Around this time, twenty-year-old pilot Michael Betterton found himself volunteered into a classified assignment. Young, unattached, and eager to chase some adventure, he didn’t ask many questions. When he reported to Wiesbaden, the colonel in charge said, “Nice to meet you, lieutenant. Welcome to the CIA!”
Betterton flashed a puzzled look. “What’s the CIA?”
Growing up in the agricultural community of Visalia, in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Betterton had never heard of America’s spy agency. Over the next seventeen months, as a support pilot mostly flying the U-2 pilots and agency leaders around the continent in a C-54, he became deeply involved in his country’s biggest secret.
“It was unbelievable to me that I was being swept up in this life,” Betterton said. “Of course, I couldn’t tell my family or friends.”
On June 20, 1956, Carl Overstreet, a Virginia native who had been stationed at Turner, took off from Wiesbaden and headed east. Within minutes he was flying a surveillance mission through East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, testing the new camera and electronic intelligence systems. Twelve days later, Jake Kratt and Glen Dunaway flew similar missions through Iron Curtain countries. All returned safely without incident.
Overflying the Soviet Union would require presidential approval, and as the Company men waited for the “go” signal, the delay was colored in irony.
In the wake of the Open Skies rebuff, General Nathan Twining, the US Air Force chief of staff, who would later be appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, happened to be in Moscow as a guest of the Soviet military. During an air show, he was allowed to witness a formation of M-4 bombers, whose existence had launched the chain reaction leading to the U-2 overflights.
On July 4, when Hervey Stockman soared toward the stratosphere and headed into the rising sun, eventually crossing the border into the USSR, the Cold War veered off in a dangerous new direction. No one could predict the end game with any certainty.
This was somehow a step beyond covert agents utilizing phony documents, tiny cameras, bugging devices, blackmail, and propaganda in the perpetual search for secrets and leverage.
One operative could easily be disavowed, but if anything should go wrong, it would be difficult for Washington to explain an aircraft so clearly designed for high-altitude reconnaissance, especially in the event that the plane and its high-tech spy pilot, wielding a camera like a bayonet, were ever blasted out of the sky. Often displaying ambivalence about the program, which on one level violated his beliefs about the way civilized nations should act toward one another during peacetime, Eisenhower once conceded, “Nothing would make me ask Congress to declare war more quickly than a violation of our airspace by Soviet aircraft.”35
Stockman, a native of New Jersey who had flown P-51 Mustangs in World War II, penetrated deep into Soviet territory on his first flight. The resulting photographic intelligence, which began to lay a foundation for a deeper understanding of Soviet capabilities, was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by Eisenhower and Dulles. Stockman landed safely. But one thing did not go according to plan, and Johnson was not happy.
“Well, boys,” he told senior members of his Skunk Works team. “Ike got his first picture postcard…. But goddamn it, we were spotted about as soon as we took off….”36
Contrary to CIA assurances, the U-2 was not invisible to Soviet radar at 70,000 feet. From the earliest flights, the Soviets carefully tracked the incursions. Sometimes MiGs were dispatched. “You could see the contrails beneath,” Kratt recalled. “But we felt reasonably safe, because we didn’t think they could reach us.” The latest model, the MiG-19, could climb no higher than about 55,000 feet, well below the U-2’s maximum ceiling.
Enraged, Khrushchev launched a protest with the American government, but he was powerless to prevent such violations of his territory. He said nothing publicly.
In August, before shipping out for his overseas deployment as part of the Detachment B, or Detachment 10-10, to the Incirlik Air Force Base in Adana, Turkey, Powers made a trip to see the family in Pound. Following orders, he said he would be conducting weather experiments, which his sister Jan thought odd. “Why do you have to go all the way over there to study the weather?” she asked, teasing him. “We have weather here.”
Beyond the thrill of handling such an innovative aircraft and flying off to the edge of the sky, Powers was driven by the desire to do something patriotic for his country. Profoundly marked by the experience of living through World War II, he understood how fragile freedom could be. It had always bugged him that he had not made it to combat in Korea. Now he saw the struggle with the Soviets in the starkest terms and felt fortunate to be a part of an effort considered so vital to the nation’s security.
Sometimes he flashed back to those early meetings with William Collins and how his life pivoted toward another reality.
“All my life I’ve wanted to do something like this,” he had told the agency man.37
All his life he would live with the consequences.
While stationed in Turkey, Powers and the other pilots in the “weather detachment” lived in small trailers on a corner of the base, far from the regular US Air Force flight line. Some enterprising aviators attached lean-tos, which they called camel bars. Security was tight. They often wandered into town and rubbed elbows with the local Turks, sometimes venturing off into the countryside and on toward the pristine Mediterranean beaches on motorcycles. They hunted ducks, snorkeled, drank beer. “Frank was a real outgoing guy… happy-go-lucky when he wasn’t flying,” recalled camera technician John Birdseye, who sometimes bowled with Powers and his wife at a primitive bowling alley in a modified Quonset hut. “Like all those pilots, [when it was time for a flight] he was a businessman with a mission.”
In the fall of 1956, Detachment A was reassigned to Giebelstadt Air Force Base in Bavaria. Unlike bustling Wiesbaden, the tiny base at Giebelstadt, which had housed one of the few squadrons of ME 262 jets at the end of World War II, was isolated and easy to camouflage. It became a perfect hiding place for the U-2.
At the start of Powers’s overseas assignment, Barbara moved in with her mother in Georgia, following through on their original plan, so they could save money for a house. But she became restless and eventually moved to Europe to be closer to him, in violation of CIA wishes, apparently living for a time in Paris. Michael Betterton liked Frank and could see his wife exerting influence that undermined him with his superiors. “[Powers] spent a lot of time with us because he would come up for a while and then go on to see her,” Betterton said. “I know [the agency security people] were not happy about [her presence in Europe] and talked to him about it.” Barbara eventually moved to Athens, landing an office job at an Air Force base, which allowed Frank to visit frequently.
With Soviet agents prowling around looking for details on the program, Barbara’s personal weakness represented a glaring vulnerability.
“Barbara was a security risk,” said Joe Murphy, who worked as a security specialist for the CIA, and had known Frank since the early days at the Ranch. “The fear was that she would lose control of herself out in public… draw attention to herself… blow the whole operation.”
During a trip back to the United States with her husband, when they visited Pound, Barbara got drunk and starting spouting off about her frustration at not being able to live with her husband. “They don’t want me telling what I know,” she said, which sounded like a threat to members of the family, who didn’t know what they didn’t know.