Operation Overflight (51 page)

I have omitted only a few particulars, and in fairness to the reader I will state their nature.

I have not included the actual altitude of the U-2. By now it may be presumed that Russia, Cuba, and Communist China all know it. Yet, just on the chance that it isn't known and that the life of a pilot might be placed in jeopardy, it will go unmentioned.

I have not itemized the number of overflights, nor related what intelligence information was received. My reasoning on this matter remains the same as when I first withheld this information from the Russians. Having held it back through many hours of interrogation, I have no intention of giving it to them now for the price of a book.

I have not mentioned certain phases of my training, both in the Air Force and in the agency, which might still be in use and thus beneficial to an enemy.

I have not included the names of other pilots, agency personnel, or representatives of Lockheed and the many other companies involved in the U-2 program. It is not my business to “blow their cover.”

And I have omitted some matters which I feel could affect present national security.

These are the only things excluded.

In the fall of 1969, as the book was nearing completion, I did something else I had wanted to do for a very long time. I wrote a letter.

Dear Zigurd:

It's been a long time since I last saw you standing in the window at Vladimir as I was being led away. As happy as I was to be leaving, there was a great sadness in me that you were remaining behind those bleak walls.

I'm sure you've heard that I was exchanged for Soviet spy Colonel Rudolf Abel. You probably have not heard much of what transpired after my release.

One of the things happening to me now is that I am writing my life story, to be published in the spring of next year. The research and reviewing of my journal and diary brought back memories, many of which I have tried to forget.

I am sending this letter to you in care of your parents, at the address you gave me the night before I left Vladimir. If you are allowed to correspond, I would like very much to hear from you. If the above-mentioned proves to be a good address, I will send you a copy of my book as soon as it is published. It will bring you up to date on the many things that have happened since I last saw you.

I hope your parents are well and happy. It would please me if you would convey to them my best wishes and my sincerest appreciation for the aid and kindness they showed me while we were at Vladimir.

Sincerely yours,

Francis Gary Powers

Some weeks later I received the return receipt I had requested. The handwriting was familiar; it was signed by Zigurd. Although to date there has been no reply, I am immensely relieved to know that he is alive and apparently no longer in prison.

A
sked during a television interview what lessons for the future could be drawn from the U-2 crisis, James Hagerty, President Eisenhower's press secretary, replied, “Don't get caught.” Similarly questioned during an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Christian Herter phrased his response only slightly differently, “Not to have accidents.”

While not wishing to contradict such eminent spokesmen, I would like to respectfully submit that if these are the only lessons we've learned, we're in trouble.

On May 1, 1970, a decade will have passed since “the incident over Sverdlovsk.” Ten years. That's a long time to avoid facing the truth. For better or worse, the decade has been one of change, sometimes peacefully effected, often otherwise. Scarcely a government in the world remains the same as in I960. During this period the national administration of the United States has changed four times, the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency an equal number. It is no longer possible to suppress the facts of the U-2 episode with the excuse that they are still classified, not when time has made it all too apparent that in this case “classified” is only a synonym for “politically embarrassing,” and even that excuse has lost validity.

Hopefully, the passage of time has given us some perspective. Hopefully, too, we've matured enough in our attitudes to accept a few hard realities.

One is that we blundered, and badly, not only during the U-2 “crisis,” but long before it became a crisis.

We were unprepared for the possibility that a plane might go down in Russia. Yet that possibility had existed from the start of the program. A rocket wasn't needed. A simple malfunction could have done it. That possibility should have been taken into consideration. It wasn't.

We used a plane of which almost every part carried some indication of national identity. We loaded it with equipment which, should even a portion be discovered, would constitute conclusive proof of espionage intent. And we placed aboard it an explosive device insufficient to the task of destroying all evidence.

If the intention was simply to render inoperative certain parts of the equipment, fine. But in this case the agency should have
kept those limitations in mind. It should also have considered the possibility that in some situations even this might not be possible. Instead, if President Eisenhower's memoirs are correct, even the President was led to believe that “in the event of mishap the plane would virtually disintegrate.”

A lesson learned? According to accounts of the
Pueblo's
seizure, it carried “hundreds of pounds” of classified documents, with no simple means of destroying them in an emergency. In the case of the
Pueblo,
however, there was at least the excuse of a reason for complacency—that the ship was to remain supposedly invulnerable in international waters. With the U-2, we lacked that excuse.

We manned the U-2 with pilots who had never been adequately briefed on what to do if captured. The word “capture” did not appear in their contracts, it did not come up in their discussions. As for me, it was mentioned only once in a briefing, and then only after I had made a number of flights over Russia and only because I had brought it up. We should have talked about it,
planned
for it as for any other possible eventuality. Ignoring a problem does not solve it.

Perhaps it was felt best, psychologically, that such fears never arise. If so, apparently both the occupant of the White House and many in the upper echelons of the CIA succumbed to this psychological conditioning also, inasmuch as they were as unprepared as the pilots.

And remained so, even while evidence accumulated that the day was rapidly approaching when we would no longer be invulnerable to missiles at our altitude.

It is a bad intelligence practice to fail to consider all available evidence. Yet, throughout the U-2 crisis, there are indications that this is exactly what happened, not once, but again and again.

If the pilots were under orders to kill themselves to evade capture—as so many, including even the President, apparently believed—then the pilots should have been apprised of this fact. In which case, we should have been required to carry the needle, not given a choice in the matter; and use should have been declared mandatory, not optional, the briefing officer making definite exactly what was expected of us. While I can only speak for one of the pilots, I know that had I been told this I would have been ready to obey those orders, or never taken the flight.

