Increasingly frustrated by his inability to score well in his Spanish class despite working hard, Conrad started bellyaching about the situation one day, as the final approached. “Well,” I said, “I can get the test.”
The planning resembled a CIA covert operation.
For several days, I arrived at school early and stationed myself in a distant area of the parking lot. Armed with binoculars, I closely watched the teacher, who approached the front door and keyed in the security code. “By this time, we knew which four numbers it was; we could tell by the condition of the keys,” Conrad recalled. “But Gary had to figure out the sequence.”
Having the security code allowed the small team of burglars, dressed in black and wielding penlights, to penetrate the building.
During class, I had closely studied the movements of my teacher and knew exactly which folder contained the test, and which drawer.
Using my lock-picking skills, I quickly opened the file cabinet. We retrieved the test and rushed to a nearby post office, where we utilized a copy machine located in the 24-hour lobby. Soon we returned the test to the appropriate folder and exited the premises without detection.
The school featured several security cameras, and, obsessed with every possible detail, I suggested we paste a still picture of the appropriate scene onto the camera lens. But the other guys decided this was unnecessary. The day before, we went around the school slightly adjusting the aim of the cameras. No one noticed. No evidence was captured.
To prevent suspicion, we all agreed to purposely miss a few questions.
Emboldened by the experience, during our senior year, we acquired the final exam for every one of our classes. After learning that one of our teachers kept the all-important document in his briefcase and took it home, we bribed the son. A wad of cash did the trick. We all scored well and gained admission to good colleges. No one outside our tight little circle ever knew.
Am I proud of that all these years later? No, I’m not. I’m also not ashamed, but did I learn from it? Yes, I did. Fortunately, we never got caught.
If the cloak-and-dagger operations satisfied some powerful desire for me to feel closer to my father, I remained dubious about probing too deep into an existential question.
Ever since Mr. Conrad tried to buck me up by telling me to be proud of my father “no matter what you might hear,” I had been haunted by the mystery swirling around his memory. This idea was deeply engrained in my teenage insecurity. It filled me with doubts about who my father was and how this might affect me.
But this was one secret I was not quite ready to unlock.
Chapter Six
SEARCHING FOR THE TRUTH
In the summer of 1983, while approaching my freshman year at California State University at Northridge, I showed up for a rush party at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house. It immediately reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Animal House. After making my way across the overgrown lawn, past two stone lions draped with flowered leis, I walked through the front door amid the sound of blaring rock music.
The place was packed, and I was only a few feet past the door when somebody pointed me to the nearest beer keg. The mastermind of the great final exam heist at Montclair was no stranger to alcohol and loud music, but my introverted nature still made it hard for me to meet new people—I was more comfortable reading science fiction books in my room and solving logic problems than chatting up pretty girls. Nevertheless, I started walking around the house, introducing myself and striking up conversations with perfect strangers.
Moving into one room, I walked up to a member of the fraternity and extended my hand. “Hi! Gary Powers. Nice to meet you!”
His name was Jay Rose. Immediately, a bell rang. “Any relation to the U-2 pilot?”
I felt a wave of anxiety.
“Well, yeah,” I said reluctantly. “That’s my dad.”
As we started talking, I was overwhelmed with a rather ominous feeling: I can’t go anywhere without someone knowing who my dad was.
Jay Rose knew all about my father. In fact, he appeared to know more about all that history than I did, which left me with an uneasy feeling.
I was very guarded, didn’t trust people easily, and was very uncomfortable with people who knew about my dad when I didn’t know anything about them.
Growing up, my mother made me a little paranoid about people I didn’t know or what would happen if I was caught during a youthful indiscretion. After all, what if the son of Francis Gary Powers was arrested? It would be on the front page. While mom’s warnings did not stop me from living on the edge in high school, I was much more discreet in college. Mom taught me to be very careful with girls, pounding into my brain that some only want to trap a guy by getting pregnant—especially if he happens to be the son of a legendary spy. She taught me to be skeptical of whatever someone told me—especially the government—and to read between the lines of what was written in the press.
I didn’t really understand it at the time, but even though my father was dead, he was exerting a certain amount of control over my life.
When Jay made the connection between me and my world-famous father, my trained inclination was to politely retreat and find another fraternity. For various reasons, I didn’t want to be defined as “the son of…”—including the simplest of alclass="underline" I didn’t know the whole truth about what had happened all those years before. No one did.
Of course, I was aware of the U-2 from an early age. The memory of walking on the plane’s wings was deeply embedded in my psyche. Among the autographed pictures decorating my childhood room—alongside football icon O. J. Simpson, actor Robert Conrad, and five-star General Omar Bradley—was one from Kelly Johnson, the designer of the U-2 and Dad’s onetime boss.
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher was talking about the Cold War when she asked, “Does anybody know what CIA stands for?” Growing up, I had heard my father refer to the CIA many times, although he usually called it “The Agency.” I had a vague understanding of what it was, and that my father had somehow been involved with it, but I didn’t know what the letters stood for, so I didn’t try to answer the question. One of my classmates raised his hand and was able to fill in the blanks: Central Intelligence Agency.
I remember thinking, “Oh, I never knew it stood for anything.”
Hanging out on the set of the TV movie helped me understand more about the story, but I was still too young and sheltered to get beyond the basics. I guess I thought everyone’s dad had been shot down over the Soviet Union and had been exchanged for a Soviet spy.
In addition to the more universal impact of my father’s death upon my development, I was deprived of reaching the point of maturity where I could ask him pointed questions about his ordeal, which exacerbated my insecurity and introversion.
Only later would I recognize meeting Jay Rose as a turning point in my life.
The truth is, I almost decided not to join Sigma Alpha Epsilon, after meeting Jay, because I didn’t want to be known as Dad’s son.
Ultimately, I resisted the urge to run away, realizing that the same thing might happen if I joined another fraternity.
By pledging SAE, I took a small step toward conquering my fear.
One day during my sophomore year, with my curiosity mounting—and determined to be armed with the right answers when people asked me about my father—I stopped by the library and decided to look him up in the card catalogue. I didn’t know what I would find. Sure enough, there he was, firmly entrenched in the Dewey Decimal system. After some searching, I found a May 1960 issue of Time magazine featuring a picture of Dad on the cover. This was one of the many things I never knew.