They gave him another set of clothes, including a double-breasted suit three sizes too large, and took him to the interrogation room, where a dozen men sat waiting, three in uniform, two majors and a colonel. No tape recorder in sight. An interpreter sat next to the prisoner. A stenographer, who looked too old to record anything beyond name and nationality, sat at the end of the long table, a rosette in his lapel.
The prisoner nodded faintly at the array of somber faces. Men well established in state security. They seemed to regard him skeptically, although he hadn’t said a word yet. Maybe they thought it was too good to be true, getting their hands on an American air pirate after four years of overflights in unmarked planes. The prisoner thought ahead to a lifetime of potatoes and cabbage soup. Maybe a short lifetime. They might shoot him in the courtyard, like a movie, to muffled drums.
Bright flash in the sky, the way the aircraft lurched forward like a car jolted in heavy traffic.
The long night of questions began. Name, nationality, type of aircraft, type of mission, altitude, altitude, altitude. The trouble with lies is trying to remember what you said so you can repeat it when they ask again. Mainly he told the truth. He wanted to tell the truth. He wanted these people to like him. A few shrewd lies in selected areas, if only he could be sure which areas were the ones he needed to protect. There had been no preparation for this. No one had told him what to say. He was only a pilot. This is what he tried to get across. He flew a certain route, flipped the mission switches. He was a civilian employee. He recorded instrument readings, drifted off course, corrected back. A boy from the Virginia hill country. Didn’t smoke, drink or chew. Made a plane out of a cigar box for his fifth-grade teacher.
He told them he’d been flying at sixty-eight thousand feet.
Once they examined the wreckage, they would ask him about the destructor unit, which he hadn’t activated because he thought it might detonate before he had time to leave the aircraft. Embarrassing. They would also ask him about the poison needle, which they’d confiscated in Sverdlovsk hours earlier. Yes, the prisoner felt a little sheepish. He was supposed to be dead. Some very important men would be mighty surprised when they learned he was still alive. They’d spent millions to make it convenient for him to die.
When the questions ended they gave him another set of clothes, took him to another room, signaled down with the pants, gave him an injection which he assumed would either help him sleep or make him tell the truth.
They marched him past the desk of the section supervisor into a two-tiered cell block. His cell was eight by fifteen with a solid oak door supported by steel bands. There was an iron bed, a small table and chair, a double-pane window reinforced with wire mesh. He was alone and could hear the Kremlin clock. Already word was beginning to spread of the missing U-2. Bodø, Incirlik, Peshawar, Wiesbaden, Langley, Washington, Camp David. This was exciting in a way. As he undressed for the fifth or sixth time this endless, weary and disconnected day, he noticed the peephole in the door.
The spin was upside down, nose of the aircraft pointing skyward, a little like a dream in which you’re powerless to move.
The next day, instead of torturing him to get some answers they liked, they sent him on a tour of Moscow.
Aleksei Kirilenko was present for the second round of questions. A package of Laika filters sat on the table in front of him. There were ten men in the room. The questions rolled forth. The prisoner, called Francis Gary Powers, was sincerely telling the truth about half the time, just as sincerely lying the other half. So Alek estimated.
No, he had not flown over Soviet territory before.
No, the CIA had not given him a list of underground agents he could contact here.
No, he had never been stationed at Atsugi in Japan.
What about the plane?
Yes, the plane had once been based in Atsugi.
They’d given the prisoner a peasant haircut. It suited him well, Alek thought. He had a large square head, strong features, the worried look of a rustic crossing streets in the capital.
No, it did not occur to the prisoner that by violating Soviet frontiers he was endangering the upcoming summit conference.
The thinking in the Center was that Khrushchev would not reveal that Francis Gary Powers was alive and in custody until the American cover story was released in all its hopeful and pathetic variations. (An unarmed weather plane is missing somewhere near Lake Van in Turkey after the civilian pilot reported trouble with the oxygen system.) They would add or subtract details as need dictated. But they were counting on a dead man either way.
