Son of U.S. spy marks 50 years since Soviet capture

[H2O3C4Nitrogen]

Son of U.S. spy marks 50 years since Soviet capture

Francis Gary Powers Jr. examines the wreckage of his father's U-2 spyplane at the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow on April 30, 2010. Historians on May 1 will mark the 50th anniversary of the so-called "U-2 incident" in which US pilot Francis Gary Powers flying on a CIA mission was shot down in Soviet Union air space near the town Sverdlovsk.
Photograph by: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images, ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images
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MOSCOW - Fifty years after his father was shot down by the Soviets in an incident that marked a turning point in the Cold War, Francis Gary Powers Jr on Friday visited the wreckage of his dad's U-2 spy plane.


"It's a wonderful display," Powers Jr said while standing in the hall of the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow which holds the wrecked plane and other material commemorating the so-called "U-2 incident" of May 1, 1960.


On that day, Francis Gary Powers, a U.S. pilot carrying out a secret mission for the CIA to photograph Soviet nuclear sites, was shot down near the Urals Mountains city of Sverdlovsk, now called Yekaterinburg.


Powers parachuted out and was captured by the Soviets, who later convicted him of espionage and threw him in prison.


In 1962, Powers was released in a U.S.-Soviet spy swap at the border between East and West Germany, in exchange for America's release of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Powers died in 1997.


The incident was a major embarrassment for the United States, which had denied carrying out spy flights over the Soviet Union, and it derailed efforts to make peace between the two Cold War superpowers.


Russia still considers its shoot-down of the U-2 a triumph and displays the plane's wreckage in its main military museum in Moscow, which also features an expansive World War II exhibition and trophies seized from Georgian forces during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008.


Francis Gary Powers Jr, 44, told reporters that he did not bear any ill will towards present-day Russia, though he conceded that his father had been an "adversary" of the Soviet Union.


"I do not feel that I am an enemy to the people in Russia," said Powers Jr, who was visiting Moscow for a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the U-2 incident.

"I think Russia and America have very good working relations. I have been very well treated since I've been here," he added.

Son of U.S. spy marks 50 years since Soviet capture

 

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Fifty Years Later, Gary Powers and U-2 Spy Plane Incident Remembered

The engine of the downed U-2 plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers on display in Moscow in November 1960
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On May 5, 1960, the world first heard the news that an American aircraft had been shot down over Russia.

Officials in Washington initially claimed the plane was an unarmed weather research plane.

But the aircraft was not engaged in meteorological research, it was a U-2 spy plane deployed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA had been engaged in aerial espionage over Soviet Union since 1956, with missions designed to photograph military bases and other sensitive sites.

The Kremlin had known about the U-2 program all along but had been unable to respond. By 1960, it had developed the technology needed to launch countermeasures. On May 1, it used a newly designed S-75 surface-to-air missile to shoot down a U-2 plane and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

Powers, who had taken off from a U.S. military base near the Pakistani city of Peshawar, made a brief stop at Incirlik air base in Turkey before heading for the Urals. He was downed over Sverdlovsk.

The CIA was certain that Powers was dead. State Department spokesman Lincoln White attempted to portray the flight as a civilian mission that accidentally strayed off course after the pilot's oxygen supplies ran low.

"It is entirely possible the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet airspace," White said.


But as the United States was soon to learn, Powers was not dead. His plane had landed nearly intact, and he had been taken into Soviet custody.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced the capture in an address to the Supreme Soviet, and leveled an angry threat against the United States if it refused to abandon its CIA spy missions.

"Don't you fly into the Soviet Union! Don't you fly into the socialist countries!" Krushchev demanded. "Respect sovereignty and know your limits! If you don't know your limits, we will strike!"

Powers in his special pressure suit for stratospheric flights, in Russian detention in November 1960
Signal Event

The incident went on to become a notorious chapter in the history of the Cold War. But its roots stretched back to at least 1954, when American intelligence workers realized they lacked reliable data on the Soviet Union's offensive arsenal -- particularly its nuclear weapons, and delivery systems like missiles, submarines, and strategic bombers.

