Operation Overflight

by Francis Gary Powers

  The group did not engage in sabotage. Its primary functions, apparently, were to provide intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain and to form a nucleus of partisans that could be of assistance in the event of war.

  Though in the Latvian underground for over a year and a half, he did not attempt to contact his parents. Erroneously, he had been reported killed in Germany. Not wanting to endanger them because of his activities, he had allowed them to believe that he was dead.

  In summer his group had camped in the forests. Winters were so severe, however, that they had to have shelter. The underground hid them on a farm. One night they received warning that the secret police were closing in on the transmitter. A guide arrived, to take them to safety. After walking some distance, he left them by the side of a road while he went for a transport.

  Since he had the radio strapped to his back and didn’t want it to be seen, Zigurd had left the others, retreating into the woods about one hundred feet, out of sight of the road, where he sat down on a log.

  That was the last thing he remembered. On opening his eyes, he found he was staring at the checkerboard pattern in a wooden floor. He had been nearly frozen; now he was warm. Only then did he discover that he was bound to a chair in an interrogation room.

  Though he had thought about it often, he was not sure how many hours or days had passed since his capture, nor exactly how it had occurred. He was sure he had been betrayed, however, and suspected the guide had been an informer. That he had been picked up so far back from the road, moments after arriving at the spot, indicated the secret police had been lying in wait.

  After what he described as a “farce of a trial”—he was allowed no defense, the judge simply listened to the charges, then gave him the maximum prison sentence—he had been held in solitary confinement for almost three years, while they attempted to break him and make him identify others in the underground. Failing in this, they had transferred him to Vladimir.

  When he arrived, his jailers had suggested that he write to his parents, giving them his new address. He had refused to do so. Rather than have them live under the stigma of a son in prison, he preferred that they believe him dead. But the Russians had written for him. His parents had come all the way from Latvia for a visit. And now they sent him letters and packages regularly.

  That was Zigurd’s story, as he first told it. Not until much later would I learn how much he had left out.

  He apologized for his rough English. There had been more than five years since he had had an opportunity to use it.

  We made a deal: I’d help him with his English if he would teach me Russian.

  Several times during our talk I had heard tapping from the adjoining walls. Was it a code? I whispered. He nodded. What were they saying? “They’re asking, ’Is Powers there?’”

  Zigurd hadn’t replied to the tapping. Not sure whether the cell was bugged, I didn’t question him further. I guessed that having spent three years in solitary he was not willing to risk being returned there for a minor infraction of the rules.

  Only on going to bed did he remove his beret.

  There was another difference between Lubyanka and Vladimir. Here, after ten P.M., when the lights changed and the radio went off, you weren’t allowed to remain up or to read.

  Zigurd fell asleep almost immediately. I lay awake for several hours, thinking about my new world, wondering when, or if, I would ever adjust to it.

  Insofar as first impressions went, I liked my cellmate. As he told it, his story sounded believable. But I knew I couldn’t risk trusting him. There was always the possibility he was a Soviet “plant.”

  At first everything was strange. Within a few days it became routine, then, all too soon, monotonous.

  At six A.M. the squawk box blared the musical call sign of Radio Moscow. I started to get up, but my cellmate told me to remain in bed. He had to do his exercises and needed the floor space. These completed, he swept the cell. I offered to do it; he insisted it was part of his exercises. In prison, I soon learned, work of any kind is coveted. Though it required less than two minutes, Zigurd retained the right to sweep the floor, and no matter how many times I protested, he refused to let me do it.

  Once dressed, we were escorted to the toilet, taking along the bucket, which Zigurd emptied and then rinsed with a strong disinfectant. Only two trips to the toilet were allowed each day; in the interim there was the bucket. Zigurd insisted on carrying and washing it; this too was part of his exercise, he said. On this I stood firm. We reached a compromise, he taking it one trip, I the next.

  The toilet was located at the far end of the cellblock. On opening the door, the smell was almost overpowering. The window was left open permanently in an attempt to air the room. It was not successful.

  The toilets were of the Asian, that is, bombsight, type, consisting of open holes in the floor. Learning to squat over them took some getting used to.

  There was only one washbasin, with Spartan cold water. Following my cellmate’s example, I stripped to the waist and washed myself thoroughly. After that I was wide awake.

  When we returned to our cell, I sorted out my new impressions. There was only one door to the cellblock, located midway down our row. There was also, for the whole cellblock, only one guard, who didn’t wear a gun.

  About seven o’clock he brought the chaenek, filled with hot water. We used part of it to shave. I was surprised to find Zigurd not only had a razor but also a small piece of broken mirror. With the rest of the water we made tea.

