Operation Overflight

by Francis Gary Powers

  Our greatest need was work. Zigurd asked the Little Major if there was anything we could do. All that was then available was a device for making fishnet-type shopping bags. Having made them previously, Zigurd showed me how. It was a complicated procedure, involving tying tight knots in cotton string, then pulling them together with a wooden shuttle. The cheap string filled the air with lint and dust. When after several days we began coughing up the lint, we started worrying about the effect on our lungs. Fortunately, by this time other work was available. The guard brought in paper, a pattern, glue, and a sharp knife, and we set to work making envelopes. Because paper was in short supply, we’d ration it, making only a certain number at a time in order to have work left for the following day. Aside from the few we used ourselves, I never learned what happened to the envelopes we made. Perhaps they helped fulfill some Five Year Plan.

  At first the guard took the knife away each night. Later, apparently more sure of us, he allowed us to keep it in the cell.

  With the envelope-making we could keep busy about an hour each morning and afternoon.

  Still, time hung heavy. Zigurd did his best to lighten it. One day, reading a copy of O. Henry’s Short Stories, one of the paperbacks I’d brought from Moscow, he came across the word “snoozer” and asked what it meant. I told him. That afternoon when I woke up from my nap there was a hand-lettered sign on my chest: “Biggest Snoozer South of the Arctic Circle.”

  I still thank God he had a sense of humor.

  During his long imprisonment Zigurd had developed good study habits. I hadn’t. Often, out of boredom, or just to escape having to memorize the Russian words, I’d look out the window. The guard didn’t seem to mind when we peeked through the crack, but if we attempted to stand on the bed and look out the top, he’d either bang on the door or come in. One afternoon while looking out I had a surprise. A group of women was escorted through the gate. For some reason I had never imagined there were female prisoners here. Wearing black shawls, dresses that reached nearly to the ground, and felt boots, they were nearly all very old. Most, Zigurd told me, had been imprisoned as “religious fanatics.” In a godless country, that category, I supposed, was a most comprehensive one. A they went through the gate, many of the women would cross themselves. I wondered if they were former nuns.

  There was no difference between days of the week, with one exception. On Sundays the work camp was closed and the prisoners didn’t march by. Yet we anticipated several other occasions far more than any holiday.

  Every five days we were allowed to change our underwear, socks, and sheets. And every ten days was shower day.

  On shower day, the usually strict security was relaxed somewhat. The bathhouse was located in the same building that housed the kitchen, on the other side of the gate, to the left as you walked toward the administration building. We were taken there at the same time as five to seven of the work-camp prisoners. There were several guards. And conversation was supposedly forbidden. But it went on anyway.

  Each man was locked in a separate shower stall. The water was scalding hot, and the guards let you soak in it almost as long as you wanted.

  There were several washbasins, and since hot water was available, which was not so with the sinks in our cellblock, the prisoners often used this opportunity to shave. Some, like Zigurd, had small pieces of mirror. One man had taken a regular double-edged razor blade and fastened it onto a stick with a bent nail. He shaved with it as deftly as if it were a straight razor.

  The only other time we were taken outside our cells, other than for walks or to go to the toilet, was when we received a package. My first from the American Embassy in Moscow arrived on the twenty-fifth of September, and from then on, with one notable exception, the package came every month.

  Escorted downstairs to the office of the building superintendent, we had to open the container in the presence of prison officials. On top were various magazines—Time, Newsweek, Life. These were placed in a stack to the side. Zahpretne. Unfavorable to the USSR. Not allowed. But, with scarcely a glance at their titles, books were allowed. As were the writing tablets, pen and pencil set, cigarettes, toothpaste, soap, deodorant, Chapstick; several items of clothing; and food.

  We could now not only vary our menu somewhat—there were six cans of meat, four cans of fish, one jar of pickles, one jar of mustard, and nine boxes of cookies—but for breakfast we could have instant coffee, complete with sugar and Pream.

  Zigurd also received one package a month, from his parents, usually containing some kind of smoked meat. The two package days became major events in our lives.

  There were other, unexpected variations in our routine, not always pleasant.

  Occasionally the lights would go off, power failures being fairly common in our part of Russia. If this happened at night it was a startling experience. We were accustomed to a light twenty-four hours a day, and it was amazing how dark the dark was. The only thing similar I had experienced was a spelunking expedition while in college, when a friend and I had become lost in a cave and turned out the flashlight—very briefly—to conserve the batteries.

  At such times the guard would go from cell to cell distributing candles. Blowing them out, I was informed, was a punishmentcell offense.

  I’d seen the outside of the punishment cells, located in the basement of the building between the administration building and the work-camp barracks, but had never seen inside one. Zigurd—whether from personal knowledge or hearsay, I never knew—said they were located half-underground, with a single window at the top for light and air. The furnishings consisted of one wooden bench. No blankets. And there were no sanitary facilities.

  Late one night, within several weeks after my arrival at Vladimir, I discovered the one thing a prisoner fears more than any other.

  Zigurd was already asleep. As usual, I was restlessly tossing and turning, when I caught the first acrid whiff.

