Operation Overflight

by Francis Gary Powers

  While not wishing to contradict such eminent spokesmen, I would like to respectfully submit that if these are the only lessons we’ve learned, we’re in trouble.

  On May 1, 1970, a decade will have passed since “the incident over Sverdlovsk.” Ten years. That’s a long time to avoid facing the truth. For better or worse, the decade has been one of change, sometimes peacefully effected, often otherwise. Scarcely a government in the world remains the same as in I960. During this period the national administration of the United States has changed four times, the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency an equal number. It is no longer possible to suppress the facts of the U-2 episode with the excuse that they are still classified, not when time has made it all too apparent that in this case “classified” is only a synonym for “politically embarrassing,” and even that excuse has lost validity.

  Hopefully, the passage of time has given us some perspective. Hopefully, too, we’ve matured enough in our attitudes to accept a few hard realities.

  One is that we blundered, and badly, not only during the U-2 “crisis,” but long before it became a crisis.

  We were unprepared for the possibility that a plane might go down in Russia. Yet that possibility had existed from the start of the program. A rocket wasn’t needed. A simple malfunction could have done it. That possibility should have been taken into consideration. It wasn’t.

  We used a plane of which almost every part carried some indication of national identity. We loaded it with equipment which, should even a portion be discovered, would constitute conclusive proof of espionage intent. And we placed aboard it an explosive device insufficient to the task of destroying all evidence.

  If the intention was simply to render inoperative certain parts of the equipment, fine. But in this case the agency should have kept those limitations in mind. It should also have considered the possibility that in some situations even this might not be possible. Instead, if President Eisenhower’s memoirs are correct, even the President was led to believe that “in the event of mishap the plane would virtually disintegrate.”

  A lesson learned? According to accounts of the Pueblo’s seizure, it carried “hundreds of pounds” of classified documents, with no simple means of destroying them in an emergency. In the case of the Pueblo, however, there was at least the excuse of a reason for complacency—that the ship was to remain supposedly invulnerable in international waters. With the U-2, we lacked that excuse.

  We manned the U-2 with pilots who had never been adequately briefed on what to do if captured. The word “capture” did not appear in their contracts, it did not come up in their discussions. As for me, it was mentioned only once in a briefing, and then only after I had made a number of flights over Russia and only because I had brought it up. We should have talked about it, planned for it as for any other possible eventuality. Ignoring a problem does not solve it.

  Perhaps it was felt best, psychologically, that such fears never arise. If so, apparently both the occupant of the White House and many in the upper echelons of the CIA succumbed to this psychological conditioning also, inasmuch as they were as unprepared as the pilots.

  And remained so, even while evidence accumulated that the day was rapidly approaching when we would no longer be invulnerable to missiles at our altitude.

  It is a bad intelligence practice to fail to consider all available evidence. Yet, throughout the U-2 crisis, there are indications that this is exactly what happened, not once, but again and again.

  If the pilots were under orders to kill themselves to evade capture—as so many, including even the President, apparently believed—then the pilots should have been apprised of this fact. In which case, we should have been required to carry the needle, not given a choice in the matter; and use should have been declared mandatory, not optional, the briefing officer making definite exactly what was expected of us. While I can only speak for one of the pilots, I know that had I been told this I would have been ready to obey those orders, or never taken the flight.

  As pilots, we were not only unprepared for capture, we were ill-prepared, in many ways a much worse situation. The advice “You may as well tell them everything, because they’re going to get it out of you anyway” was, under the circumstances, bad. Perhaps the agency couldn’t have foreseen this. Brainwashing, drugs, and torture having been the lot of prisoners in the past, it may have been wise to prepare us for the worst. All I know, however, is that had I followed these instructions, the damage to the United States would have been monumental.

  Even more serious, in many ways, were the misconceptions I carried with me. From the American press, from my Air Force indoctrinations, from the attitude adopted by the agency, I had been led to believe that Russian intelligence was nearly omnipotent, that the KGB had agents everywhere, that “they probably know more about you than you know about yourself.”

  These misconceptions, as it turned out, were far more dangerous than the advice I had been given. Because I believed the Russians knew a great deal more than they probably did, I may well have told them far more than was necessary. That it was a great deal less than our orders called for does not minimize its seriousness. Overrating an enemy can be as much a mistake as underrating him.

  At no point in my agency training was I instructed on how to handle myself during an interrogation. In my CIA “clearance” the agency justified this with the explanation that we were hired as pilots, not espionage agents. This was true. But it ignores the fact that, though pilots, we were potentially in as much danger of capture as any covert agent. We should have been briefed—as to what tricks to expect, as to tricks we could in turn use to avoid answering a question, as to how best to withstand hour after hour of continuous interrogation. While such briefings, I realize, wouldn’t have prepared me for all eventualities, they would have helped immensely, if only to give me a realistic idea of what was possible under the right conditions. Instead, I had to improvise. It worked out better than I expected. But it could have gone very badly.

