Unaware that six other pilots were already training at the Ranch, Powers was called to Collins’s hotel room in Washington, where he joined several others for the big reveal. The agency man reached into his briefcase and pulled out a black-and-white photograph as the pilots moved in to study it closely. “It was a strange-looking aircraft, unlike any I had ever seen… [with a] remarkably long wingspan…. A jet, but with the body of a glider,” Powers recalled.31
As Collins answered various questions, a table-top radio blared. Frustrated that he could not hear clearly, Powers reached over and turned it off. He was surprised when Collins, too, stopped making noise. At that time, Powers was still unaware of even the most basic spy-craft—until it dawned on him that the radio was filling the room with noise for a reason. Embarrassed, he reached over and turned the radio back on, and the spook continued his briefing.
Looking closely at the photograph, Powers liked one thing about the aircraft immediately. It was a single-seater, and like most fighter pilots, he preferred to fly alone.
Utilizing the fake name Francis G. Palmer, and a phony address, he flew all over the country for several months, undergoing extensive physicals at Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as well as psychological tests, security clearances, and pressure-suit fittings. They tested him in the suit in a high-altitude chamber, attached various probes to his body, and stimulated a wide variety of physical reactions to make sure he was not prone to seizures, blacking out, or panic. None of the activities took place in a government building, because it was a completely black operation, and none of it could be traced back to Washington, in case they were being watched by the Soviets. They made him take a lie-detector test. They introduced him to various aspects of spy-craft, including the importance of avoiding noticeable patterns, to make it difficult for an operative to be tailed, which is the reason why a particular Company trip flew him and several others from Washington, DC, to St. Louis, Missouri, to Omaha, Nebraska, and back to St. Louis, before arriving in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Eventually Frank wound up at the Ranch, where he was finally introduced to the airplane and began developing the skills he would need in the dangerous days ahead. He learned the U-2’s various limits and idiosyncrasies, including the delicate hand required to land it, while carefully managing the wing angles, especially when confronted with high crosswinds. He saw how the plane kept climbing as the fuel burned off, and how at a certain altitude, he could pull the throttle all the way back to idle and it would remain at 100 percent power. He became acquainted with the dangerous intersection known as the “coffin corner.”
“Down at sea level, you had a huge margin between the fastest the airplane could fly and the slowest it could fly, around 200 miles per hour,” he said.32 “But when you are at max altitude… your fastest and slowest speed come to a point where, you’re flying it as slow as you possibly can without stalling and you’re going almost as fast as you can without getting into severe buffeting. If you speed up, you’re in trouble. If you slow down, you’re in trouble. Takes a lot of attention and personal control.”
Harry Andonian, who tested the plane for the Air Force, said, “That was one of the most difficult aspects of flying the U-2. The coffin corner could be very tricky. You had very little margin for error.”
As part of the need to reduce weight, the Skunks Works had opted not to include an ejection seat, which meant if a pilot decided to abandon the aircraft, he would need to bail out.
High-altitude flight required the same sort of nylon pressure suits then being worn by the test pilots heading for the edge of space in experimental craft at Edwards; these suits were designed as a black project by the David Clark Company, maker of women’s braziers. Because of the peculiarities of such high-altitude flight, pilots spent significant time learning to deal with the confinement.
Among the various features of the aircraft Powers learned to master was the self-destruct mechanism. In the event he ever felt the need to bail out, he knew exactly which two buttons to push to activate the explosive charge designed to destroy the camera. The secret of the U-2 needed to be protected at all costs.
During his training, Powers took several days off and traveled to Virginia to see the family. Stopping by to visit his new brother-in-law Jack Goff, he suggested they go hunting for rabbits.
“Found that kinda strange,” Jack said. “I don’t hunt rabbits and I never know of him to hunt rabbits.”
Jack wondered if this was a desperate effort for his friend to reconnect to the place he had escaped.
Still, Jack grabbed two rifles and they headed out across the field behind his house, bound for the nearby woods.
At one point, when they were far from the house, all alone in the woods, Francis turned to him and said, “Jack, I want you to know something. If anything happens to me, I want you to know, I was doing what I thought was best for the most people….”
Was he talking about his decision to leave Pound? Was he talking about something he had done?
Jack just nodded. “Okay,” he said, perplexed but somehow understanding that his friend was speaking purposely in a riddle.
They stepped carefully through the tall grass, keeping a sharp eye out for rabbits.
About two weeks before LeVier began testing the U-2, in late July 1955, President Eisenhower traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, for a summit conference with Anthony Eden, the prime minister of the United Kingdom; Edgar Faure, the prime minister of France; and Nikolai Bulganin, the premier of the Soviet Union, who appeared on behalf of Khrushchev. (At this time, in the Soviet system, Khrushchev was not officially the head of state, but no one doubted who called the shots.) During the meeting, Eisenhower presented a radical proposal, calling on the world’s two superpowers to exchange detailed maps of all military installations and to allow reconnaissance flights of each other’s territory. The meeting was cordial, widely interpreted as the beginning of a thaw in the Cold War, but the so-called Open Skies policy was immediately dismissed by Khrushchev, who branded it nothing more than an “espionage plot.”33
If the Soviets had taken up the White House on this idea, the U-2 might never have been needed and Francis Gary Powers’s life most certainly would have taken a very different turn.
Eleven months later, the CIA was prepared to open the skies without Khrushchev’s permission.
Not content to simply be invisible, someone in Washington decided it would be better for the U-2 to hide in plain sight. When the first detachment of planes and pilots were deployed to the joint US Air Force and Royal Air Force base Lakenheath in England in May, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), issued a press release announcing a program to conduct weather research with the new plane, whose existence had been a secret. The U-2 was now the center, instead, of an elaborate lie. When he heard the news, Johnson was livid, writing in his journal, “A stupid shambles!”34 Fortunately the release generated no attention.
Despite the British initially agreeing to host the first operational U-2 wing, known as Detachment A, the deal became a casualty of an embarrassing attempt at espionage when a British frogman was caught spying on a Soviet ship. Prime Minister Eden and his cabinet got cold feet about the American espionage about to commence from their airspace, and retracted their approval, necessitating a hasty relocation to the NATO base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, where Chancellor Konrad Adenauer gave his stamp of approval.