“There’s people here, some of ’em would’ve killed him, if they’d gotten a chance,” Meade said.
The talk wounded Powers deeply. Spending all that time in a Soviet prison was a kind of torture, but returning to his own country and having his patriotism questioned was the most hurtful blow of all. The infamy now attached to his name represented a special kind of confinement from which he could never hope to escape.
Why did he not use the poison pin?
Why didn’t he destroy the plane?
Is it true he descended to a lower altitude?
What secrets did he reveal to the Soviets?
Why did he say what he said?
The people who were willing to believe Powers betrayed his country hated him for how his failure made them feel.
At the triumphant height of the American Century, when the country was unaccustomed to foreign-policy debacles and unwilling to concede its limitations, the profound humiliation of hearing him apologize to the Soviets was not something they would soon forget.
They needed someone to blame for their shame.
In a world tantalized by James Bond and other fictional spies, the lore of the poison pin captured the public’s imagination, playing into preconceived ideas about the shadowy world of espionage. It was easy to believe such a man, shouldering the risk of flying into denied territory for the nefarious purpose of taking photographs of sensitive military sites, would be ordered to prick himself and be done with it—taking one for the team and denying the enemy the opportunity to gain information, leverage, and propaganda points.
At his wedding in the summer of 1962, Joe Murphy could see that some of his friends disapproved of Powers’s presence. “Nothing was said to him, but I knew how some felt,” he said. “I could never understand that way of thinking.”
Even before his parachute tumbled to the ground, the narrative of his life was established in the eyes of many: By allowing himself to be captured alive, Francis Gary Powers was a traitor.
Some didn’t know the truth of the poison pin: that it was optional and completely within his discretion. He was under no orders to kill himself.
Some didn’t care, believing he should have taken his own life—regardless of what he was obligated to do.
The lack of a definitive public explanation by Washington on this matter and others related to the U-2 Incident enabled various conspiracy theories to swirl, even pulling in the celebrated Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who said:
I don’t for a moment believe that Powers was shot down at 68,000 feet by Russian rockets. I believe it was sabotage at the Turkish base—delayed action bombs in the tail section….40
Like many others, Fleming believed Washington should have disavowed Powers—“throwing [him] cold-bloodedly to the dogs”—and that the pilot should have accepted the consequences of his job, which warranted such a handsome salary primarily because it was fraught with such risks. “He was expendable. Expend him!”
Of course, his family and friends and various others thought differently. They saw him as a good man who did his best under trying circumstances and loved his country but was not required to sacrifice his life to prove his patriotism.
“I knew my brother was no traitor,” Joan said. “He did his duty. Some people just didn’t understand.”
Some of the people in the office at Langley enjoyed teasing Jeannie Popovich. Young and impressionable, the wide-eyed eighteen-year-old had recently migrated from a coal-mining community in western Pennsylvania to take a job as a clerk-typist at the agency. Sometimes the others told her outlandish stories just to test her level of gullibility, invariably sealing the ritual with an admission of the lie and a good-natured laugh shared by all. She took it all in stride and never considered it mean-spirited. But she was determined not to believe the next tall tale.
One day in the spring of 1962, about three months after she joined the CIA, Popovich heard a knock at the department door. Their office did not have a receptionist, but since her desk was located nearest the door, she got up and answered the knock. The man said he was there to see the gentleman in charge of the section. “My name is Powers,” he said.
When Jeannie ushered the man into her boss’s office and returned to her desk, one of her coworkers approached and said, “Do you know who that was?”
“The man said his name was Powers.”
“That was Francis Gary Powers. Do you know who Francis Gary Powers is?”
Of course she knew.
But she assumed her colleague was trying to tell her another whopper, and she wasn’t going to fall for it.
Soon others joined in, trying to convince her. One even went to the office safe and retrieved a file, which showed that the famous spy was scheduled to start work in their office that very day.
“Read this!”
She began to believe it might be true.
A while later, when the boss opened his door and began introducing Powers to the staff, Popovich accepted a different kind of grief from her friends, negotiating an important milestone in her evolution to skeptical CIA veteran.
Soon after the shoot-down, the agency recognized a glaring vulnerability by creating a program to train pilots to deal with being captured and interrogated. Simulated prison experiences, which benefited from knowledge gained about Soviet and Chinese methods, taught pilots how to recognize and deal with their own vulnerabilities while maneuvering in an environment without Geneva Convention protections.
“Our people would have a cover story, flimsy as it may be… and they can’t simply clam up and refuse to say anything,” said Kenneth Bradt, one of the psychologists who administered the program. “What can you say and what do you need to protect? That was a big part of the training.”
Unable to put Powers back in the air, and not knowing what else to do with him, the CIA leadership assigned him to the training program, where his experience became a closely examined case study.
Studying Powers’s incarceration, Bradt admired the way the pilot handled the situation. “Considering what he had [to deal with], the guy did a remarkable job,” Bradt said. “His whole focus was on not revealing secret information. And he did a good job of that… not realizing the main focus of the Soviets was to use him for propaganda.”
“The pressure on him was twofold,” Bradt said. “In addition to waking up every morning and wondering if this is the day they’re going to take him out and shoot him, he had to deal with… what was going on with his wife. The Soviets were most happy to let all the letters through… to let him know his wife was becoming an alcoholic and sleeping with other men.”
Even as he dealt with the complications of his ambivalent repatriation, Powers learned in greater detail about his wife’s activities while he was away.
Increasingly out of control, Barbara was seen at all hours of the day and night at the bars in Milledgeville, where she often caused a scene. She made no attempt to conceal romantic liaisons with several different married men around town.
One night she caused a stir in the parking lot of a drinking establishment while partying with her African American maid in the front seat of Powers’s Mercedes. Authorities were dispatched to the scene. “The Ku Klux Klan got into the act,” Baugh said, “and it was only the timely intervention of Chief of Police, Eugene Ellis, that [prevented] every newspaper in the country [from writing] about the wife of the U-2 pilot… being placed in jail for violating the race mixing laws.”41
During a trip to Jacksonville, Florida, accompanied by the wife of another pilot, a drunk Barbara drove off from her beachside hotel and ran a car into someone’s yard. She was arrested and spent the night in jail, cursing and threatening the officers, revealing her identity as the wife of the world-famous pilot. The FBI and CIA smoothed things over, and her mother bailed her out of jail. Nothing ever wound up in the papers.