the condensation trail of another single-engine jet plane, moving parallel to his course but in the opposite direction. Shortly afterward he saw another contrail, this one moving in the opposite direction. Probably it was the same machine. He assumed that Soviet spotters had spotted him on their radar screens and were sending up scouts. He wasn’t worried. The trails were so far below him that the Russian pilot couldn’t possibly see him.
Some thirty miles to the east he passed over the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, Russia’s Cape Canaveral, and looked down on the pads from which the Soviet sputniks and ICBM’s had been launched. He flipped switches, turning on the cameras. The cloud cover thickened again; he switched them off. Fifty miles south of Chelyabinsk the skies cleared, giving him a good view of the snow-topped Ural mountain range, once considered the dividing line between Asia and Europe, and at that point the aircraft started giving him trouble. The autopilot had gone haywire; the U-2 was pitching nose-up. He turned the autopilot off, drove the plane manually for a while, and turned the autopilot on again. Again it pitched. He considered turning back to Pakistan—in an abort situation the decision was up to the pilot—but he had already crossed 1,300 miles of Russia and the visibility ahead was excellent. He decided to continue, flying manually. Passing over an enormous oil storage area and an industrial complex, he zigged toward Sverdlovsk, the Soviet Ruhr. There, at an altitude of 65,000 feet, he made a 90-degree turn for a zag northward. He was making log entries of the altitude, time, speed, exhaust-gas temperature and engine instrument readings when he felt a dull thud. The plane bucked forward, and a blinding flash of orange light flooded the cockpit.
It was about a half-hour after midnight in the White House. In the Kremlin it was 7:30 A.M. Powers thought: “My God, I’ve had it now!”
Out of control, the machine started to go down. He reached for the destruction switches and changed his mind; he wanted to get into position to use the ejection seat first. He couldn’t quite make it. The metal canopy rail was pinning his legs. Ejecting in this position, he would lose both legs, each severed about three inches above the knee. He was down to 34,000 feet and losing altitude fast. Fleetingly he thought of the destruction switches again, but first he wanted to release his seat belt. He did, and the force of gravity pulled him halfway out of the plane. Now the oxygen hoses were holding him back. He had forgotten to unfasten them. Near panic, he kicked and squirmed away from them. He floated free and was thinking about pulling the parachute ripcord when he felt a tremendous jerk. At 15,000 feet it had opened automatically. Suddenly his plane passed him; it was intact, and hurling downward. He thought of the silver dollar. Unscrewing the loop of it, he slipped out the suicide needle and considered pricking himself. Then he dropped it into his pocket. He wanted to live.
That was on a Sunday. The following
Thursday Nikita Khrushchev addressed the Supreme Soviet for three and a half hours. His remarks on the U-2, coming at the end, set off two weeks of pandemonium.
USSR U.S. AND ALLIES
MAY 5 Khrushchev says: “I am duty bound to report to you on the aggressive acts… by the United States of America.” Announces Russian gunners have shot down a U.S. aircraft over Soviet territory but does not say where. Charges that the mission of the operation was “one of aggressive provocation aimed at wrecking the summit conference.” Is careful to exonerate Eisenhower of blame. U.S. Aeronautics and Space Administration reports that a weather observation plane is missing over Turkey after pilot reported oxygen trouble. NASA says the pilot may have strayed over the Russo-Turkish border.
MAY 6 Lincoln White, State Department spokesman: “There was absolutely no—N-O—deliberate intention to violate the Soviet air space, and there has never been.” NASA identifies the “weather” pilot as Francis G. Powers. This is what Khrushchev has been waiting for.
MAY 7 Khrushchev tells the Supreme Soviet that Powers has been captured “alive and kicking,” that a Russian rocket brought the U-2 down from an altitude of 65,000 feet, and that at that time the plane was 1,300 miles from the Soviet-Afghan border. Powers, he says, has made a complete confession. State Department admits it lied yesterday. Says these “surveillance” flights date from Soviet rejection of Ike’s “open skies” proposal at Geneva in 1955.
MAY 8 Consternation among allies over timing of flights, the fact that U.S. has been caught in lie, and the implication that the President has been unaware of something so important.
MAY 9 Khrushchev warns that Soviet rockets will attack countries that allow U.S. spy planes to use their territory. Secretary of State Herter says Ike approved the program but specific flights are not subject to presidential approval. U-2 flights will continue.
MAY 10 Soviet formally protests U-2 operation and states that Powers will be tried.
MAY 11 Speaking at a display of the U-2 wreckage, Khrushchev says, “The Russian people would say I was mad to welcome a man who sends spy planes over here.” President Eisenhower assumes personal responsibility for the U-2 flights.
MAY 12 Eisenhower tells congressmen that he still plans to fly to Moscow unless the invitation is withdrawn.
MAY 14 Hopes that the summit can be retrieved rise when Khrushchev, arriving in Paris, pledges himself to work for its success.
MAY 15 Khrushchev says he will not participate in the summit talks unless U.S. ends all U-2 flights, apologizes for past “aggressions,” and punishes those responsible for the flights. Eisenhower says the flights have been suspended and will not be resumed.
MAY 16 Khrushchev, Eisenhower, President de Gaulle, and Harold Macmillan meet in Elysée Palace in Paris for the opening session of the conference. The atmosphere is frigid.
Khrushchev takes the floor. He is curt and rude. He suggests that the summit be postponed for six months, accuses Ike of “treachery” and “bandit” acts, and cancels the invitation for the reciprocal Eisenhower visit to Russia. Ike, grim, says that the overflights are over, but that Khrushchev’s “ultimatum” is unacceptable to the U.S.