Reports from agents in the field were few and far between. So the idea was hatched to use aerial photography as a new way of collecting information.

In order to do that, U.S. intelligence had to solve two problems at once: a) creating a high-altitude plane that could fly beyond the reach of Soviet fighter jets, and b) designing a camera that could capture accurate images from that range.


The camera came first. Edwin Land, the head of the CIA's scientific and technical council, worked with astronomer and optician James Baker to create a camera capable of capturing images from an altitude of 18,000 meters. The camera's resolution was four times greater than that of any aerial cameras at that time. It could capture the image not only of a person on the ground, but also of the rifle in his hands. It also used super-thin film that allowed for as many as 4,000 shots in a single overflight.

Engineer Clarence Johnson followed by creating the U-2, a sleek aircraft with long, glider-like wings that could reach altitudes of 21,000 meters -- far higher than the reach of the Soviet fighters, missiles, and radar of that time. The U-2 had its first test run in 1955 and surveillance flights over the Soviet Union began the next year.

A 'Normal' Guy

Powers, a veteran of the Korean War, was one of the first pilots to conduct the mission, and made numerous flights before he was shot down in 1960. His son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., was born five years after his father's capture in the Soviet Union. He says that for all his adventures, his father was, at heart, a simple man.

"My father was a normal person. He was raised in southwest Virginia, in Appalachian coal country. He was the first of his family to go to college. He wanted to fly airplanes from a very early age, and upon graduation from college in 1950, he enlisted in the Air Force," says Francis Gary Powers Jr. "My father was somewhat shy, an introvert. He didn't like to speak in front of crowds. And that all changed after he was shot down and subjected to a trial in the Soviet Union, and then came home and gave lectures and appearances. But for the most part, he liked to be with himself or very close friends."

After his crash, Powers was interrogated for months by the KGB before being convicted of espionage and sentenced to 10 years in jail. Less than two years later, he was released in a swap for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.

Powers was initially criticized by the U.S. government for failing to destroy the plane's camera and photo records, and for not committing suicide, before the information could fall into Soviet hands. With time, however, Powers was exonerated and went on to work as a test pilot and a traffic reporter. He died in a helicopter accident in 1977 at the age of 48.


Powers' son explains what drove his father as a young man to leave the Air Force and begin working with the CIA.

"He's indicated that, as an Air Force pilot, he liked the duties, he liked flying the airplane, he liked the missions he was on as an Air Force pilot," he says. "However, when he was approached by the CIA to fly a new, top-secret airplane -- doing something patriotic for his country that would also pay better than an Air Force salary -- these were all motivations for him to enlist and volunteer for the U-2 program."


Powers (right) listens to the verdict being pronounced at his Moscow trial for spying.

Mind The Gap

Powers conducted a total of 27 flights over the Soviet Union and communist-bloc states. Powers Jr. says the work of his father and other U-2 pilots had great military strategic significance for the United States because it assured U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and American defense planners that they were not falling behind the Russians militarily -- that there was in fact no "missile gap."

The discovery, historians argue, saved the United States billions of dollars in needless arms costs. Powers Jr., who has co-founded the Cold War Museum dedicated to relics from the U-2 incident and other Cold War events, says the realization also gave the U.S. more leverage in future negotiations with the Soviets.

"As a direct result of the U-2 flights the American government, President Eisenhower knew that there was no missile gap, there was no bomber gap," Powers says. "He knew that the Soviets did not have more weapons in place than we did. And that was used to help with negotiations between Eisenhower and Khrushchev at the time."

Ironically, before the plane carrying Powers was shot down, Eisenhower was forced to keep to himself his knowledge that there was no missile gap, or risk revealing the highly successful U-2 missions.

