When Eisenhower finally acknowledged his direct approval of the overflights, he called the program a “distasteful but vital necessity” to prevent the next Pearl Harbor.65
Condemnation was swift. Time magazine called Washington’s handling of the affair “clumsy and inept.”66 James “Scotty” Reston, the esteemed Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, criticized the White House for “bad judgment and bad faith” in issuing “a series of misleading official statements.”67 The Toledo Blade called it “the most colossal diplomatic blunder in the nation’s history.”68
To most diplomats and journalists, it was not the least bit problematic that Washington had spied. Both sides spied, after all. But as the Times said, “In the Cold War, the guilty person is the one who gets caught.”69
The trust most Americans placed in their government in 1960 made Eisenhower’s duplicity—rooted in what biographer Stephen E. Ambrose called the president’s “fetish about keeping the U-2 a secret,”70 even from key members of Congress—difficult to shoulder, especially when the truth was delivered by the Soviets. The stature Ike enjoyed as an American hero and the personal warmth the vast majority of the country felt for him tempered the feelings of betrayal, but it was a still shock to the whole system.
The country was not quite ready for the cynical age just over the horizon, but in time, the backlash of May 1960 would look like a harbinger.
The debate raging in various quarters could be seen in an essay question placed on a final exam ending the spring term at the Citadel, the South Carolina military college. “I argued that Eisenhower should have told the truth from the beginning,” recalled graduating senior David Boyd, who was headed for a commission in the US Army. “He should have said, ‘Yes, we did it. What are you going to do about it? We spy on you and you spy on us.’ It was the not telling the truth that got him in trouble.”
Around 7 a.m. on the morning after Francis Gary Powers became world-famous, his name flashed across newspaper front pages and broadcasts on every continent, Lieutenant Michael Betterton heard a doorbell at his South Florida home. He was getting ready for work. After leaving the CIA, he had returned to regular Air Force duty, flying a KC-97 while attached to the 19th Air Refueling Squadron at Homestead Air Force Base. When he opened the door, he saw two earnest-looking young men in dark suits with skinny neckties and short haircuts. He immediately knew who they were. “They were there to remind me not to talk to anybody, not to tell anybody that I even knew who Francis Gary Powers was,” Betterton said. “Well, of course, I knew that without being told. I couldn’t even tell my wife.” It would be another four decades before he could inform her that he had once worked for the CIA.
Even as key members of the Eisenhower administration believed it was likely Powers had defected, perhaps sabotaging his own mission, the vigorous interrogations continued at Lubyanka, where, completely isolated from the outside world, he began to spiral into a fatalistic despair, especially about his wife and his parents. His mother suffered from a heart condition, and he worried about how she must be suffering with his disappearance.
“No one knows I’m here,” he told his captors. “You can just take me out and shoot me and no one will know the difference.”71
They brought in Western newspapers, including the New York Times, and started reading passages to him, to prove that the outside world knew he had been captured. He doubted them at first, especially when they refused to let him hold the papers. “You could have had those printed somewhere in Moscow, and I wouldn’t know the difference,” he said. Eventually he accepted the news, when they read statements from his parents. The wording sounded like something they would say.72
In the moment of realization, he broke down in tears, shocking his captors. “It was just such a relief to know that someone in the world knew I was alive.”73
Usually facing a five-member team, led at times by a man he later learned to be Roman Andreyevich Rudenko, onetime lead Soviet prosecutor in the Nazi war crime tribunals at Nuremberg, Powers was questioned for nineteen days straight. They discussed the U-2 and his surveillance activities in great detail. The interrogations lasted as long as eleven hours per day, pushing him to the physical and emotional brink. He longed for the opportunity to sleep, to escape the badgering, but rest in his tiny 12´×5´ cell, on an uncomfortable cot, featuring what he recalled as “two pieces of cloth with lumps placed on top of a welded iron grid,” came fitfully.74 He tossed and turned, thinking of home, worrying about his wife. He assumed it was only a matter of time before he was lined up against a wall and shot. Or perhaps worse.
“The possibility of torture stayed with me until trial,” he said. “I expected them to pull my fingernails or other terrible things. And I think it was the indefiniteness of it all that bothered me the most. Not knowing what or when. If a man knows he is going to be shot at a certain time, then it is settled…. They make you uncomfortable and you don’t know what is coming.”75
As Powers embarked on an uncertain road, fearing the worst, he had plenty of time to think about the choices he had made up to this point in his life. He had escaped the dead-end existence of the coal miners but now was learning that following one’s dream could come at a high price. Perhaps he reconsidered his decision not to become a doctor.
The pilot could not fully appreciate the impact of his capture.
Eisenhower saw the Paris summit as an opportunity to pursue long-term peace with the Soviets and perhaps achieve some very concrete steps to end the arms race.
“There is no place on this earth to which I would not travel, there is no chore I would not undertake,” he said in 1955, before deciding to seek re-election, “if I had the faintest hope that, by so doing, I would promote the general cause of world peace.”76
The U-2 program had demonstrated the fallacy of the “bomber gap” and was beginning to disprove the “missile gap,” despite the hype associated with Sputnik and its successors. The White House had been able to use the intelligence gathered by the spy plane to more wisely allocate finite tax dollars. Now, as Ike began to think about his legacy, he wanted to engage in dialogue to ratchet down the tension.
Khrushchev was driven by a different agenda. American officials believed he was less interested in peace than in finding a way to bully the three Allied powers out of Berlin. Determined to use the U-2 Incident to his advantage—with the hard-liners in his own country who bristled at some of his modernization impulses, as well as the impressionable minds of the third world—the Soviet leader traveled to Paris for the Summit Conference with Eisenhower, French president Charles de Gaulle, and British prime minister Harold Macmillan. He quickly used the opportunity of focused world attention to lambaste the United States; officially rescind the invitation he had extended to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union; and demand an apology from the president, who refused. Then he stormed out, ending any hopes of a thaw in the Cold War.
Boarding his plane to Moscow the next morning Khrushchev make sure reporters heard an exchange with Foreign Minister Gromyko, who was headed to New York to denounce the American spying before the United Nations. “When you get to the United States,” he said, “be careful of those imperialists. Be careful to cover your back, don’t expose your back to them.”77
Watching the communist leader seize the moral high ground was a painful experience for American officials.