  Between seven-thirty and eight, breakfast was served. We received the same food as the other prisoners, soup or porridge, ladled out of the huge kettle. There were two kinds of soup, one smelling strongly of fish and the other made primarily from dried peas. We received whichever kind was available that day. When porridge was served, it was one of several varieties—manna (similar to Cream of Wheat), boiled oats, barley, millet, or buckwheat. I liked the manna best. I couldn’t stomach the fish soup; even when I held my nose, it smelled bad. At breakfast we were also issued our bread ration for the day: a good-sized piece of black or rye bread, about five inches long and three inches thick. Occasionally a lighter whole wheat was served instead. Delicious, fairly fresh white bread could be purchased from the commissary, as could margarine and, on rare occasion, butter. These extra items were available to anyone with money to buy them. Fortunately, before leaving Moscow, Barbara had left twenty-six hundred rubles (about $260) on deposit in my name, to cover such purchasable items, postage, and duty on packages. I was not too fond of black bread and usually gave Zigurd my ration.

  There was a labor camp connected to the prison, with about 150 prisoners. Their barracks—which also housed the cooks and other service personnel—was one of the buildings I’d passed on the way from the administration building, and from the window I could see its upper floors, as well as the tops of the buildings in the work area itself. At eight each morning I’d peek through the crack in the window to watch some sixty to eight of the prisoners as they were marched through the arched gateway, around our building, and—on the other side, out of sight—through another gate into the work camp. Most wore prison-issue clothing, gray coat and pants, but some wore combinations of prison issue and their own.

  I knew nothing about their life, and only a little about their work—apparently they worked with lumber, possibly making boxes or something similar, as I could hear a sawmill and hammering—but I envied their being outside and having something to do. I had already counted my time. It would be fifteen months before I could apply for transfer to a work camp, and even then there was no assurance the request would be granted.

  After washing our breakfast dishes with newspapers, not a very sanitary method but all we could manage, there was about an hour and a half before our walk. We usually spent the time reading. Zigurd was as happy as a child at Christmas when he saw all the American paperbacks I’d brought from Lubyanka. Otherwise, we’d study Russian. Finding it hard to concentrate, I wa
s a slow pupil, but Zigurd was patient. In a remarkably short time, just from our conversations, his English improved greatly. He had a natural flair for languages and had given up the study of French only because, having no one to practice it with, he was afraid of developing bad pronunciation habits. It wasn’t long before he had thoroughly indoctrinated me in one of his beliefs: every child in every country should be taught Esperanto. With all people able to converse in a common tongue, he was convinced that many of the world’s problems would disappear.

  About ten o’clock we were taken out for our walk. And I made some additional discoveries, negating those made earlier. Although our guard had keys to all the cells, he did not have a key to the door connecting our cellblock to the rest of the building. This had to be opened by a guard on the other side. So, even should we succeed in overpowering our guard, there still remained the problem of getting out of the cellblock.

  The green, red, and white light arrangement wasn’t used at Vladimir. But chance encounters were prevented by taking out only the occupants of a single cell at one time. According to my cellmate, this was of greater concern in our building than in others, because it housed political prisoners, that is, conspiring types. Some of the political prisoners had cellmates; many didn’t. Those who did were carefully paired in order to prevent their spending their time plotting. In the work camp, there were five to seven men in each room.

  Our cell faced east. The walk areas were on the opposite side of the building, at ground level. To reach them we were taken downstairs, then out and around the building. Set some distance away from the building, up against the wall, there were about seven of these courtyards. From his guardwalk, one man could watch them all.

  Our courtyard measured twenty by twenty-five feet. It took ten seconds to make a complete circle. To break the monotony—we had two hours—we would sit in the sun and do pushups. Feeding the pigeons we enjoyed most of all. It wasn’t long before I had several favorites and would watch for them each day.

  From our courtyard we could see the windows of some of the cells on the west side of our building. Prisoners were forbidden to stand on their beds and yell out at those in the courtyards below. Some ignored the injunction. Zigurd would translate. For the first several days the messages were all the same.

  “Is that Powers?” they would ask.

  “Yes,” Zigurd would yell back.

  “Give him our best wishes.”

  I had wondered how other prisoners would react to the presence of an American spy. They were friendly, and curious.

  They weren’t the only curious ones. Cadets studying to be prison officials would visit Vladimir for practical experience. Often we could hear them outside the cell, whole classes lining up for their turn to look through the peephole at the American.

  We could always tell when the building superintendent was making his rounds. The Little Major, as we dubbed him, was so fat that his belt buckle scraped against the door.

  There was even less privacy than at Lubyanka. However, whenever we heard a sound outside—someone yelling, or, on one occasion, a gunshot—we devised a way to look out the top of the window without being observed. One of us would stand in front of the door, the back of his head covering the peephole, while the other looked out. It had to be quick, because if the guard looked in and saw the peephole blocked, he’d immediately open the door.