  Much has been written about the mistakes made in pulling from the files a cover story which did not fit the facts, then maintaining it even when it was obviously discredited. In all this criticism, one very serious error has never been brought out. And that is that the pilots themselves were never informed as to what the cover story would be. I not only hadn’t been briefed, I wasn’t even sure a cover story would be issued. It may well be that no cover story would have been adequate to the situation; the one I improvised fell apart the moment my maps and rolls of film were brought in. But it would have helped to have some idea about the story being told in the world outside.

  While we overrated the Russians in many ways, we also underrated them in the one area in which they are undisputed masters: propaganda.

  In Waging Peace, President Eisenhower wrote: “Of those concerned, I was the only principal who consistently expressed a conviction that if ever one of the planes fell in Soviet territory a wave of excitement amounting almost to panic would sweep the world, inspired by the standard Soviet claim of injustice, unfairness, aggression, and ruthlessness. The others, except for my own immediate staff and Mr. Bissell, disagreed. Secretary Dulles, for instance, would say laughingly, ’If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I’m sure they will never admit it. To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for years we had been carrying on flights over their territory while they, the Soviets, had been helpless to do anything about the matter.’”

  Secretary Dulles made a bad guess. But he could have been right. The worst mistake is not that he guessed wrongly, but that we were unprepared for any other possibility. Not only that, but even after the receipt of contrary evidence, we ignored it because it did not fit our preconceptions. Instead, we engaged in wishful thinking, as if wishing would make it so.

  There were, I’m quite sure, many in Washington who hoped that the pilot was dead. That is, I realize, a strong assertion, but after ten years it seems foolish any longer to deny
the obvious. The cover story, and our whole official attitude in the week of May 1 through May 7, was predicated upon this assumption. Yet, from the beginning, the possibility that I was alive existed and was ignored.

  I was amazed to discover, on my return to the United States, that on May 5—two days before Khrushchev’s announcement of my capture—the State Department received a telegram from Ambassador Thompson in Moscow warning of a rumor that the pilot was alive and a captive of the Russians. It was an unconfirmed report, the drunken bragging of a Soviet official at a diplomatic reception. But surely someone in our intelligence apparatus should have been alerted. Instead we continued to embellish the cover story, walking blindly into Khrushchev’s trap.

  It was a decidedly one-sided chess game, Khrushchev calling the moves, the U.S. ignoring the pieces on the board.

  I now believe that the story that I had descended to a lower altitude was a controlled leak. I also believe that some person or persons within the agency, desperate to justify the decision to make the flight, helped perpetuate it. If the aircraft had descended to a lower altitude and then was shot down, it would have been bad luck, therefore, no one in the agency could be blamed.

  The tenacity with which human beings, and governments, can stick to a fixed notion, even in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary, is quite incredible. It is especially so when manifesting itself in an organization whose task includes the collection and evaluation of intelligence.

  Even after I was brought to trial there were those in the agency who continued to hope that it wasn’t Powers but someone else who had stood in that prisoner’s dock.

  Looking back, I now suspect that the decision to make me a scapegoat was due, at least in part, to someone’s pique that, by being alive, I had proven them wrong.

  There were other reasons, and although I am admittedly less than an impartial spectator, I think those reasons should be examined for whatever insight they may give into the U-2 episode.

  Though the phrase was not coined until a much later date and under a different set of circumstances, in a very real sense the “credibility gap” was born of the contradictory official statements which appeared after the downing of the U-2.

  The gap between what the government knew and what it told the American public had, of course, existed for a long time. But for the first time the American people realized they had been lied to, had been intentionally deceived by their own government. Even worse, the government had been caught in those lies, and made to seem a fool in the eyes of the world. One lingering after-effect was a distrust of government pronouncements, as evidenced by the public’s refusal to accept the Warren Commission Report, statements on the Vietnam war, the official version of the Green Berets’ case.

  The most immediate result, however, was anger; and that anger needed an outlet, someone to blame.

  Many criticized President Eisenhower for making the unprecedented admission that he had authorized espionage. Boxed into a corner by Khrushchev, given a choice between this and the admission he was not in charge of his own government, he really had little opportunity to do otherwise. Yet I personally feel it says much for the President that he chose this alternative to one of the “easy outs,” such as making Allen Dulles or “Newman” and Powers the scapegoats.

  Others found another target. Following the lead of the Russians, they made the pilot the symbol. It was far easier to fix the blame on a single individual, as did Representative Cannon when he suggested the fault might lie in “some psychological defect” in the pilot, than to accept the unpleasant fact that the blame would have to be shared by a great many people.

  The impression that I had “told everything,” the belief that I had gone against orders by refusing to kill myself, my statement during the trial that I was “sorry,” added weight to the censure.

  There were good and valid reasons why the CIA did nothing to clear up these impressions during my imprisonment.

  It was otherwise when I returned home.

  A scapegoat, by dictionary definition, is one made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place.

