Khrushchev “used the U-2 as a good excuse for torpedoing both the trip and the conference,” Dulles said many years later.78
In this Francis Gary Powers emerged as a Cold War pawn.
The KGB interrogators played many different cards to try to pump him for information and break him down, including guilt. Around the time he learned he would be tried for espionage, his captors asked him how it felt to be the cause of scuttling the summit, escalating tensions between the two superpowers.
Up to this point, he had not considered a linkage between his flight and the summit. At least for the moment, the Soviets succeeded in making him feel some level of remorse.
“They told me I had wrecked the summit conference,” he said years later.79 “They put the whole burden on me. It made me feel terrible.”
Around nine o’clock on the evening of May 9, a telephone rang at 1650 Pine Valley Road, a spacious, modern-style three-bedroom house on the outskirts of Milledgeville, Georgia.
“Is this Dr. Baugh?”
“It is.”
The man on the other end of the line seemed nervous. He requested that James Baugh make a house call to 1626 Marion Street.80
Like most small-town doctors of the day, Baugh, known to his friends as Jimmy, was accustomed to phone calls at all hours of the day and night. The beloved general practitioner routinely interrupted family meals and favorite television programs to head out the front door with his bag. “House calls were part of a doctor’s life; Jimmy was very committed to his patients,” recalled his wife, Betty George, known around town as BeeGee.
The man was vague about the patient’s symptoms, but Baugh dutifully walked out to his car and drove to the address. Two men met him at the curb, including the one who had called him, and escorted him into the house, where they were joined by Mrs. Monteen Brown, who had been his patient for several years. Mrs. Brown was not ill, but she explained that her daughter needed medical attention.
This all struck Baugh as quite odd, until Mrs. Brown led him to one of the bedrooms to meet Barbara Powers.
The doctor kept up with the news and had heard all about the fallen airplane and the captured pilot with connections to Georgia.
Understanding that reporters from all over the country were trying to locate and interview the wife of the man who was suddenly among the most famous individuals in the world, the middle-aged doctor agreed to be discreet.
In addition to her fractured leg, which had been placed in a walking cast by a physician in Turkey, Barbara suffered from a bronchial infection. The other doctor had also prescribed a tranquilizer for nerves. Baugh gave her a thorough examination, administered a shot for pain, and arranged for her to have some tests the next day, including an EKG.
Baugh, who grew up on a farm near Milledgeville and attended the University of Georgia, where he studied political science and history, was profoundly shaped by Pearl Harbor, like many men of his generation. Bright and ambitious, he interrupted his plans—he dreamed of a career in the foreign service—and immediately entered the US Army, becoming a platoon leader of the 82nd Airborne Division, a remarkable unit which proved crucial to the Allied victory. He fought in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, and Holland, participating in D-day, the Battle of the Bulge, and Operation Market Garden. He watched many of his friends die, so he felt lucky to survive the war.
Baugh returned to the United States no longer so eager to spend his life traveling the world. He had seen liberated Paris and defeated Germany. Now he felt driven to build a regular life, so he enrolled in medical school and eventually moved back to his hometown, becoming a pillar of the community who was so admired, he eventually served eighteen years as mayor. He delivered more than 4,000 babies. Patients often showed up at his house to be treated in a little converted study, and sometimes they paid him in eggs, meat, and vegetables.
“Jimmy was an old-fashioned country doctor, and he worked all the time,” Betty said.
Among his close friends was a man from Milledgeville who worked for the CIA. Only a select few people in his life were allowed to know he was employed by the intelligence agency, and no one knew exactly what he did. But after learning that his friend Jimmy was treating Barbara Powers, he telephoned and recruited him for a special mission: Keep a close eye on the troubled wife, with special attention to her “emotional state” and “other related problems.”81 Jimmy was provided a contact and a number to call in Washington. No one knew that the kindly small-town doctor was performing a special service for his government.
“Due to things already known about the weaknesses of Mrs. Powers,” Baugh wrote in 1960, in a never-published manuscript concerning his involvement with the case, “[the CIA] believed she could be influenced by the wrong people…. It was implied that she naturally knew a lot about the set-up of the 10-10 Detachment and much of the intelligence program.”82
Various business related to Barbara wound up on Baugh’s desk, including her eagerness to visit Moscow for the trial. At first, the government opposed her attendance, deeming it too risky. However, the CIA changed its mind, apparently influenced by the opinion of Columbia University law professor Dr. John M. Hazard, an expert on Soviet jurisprudence. The CIA asked Baugh to escort her, which required the doctor without a partner to take critical time away from his medical practice.
In the early days after the shoot-down, media outlets were still buying the Company line that Powers worked for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Among other things, Baugh was tasked with making sure Barbara did not say anything to the press that betrayed the approved message. When the doctor organized a press conference for the wife on her mother’s front lawn, he was able to convince the assembled newsmen to submit their questions in writing.
In a clear attempt to rally support for a trip, Barbara, one of the few people who called her husband Gary, read selected portions from a letter from him urging her to travel to Moscow for the trial. “He is getting plenty of food and has been treated well,” said Barbara, who started talking about the tour they gave him of Moscow, including the exhibit of his plane’s wreckage.83
She talked about her fear that the pilot could spend years in prison or be put to death.
“My husband is not a spy,” she insisted.84
While he was facing an uncertain fate, his wife was causing much distress for a small circle in Milledgeville. Baugh quickly became disturbed by “the vast amount of evidence pointing to Barbara Powers being a very mentally unpredictable person and judging from some of her recently acquired acquaintances, a very unwise person.”85 She was frequently seen out on the town drinking heavily, in the company of people who were regarded as shady, especially men.
One bizarre incident gave him great pause about her state of mind. About 3 a.m. on June 22, Barbara knocked on someone’s front door, demanding some papers and bonds from a man she identified as “Jack Dempsey.” When the puzzled lady who answered the door found out who she was, she invited Barbara in, but Barbara “ran down the steps to a waiting car and disappeared in the night.”86
Baugh’s contact in Washington was disturbed but not surprised, “regarding it as consistent with what they had expected.”87
“It didn’t take Jimmy long to figure out Barbara was a mess,” Betty said. “She was a very troubled young woman.”
After consulting with Washington, he enlisted the help of his friend Eugene Ellis, the Milledgeville chief of police, to closely monitor her activities and interactions.