Operation Overflight

by Francis Gary Powers

  It was my “fifty-thousand-dollar” back pay that concerned them most, however. Should I be allowed to receive it?

  “Our recommendation would be no,” Newsday editorialized. “He was hired to do a job, and he flopped at that job. He left his U-2 behind, substantially undamaged, so the Reds could copy or improve upon it. Under the circumstances, back pay would be laughable. He is lucky to be home again. Anything he can contribute about the Russians will be willingly received. But he is no hero, and he should not be regarded as one. The White House is eminently right in not bringing him in for a meeting with the President….”

  Actually, to set the record straight, the amount of my back pay was not $50,000, but approximately $52,500, or $2,500 per month for twenty-one months.

  Again unmentioned was that a total of $10,500 or five hundred dollars per month, had already been paid to Barbara while I was in prison. And that the walloping tax bite would further reduce the amount to less than half the total—or about twenty-two thousand dollars.

  In addition, because there was no provision for accumulating it in my contract, I also lost the money ordinarily paid for unused leave time. Fortunately I still had my savings, from the earlier portion of the program.

  According to newspapers, one of the major reasons for holding the board of inquiry was to determine whether I should receive my back pay. This was not true. Arrangements regarding payments had been made in my contract, and no one from the agency had indicated differently.

  The papers didn’t stop at twisting the “facts” to make their case. In more than one instance, they manufactured them.

  “The life of pilot Powers is important,” said an editorial in the Dallas Morning News, which I saw sometime later, “but so are the many lives which may have been lost as a result of his failure to follow orders.”

  As far as I knew, no deaths had resulted from the U-2 incident.

  “It has been reported,” the editorial continued, “that at least two U-2 pilots blew themselves and their planes up when they ran into trouble. These are the real U-2 heroes, and Powers should not be allowed to join them until he has given a good explanation of why he failed to do the same.”

  This too was a complete lie. A number of pilots—including close personal friends—had lost their lives in U-2 crashes. But not one had involved the destruct device, which was carried only on missions over hostile territory. To this date—and over the years I have remained in contact with several people involved with the U-2—the destruct device, for all the publicity it has received, has never been used. Not once.

  Yet surely some who read that editorial believed it, felt I was not only a traitor but also a murderer.

  After reading such nonsense, I was thankful the agency was keeping me from a face-to-face encounter with the press. It might have made headlines of a different sort.

  Not all the fictions were a result of “imaginative reporting.” Some person or persons in the government had been responsible for the dissemination of more than a few. One was the story which had bothered me so much in Russia. I now learned that the editor of an aviation journal had stated on an NBC-TV White Paper on the U-2 that he had been assured by totally reliable government sources that the U-2 had not been hit at sixty-eight-thousand feet but, suffering an engine flameout, had descended to thirty-thousand feet, at which point it was shot down. U.S. intelligence knew this, he said, because (1) I had radioed this information; and (2) the entire flight had been tracked on radar. The story was certainly a nice plug for the effectiveness of our radio and radar. The only trouble was, both claims were not only not true, they were also not possible.

  My early suspicions were not certainties. There were some people in the government absolutely refusing to accept the fact that Russia had surface-to-air missiles capable of hitting high-flying aircraft.

  It wasn’t until much later, in 1965, with the publication of President Eisenhower’s memoirs, that I was to learn how far up the chain of command this misapprehension apparently extended.

  “HERO OR BUM?” asked one newspaper. “Many questions need answering, not the least of which involve Powers’ own conduct,” noted another. “Should he, like Nathan Hale, have died for his country?” queried Newsweek.

  I stopped reading the newspapers and news magazines. Yet it wasn’t that easy. For by this time I had heard, from several people in the agency something even more disturbing. Negotiations for the Abel-Powers trade had begun under William P. Rogers, Eisenhower’s attorney general. The current attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, had opposed the trade. Moreover, he had said that upon my return to the United States he personally intended to try me for treason.

  For God’s sake, why? I asked the people from the agency. As the President’s brother, he was certainly aware of the true facts of the case, including the importance of the information withheld.

  There was no clear-cut answer, only conjecture. Rumor had it that, reacting to criticism of his appointment as attorney general when he had never actually practiced law, Robert Kennedy had wanted to “prove himself” with a spectacular trial.

  I felt there must be more to it than that.

  They were the experts. They knew what was important and what wasn’t. Yet as the debriefings continued—we had by this time moved to a third “safe” house, near McLean, Virginia, not far from Hickory Hill, the Kennedy estate—I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by their lack of thoroughness, the questioning being neither so intensive nor the queries so probing as I had anticipated.

