Concerned about what the Soviet agents might do if he left them alone long enough to alert agency security, Betterton, who was unarmed, decided the best course of action was to annoy them. So he kept talking. Finally, after about ten minutes, they gave up and drove away.
Not long after, the security chief thanked him for his actions and chided him for taking such a foolish chance with two men who might have killed him. The CIA was starting to make arrangements to shut down its operation at Giebelstadt and transfer most of the pilots to Incirlik. (Some eventually wound up with the new Detachment C in Atsugi, Japan.) The risk of KGB surveillance in West Germany was now too great. The disbandment of Detachment A would make it much more difficult for the Company to reach the interior of the Soviet Union, which significantly increased the risks associated with the overflights.
Jake Kratt wound up in Incirlik, where he lived two trailers down from Powers. “That’s when I first met Frank,” said Kratt, who never became a close friend but remembered him as a “a good pilot… [who was] like the rest of us, focused on doing his job.”
In 1958, at the end of his first eighteen-month deployment, Powers signed a new contract with the CIA and obtained permission to move his wife to Turkey. They decided to give it another try.
As the space race emerged as yet another proxy for the Cold War, the leaders of the superpowers were at least starting to communicate. During a visit to a model American home exhibit in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon, while lingering in the kitchen, engaged in an impromptu televised debate with Premier Khrushchev about the relative merits of capitalism and communism. The two politicians were equally forceful but pleasant.
Not once did Khrushchev talk about “burying” the West, avoiding the violent verb that had caused a walkout of US-allied ambassadors in 1956. (The leader was talking about industrial progress, not military action, but the distinction was largely lost in translation.) Around this time, during an address to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev angered hard-liners in his own country by denouncing some of Stalin’s more brutal tactics, which he characterized as a “deviation” from Marxism-Leninism. But 1956 was also the year of the Hungarian Revolution. When an uprising ignited by student protesters threatened the communist government in Budapest, Soviet tanks rolled in and crushed the revolt, demonstrating Moscow’s determination to maintain its iron grip on the Eastern bloc.
Two months after the so-called Kitchen Debate, in September 1959, the Soviet leader visited the United States. He was alternately charming (while riding on a train; chatting with supermarket shoppers; visiting factory workers; schmoozing with Hollywood stars, including Frank Sinatra; full of smiles and back-slapping) and confrontational (when he felt he had been insulted by an anti-communist civic leader at a banquet in Los Angeles).
“Our rockets are on the assembly lines already!” he thundered from the dais, as the room of dignitaries turned deadly quiet. “Our rockets are on the launching pads! It is a question of war or peace.”43
He was not smiling.
When security concerns caused him to be turned away at Disneyland, he started cracking jokes but was clearly enraged at the thought that he could be locked out of the home of Mickey Mouse.
The first state visit to the United States by a Soviet leader helped set the stage for a planned summit meeting in Paris in May 1960. Khrushchev also invited Eisenhower to Moscow later in his final full year in the White House. Hopes for achieving a new era of harmony were tempered, however, by a brewing crisis in Berlin.
Increasingly concerned about the Soviets’ progress in developing and deploying their ICBMs, which had escaped the view of the U-2s, several key advisors, including Dulles and Bissell, encouraged Eisenhower to approve additional overflights in the winter and spring of 1960. As usual, he was conflicted. By this point, the U-2 had secured a treasure trove of intelligence, making Washington incredibly knowledgeable about Soviet capabilities. Why push their luck? The CIA and Kelly Johnson were already at work on a new spy plane, a strange-looking bird offering the promise of much-faster speeds and higher altitude, along with a vastly reduced radar cross-section. The age of the spy satellite was also dawning, offering reconnaissance photographs from the edge of space. Perhaps they should wait until these next-generation vehicles became operational.
With Paris looming, and with many experts believing it was only a matter of time before Soviet fighters and surface-to-air missiles achieved the range to shoot a U-2 out of the sky, Eisenhower worried about the potential impact of a lost aircraft “when we were engaged in apparently sincere deliberations.”44 What if the Soviets got lucky, he wondered, and made him look duplicitous?
Khrushchev’s recent silence concerning the incursions may have contributed to a false state of security, but as Dulles later said, “Since he had been unable to do anything about the U-2, he did not wish to advertise the fact of his impotence to his own people.”45
Ultimately, Eisenhower, believing the need to gather the intelligence and gain leverage for the summit trumped the potential risks, approved additional overflights to work the missile problem. After a successful mission on April 9, which the Soviets tracked and tried to shoot down, and with the Paris summit scheduled to commence on May 16, the president ordered a final deadline: One last flight, but under no circumstances was an incursion to take place after May 1.
When the agency determined the objectives and decided to conduct the flight out of the Incirlik-based detachment, Frank Powers was selected to fly the mission and began making preparations.
Because he would be flying deeper than ever into denied air space—totaling about nine hours—Washington had arranged to launch the mission out of a base in Peshawar, Pakistan, roughly 2,000 miles closer to the Soviet border.
While packing for the trip during the last week of April, Frank struggled to put Barbara out of his mind. Living in the same trailer had not affected her drinking. Several days earlier, while partying with some of the other pilots and wives, she had stumbled on the dance floor and broken her leg, necessitating a cast. It was just the latest indication that his wife suffered from a serious problem, which he did not know how to handle. He tried to put it out of his mind. He would deal with her when he got back.
After he arrived in Pakistan, the flight was scrubbed twice—once because of intense cloud cover over the target zones, which would have rendered the U-2 camera useless—leaving him to kill time in the hangar reading and playing poker with members of the large support crew that had traveled from Incirlik. It concerned him to learn that his usual plane was being temporarily grounded because of routine maintenance issues. This caused him to use an aircraft with a history of mechanical problems, one of which had previously necessitated an emergency landing in Japan.
With the deadline looming, “everybody was eager to get in the air, including Frank,” said Jake Kratt, one of the backup pilots on hand in case Powers became ill.
On the night before the flight, Frank slept fitfully on a hangar cot. Not long after his 2 a.m. wake-up call on May 1, he started discussing the weather and his variety of landing options with his commanding officer, Air Force Colonel William M. Shelton, who surprised him with a question. “Do you want the silver dollar?”46
Since the early days of the program, U-2 pilots had been given the option to carry along a specially designed poison pin hidden inside a silver dollar. Once dislodged from the coin, the pin could be used to prick the skin, causing death by asphyxiation. Like many of his contemporaries, Powers routinely declined to carry the suicide device. This time, however, facing the longest flight so far over the Soviet Union, Frank made a snap decision and slipped the dollar into the pocket of his outer flight suit.