Khrushchev, for his part, knew about the CIA's U-2 program but was unable to expose it for fear of revealing to his public that the Soviets lacked the technical skill to shoot them down. He later wrote in his memoirs: "No matter how hard we forced the engines of our fighter jets we could not get to those 'flyers' that flew, so to say, laughing at our efforts, morally offending us. This created even more tensions between our countries."

Legendary U.S. broadcaster Walter Cronkite, who covered the story, later recalled that "each man, for his own reasons, needed to protect the secrecy of the missions." With the downing of Powers' plane, that secrecy -- and a pivotal chapter of the Cold War -- was over.


Fifty Years Later, Gary Powers and U-2 Spy Plane Incident Remembered - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty 2010

 

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Downed U-2 pilot's son on own mission in Russia

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV and LYNN BERRY (AP) – 6 hours ago

MOSCOW — Fifty years ago Saturday, U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, a dramatic episode of the Cold War that pushed the rival superpowers closer to confrontation.

Now his son has come to Moscow on a mission of his own: By telling his late father's story, he hopes to help preserve Cold War history and prevent future generations of Russians and Americans from ever again facing the threat of nuclear war.

On May 1, 1960, Powers was in the cockpit of the world's highest-flying plane, concentrated on keeping his course steady to film Soviet military bases far below, when he saw an orange flash all around him. His plane had been hit by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. He parachuted to safety but was quickly captured.

In the months before Powers' plane was downed, Moscow and Washington had been moving cautiously toward a thaw. The U-2 incident shattered these efforts.

It also humiliated U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had to admit that an initial claim by his administration that the plane was on a weather mission was a lie.

"In order to understand the world today you must understand how we got here and we got here through the Cold War," the pilot's 44-year-old son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., said Friday.

"And then we have to understand how this period of time developed and expanded and how close we came to nuclear war, but through diplomacy and some luck we were able to avert it during the Cuban Missile Crisis" of 1962.

The younger Powers joined Russian military historians in speaking to soldiers and cadets at the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow, where the charred wreckage of his father's U-2 spy plane is on display. He had traveled to Russia twice in the 1990s, but this was his first time speaking publicly.

His visit comes as Washington and Moscow try to push the reset button to improve ties, recently signing a deal on reducing their nuclear arsenals.

Powers Jr. has dedicated his professional life to preserving Cold War history. His own museum, affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution and essentially a traveling exhibit since he founded it in 1996, has just found its first permanent home on a former Army communications base outside Washington. He also runs spy tours of the U.S. capital.

His father's fateful mission was the 24th overflight of the Soviet Union in a highly secretive CIA program that was considered vital for national security at a time before spy satellites.

Among many other Soviet secrets, the previous flights had revealed that Soviet long-range bomber and intercontinental nuclear missile programs were not as advanced as feared, allowing the U.S. to avoid an immediate costly buildup of its own forces.

After nearly four years of unsuccessful Soviet attempts to intercept the U-2s flying at about 70,000 feet (over 21,000 meters), the CIA grew confident of the plane's immunity to Soviet defenses. But the Soviets worked desperately to develop higher-flying fighter jets and a powerful new air defense missile.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev received reports about another U.S. spy plane intrusion as he was preparing to attend a Red Square parade on May Day, one of the main Soviet holidays. His son, Sergei, then a young missile designer, told the Associated Press that he discussed this with his father that morning.

"I asked him: Will they shoot it down this time?" the younger Khrushchev recalled. "And he said: What kind of question is that? They will if they don't let the chance slip by."

Khrushchev was standing on Lenin's mausoleum with other Soviet officials watching the parade when the Soviet air defense chief, Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, walked purposefully along the stands, climbed up the stairs and whispered the news about downing the plane into his ear.

When Powers' plane went missing over the Soviet Union and no statements came immediately from the Kremlin, the CIA assumed that neither the pilot nor the spying equipment had survived. On May 3, the U.S. claimed that a high-altitude weather plane had gone missing on a flight over Turkey.

Khrushchev kept a poker face, announcing first that a U.S. spy plane had been downed without saying a word about its pilot. The U.S. stubbornly stuck to its cover story until the Soviet leader announced May 7 that the pilot had been caught and had confessed to spying.

