days at Area 51, back when the U-2 didn’t have an ejection seat. Back when escaping from the U-2 was the pilot’s job, not a mechanical one. Reaching up, Powers unlocked the airplane canopy. It flew off and sailed into the darkness. Instantly, the centrifugal force of the spinning airplane sucked him out into the atmosphere. He was free at last; all he needed to do was deploy his parachute. Then, to his horror, he realized that he was still attached to the airplane by his oxygen hoses. Powers tried to think through his options, but the gforces were too great. There was nothing he could do anymore. His fate was out of his hands. He blacked out.
Nearly two thousand miles away, at a National Security Agency listening post in Turkey, NSA operators eavesdropped on Soviet radar operators at Kyshtym 40 as operators there tried to shoot Gary Powers’s U-2 out of the sky. The NSA had participated in many U-2 missions before. It was their job to equip CIA planes with listening systems, special recorders that gathered electronic intelligence, or ELINT. The NSA operators knew something was wrong the moment they heard a Soviet MiG pilot, the one who was chasing Powers from below, talking to the missile operators at Kyshtym 40. “He’s turning left,” the MiG pilot said, helping the missile operator to target Powers’s exact location. Just a few moments later, NSA operators heard Kyshtym 40 say that Powers’s U-2 had disappeared from their radar screens.
NSA immediately sent a message to the White House marked CRITIC. Meanwhile, in the Soviet command post in Moscow, Russian colonel Alexander Orlov received an urgent report from Siberia: the American spy plane had been shot down. A missile had been fired and the target had disappeared from radar screen. The news was phoned to Khrushchev, who demanded physical proof. The White House sent a message to the CIA that was received by Bissell’s special assistant, Bob King. “Bill Bailey did not come home” was how Richard Bissell learned of the incident, in code.
Over Sverdlovsk, Francis Gary Powers was free-falling through the atmosphere. Somehow, he had detached from the spinning airplane. “My body [was] just falling perfectly free. It was a pleasant, exhilarating feeling,” Powers would later recall. It felt “even better than floating in a swimming pool.” His parachute deployed, and Powers floated into a wide, grassy field. His thoughts during the last ten thousand feet before the ground were sharp and clear. “Everything was cold, quiet, serene. There was no sensation of falling. It was as if I were hanging in the sky.” A large section of the aircraft floated by, “twisting and fluttering like a leaf.” Below him, the countryside looked beautiful. There were forests, lakes, roads, and small villages. The landscape reminded him of Virginia in the spring. As Powers floated down toward Earth, he noticed a small car driving down a dirt road alongside him, as if following his course. Finally, he made contact with the ground. The car stopped and men were helping him. One assisted with his chute. Another man helped him to his feet. A third man reached over to Powers’s survival pack and took his pistol. A crowd of approximately fifty people had gathered around. The men motioned for Powers to follow them. They loaded him into the front seat of a truck and began driving.
The men seemed friendly. One of them offered Powers a cigarette. The emblem on the cigarette pack was that of a dog. Taking it, Powers realized the incredible irony of it all. The brand was Laika, and its emblem was the world’s first space dog. Laika had flown inside Sputnik 2, the second Russian satellite to be launched from the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the CIA target that Powers had photographed a little over an hour before. Gary Powers sat back and smoked the cigarette, noting how remarkably like an American cigarette it was.
With the U-2 spy plane and the SA-2 missile system, the Americans and the Soviets had been playing a game of cat and mouse: constant pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes. Now that game was over. Powers, like the mouse, had been caught. But there was a second, even greater catastrophe in the works. When the White House staff learned Powers’s U-2 had been shot down, they assumed he was dead. This was an assumption based on CIA “facts.” Richard Bissell had personally assured the president that in the unlikely event that an SA-2 missile was able to reach a U-2 and shoot it down, the pilot would not survive. “We believed that if a U-2 was shot down over Soviet territory, all the Russians would have was the wreckage of an aircraft,” Bissell later explained. And so, believing Gary Powers was dead, the White House denied that the airplane was on any kind of espionage mission, in opposition to Khrushchev’s very public accusation. For five days, the White House claimed that Gary Powers had been gathering high-altitude weather data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA.
