Skunk Works

Powers took off at dawn from Peshawar, Pakistan, on Sunday, May 1, 1960. Flying across the Soviet border for the first time from Pakistan was another way to catch the Russians napping. And for the first three hours into the flight the plan worked perfectly. He flew over Tyuratam without difficulty then changed course and headed south toward Sverdlovsk, on the same flight plan as Knutson’s only weeks earlier. As he approached the Sverdlovsk complex, Powers was suddenly blinded by a brilliant orange flash and felt an explosion from behind. His right wing dropped and he began pitching down. His instincts told him his tail had been hit as the airplane began a steep nosedive. In horror he saw his wings rip off. His pressure suit inflated, squeezing him in a viselike grip, and his faceplate began to frost. He glanced at the altimeter, saw he was at thirty-four thousand feet and falling fast, and almost panicked realizing he was pinned by the centrifugal force up against the instrument panel. If he hit the ejection lever, he’d be blasted out of the cabin while leaving both his pinned legs behind. He struggled to push back in his seat and manually open the canopy. He unhitched his safety harness, and as the wingless fuselage spun upside down, Francis Gary Powers fell free.

As his chute opened, Powers was startled to see another chute opening in the distance. Whatever hit him had also hit a Soviet pilot as well. He landed hard in a farmer’s field. Several villagers came running to him. They weren’t unfriendly and had no idea he was an American because he was too stunned to even say a word while they conversed among themselves excitedly. They finally helped him to a truck and drove him off. He would later learn they were driving him to the local airport, assuming he was a Russian pilot and not knowing what else to do with him. At some point, though, the truck was stopped by the militia. The police grabbed Powers and took him away.

It would later be determined that a Soviet missile battery had launched in shotgun fashion fourteen SA-2s at the approaching U-2—an indication that they were waiting for his arrival. One missile had knocked down a Russian fighter trying to intercept Powers, and the shock waves from the exploding missiles had knocked off the U-2’s tail.

Kelly received the call at home, well after midnight, and he grimly arrived at the Skunk Works that Monday morning and assembled a group of us. “We got nailed over Sverdlovsk by an SA-2. That’s that. We’re dead.”

It was the first time in history that a ground-to-air missile had shot down an airplane, and all of us assumed, knowing how fragile the U-2 was and at the height it was probably flying when it was hit, that the pilot had been killed. The CIA immediately had NASA launch a preplanned cover story that one of its weather research planes, flying out of Turkey, had strayed off course and was missing after the pilot indicated he was having oxygen problems. Cagey Khrushchev waited for Eisenhower to arrive in Paris for the summit before announcing that the Russians had shot down a U-2 spy plane. The administration called that a “fantastic allegation.” Eisenhower denied spy flights, and then on the eve of the summit Khrushchev announced that the pilot had been captured and confessed his spy mission. The pilot was named Francis Gary Powers.

Eisenhower was humiliated and forced to admit the U-2 spy operation, which he said was justified since Khrushchev had recently turned down his Open Skies proposal. To mollify the Russians and save the summit, Ike announced we would end the flights, which he had privately done anyway. But when Khrushchev demanded an apology, the summit collapsed and Eisenhower went back home.

Inside the Skunk Works we were no less stunned that Powers had survived than the CIA and the White House. The agency was livid at Powers for not dying in the hit or taking his own life, even though using the poison needle that had replaced the cyanide pill in a pilot’s kit was entirely optional. But some of the more macho patriots around the Skunk Works agreed with their opposite numbers thundering around at the CIA that Powers was a damned traitor for not self-destructing. And they meant it! Because he was chicken, the president endured a terrible international humiliation. Power’s survival also embarrassed Dulles and Bissell, who had assured the president, presumably in good faith, that not much would be left of a U-2 or a pilot if shot down by a missile. Powers was also faulted for not pulling a seventy-second delayed explosive charge before bailing out that would have destroyed the film and cameras and kept them out of the hands of the KGB.