Khrushchev stalks from the palace, leaving behind the shambles of Ike’s hopes for a detente and world conciliation. Eisenhower returns to the U.S. embassy in Paris shaking with rage.
MAY 17 Khrushchev boycotts the meeting. One of his aides telephones the Elysée palace to ask whether Ike is ready to apologize for the U-2 and punish those responsible. De Gaulle and Macmillan make last-ditch efforts to save the conference. At 3 P.M. Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and Macmillan meet for the conference’s first business session.
Eisenhower: no apologies, no punishment.
5 P.M.: The summit ends.
MAY 18 In a chaotic press conference attended by 3,000 people, Khrushchev denounces the U.S. as “thief-like,” “piratical,” and “cowardly.” The Soviet Union will now solve the Berlin problem by signing a separate treaty with Communist East Germany.
MAY 25 General Thomas D. White, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, says that the U-2 gamble was needless and that had he known about it he would have recommended suspension of the overflights before the summit.
On the way home Eisenhower landed in Lisbon; he had chosen this peculiar time to honor Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal’s septuagenarian dictator. While strolling through the formal gardens of Queloz Palace he came upon an American reporter who was idly tossing French coins into a fountain. Wearily the President asked, “That how you’re keeping busy?”
“No, sir,” said the reporter. “This is just for luck.”
Turning away, Eisenhower said, “Then you’d better throw some in for all of us.”
But the President was not rid of the U-2 jinx. Japan, America’s strongest Asian ally, was to be the last destination in his odyssey of personal diplomacy. Had the summit gone well, it would have been a triumphal tour. Now it became a desperate opportunity to patch up presidential prestige. Even that was denied him. Japan was known to be the Asian base for U-2 overflights. Three of the now notorious spy planes were there, and Japanese leftists, taking their cue from Khrushchev, made them an excuse for rioting. On June 11 Jim Hagerty landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to make arrangements for the visit. Like Nixon in Caracas, he was lucky to escape with his life. For over an hour a mob of twenty thousand kept him and Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II imprisoned in their automobile. They had to be rescued by a Marine helicopter.
Eisenhower was in Manila when the Japanese cabinet, meeting in emergency session, asked him to stay away for the sake of his own safety. Humiliated, he went to Formosa instead, convoyed by six warships and 100 aircraft of the Seventh Fleet. The ships raced through the water at speeds exceeding thirty knots, not because they didn’t want to keep Chiang Kai-shek waiting but as a precaution against unfriendly submarines. On the Chinese mainland Radio Peking was denouncing the President as a “god of plague.” To give him some idea of how they felt, they battered the offshore island of Quemoy with its heaviest shelling in years. It could be heard abroad his Seventh Fleet armada. Wry correspondents said that he was the only chief of staff ever to get an eighty-thousand-gun salute.
When Eisenhower landed back in Washington on June 27, his travels were over. In eighteen months he had covered 60,000 miles in pursuit of peace, and he had come home empty-handed. Surveying the wreckage and looking for the cause, he said wanly, “After all, Communists will act like Communists.” Emmet John Hughes wrote sorrowfully:
All the gleam of political promise in his fantastic global journeys now was gone beyond recapturing. He had given unstintingly of his energy and his personality. He had been repaid in popular coin—the voices of millions yelling lusty ovations, the hands of millions waving gaudy banners. He had invested all this amassed political capital in the two great chances—one in Paris, one in Tokyo. Now it was spent—all of it.
The cold war was closing in again on all fronts. Travel to the Soviet Union became difficult. There were incidents at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. After the summit debris had been swept away, a ten-nation East-West disarmament conference, which had been going well all spring, resumed in Geneva; it, too, collapsed when Valerian A. Zorin, the chief Soviet delegate, denounced the West for ninety minutes and walked out. In July the Russians shot down an American RB-47 reconnaissance plane over international waters and vetoed a United States-sponsored U.N. resolution calling for an impartial investigation of it.
Then, in August, during the lull after the Democratic and Republican national conventions in the United States, Americans relived the mortification of the U-2 when Francis Gary Powers was convicted of espionage in Moscow. Powers had landed on a large state farm. Taking his pistol away from him, the farmers had held him at gunpoint until officers of the KGB—the Committee for State Security, the secret police—arrived to take him into custody. He told the Soviet court that he understood that the summit conference and Eisenhower’s planned visit to the USSR had been
called off because of his flight and that it had increased world tension. “I am sincerely sorry that I had anything to do with this,” he said. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.2
During his last months in office the President became reflective. Government spending by his administration made Franklin Roosevelt’s pump priming seem puny—the total cost of government, including state and local expenditures, was now 170 billion dollars, almost one-third of the Gross National Product—and he was chagrined by his party’s failure to convert young independent voters who had supported him into Republicans. “What happened,” he asked Sherman Adams when his former assistant returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a visit, “to all those fine young people who sailed balloons and rang doorbells for us in 1952?”
He had one final word for his constituents, and he gave it the following January, three days before he left the White House. During the 1950s the Pentagon, and especially the Air Force, had fostered a growing band of corporations whose leaders were retired generals and admirals. Eisenhower warned of the dangers in this. In his farewell radio and television address to the American people he observed that “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Because this need is sharp and apparent, I confess I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment.” He continued, “I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight. Happily, I can say that war has been avoided.” He spoke of the prodigious growth of companies manufacturing munitions. Then:
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 131