  It seemed to me that some of the information I possessed— concerning what I had observed on the May 1 flight and subsequently during my interrogations, trial, and imprisonment—was of intelligence value. For example, that the KGB had asked me some questions and not others seemed significant, as did whether the question was general or specific, was in the nature of a “fishing expedition” or indicated prior detailed knowledge. Such things, I felt, were important clues as to how good their intelligence was, and, though only bits and pieces, might be helpful in constructing a composite picture of the extent of their knowledge.

  But the agency apparently felt otherwise. In this, as with other areas I thought important, they showed little interest.

  They were far more concerned about what I had told the Russians regarding some of their other clandestine operations, and greatly surprised to discover that quite often I knew little or nothing about them.

  There were many questions I felt should have been asked—but weren’t. Yet when I attempted to volunteer information, often as not it wasn’t appreciated. For example, while being questioned about the KGB officials with whom I had come into contact, I was shown a photograph of Shelepin, head of the KGB, and asked if I could identify him. But when I volunteered that it was Rudenko, not Shelepin, who appeared to be the “big wheel” in the interrogations, the man to whom the others deferred, they quickly passed on to something else. Maybe this wasn’t important. Yet, for a comparable example, if in the interrogations of a Soviet spy FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover played a superior role to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, I suspect the KGB would have been greatly interested in that fact.

  One of the reasons I had kept the journal was to record things I felt might later be of use to the agency. When I told them about the journal, however, they expressed no desire to see it. I had assumed they would be interested in the fate of their former agent Evgeni Brick. From their reactions I got the distinct impression that they couldn’t have cared less. I had presumed they would communicate my information regarding Zigurd Kruminsh to the British, since he had been a British agent. If they did, there was no follow-up.

  From the start, it was obvious they believed my story. The “Collins” message had gotten through. As had the repeated references to my altitude. And, from the simple fact that certain things hadn’t happened which would have happened had I told the Russians about the “special” missions, they realized I hadn’t told everything. I was pleased that they believed me. Yet I remained d
isappointed in the debriefings. It may be that the information I possessed was worthless. The only way to determine that, however, was to find out what I did know, then evaluate its importance or lack of it. Instead they seemed to have decided in advance what they were interested in, which—to me, at least—seemed a rather faulty intelligence practice. And considering the questions, I couldn’t help discerning an obvious pattern behind them: that the agency was not really interested in what I had to tell them; their primary concern was to get the CIA off the hook.

  Two

  If true, this was not the first attempt to pass the buck, to pin the blame elsewhere. Shortly after my return, on coming into contact with several former participants in Operation Overflight, I heard a most disturbing story.

  When I had failed to appear at Bodö, Norway, the ramifications had hit Washington like a burst of flack. I had gone down somewhere in Russia: there could be no other explanation. Yet, because number 360 had a fuel-tank problem, this didn’t necessarily mean I had been shot down, and, since Russia was a very large country, it could be that the plane wouldn’t be found. In any event, it was unlikely the pilot was still alive.

  A contingency plan was hastily drawn up, for use in the event the Russians should have the wreckage of the plane and decide to make an issue of it.

  The plan was quite simple. One of the higher-ranking agency representatives at Adana, a man whom we’ll call Rick Newman, would confess to overzealously taking it upon himself to order me to make the flight, with no authorization whatsoever. Thus, by blaming a “gung-ho” underling, the President and the CIA could evade admission of responsibility.

  The reason for their settling on Newman and not Colonel Shelton was obvious: they needed a civilian, so the Russians couldn’t term it a military operation.

  As preparation for putting the plan into effect, Newman was secretly flown from Turkey to Germany and hidden in the basement of the house of our agency liaison there, to make sure he couldn’t be reached by reporters.

  The plan, however, had one basic flaw: it presumed that I was dead. Alive, with no prior knowledge of the cover story, anything I said would in all likelihood contradict their version.

  With Khrushchev’s announcement on May 7 that the pilot was “alive and kicking,” it should have been obvious the plan would have to be scrapped. Yet at six P.M. on the seventh, some dozen hours afterword reached the United States of Khrushchev’s speech, the State Department released the cover story, approved by the President, that although a U-2 had probably made an intelligencegathering flight over the Soviet Union, no authorization for such a flight had been given by authorities in Washington.

  The first three paragraphs of James Reston’s lead story on the front page of The New York Times, May 8, I960, give the details:

  WASHINGTON, May 7—The United States admitted tonight that one of the country’s planes equipped for intelligence purposes had “probably” flown over Soviet territory.

  An official statement stressed, however, that “there was no authorization for any such flight” from authorities in Washington.

  As to who might have authorized the flight, officials refused to comment. If this particular flight of the U-2 was not authorized here, it could only be assumed that someone in the chain of command in the Middle East or Europe had given the order.

  Eventually, of course, the plan was abandoned, with President Eisenhower’s unprecedented admission that he had personally authorized the overflights, but not before several alternate plans had been considered, including Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles’ offer to resign and assume the blame.