  “Zigurd” I cried; “something’s on fire!”

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t in our cell. As the smoke smell grew stronger, we could hear running feet; that sound was soon drowned out by prisoners in other cells yelling or banging on their doors.

  I had never known pure panic before. Not even when I thought I was trapped in the falling U-2 matched what I felt then. The building was old, the floors wood, we were locked in with no way to get out.

  After a while the acrid smell diminished, and finally the cellblock became quiet again.

  The next morning, although sure he already knew the answer, Zigurd asked the guard what had happened.

  One of the prisoners had gone mad and set his mattress on fire.

  Even though I was not allowed American newspapers or news magazines, we could obtain, fairly regularly, Pravda and the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, and, occasionally, the American Worker and the British Daily Worker.

  Of the last two, I preferred the British version. Though it had just as much propaganda, it also contained straight news dispatches from Reuters.

  As for the other two papers, they played special roles in our lives.

  Although Russian cigarettes could be purchased from the commissary, and I obtained American cigarettes in my embassy package, once a week each prisoner was issued a few ounces of coarse tobacco, made from ground-up tobacco stalks, for roll-your-owns.

  There was a saying in the prison: Pravda best for cigarette paper, L’Humanité for toilet tissue.

  Communist propaganda does have its uses.

  Eleven

  On September 21 I was told I would be allowed to write four letters per month. I decided, initially, to write two to Barbara, one to my parents, then, on different months, to alternate the remaining one among my sisters.

  Unlike at Lubyanka, there was no attempt to dictate contents, nor were the letters edited, then rewritten. They were read, however, and we left the envelopes unsealed for that purpose.

  As yet I hadn’t received any mail from home. Though the move from Moscow had probably dela
yed it, it still concerned me. Zigurd suggested that in the future I do what he did. Work up an arrangement with my correspondents to number our letters. That way we could tell if any were missing.

  I tried to make my letters as cheery as possible. This took some imagination, and even then didn’t always come off. For example, in my first letter I noted, “Don’t worry about me. Where I am there is very little that can happen to me. I am safer here than in an airplane. Think of it that way.”

  I neglected to add that, given a choice, I’d pick the sky.

  Airplanes were very much on my mind, particularly after I had discovered that jets would occasionally pass overhead. Apparently we were near a letdown pattern. Several times, on our walks, I recognized MIG 17s and 15s.

  Because to me flying had always been a form of freedom, the sound and sight of those MIGs filled me with special longing.

  Although there was no evidence that our cell was bugged, we automatically presumed this to be the case, and by unspoken agreement saved certain topics of conversation for our walks. Escape was one.

  We didn’t admit it was impossible. To do so would have been to surrender one of our few hopes. But, considered realistically, we had to face the fact that our prospects were less than good.

  Sawing bars and dropping two stories to the ground was out. We couldn’t even reach the bars, without first breaking several windows.

  The guards inside the prison had no guns. But those in the towers did. No prisoner ever crossed the yard alone. Even service personnel—cooks and others—were escorted. Seeing a prisoner without escort, guards were under orders to shoot.

  I tried to remember some notable POW escapes during World War II. Most had involved digging tunnels. We weren’t near any ground. The walk area was asphalt. And we were watched every minute.

  During the war POWs were usually housed in barracks, in large groups. Thus they could plan, assign duties, establish cover, create diversions. Except for shower day, when there were guards present, we had no contact whatsoever with other prisoners. There was never a time, not even in the toilet, that we weren’t subject to surveillance.

  On October 11 received three letters, two from my parents, one from my sister Jessie. The dates—September 13, 17, 19—indicated a delay of twelve to eighteen days.

  The first letter from Barbara did not arrive until a week later. It was dated September 10, and had taken twenty-seven days.

  She had answered two of mine with one of hers. Unless some letters were missing, this was the first time she had written since the trial, and that bothered me. Her news wasn’t good. Neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev had acknowledged receiving the appeals.

  Yet just receiving mail made the day an occasion. And to top it off, that afternoon I saw my first movie.

  The theater was located in the work-camp barracks; about forty prisoners were already in the small auditorium, seated on wooden benches, when we arrived. We weren’t allowed to join them. My cellmate and I, plus a guard, shared a bench in the projection room, watching the movie through a small glass window. Here, as elsewhere, the “politicals” were strictly segregated, not only from other prisoners but also from each other. No more than one or two attended each showing.

  Between reels the lights would come on, and the work-camp inmates would turn around in their seats to stare up at us in frank curiosity. I was equally curious about them.

  We were forbidden to talk to the projectionists, who were also prisoners. However, you don’t need words to convey a feeling of mutual sympathy.

  The movie was about deep-sea diving. Zigurd translated enough for me to follow the plot. It wasn’t particularly good, but the change was most welcome.