But Khrushchev had evidence, which he would soon make public. With great bravado, on May 5, he gathered all thirteen hundred members of the Soviet parliament inside the Great Kremlin Palace speaking hall and addressed them from the stage. The United States has been making a fool of Mother Russia, Khrushchev declared. The Americans had been sending spy planes over the Soviet Union for nearly four years. To underscore the significance of what had happened, Khrushchev gave a bold analogy. “Just imagine what would have happened had a Soviet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago or Detroit? That would mean the outbreak of war!” Amid gasps of horror, Khrushchev explained how the Soviet Union had first used diplomatic channels to protest the spy flights. That he had called upon the U.N. Security Council to take action, but nothing was done. Just four days earlier, Khrushchev explained, on May 1, yet another illegal espionage mission had occurred. Only this time the Soviets had succeeded in shooting down the spy plane. The audience broke into wild cheers. Then came the heart of the matter in the form of a question. It was also Khrushchev’s bait. “Who sent this aircraft across the Soviet frontier?” he asked. “Was it the American Commander-inChief who, as everyone knows, is the president? Or was this aggressive act performed by Pentagon militarists without the president’s knowledge? If American military men can take such action on their own, the world should be greatly concerned.” By now, Khrushchev’s audience members were stomping their feet.
Halfway across the world, President Eisenhower continued to have no idea that Gary Powers was alive and had been talking to his captors. All the White House and the CIA knew was that the Soviets had a wrecked U-2 in their possession. Khrushchev had laid a dangerous trap, one in which President Eisenhower got caught. The White House sent its press officer Walter Bonney to the press room to greet journalists and to tell the nation a lie. Gary Powers’s weathersampling airplane was supposed to be flying over Turkey. Instead, it had gone astray. Two days later, on May 7, Khrushchev sprung his trap. “Comrades,” he told the parliament, who’d been gathered for a second revelatory speech. “I must let you in on a secret.” He smiled. “When I made my report two days ago I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane and we also have the pilot who is quite alive and kicking,” Khrushchev said. For the United States, it was a diplomatic disaster of the worst order.
The president was trapped. Were he to deny knowing what his “militarists” were up to, he would appear uninformed by his own military. Were he to admit that he had in fact personally authorized Powers’s flight, it would become clear he’d lied earlier when he claimed the downed airplane had been conducting weather research, not espionage. So despondent was the commander in chief about his untenable position that when he walked into the Oval Office two days later, he told his secretary Ann Whitman, “I would like to resign.” Spying on Russia and defying Soviet airspace was one thing; lying about it after being caught red-handed made the president look like a liar in the eyes of the world. In 1960, American presidents were expected to be truth tellers; there was no public precedent for lying.
Khrushchev demanded an apology from his nemesis. Eisenhower wouldn’t bow. Apologizing would only open Pandora’s box. There were too many overflights to make them transparent. There had been at least twenty-four U-2 flights over Russia and hundreds more bomber overflights by General LeMay. To reveal the dangerous game of cat and mouse that had been going on in secret — at a time when thermonuclear weapons on both sides were ready to fly — would likely shock and frighten people more than having a president who lied. A national poll revealed that more than half of adult Americans believed they were more likely to die in a thermonuclear war with the Russians than of old age. So Eisenhower made the decision to keep the focus on Gary Powers’s flight only and admit that he personally had authorized it. This was “the first time any nation had publicly admitted it was engaged in espionage,” noted Eisenhower’s lead U-2 photo interpreter at the time, Dino Brugioni.
Khrushchev could play the game too. And he did so by making a dangerous, offensive move. By the summer of 1960, he had authorized a Soviet military base to be set up in Cuba. The island, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, was in America’s backyard. Khrushchev’s plan was to put nuclear warheads in striking distance of Washington, DC. In this way, Soviet missiles could be launched from Havana and obliterate the nation’s capital in just twenty-five minutes’ time. Khrushchev was showing Eisenhower that he could play cat and mouse too.
Immediately after Gary Powers had been shot down in his U-2 and picked up by the Soviets, he was flown from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, where he was put in a cell inside Lubyanka Prison, which doubled as headquarters for the KGB. There, his interrogation began. Powers had already decided on a tactic. He’d tell the Russians the truth, but “with definite limitation.” The KGB wanted to know about Area 51. Where had he trained to fly the U-2? Powers was asked. According to Powers’s memoir, he told the KGB that training took place at a base on the West Coast called Watertown. Powers wrote that the Soviets believed Watertown was located in Arizona and that they