  I heard the story from several people in the agency. One was Newman himself, who laughed as he recounted how he had hidden in that basement for several days.

  Newman had a wife and three children. Although presumably there would have been some financial compensation—perhaps his retirement with a better pension than otherwise—they would have had to live the rest of their lives under the stigma that he had recklessly precipitated an action which wrecked the Summit Conference and conceivably could have launched a nuclear war.

  It was not an easy laugh.

  Nor did I laugh in return. For, in a sense, the plan called for two scapegoats, as the flight could not have taken place without my concurrence.

  On hearing the story, I was glad, for the sake of everyone concerned, that the plan had been abandoned.

  What I didn’t realize, until much later, was that this was only half-true.

  According to the newspapers, retired Federal Appeals Court Judge E. Barrett Prettyman had been chosen to conduct the board of inquiry. The hearing would be held “in-house,” closed to the press and public, in CIA headquarters in Washington.

  A few days earlier, I was taken to 2430 E Street to meet Allen Dulles. By this time Dulles had been replaced as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) by Kennedy appointee John A. McCone. He was still in the process of moving out of his office, however.

  It was an odd meeting. Dulles greeted me with a bemused look. We shook hands. He commented wryly that he had heard quite a bit about me. I told him how pleased I was to be back in the United States. He replied that he had read the debriefing reports: “We are proud of what you have done.”

  Later, wondering why the meeting had taken place, I guessed it was simply because Dulles wanted to meet the spy who had given him so many headaches.

  I had a problem, which became clearly obvious just as I was to appear before the board of inquiry. With few exceptions, most agency personnel I had come into contact with since my return home were people I had never met previously. Most of them—such as the security men who kept me in “protective custody” at the “safe” houses—had no connection with the U-2 program. This meant that they were not cleared for such information, and I couldn’t discuss the more sensitive aspects of the operation with them.

  I knew nothing about Prettyman himself. It had been reiterated, a number of times, that the hearing was merely a formality, in order to give something to the press, that, insofar as the agency itself was concerned, I had already been completely “cleared.” Obviously it would help my case, put me in a far more favorable light, if I could reveal exactly what I had withheld from the Russians. Yet some of it, such as that portion pertaining to the “special” missions, no hint of which had ever appeared publicly, was still political dynamite. Any leak, even at this late date, could have tremendous international repercussions.

  “How much should I tell Prettyman?” I asked one of the agency representatives. His suggestion: “Use your own discretion.” It was not exactly a carte-blanche reply.

  Obviously the “special” missions were not to be mentioned: those missions that began on September 27, 1956, in Turkey, when Colonel Perry instructed me to fly over the Mediterranean, watch for and photograph any concentration of two or more ships.

  The assignment, the first of many such “special” missions, gave me an increased respect for the effectiveness of American intelligence. In July, 1956, Egypt had seized the Suez Canal. In late September, a full month before the first shot was fired in the Sinai, the United States was aware not only that Israel intended to invade Egypt but also that preparations were being made for France and Great Britain to come to her aid.

  The ships U.S. intelligence was looking for were British, French, and Israeli.

  I flew the mission, going as far as the island of Malta, and returning, caught sight of several ships and photographed them. From the air I could not identify the registry; however, later, when the photographs had been developed and studied, I was told the mission had been successful. Although I was in a very real sense spying on the vessels of three friendly nations, I felt no compunctions about my action. In our atomic age, any war, no matter how isolated, how small, how seemingly insignificant, could blossom into a nuclear holocaust. It seemed to me then—and still does—far more important that we know exactly what was going on and do nothing about it, as in this case, than plunge in
and try to do something, with no real idea of what was happening, as had been the case on more than a few other occasions.

  After that the “special” missions became frequent occurrences. Because I had done so well in navigation during my training at Watertown, Colonel Perry assigned me many of these flights. A great number of them during this period were over Israel and Egypt. On such missions I would usually first overfly Cyprus, at that time still under British rule, with cameras on, primarily to see if a fleet was being assembled there, then on to Egypt and Israel. One does not realize, until seeing it from the air, just how small Israel is. A few passes, a few miles apart, and it could be photographed in its entirety. By comparison, Egypt is a mammoth presence.

  On these missions several places merited special attention. The Suez Canal, of course, was one. Another was the Gulf of ’Aqaba, then as now a source of contention. Here, in close proximity, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt all had ports, Israel’s port being its only link with the Red Sea. Another was the Sinai Peninsula. There are few more desolate places than the Sinai. Against it, the deserts of the American Southwest look like oases. For miles and miles there is absolutely nothing but bleakness.

  Yet, on a flight on October 30, 1956,1 looked down and spotted something. Black puffs of smoke—what must have been the first shots fired in the first daytime battle of the Sinai campaign.