Officials had figured on getting two years out of the U-2. By 1960, they had gotten four. But the Soviets were tracking the flights on radar, as they had been almost from the beginning, and their surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were getting closer. The president often ordered the flight plans changed or the flights delayed. It drove the agency and the Skunk Works people crazy. They called Ike “Speedy Gonzales.”
The last flight, called “Grand Slam” because it would fly all the way across the Soviet Union, south to north, was approved for late April.
Weather delayed the flight. The unit shipped from Turkey to Pakistan, where the flights operated from temporary setups. The scheduled airplane, which had the best record, turned out to be due for maintenance; instead, Powers got number 360, a known “dog.” (The planes were basically built by hand and tended to have individual differences and eccentricities. Some were sturdy performers, others plagued with gremlins. Flying out of Atsugi, the Japanese U-2 base, 360 had once made an embarrassingly public crash-landing on a muddy airstrip, where armed guards chased off a crowd of camera-toting Japanese.)
The plane was constantly developing new and different technical maladies. During Powers’s flight, the autopilot quickly began to go on the blink. Tracking Powers, the Soviet military launched a salvo of SAMs. Nine miles above the earth, Powers was writing in his logbook when he saw an orange flash.
His first thought was “I’m done for.” Then the wings went and the fuselage began spinning. Powers’s legs were pinned against the panel by the force. He couldn’t eject, or his legs would be taken off above the knee. He decided to scramble out of the cockpit but found himself held in by his oxygen lines. He tried to reach the destruct button. He got within six inches of it. Then he decided he had to try to save himself. He got free of the plane. Floating beneath his parachute, he saw rolling hills, a forest, a lake, a village. In its early spring greenery, it reminded him of his native West Virginia. He remembered a map in his pocket showing alternate routes back to Pakistan and Turkey. First taking off his gloves, he pulled out the map and carefully ripped it into little pieces and scattered them. Then he thought of the coin and the poison pin inside: a silver dollar with a hidden pin laced with curare — a device for suicide.
It was the first time Powers had decided to carry the silver dollar. He did so on a whim, thinking of it vaguely as a potential weapon, not a means of self-destruction.
Then a sense of the absurdity of the device replaced his previous admiration for its cleverness. What better token of a capitalist spy pilot than a silver dollar? It was just the sort of James Bond gadget that people expected the CIA to come up with — and the agency had tried to meet their expectations. Who in 1960 used silver dollars anymore, except on ceremonial occasions?
Powers pulled the pin from the coin, hid it in a pocket of his flight suit, then dropped the silver dollar.
He saw a second parachute blossom above him, which confused him. It appeared that a Soviet pilot had had to bail out too.
On the ground, someone handed him a filter cigarette — Laika brand, named after the dog who rode into orbit on Sputnik II. It tasted like the Kents he carried in his flight suit pocket.
Twice, the pin escaped discovery in body searches. When the Soviets took his flight suit, though, he warned them about the pin. They tested it on a dog. The dog’s tongue turned blue, and it collapsed on its side. Within ninety seconds it stopped breathing; in three minutes it was dead.
He found his interrogators frequently incompetent. There was none of the torture or Korean War — style brainwashing he had worried about. There was much danger, he thought, in overestimating your enemy.
He told the Russians plainly that he had trained at the Ranch, Watertown, strip. His captors came in bearing a map and asked him to point out the Ranch, “to see if he was telling the truth.” He pointed to a spot but did not mention that it was a map of Arizona, not Nevada.
The regret in Washington was that the man they had carefully and expensively trained in Dreamland had had the temerity to survive.
Khrushchev fooled Eisenhower with incomplete statements. He hid the fact that Powers was alive until Ike came out with the cover story about a weather flight. The Russians displayed the wreckage of what they said was the U-2, but Kelly Johnson took one look at it and knew they were lying. It was another game, although he never understood why the Soviets had done it. The real wreckage was later displayed in Gorky Park.
It was a classic Cold War mind game. The United States kept insisting that Powers had had a flameout and had descended to a lower altitude to restart his engine, while Powers kept insisting he had been shot down at 68,000 feet, which he gave as the maximum ceiling for the plane. The government wanted to keep the maximum height from the Soviets; Powers wanted to signal his employers not to send over any other pilots, that the Soviets had indeed figured out how to reach the U-2’s operating altitude with SAMs. In citing 68,000 as the maximum altitude, which was not true, he was also subtly signaling that he had not told the Russians the real figure.
The Pentagon also wanted to hide the U-2’s true operating ceiling in order to preserve public trust in the strength of our nuclear deterrent. How long would it take the press to tell the public that if missiles could reach spy planes above 60,000 feet they could also reach Curtis LeMay’s bombers at their lower altitudes? It was a game something like the bomber gap game with the Russians: The president could not reveal that the U-2 had debunked the gap, for which candidate John F. Kennedy was attacking his administration, without revealing the existence of the spy plane.
Forced to chose between admitting he didn’t know what was happening in his own administration and admitting responsibility for the intrusion, Ike chose the latter, justifying the need for overflights because the Soviets had rejected his Open Skies proposal, and explicitly citing the danger of “another Pearl Harbor.”
In 1962 Powers was exchanged for Rudolph Abel, whom the CIA had described as “a master spy” but who later said he got 90 percent of his intelligence from The New York Times and Scientific American.
The exchange took place on a green bridge between Potsdam and Berlin, a scene out of a John le Carré novel. In a heavy coat and Russian-style fur hat, Powers came into view flanked by a pair of goons, then walked past the thin-faced Abel without acknowledging him.
On the plane home — one of Kelly Johnson’s Superconstellations — Powers ate a fine meal of steak and potatoes, as good as anything back at the Ranch.
He was debriefed in a safe house in the Maryland countryside. “What happened to my airplane?” Kelly Johnson asked him. He believed Powers’s story and, after the grilling at the congressional hearings, hired Powers as a test pilot flying U-2s. Apparently, Powers never knew his salary was paid by the CIA.
Powers’s book came out in 1970, for the tenth anniversary of the flight, and around the same time Lockheed let him go. He then became one of the first traffic-helicopter pilots in Los Angeles.
The great national and political coming to terms with the shootdown followed. The planned superpower summit was bust; Eisenhower left office diminished in prestige. The whole incident became surrounded by a cloud of suspicion. The mission had been delayed by the Oval Office, and when the go-ahead finally came, there were problems with the radio and the word had been transmitted by an open telephone land line — a violation of security. Then there was “the Granger,” the radar spoofer that the Skunk Works had come up with to fool Soviet radars. If the Russians knew how the Granger worked, they could have used it as a tracking device. Three Taiwanese U-2s were later knocked down over the People’s Republic in a single day in this way.