  Lunch was the best meal of the day, consisting of an excellent soup and a plate of either cabbage, noodles, rice, manna, or mashed potatoes. We were also given two hundred grams, or about half a tin cup, of milk. This was a special privilege, Zigurd informed me; milk was usually reserved for convalescent patients in the hospital. Possibly it was due to the fact that I was still having some stomach trouble. On warm days the milk was usually spoiled, but by letting it stand until it turned to clabber and mixing in a little sugar, we made a passable yoghurt.

  We were accorded still another special privilege, although several days passed before we were informed of it. I would be allowed to keep my hair, and since we were in the same cell, Zigurd would be allowed to grow his again. This pleased me as much as it did him, although for quite different reasons. The hair rule appeared to be arbitrary. Of those prisoners I could see from my window, most had their hair clipped short, but a number didn’t. Among the latter, however, were apparently those shortly due for release. It was a small thing, perhaps entirely meaningless, but letting me keep my hair seemed to indicate that there might be some possibility of an early release. Of such fragmentary hopes are a prisoner’s day made.

  Actually, in retrospect, I suspect letting me keep my hair was intended less as a privilege than because it suited Soviet propaganda purposes. When, later, pictures were taken of me, which I was actually urged to send to my family, I looked healthier and far better-treated than would have been the case had I been scalped.

  Masters of propaganda, the Russians carefully considered such things.

  The afternoon passed slowly, and was spent in napping, reading, or studying. Supper, the worst meal of the day, was invariably potatoes or cabbage. After supper we took our second and last trip to the toilet. The evening was spent in much the same manner as mornings and afternoons.

  One night we decided to test how far our “privileged state” extended. Using cardboard from a package, we made a shade for the night light, to keep it from shining directly in our eyes. Our privileged state didn’t extend that far. Yelling “Nyet!” the guard rushed in and made us take it down.

  Usually I would not fall asleep until after the changing of the guard, at midnight. Often much later. This was the very worst time for me. It seemed that the moment I was ready to go to sleep my mind would be filled with thoughts I couldn’t suppress. During the day our conversation served to hold the most depressing of these in abeyance. In the still of the night they would sometimes rebound with nightmare intensity.

  Nearly all concerned Barbara. Hopes, worries, and fears, and when I’d face up to it, thoughts about her, about me, about our marriage.

  Through sheer willpower I’d nearly always succeed in suppressing such thoughts. But never for very long. I needed to trust my wife, but there was no reason to suppose that just because I was locked in a prison cell her pattern would change.

  When sleep did come, it was often troubled.

  This was my routine.

  Fortunately, for our sanity, there were variations.

  About once a week we were given a small cube of meat, usually thumbnail size. This was our sole meat ration, and we looked forward to it with a longing out of all proportion to what we actually received. We were starved for fats. There was margarine available from the prison commissary, but it didn’t satisfy the body’s craving.

  Also about once a week the doctor or nurse came around to see how we were feeling, asking if we needed pills for constipation or aspirin for headaches. Oddly enough, the nurses were known as “Sisters,” a lingering vestige of more religious days.

  Zigurd told me a story relating to these visits. A former cellmate, a young boy arrested for painting posters satirizing Soviet leaders, had developed a crush on one of the nurses. There was no indication that his feelings were reciprocated, but he talked of nothing else, counting the days, hours, minutes, until her next visit. One day, while Zigurd was napping, he tore apart his tin plate and swallowed the pieces, knowing the doctors would have to operate to remove them and that he would remain in the hospital, within sight of her, while recuperating.

  Sensing my skepticism, Zigurd assured me the story was true. When the guard took the boy out, Zigurd said he could hear the tin pieces rattling in his stomach as he walked.

  It wasn’t long before I accepted such stories as fact, the incredible all too soon becoming, if not acceptable, understandable. Many prisoners committed suicide. Others went mad. One, whether insane or merely feigning it to be transferred to a mental hospital, painted the walls of his cell with his excreta. Believing that he was faking his insanity, the prison officials l
eft him in his own filth.

  During his time at Vladimir, Zigurd had had several cellmates. Often he told me stories about them. Also, from shortly after his arrival, he had kept a journal. Sometimes he read me passages. Through him I was able to put together a comprehensive picture of prison life in Russia. And, I suspect, one much more honest than my captors wished me to have.

  About once a month all prisoners were visited by a representative of the KGB, at first a major, later a colonel, who asked us if we needed anything, had any complaints or questions. Major Yakovlov was the political commissar for Vladimir, and it was apparent from his questions that “the people in Moscow” were anxious that their well-publicized American convict have as good an impression of Russia as possible, under the circumstances.

  Why? Again it seemed to be evidence that I might be released shortly.

  We requested books. There was a prison library, but none of its volumes were in English. There were English books available from Moscow University library, and Major Yakovlov arranged for them to send some. It took about a week to ten days before the first ones arrived.