Then the Premier would mount the rostrum in the Great Hall, wearing a modest cluster of medals on the breast pocket of his business suit, and announce the interesting news, with photographs, with fitting gestures, his voice carrying in bursts over the delegates, Presidium members, diplomatic corps and international press.
Comrades, he would begin, I must let you in on a secret. The broad smile, the choppy gesturing hand. We have the pilot of the innocent weather plane you have all been hearing about. We have the wreckage of the plane. Shot down by our missiles two thousand kilometers inside Soviet territory. The shadow in the sky. Sent to photograph military and industrial sites. We have the camera and rolls of film. Waving the spy photos, making jokes about the air samples the plane had allegedly been sent to gather. Yes, yes, Francis Gary Powers is alive and kicking, safe and sound, despite the plane’s destructor unit, despite the poison meant to end his life, and the pistol with silencer, and the long knife. Pausing to drink some water. Seven thousand rubles in Soviet currency. Did they send him all this way to exchange old rubles for new ones?
Laughter, applause.
Alek looked forward to the theater that Khrushchev would make of the U-2 affair. The summit was scheduled for Paris in two weeks. Eisenhower’s moral leadership turns to shit.
But as the questions continued for hours, then days, he began to feel uneasy. The men in uniform, the GRU, kept coming back to the question of altitude. Didn’t they know how high the plane was flying when they hit it? Had it been an accidental hit with a haywire missile? Had he taken the plane down to reignite the engine after a flameout? Is that how they hit it? There were rumors they hadn’t hit it at all. Had the plane been sabotaged by the CIA to wreck the summit?
Francis Gary Powers repeatedly claimed he was at maximum altitude when he felt the impact and saw the flash. Sixty-eight thousand feet. It seemed the GRU thought he was lying. They believed U-2s went much higher and they knew Soviet missiles could not reach these altitudes.
Why would they believe the plane flew higher than the pilot contended?
Because Oswald told them? Surely they would have strong corroboration from other sources. In any case this affair tended to strengthen the boy’s claim to authority. He’d evidently been right about the extreme altitude the plane could reach. He was also the one person in the USSR who had inside working knowledge of the U-2, who was American like Powers, who could measure his coun tryman’s responses and telltale inflections, who could evaluate what he said about ground personnel, base security and so on.
Lee H. Oswald was taking shape in Kirilenko’s mind as some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events.
Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all.
Alek had never been to the United States. Everything he’d learned about the country made him wary of its impulsiveness, its shallow self-assurance. It is a nursery school of a culture, startled, dribbling, forgetful, compared to what we have here, the massive treasure of a history that endures in the souls of the people.
Cigarettes made him patriotic. He was smoking again after six years of nibbling tiny things.
At least Oswald looked American. Francis Gary Powers would eventually stand in the dock in the chandeliered courtroom of the Hall of Columns in his doltish haircut and ridiculous oversized clothes, or undersized clothes, looking like some woodchopper from the Balkans.
Citizen Oswald came to town wearing his dark tie, cashmere sweater and gray flannel suit. It was nice to be back in Moscow.
They led him into the room some minutes after the interrogation had begun. He sat against the wall, fifteen feet behind the prisoner, with a security man in plainclothes. He had a notepad and pencil.
The news, of course, was everywhere, dominating the press and the air waves. The U-2 was the biggest thing in years. A tremendous clamor of righteous Soviet voices, historic American lies, damaged relations. He listened to Francis Gary Powers trying to handle the questions of Roman Rudenko, who had been one of the chief prosecutors of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. He thought a prosecutor of Nazis was a slightly dramatic touch for someone like Francis Gary Powers. The prisoner sounded like an ordinary guy. A coal miner’s son from some hollow in the boondocks. Paid to fly a plane.
For three solid hours of questions and answers, Oswald stared at the back of the head of Francis Gary Powers.