  Sometimes, Zigurd told me, there would be a movie almost every week. At other times, months would pass before the prison received a print. Too, it was a privilege revocable at any time, on whim of the authorities. During one period the Soviets had attempted to make Vladimir a “showcase prison,” even allowing TV. That phase had quickly passed. Now it was like any other, a place apart from the main current of life; yet, not quite. There were political commissars, to make sure prisoners were indoctrinated in each change of party line. And whenever there was a food shortage in the Soviet Union, prisoners were among the first to feel it.

  On October 13 I received some good news: although I could write only four letters each month, I could receive as many as were sent me. I wrote Barbara to this effect, adding something else that had been on my mind: “This is grasping at straws, I know, but have you heard anything at all about the possibility of an exchange of prisoners? Maybe you could get the lawyers who accompanied you to Moscow to check into this and maybe accomplish something in this direction. If it isn’t pushed, it will probably be forgotten. I realize there are probably more important people they would rather exchange for; but I can hope.”

  By the lawyers, I of course meant the CIA.

  Diary, October 15: “Saw my second movie—about a quarrel on a collective farm. Not real good.”

  After that I’d rarely have to ask Zigurd to explain the plot. All too often it was the same one: boy tractor driver meets girl tractor driver; they fall in love and drive tractors together.

  Occasionally the singing was good. The acting was something else.

  The next diary entry was October 20: “First snow. Pretty cold.” With it began my first winter in Russia.

  Winter was early this year, the guard said, the earliest in seventy years, meaning it would be long and hard.

  Our radiator was the old-fashioned type. When the wind was blowing from the west, or opposite, side of the building, the cell was nice and warm. When it came from the east, however, our teeth chattered.

  When the temperature dropped below freezing, we were allowed to divide our walk time, so as to have one hour in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Even then we rarely wanted to stay out the full hour. We would walk steadily, stopping only to feed the pigeons.

  As the days grew shorter, daylight did not come until eight in the morning, and getting up at six became more difficult. I no longer looked forward to the morning trip to the bathroom. Now, with the window open, the temperature inside was the same as out. It was something to be endured.

  Winter brought some advantages. The milk didn’t spoil. And the dead-air space between the two windows became a freezer where we could store what meat Zigurd’s parents sent, permitting us to ration it out for a longer period.

  Diary, October 23, I960: “Saw a movie about a poet and artist in prerevolutionary days. Good, though I didn’t understand it enough to enjoy it thoroughly.”

  October 29: “Saw another movie about construction of a railroad bridge in Siberia. Fair.”

  The diary entries were brief, for two reasons. There was very little to write about, and it was so cold in the cell now that we had to wear gloves.

  Letter to Barbara, October 31: “Winter has definitely set in here. It has snowed almost every day since the twentieth. The temperature has been freezing or below for about three weeks now. …

  “I suppose you have read about the American tourist who was sentenced to seven years for spying and who was released when he appealed to the Presidium. I heard about it on the Moscow News and was very surprised. He was convicted under the same article as I was, but then, his case was much different from mine.

  “I am tempted to write an appeal, although I am sure it would do no good. One doesn’t know until one tries, though. Many things that have happened here have surprised me. Last May I didn’t think I would be alive in October, but here I am. I guess I should be satisfied, but I still hope for some miracle to happen.”

  It was an up-and-down cycle. There were all-right days, and bad ones.

  Diary, November 1: “Usual day of prison life. Have now been in prison for six months. I am sure I will never stay for ten years. Will do something drastic first.”

  November 4: “People from Moscow KGB visited me today.”

  The visit, which came as a
surprise, was my first real interrogation since the trial. Obviously aeronautical experts had been studying the remains of the U-2, since all questions concerned the aircraft. Handing me photographs, they would ask: Why does the drive shaft in this electrical motor turn this way instead of that? Why do the flaps move up as well as down? There was nothing in this to fall into the realm of security or to give them any sort of technical advantage, yet I had resisted their questioning for so long that it was an ingrained habit. I answered all the obvious ones, replying to the others that when a pilot flips a switch he knows only that certain things are supposed to happen; he doesn’t necessarily know the engineering sequence involved.

  Early in October, deciding to follow Zigurd’s example and keep a journal, I had ordered a bound notebook from Moscow. It finally arrived, and on November 4 I made my first entry.

  The purpose of my journal, I decided, would be to put down everything I could remember about the May 1 flight and events following. If I didn’t do this, I’d probably forget many details, and there were some in which, I was sure, the CIA would be most interested. Like the diary, however, the journal posed two problems: when I was released, I might not be allowed to take it with me: and, in the interim, my jailers might read or copy it while we were outside the cell. Therefore I would have to continue to maintain all the fictions: this had been my first overflight; I had learned I was to make it only a few hours before takeoff; and so on. When it came to touchy matters, I decided to use a memory code, words or phrases to serve as reminders of things I didn’t wish to have read. Even should they keep both the journal and the diary, the two would have served one positive function—giving me something to do. But since I did want to keep them, I took out some insurance. Here and there I’d add a phrase such as “No brainwashing here … ” or “Have never seen a prisoner mistreated …,” the kind of thing they would be anxious to have publicized. I didn’t know if it would help, but it wouldn’t hurt.