  The making of scapegoats is also an excuse to avoid facing the truth.

  These, to my mind, were some of the mistakes made during the U-2 incident. I state them here neither to justify my own conduct nor to engage in Monday-morning quarterbacking (it is rather late for that, thanks to the eight-year suppression of this story). Nor is it my intention to join those who would make the Central Intelligence Agency a repository of all our national ills. This simplistic attitude is only another manifestation of scapegoatism. I believe in the value of accurate, properly evaluated intelligence. Its lack, I feel strongly, is one of the greatest dangers our system of government faces in this thermonuclear age. The CIA is a major part of our intelligence apparatus. I have no desire to subvert it.

  But this does not mean I wouldn’t like to see it function better. Although these are strong criticisms, I feel they are both constructive and fair. They should come as no surprise to the CIA; they are much the same complaints I made in the debriefings upon my return, in my work with the training section. Perhaps unrealistically, I had hoped that by now some of these lessons would have been learned.

  Having stated this, I also wish to make it clear that I do not approve of everything the CIA has done. While the lack of accurate intelligence may be one of the greatest threats to our national survival, it is not the only one. Sometimes in our rush to achieve an objective we overlook our reason for pursuing it. It would be tragic if, in the process of trying to protect our government, we forgot that it was founded upon the concept of the worth of the individual.

  These are some of the negative aspects of the U-2 incident. There is, I believe, a more positive side to the whole affair.

  There are many turning points in history; the U-2 incident was one. Never again would we look at the world in quite the same way. Never again would we be quite so innocent.

  When my U-2 was shot down, a number of our most cherished illusions went crashing down with it: that the United States was too honorable to use the deplorable enemy tactics of espionage; that we were incapable of acting in our own defense, until after being attacked.

  I’m not too sure the loss was all that great.

  As a people, we Americans grew up a little in May, I960, and during the days that followed. As with any growing process, it was at times a painful experience.

  Yet I suspect that, for more than a few persons, reaction to the disclosure that we were keeping our eyes on Russia must have been similar to what I first felt in 1956 on learning of Operation Overflight; pride that the United States could conceive and carry out an intelligence operation of such boldness and importance; relief that we weren’t asleep, weren’t totally unprepared.

  I’m also inclined to agree with Philip M. Wagner, when he wrote in the June, 1962, Harper’s that President Eisenhower’s admission that the United States was engaged in espionage “had a number of wholesome effects.”

  “For one thing, it invoked a sudden respect for American intelligence work which had not been general in Europe. In invoked that same respect in Russia. It also caused abrupt revision of estimates of American military strength, and such estimates are important influences on the course of diplomacy. If we had been able to keep that secret, what other secrets were we perhaps keeping? Were we as weak as many had been saying? Possibly not. It caused other revisions of judgment. U-2 was damning commentary on the supposed invulnerability of Russian air defense.”

  Also, I’m not too sure some of those negative aspects mightn’t prove to be of positive value. It isn’t necessarily bad that we’ve become suspicious of the motives behind some of our governmental pronouncements, that we question whether certain information is being withheld from the public because of “national security” or for strictly political reasons, that our elected leaders are on occasion called upon to justify their actions to the people they represent, that we demand—though we don’t always o
btain—a greater honesty from our officials.

  The alternative is the kind of government to be found in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Communist China, and elsewhere.

  Following the U-2 incident, espionage attained an acceptance in the United States reaching the dimensions of a popular fad. Beginning with America’s discovery of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and the popularity of such TV shows as I Spy it progressed to the much more realistic novels of John LeCarré and others.

  In I960, in the earliest cover stories following the downing of the U-2, the United States denied its engagement in anything so distasteful as espionage.

  In 1968, with the capture of the Pueblo, the United States was frank from the outset in admitting that the ship’s mission was intelligence-gathering.

  In my trial in August, I960, when, acting on the advice of counsel, I stated that I was “deeply repentant and profoundly sorry,” many in the U.S. damned me for doing so.

  In December, 1968, when a representative of the United States government signed a document admitting that the Pueblo had invaded North Korean waters, at the same time stating that this was a lie, done only to effect the release of the crew, there was little criticism of his action.

  For better or worse, we’ve grown up to accept some of the realities of our times, unpleasant though they may be.

  But then, we’re not the only ones who’ve done so. In I960 the Soviet Union was still denying that it used spies. In 1962 the release of Powers and Abel was not an exchange, for Abel was not one of theirs; it was simply a gesture of Soviet humaneness, on behalf of the families of the two men (which, presumably out of modesty, they did not bother to announce in the USSR). It was therefore with more than a little amusement that I read a wire-service report in November, 1969, describing an event in East Berlin. One of that city’s streets was being renamed for Richard Sorge, the remarkable agent who stole German and Japanese secrets for the Russians. Present for the dedication ceremony, according to the account from behind the Iron Curtain, were Russia’s most famous spies, including one Rudolf Abel.