Then he went to the Chess Pavilion in Gorky Park to see a display of the plane’s battered fuselage and tail section. The wings were mounted in the center of the room. The pilot’s survival gear, personal effects and signed confession were in glass cases. There were photographs of the pilot under a sign reading POWERS FRANCIS GARY THE PILOT OF THE SHOT AMERICAN PLANE. The crowd was in a holiday mood. Oswald wondered if Powers played chess. It would be a nice gesture if Alek let him into the cell to play a game of chess with Francis Gary Powers.
His plainclothes escort took him back to Lubyanka. Alek and a uniformed guard led him into the cell block. The floor was carpeted. Powers’ cell was on the lower level. The guard slid the cover off the spyhole on the door. Oswald looked into the cell. The prisoner sat at a small table, drawing lines on a piece of paper. Oswald thought he might be making a calendar. Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it’s a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.
There was something gentle about Powers. He was the type Oswald could get along with in the barracks. He raised his head a moment and looked directly at the spyhole as if he sensed someone watching. Paid to fly a plane and incidentally to kill himself if the mission failed. Well we don’t always follow orders, do we? Some orders require thought, ha ha. He wanted to call to the prisoner through the door,
You were right; good for you; disobey.
The prisoner wore a checked shirt buttoned to the top. He waved at a fly and returned to his piece of paper. He seemed to toil at those lines he was drawing. What is the Russian for firing squad?
Alek led Oswald to the interrogation room, where they sat alone in the faint stink of ground-out cigarettes.
“Now you’ve seen him as close as we can get you. Tell me. Does he look familiar?”
“No.”
“Do you know him from Atsugi?”
“They wear helmets and faceplates. There are armed guards around them all the time. I never got a good look at a pilot.”
“From the bars perhaps. The nightclubs.”
“I don’t recall him at all.”
“Did you know they had flights from Peshawar?”
“Where is that?”
“Pakistan. Where this flight originated.”
“No.”
“Powers is telling us many lies. What do you think?”
“He’s confused. I think he’s mainly truthful. He wants to survive.”
“He says sixty-eight thousand feet, maximum altitude. You say eighty thousand, ninety thousand.”
“I could be wrong.”
“I don’t think you’re wrong.”
“I could definitely be mistaken.”
“You sounded very sure. You described the pilot’s voice. There is reason to believe you were correct.”
“Eighty is pretty damn high. Maybe I thought I heard eighty but it was sixty-eight. I think Powers is telling the truth, based on the type fellow he seems to be.”
“What type is that?”
“Basically honest and sincere. Cooperating to the best of his ability. What will happen to him?”
“Too early to say.”
“Will they put him on trial?”
“This is almost certain.”
“Will they execute him?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’ll get the firing squad, won’t he?”
“This is not
correct
to assume.”
“That’s the way it’s done, isn’t it? They shoot them here.”
Smiling. “Not so much anymore.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“Not a good idea.”
“I could lecture him on the virtues of life in the Soviet Union. Making radios for the masses.”
“The masses need radios so they won’t be masses anymore.”
“I have an idea I’ve been thinking.” He paused to assemble the dramatic words. “I want to go to Patrice Lumumba Friendship University.”
“A wonderful place no doubt. But it happens to be in Moscow and I don’t think this is the right time for you to live here.”
“Alek, how do I get ahead? I want to study. The plant is dull and regimented. Always go to meetings, always read the propaganda. Everything is the same. Everything tastes the same. The newspapers say the same things.”
“All right, this much. We will think about further schooling for Lee H. Oswald.”
“I will wait to hear from you. I depend on it.”
“Tell me, personally, for my own enlightenment, is Francis Gary Powers a typical American?”
It occurred to Oswald that everyone called the prisoner by his full name. The Soviet press, local TV, the BBC, the Voice of America, the interrogators, etc. Once you did something notorious, they tagged you with an extra name, a middle name that was ordinarily never used. You were officially marked, a chapter in the imagination of the state. Francis Gary Powers. In just these few days the name had taken on a resonance, a sense of fateful event. It already sounded historic.