Invited to the Bodo conference to speak about his father and the Soviet side of the Cold War, Sergei was introduced to a young man who looked familiar. “I thought he looked Bulgarian,” Khrushchev recalled. “My father never liked Bulgarians.”
In time, I would learn many of the hidden details of the Soviet side on the day my father was shot down, some of it directly from the premier’s son. “Everybody knew our missile technology was getting better, including the Americans,” said Sergei, who was employed as a high-ranking missile engineer at the time. “Of course the CIA knew it was only a matter of time.”
On May 1, 1960, Sergei heard the news of the latest incursion from his father at the breakfast table. They lived in the same house. “I was very upset and asked my father what would happen next,” he recalled. “He thought this a stupid question. ‘Of course we will try to shoot it down….’”
He later learned from this father that some of the people who greeted the American pilot when he tumbled from the sky asked him if he was Bulgarian. “So when I see this young man who looks Bulgarian, I was not surprised to hear he was Gary Powers,” Sergei said. “He looked a lot like his father.”
At first, Sergei was skeptical of me. But Khrushchev was quickly disarmed by the son of his onetime Cold War adversary. He could see I was sincere and only wanted to know the truth.
“I found that he was a good and honest person who was strongly interested in preserving the memory of his father,” he said. “I appreciate and respect such people.”
That day was the start of a wonderful friendship between a young American and an aging Russian.
After speaking about my father’s ill-fated flight, I invited questions from the audience at the Bodo conference. A Norwegian man stood up and started heckling me, telling me how a Norwegian spy had planted a bomb in the tail section of the U-2 before Dad took off from Pakistan. This was one of the many conspiracy theories that colored the incident in the sort of hazy mythology so often associated with the Kennedy assassination.
Politely but forcefully, I began to refute the charge.
The man did not think much of my answer. He kept insisting that I was engaged in some sort of cover-up.
“You can’t always believe everything you read in the press!” I finally said.
And the room exploded in applause.
A feeling of deep satisfaction swept over me. It was an important milepost in my journey to combat the misinformation about my father.
As part of my process of discovery, I developed a deep interest in the Cold War, which began to fade into the history books as the old Soviet Union splintered into fourteen different independent countries, leaving a much smaller and less powerful Russia, and the nations of the old Eastern bloc embraced freedom for the first time in more than four decades.
In 1996, John C. Welch and I founded The Cold War Museum. At first it was little more than an idea and my traveling U-2 Incident exhibit, as I began working through various roadblocks, including fund-raising, artifact collection, and the search for a permanent physical location.
“In a way, I am honoring my father,” I told reporters as the project began to gather momentum. “But I want the museum to honor all of the men and women who died for American freedom during the Cold War.”1
One of the first people I recruited to help with the effort was Sergei Khrushchev, who joined the advisory board of directors and helped make sure it reflected both sides of the conflict.
“It is important that we remember,” Khrushchev said.
Sergei and I often spoke on the same panel. One time, Mom was in the audience, and she turned to my friends Jon Teperson and Bob Kallos during the program. “His daddy put Gary’s daddy in jail.”
While pursuing a career in public administration—including serving as the executive director of several different nonprofit organizations and chambers of commerce—and eventually marrying and starting a family, I remained committed to learning the truth about my father. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests and began lecturing about the U-2 Incident across the country and beyond, emerging as an expert on the subject and a vigorous defender of my father’s memory.
My search for knowledge led to a memorable trip to a free and capitalist Russia in June 1997. As part of a so-called spy tour, organized by former intelligence officials on both sides, with a group of other Americans, I drove by Lubyanka Prison and the KGB headquarters and visited safe houses, drop sites, and other once-clandestine points of interest around Moscow.
The various once-unimagined changes roiling the onetime evil empire, now abuzz with capitalist activity, could be seen in something very personaclass="underline" The KGB museum exhibit featuring artifacts from Dad’s fateful mission, including his .22-caliber pistol with silencer and the poison-tipped pin Dad took on his mission. I learned that other items from the U-2 were being displayed at the Border Guard Museum, including items from his survival kit: a book of matches, a saw, a canteen, a compass, and a shaving kit. The display included a large stack of rubles, which had been sewn into Dad’s jacket all those years ago, and a pack of Kent cigarettes. (In Soviet lore, Kent became “the cigarette of spies,” because the pack was found on the spy pilot.)
Especially excited to see wreckage from the plane, I was intrigued to see a plaque claiming, in Russian, that the ejection seat was rigged with an explosive that would have killed the pilot. I knew that there was an explosive charge under the seat—it’s what was used to blast it out. But to kill the pilot? This sounded like Soviet propaganda to me.
Still, as I began to learn about every detail of the aircraft, I would always remember a private conversation with high-altitude specialist Tom Bowen. After the pilot was shown the charge and told it was set to explode seventy seconds after the buttons were pushed, Bowen said, “he would have no way of knowing if it had been reset to zero.”
I would always wonder if Dad had decided not to use the ejection seat because he was concerned it would explode instantaneously, or because he would have severed his legs had he used the ejection seat. This was yet another mystery I would never be able to solve.
With the help of Jim Connell, whom I met during the POW/MIA meeting, I wrangled my way into Vladimir Prison, which required a three-hour drive from Moscow.
Walking into the still-open penitentiary, the commandant greeted me graciously and escorted me to the cell my father had once occupied. We exchanged gifts. I stepped into the small space, which had been freshly painted for my visit, and smiled as Connell snapped a photograph.
I asked for a few minutes alone, and carefully studied the walls, trying to imagine how it felt for Dad to look out from behind those bars and wonder if he would ever get to go home. It was hard to believe I was actually standing there.
Something stirred in me that day, while standing in my father’s footsteps. It was a moment I would never forget.
In 1997, after a decade of learning everything I could about my father’s story—and the peculiarities of the federal government’s bureaucracy—I began to seek for him a measure of vindication.
The effort started with a letter: