Quickly thinking through his options, as the plane descended below 35,000 feet, Frank jettisoned the canopy, which flew off toward the heavens, and decided to climb out of the cockpit. When he released his seat belt, the resulting force threw him out.
But this solution created another problem: Because he was still tethered to his oxygen supply, and because the g-forces were so severe, he could no longer reach the self-destruct buttons. Even as his faceplate frosted over in the extreme cold, he fumbled in the dark on a bright sunny day, extending his fingers as far as they would go. No luck. Now he had no way to destroy the plane, to keep it from falling into enemy hands.
Somehow he broke free from the oxygen hose and eventually felt a jerk, which yanked him forward. His parachute opened automatically at 15,000 feet and he descended slowly toward the countryside, near a small village.
“I was immediately struck by the silence,” he later recalled. “Everything was cold, quiet, serene…. There was no sensation of falling. It was as if I were hanging in the sky.”28
Aware that he could breathe without his oxygen tank, he pulled off his faceplate and continued his descent.
On his way down, he took off his gloves, reached into his pocket, pulled out the map that showed alternate routes back to Pakistan, and ripped it into tiny pieces, which he tossed to the winds. He didn’t want such incriminating evidence to fall into the hands of the Soviets.29
Then he reached for the silver dollar containing the poison pin. It was a regular-looking straight pin with grooves, which had been dipped in poison, certain to cause almost instantaneous death by asphyxiation. The device was covered by a sheath.
For a moment, he considered whether he should use it. One prick and he would be gone. “A minute or so later… a horrible minute,” he once surmised.30 Washington could disavow him, although the wreckage of the plane would be difficult to explain.
With his life never more completely in his own hands, caught in a moment that would define him for the ages in many eyes, perhaps his mind brushed upon a twenty-year-old memory, when Oliver told him: “If you kill yourself, you kill a man…. A man who dies in sin, he can’t be saved.”31
Instead of using the device, he quickly dislodged it from the coin and the sheath, threw the dollar into the winds, and slipped the poison pin carefully into his pocket.
Looking down, he saw a landscape reminiscent of his native Virginia, including a lake and a forest. He tried to aim for the trees. Perhaps he could slip in unnoticed and plot his escape. But the wind shifted, and he landed in a plowed field on a collective farm instead, barely missing a power line and falling hard near a man on a tractor and another man working with his hands.
The two men ran up to assist him, one collapsing the chute, the other helping the stranger who fell from the sky to his feet.
His clothing contained no markings, so they assumed he was a Soviet pilot.
A car he had seen while floating to the ground pulled up nearby, and two men stepped out. One man was a chauffeur. They helped him take off his helmet and harness.
The locals could see he was dazed, especially as a crowd of children and adults from the nearby village surrounded him, peppering him with questions in Russian, questions he could not understand.
One man held up two fingers, pointed to him and then pointed to the distant sky, where a single red-and-white parachute could be seen drifting gently toward an eventual landing. He was puzzled by the chute but knew it was not connected to his plane. He shook his head.
By this time, he could tell the people surrounding him were starting to grow suspicious, particularly when one of the men looked down and saw the pistol strapped to the outside of his suit.
The man grabbed the weapon, and the pilot made no attempt to stop him. He knew his silence was merely delaying the inevitable.
“Escape would have been hopeless,” he recalled, since he was in the middle of the vast USSR, “a long way from the border.”32
After the Russians loaded his parachute and seat pack into the trunk of the small car, Powers was ushered into the front seat, between the driver and the man with the gun. He didn’t need to speak the language to know where they were headed.
After all those hours in the air, Frank enjoyed the cigarette they offered. He felt thirsty, using sign language to let them know he wanted something to drink, and the man behind the wheel pulled up to a house. One of the other men—one of the three or four piled into the back seat—ran inside and quickly returned with a glass of water. The pilot guzzled the water but was still thirsty. He head throbbed—as it often did after being exposed to the pure-oxygen environment for such a long period—and he could feel his heart racing as the car resumed its journey down the bumpy, muddy road.33
At one point, the man with his gun began to examine it closely: running his fingers down the barrel, over the prominent letters carved into the metal. He then ran a single finger over the dusty dashboard and spelled out the same letters: U S A.34
By the time Powers dropped out of the sky, Moscow was alive with communist pride. As the annual May Day parade of military hardware moved through Red Square, Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., the American ambassador, focused his eyes on Premier Khrushchev. As usual, Khrushchev was surrounded by key Communist Party and military leaders outside Lenin’s and Stalin’s Mausoleum as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians lined the streets, celebrating their most sacred holiday. The military men were all attired in their dress uniforms, with chests full ribbons, so when one Air Force man, wearing only a regular service jacket, moved through the back of the reviewing stand and approached Khrushchev, Thompson instinctively realized something important was being relayed to the Soviet leader. Only later would he put two and two together.35
Leaning in close so he could be heard above the noise of the crowd, Marshall Sergei Biryuzov, the commander of Soviet antiaircraft defenses, whispered in Khrushchev’s ear: The U-2 pilot has been shot down and taken prisoner.36
Reveling in what he would later recall as an “excellent surprise,” Khrushchev congratulated Biryuzov, shaking his hand enthusiastically.37
While Khrushchev watched the parade move into its second hour and began plotting his next move, the vise tightened on the American pilot.
At the first stop, in a village with paved streets several miles from the state-owned farm, he was taken into a civic building and searched by a policeman. He was asked to undress. They confiscated some items, including his pressure suit, pack of Kent cigarettes, and lighter. A female doctor examined him, treating some scratches on his leg. She gave him two aspirin tablets.
When Powers was allowed to slip his flight suit back on, he casually patted his pocket. It was still there.
Someone tried to communicate with him in German, but he did not speak German, which was just as well. He still hadn’t figured out what he should say.
The CIA failed its pilots by not preparing them to be captured. When he landed on Soviet soil, Powers did not know how Washington planned to respond to his capture or what it would say about his mission. If he had been aware of the planned cover story, at least he could have given voice to the same narrative. Nor had he received any instruction about how he was to act during interrogation.
“I was completely unprepared,” he recalled.38
Attuned to the details of his environment but unable to understand what was being said by the crowd around him, he noticed a steady stream of men walking through the door, presenting identification cards. Some carried artifacts from his downed plane, including a spool of 72-millimeter film.