August 7, 1997
Secretary of the Air Force (SAF/MRC)
DoD Civilian/Military Service Review Board
Washington, DC 20330-1000
Dear Members of the Service Review Board,
I am writing to request a determination by the Service Review Board for my father’s eligibility to be awarded the POW Medal posthumously. Subsection 1128 (a) of Title 10 states that, “The Secretary shall issue a prisoner-of-war medal to any person who, while serving in any capacity with the armed forces, was taken prisoner and held captive”—It is also my understanding that the Secretary can make a special determination when circumstances permit.
Francis Gary Powers, my father, was in the USAF from 1950 to 1956. In 1956, he began working for the CIA flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. He was stationed at Incirlik Air Force Base in Adana, Turkey, and reported to USAF military personnel. On May 1, 1960, he was shot down over the Soviet Union and held prisoner for three months by the KGB in Lubyanka Prison. On August 17 he was put on trial by the Soviet Union and sentenced to ten years in prison. He served 18 months in Vladimir Prison before he returned to the United States after being exchanged for Soviet spy, Col. Rudolf I. Abel.
I believe that my father was classified as a civilian working for the government during his involvement with the U-2 program and during his subsequent imprisonment. He had DoD and NASA identification and it was understood that U-2 pilots upon fulfillment of their CIA contracts could return to the military at a rank comparable with their peers. Many of the other U-2 pilots did return to the military at a comparable rank, but my father after returning home from Vladimir Prison decided he could best serve his country by working for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation as a U-2 test pilot.
I look forward to hearing from you with a favorable determination. If you should have any questions or need additional information, please do not hesitate to call.
Several weeks later, a reply arrived from James D. Johnston, executive secretary of the Military Service Review Board, stating that DoD Directive 1348 limits the issue of the POW Medal to “those taken prisoner by foreign armed forces that are hostile to the United States, under circumstances which the Secretary concerned finds to have been comparable to those under which persons have generally been held captive by enemy armed forces during periods of armed conflict.”3
“The Cold War is not one of the periods noted in the directive,” Johnston wrote.
Johnston left open the possibility of an exception, but I began to understand the unique circumstances weighing against my father. Not only was his clandestine service treated differently, but combatants in the Cold War, the most important conflict of the previous four decades, were being denied the honors reserved for “shooting” wars such as Korea and Vietnam, which many historians considered battles of the larger Cold War.
I traded several letters with the Air Force pushing my father’s case, but it took a flurry of once-secret documents to move the ball.
For all I had learned about my father’s brush with history, several questions remained unanswered.
My father always said he had been hit at maximum altitude, but I knew that several key figures in Washington doubted his story, including CIA director John McCone. My father felt so betrayed by McCone that when he was finally awarded the Intelligence Star, his initial inclination was to tell the CIA boss to “shove it.”
Mom was able to calm him down, and he eventually made the trip and graciously accepted the medal.
Caught between my admiration for my father and my determination to consider all of the evidence, I was left unable to offer any definitive evidence to refute the notion that he had descended to a lower altitude.
Until 1998.
With the Cold War fading in the rear-view mirror, my mother and I attended a declassification conference at Fort McNair, home of the National War College in Washington, DC. At this event, thousands of pages of once-classified secrets concerning the Cold War were finally exposed to the public. For us, it was a moment fraught with excitement.
Flipping through a book containing various letters and files, there it was: a document definitively stating that Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 was disabled at 70,500 feet.4
That proved that Dad had been telling the truth all along.
Other evidence pointed to the likelihood that as many as eight different surface-to-air missiles exploded in the vicinity of the aircraft, none of them landing a direct hit.
Nearly four decades after the U-2 Incident, it was clear that Washington knew the aircraft was more vulnerable to Soviet missiles than it was willing to acknowledge at the time. By refusing to definitively refute the potential of a flame-out or an intentional descent, Washington protected its secrets at the expense of the man who spent twenty-one months locked up by the KGB.
Reading through the large cache of released documents, I located other pages showing the U-2 was a joint operation of the CIA and the Air Force, which was just the evidence we needed to push the Pentagon on the question of whether or not to award my father a POW Medal.
Equally troubling to the family was the way the government had allowed the misinformation to linger concerning the poison pin. Only after the Cold War ended were many of my dad’s former colleagues free to discuss the device. I sought out a long list of pilots and CIA officials, who shared my frustration that Dad had been branded a traitor by some.
“That pin was only there if you thought you couldn’t take what they were doing to you,” said Tony Bevacqua, his onetime roommate. “No way was he expected to use it. Frank had a hard time when he got back, and one of the reasons was because too many people thought it was his duty to kill himself. And that’s baloney.”
Even with demonstrable evidence that he was never under any orders to commit suicide, I often dealt with people who believed he should have sacrificed his life to deprive the Soviets of a Cold War trophy.
While appearing on Oliver North’s Fox News Channel broadcast, I was confronted by a caller who insisted Dad was a traitor because he didn’t use the pin.
“Well, I’m glad he didn’t, because I wouldn’t be here if he had,” I said with a chuckle, before calmly explaining the facts.
Armed with the declassified documents, I kept flooding the Pentagon with paperwork, including a letter supporting the award from retired General John A. Shaud, the executive director of the Air Force Association. Shaud, who had successfully petitioned for the POW Medals to be bestowed on Colonels John McKone and Bruce Olmstead, the only survivors of the RB-47 shoot-down, who were imprisoned at Lubyanka at the same as my father, urged the Air Force to look beyond the U-2 pilot’s CIA employment and treat him as a member of the armed forces.
Like the Berlin Wall, the American government’s official antipathy toward Francis Gary Powers began to crumble.
In announcing the Air Force’s decision in a letter dated November 22,1999, Staff Judge Advocate Colonel R. Philip Deavel said, “We believe there is substantial evidence in the record to support the applicant’s request that the AFBCMR [Air Force Board of Correction of Military Records] characterize his father’s service with the CIA as ‘military’ service.”5 This determination cleared the way for my dad to receive the POW Medal.
Forty-five years after President Eisenhower insisted the overflights be conducted exclusively by civilian pilots, the distinction was understood as a necessary conceit to avoid violations of airspace that might be interpreted as overt acts of war. Only in the most technical terms could the military establishment argue that my father was not a prisoner of war, especially given his previous Air Force service and the Air Force’s decision to posthumously promote him to captain—although no one in the Powers family knew about this until his military record was officially updated in 2000.