"The Americans, the U.S., for the first time were caught red-handed in espionage activities," Powers Jr. said.

For Khrushchev, the incident provided a long-sought opportunity to punish the United States.

"My father perceived the U-2 flights as not only damaging national security, but even more important as a sign of condescension, a demonstration by the Americans that they could do whatever they want and fly where they liked without consequences," Sergei Khrushchev said in a recent telephone interview. "He decided to take revenge and said: Let's wait a bit and see what the Americans will do."

The scandal led to the collapse of a peace summit in Paris scheduled for mid-May and also ruined hopes for a quick agreement on a nuclear test ban.

"The hawks won, and tensions heightened," said Sergei Khrushchev, now a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

After months of KGB interrogation, Powers was sentenced to 10 years in prison in August 1960. But he was exchanged for KGB spy Col. Rudolph Abel on Feb. 10, 1962.

Back from Soviet captivity, Powers went through debriefings by CIA officers unwilling to believe that his plane had been shot down by a Soviet missile. Some thought Powers had inadvertently descended to a lower altitude, allowing the Soviets to intercept him.

"The American military, the American government just couldn't bring themselves to believe that the Soviets were more advanced than they may have thought," the younger Powers said.

Powers was eventually exonerated. He worked as a test pilot for Lockheed until 1970, then flew a light plane as a traffic reporter and later worked as a pilot for a Los Angeles television station. He died when his helicopter crashed on Aug. 1, 1977.

After the Soviet collapse, Soviet military veterans unveiled previously hidden details of the incident.

It became known that the Soviets accidentally shot down one of their own fighter planes that had been scrambled to intercept Powers' aircraft. Its pilot was killed.

When Powers' plane was still in the air, another Soviet fighter pilot was ordered to intercept the U-2 in a factory-fresh Su-9 fighter carrying no weapons. The pilot was told to ram the American plane at the cost of his own life, but he couldn't locate Powers and landed safely.

Powers Jr. remembered bugging his father with questions on how high he was
flying on May 1, 1960: "He got so tired of me asking this question that he finally looked at me one day and said: Gary, I wasn't flying high enough."


The Associated Press: Downed U-2 pilot's son on own mission in Russia

 

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Fifteen years earlier (August 29, 1945), a Soviet Yak fighter "accidentally" fired upon an American B-29 - the "Hog Wild" - forcing it to land on a Russian airdrome. The B-29 was on a POW supply mission to Soviet-occupied northern Korea.

Although no one was killed in the incident, the 13-man B-29 crew was interned at the Konan POW Camp for sixteen days while high-ranking Soviet and American commanders negotiated for their release.

Bill Streifer & Irek Sabitov
The Flight of the Hog Wild

 

[nightcrawler]

Anyone need clarification:
The U2 plane downed was the only downed U2 plane i.e before U2 plane quiet successfully reckon Soviet Union....But the only U2 flown from Pakistan airbase didn't return home i.e it was the same plane downed by Soviets. So is there any probability that we via China had somehow prewarned Soviets, for then our relations weren't that strained??

 

[ARSENAL6]

THe Russian should have put him in the Gulag or put him in such totured using techniques like water boarding or have him naked and parraded for female soilders to see his errection like Pvt. Lynndie Rana England shown below:

File:AG-10.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

........ then again russian aren't animals or cowards or looser like their
formor cold war counterpart.

 

[Iqbal_Brar]

Anyone need clarification:
The U2 plane downed was the only downed U2 plane i.e before U2 plane quiet successfully reckon Soviet Union....But the only U2 flown from Pakistan airbase didn't return home i.e it was the same plane downed by Soviets. So is there any probability that we via China had somehow prewarned Soviets, for then our relations weren't that strained??

No because Soviet Union and China were not friends.. infact, they were closer to being enemies.. The Soviets almost invaded China in the 1960s... plus later on China started helping America against Soviets..