As pilots, we were not only unprepared for capture, we were
ill
-prepared, in many ways a much worse situation. The advice “You may as well tell them everything, because they're going to
get it out of you anyway” was, under the circumstances, bad. Perhaps the agency couldn't have foreseen this. Brainwashing, drugs, and torture having been the lot of prisoners in the past, it may have been wise to prepare us for the worst. All I know, however, is that had I followed these instructions, the damage to the United States would have been monumental.

Even more serious, in many ways, were the misconceptions I carried with me. From the American press, from my Air Force indoctrinations, from the attitude adopted by the agency, I had been led to believe that Russian intelligence was nearly omnipotent, that the KGB had agents everywhere, that “they probably know more about you than you know about yourself.”

These misconceptions, as it turned out, were far more dangerous than the advice I had been given. Because I believed the Russians knew a great deal more than they probably did, I may well have told them far more than was necessary. That it was a great deal less than our orders called for does not minimize its seriousness. Overrating an enemy can be as much a mistake as underrating him.

At no point in my agency training was I instructed on how to handle myself during an interrogation. In my CIA “clearance” the agency justified this with the explanation that we were hired as pilots, not espionage agents. This was true. But it ignores the fact that, though pilots, we were potentially in as much danger of capture as any covert agent. We should have been briefed—as to what tricks to expect, as to tricks we could in turn use to avoid answering a question, as to how best to withstand hour after hour of continuous interrogation. While such briefings, I realize, wouldn't have prepared me for all eventualities, they would have helped immensely, if only to give me a realistic idea of what was possible under the right conditions. Instead, I had to improvise. It worked out better than I expected. But it could have gone very badly.

Much has been written about the mistakes made in pulling from the files a cover story which did not fit the facts, then maintaining it even when it was obviously discredited. In all this criticism, one very serious error has never been brought out. And that is that the pilots themselves were never informed as to what the cover story would be. I not only hadn't been briefed, I wasn't even sure a cover story would be issued. It may well be that no cover story would have been adequate to the situation; the one I improvised fell apart the moment my maps and rolls of film were brought in. But it would have helped to have some idea about the story being told in the world outside.

While we overrated the Russians in many ways, we also underrated them in the one area in which they are undisputed masters: propaganda.

In
Waging Peace,
President Eisenhower wrote: “Of those concerned, I was the only principal who consistently expressed a conviction that if ever one of the planes fell in Soviet territory a wave of excitement amounting almost to panic would sweep the world, inspired by the standard Soviet claim of injustice, unfairness, aggression, and ruthlessness. The others, except for my own immediate staff and Mr. Bissell, disagreed. Secretary Dulles, for instance, would say laughingly, 'If the Soviets ever capture one of these planes, I'm sure they will never admit it. To do so would make it necessary for them to admit also that for years we had been carrying on flights over their territory while they, the Soviets, had been helpless to do anything about the matter.'”

Secretary Dulles made a bad guess. But he could have been right. The worst mistake is not that he guessed wrongly, but that we were unprepared for any other possibility. Not only that, but even after the receipt of contrary evidence, we ignored it because it did not fit our preconceptions. Instead, we engaged in wishful thinking, as if wishing would make it so.

There were, I'm quite sure, many in Washington who hoped that the pilot was dead. That is, I realize, a strong assertion, but after ten years it seems foolish any longer to deny the obvious. The cover story, and our whole official attitude in the week of May 1 through May 7, was predicated upon this assumption. Yet, from the beginning, the possibility that I was alive existed and was ignored.

I was amazed to discover, on my return to the United States, that on May 5—
two days
before Khrushchev's announcement of my capture—the State Department received a telegram from Ambassador Thompson in Moscow warning of a rumor that the pilot was alive and a captive of the Russians. It was an unconfirmed report, the drunken bragging of a Soviet official at a diplomatic reception. But surely someone in our intelligence apparatus should have been alerted. Instead we continued to embellish the cover story, walking blindly into Khrushchev's trap.

It was a decidedly one-sided chess game, Khrushchev calling the moves, the U.S. ignoring the pieces on the board.

I now believe that the story that I had descended to a lower altitude was a controlled leak. I also believe that some person or persons within the agency, desperate to justify the decision to make
the flight, helped perpetuate it. If the aircraft had descended to a lower altitude and then was shot down, it would have been bad luck, therefore, no one in the agency could be blamed.

The tenacity with which human beings, and governments, can stick to a fixed notion, even in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary, is quite incredible. It is especially so when manifesting itself in an organization whose task includes the collection and evaluation of intelligence.

Even after I was brought to trial there were those in the agency who continued to hope that it wasn't Powers but someone else who had stood in that prisoner's dock.

Looking back, I now suspect that the decision to make me a scapegoat was due, at least in part, to someone's pique that, by being alive, I had proven them wrong.

There were other reasons, and although I am admittedly less than an impartial spectator, I think those reasons should be examined for whatever insight they may give into the U-2 episode.

Though the phrase was not coined until a much later date and under a different set of circumstances, in a very real sense the “credibility gap” was born of the contradictory official statements which appeared after the downing of the U-2.

The gap between what the government knew and what it told the American public had, of course, existed for a long time. But for the first time the American people realized they had been lied to, had been intentionally deceived by their own government. Even worse, the government had been caught in those lies, and made to seem a fool in the eyes of the world. One lingering after-effect was a distrust of government pronouncements, as evidenced by the public's refusal to accept the Warren Commission Report, statements on the Vietnam war, the official version of the Green Berets' case.