When I first started to transcribe my father’s journal, while in graduate school at George Mason, I took great care to methodically type the words. It became something I usually did after arriving home at night, hunched over my computer for an hour or two at a time. I always felt like I learned something. It was part of the puzzle slowly being revealed to me, including the early portions when Dad described the moments after he lost control of the plane.
“My first reaction was to reach toward the destruction switches,” he wrote. “I knew that after activating them I would have seventy seconds in which to leave the plane before the explosion. I then thought I had better see if I could get into the position to use the ejection seat before activating the switches. It was a good thing I did this because I spent several minutes I suppose (I don’t know how long I was in the spinning plane), trying to get my feet in the proper place and trying to get far enough back into the seat so that I could eject without tearing my legs off on the canopy rail as I shot out of the cabin. I could not get into the proper position. I was not sitting at all but hanging by the seat belt and it was impossible to shorten the belt with all the forces against it….”14
This sequence became an important part of the debriefing.
US Interrogator: As you moved down in your seat in that odd inverted position, the plane was not flaming or smoking or anything, was it, as far as you could recall it?
Powers: I would say there was no fire connected with…
US Interrogator: No fire connected with it. In other words, …it wasn’t billowing smoke or…
Powers: If it was, I knew nothing about it.
US Interrogator: And, and then, then…
Powers: I feel sure that the engine stopped at this, ah, was stopping as this, ah, maneuver started to take place. Because I can remember somewhere along this that the, ah, RPM gauge was going down. But I can’t remember exactly when I noticed that. There was some—when the nose dropped there was some very violent maneuvers. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. I don’t know exactly what happened there. And it didn’t take long. But it ended up in that inverted position going around, and I think it was going around clockwise….
After deciding to bail out and eventually parachuting to the ground, Dad wrote about his feelings concerning his impending fate: “I knew I was as good as dead and I also knew in my own mind that my death would not be a fast one but one of slow torture….”
US Interrogator: When you got to the ground… you didn’t try to escape?
Powers: No, there was… while I was still lying there on the ground with the parachute dragging me, one man was helping me out of the parachute and the other was trying to help me up, and by the time I got on my feet and took the helmet off, there was a large group around.
US Interrogator: There was just no opportunity to even think of escaping?
Powers: I think I couldn’t have gotten through this group if none of them were armed…. I don’t think any of them were, but it was just a large press of people and I could not have gotten through anyway.
US Interrogator: Yeah, now then…
Powers: And they had also taken this .22 pistol away from me before I had an opportunity to even think about it.
US Interrogator: You didn’t resist in any way?
Powers: No, I gave no active resistance.
US Interrogator: Why didn’t you resist?
Powers: Just too many people.
US Interrogator: Uh-huh. It just would have been foolhardy, in other words?
Powers: That’s what it seemed to me. It just seemed that… well, I’m alive right now. I could try to escape, which I wanted to do. I was pretty much in shock at the time also, I don’t suppose I was thinking too clearly, but I was looking around, trying to see some way to escape or something to do, and all these people milling around…. It was just impossible to do anything, in my opinion.15
After concluding the interrogation, Harry Cordes and his colleague John Hughes, who represented the Defense Intelligence Agency, flew to Washington to brief a series of high-ranking officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who criticized the pilot’s decision to proceed after his autopilot malfunctioned. Cordes emerged as an important advocate for my father against the forces who doubted his story, especially John McCone.
Confronting the NSA report suggesting the pilot had descended below 30,000 feet before being shot down, Cordes shot holes in the theory by citing inaccurate data produced during similar incidents, including the loss of the RB-47. “I had knowledge of the same intelligence information,” he said, “but I believed Powers.”16
While reading and transcribing my father’s journal entries concerning the KGB interrogations, it was difficult for me to maintain any sort of detachment. I could feel my father’s desperation, the emotional roller-coaster ride he was experiencing, not knowing whether he would ever get to go home.
Writing about the experience several months after the fact, Frank said:
I felt that there was no hope for me. I thought I would be tortured and later shot—probably without anyone outside the Soviet Union ever knowing what had happened to me. I did not realize or even think of the political importance of the incident and how it would be used. If I had been able to think clearly I might have come to the conclusion that the incident and therefore myself were too important to keep secret and not used to the utmost to sway world public opinion away from the US and to the USSR….
During the interrogation on the third of May I was asked about the radio communication equipment on board the U-2, and if I informed my base of what happened to me. I refused to answer these questions and told them that I personally felt it was to my advantage not to answer them….
My thinking at the time was that my mother, with her bad heart, might be killed by the news of my probable death, not to mention how it might affect my father and wife. I thought that the Soviet Union, not knowing whether or not I had communicated with my base would be more likely to release the news that I was alive than they would be if I told them I did not communicate the details of the accident to them. I assumed that if they thought that I did call my base and told them that there had been an explosion and that I was bailing out that they would go ahead and release the news of my being alive….
Now that I think back I am sure they would have released the news anyway because the incident was too important to the Soviet Union politically to be hushed up and put aside.17
How he interacted with his captors was a subject that loomed large in his CIA debriefings.
US Interrogator: Almost immediately you had to… arrive at some decision in your mind as to how you were going to deal with these people, that is… you could decide to tell them to go to hell, you weren’t going to talk, or you were going to cooperate with them to a certain extent, or you were not going to cooperate with them. How did you… what decision did you arrive at in this regard and how did you arrive at it?
Powers: And when?
US Interrogator: Yeah.
Powers: At Sverdlovsk when I saw that my story that I had made up was no good whatsoever, I decided then… I remember then hearing this briefing that I had that there would be torture, that may as well, in an event like this when there was capture, may as well tell them everything because they would get it out of you anyway, and just make it last as long as possible because… the longer they thought you knew something, the longer you would live, and I decided then that I would cooperate with them to a certain extent. There [were] some thing, things, that I was never going to tell them.