Skunk Works

There was little sympathy for Powers, who was kept incommunicado inside the notorious Lubianka prison for months before enduring a propaganda show trial that heaped embarrassment on the agency and the administration for more than three weeks. Powers was sentenced harshly to ten years at hard labor and served nearly two years before being exchanged in February 1962, for the captured Russian master spy Rudolph Abel, a decision that only enraged many at the CIA even more. “That’s like trading Mickey Mantle for a goddam bullpen catcher,” one of the agency guys exploded when hearing the news.

Had Powers killed himself or not survived the missile hit, he would have come home a hero in a flag-draped wooden box. But coming home haggard and alive, he was greeted like a traitor and was whisked off in great secrecy to a CIA safe house in Virginia to be grilled unmercifully for days about his experiences over and inside Russia. Kelly was summoned to the debriefing to hear the part about the shoot-down and was satisfied that Powers was telling the truth.

Kelly had long ago analyzed photographs of the U-2 wreckage released by the Russians and reported to Bissell his conviction that the airplane had been hit from the rear. “It looks like they knocked off his tail.” At the debriefing, Powers confirmed that fact. Kelly felt sorry for the guy and offered him a job as a U-2 flight test engineer at the Skunk Works. He gratefully accepted and worked for us for eight years, until the mid-1970s, when he went to work for a local TV station as a helicopter traffic reporter. He was killed in a helicopter crash on August 1, 1977. Ten years later the Air Force awarded the former captain a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal well earned if sadly late in arriving.

Kelly long suspected that the electronic counter-measure black box we installed on the tail section of Power’s U-2 may have acted in an opposite way from the one we intended. The box was code-named Granger, and we provided the frequencies used to jam and confuse the enemy missile. These were the same frequencies the Russians used on their defensive radar. But it was possible that the Russians had changed these frequencies by the time we incorporated them into our missile spoofer, so that the incoming missile’s seeker head was on the same frequency as the beams transmitted off our tail and acted as a homing device. A few years later a similar black box was installed in the tails of CIA U-2s piloted by Taiwanese flying highly dangerous missions over the Chinese mainland. One day three of four U-2s were shot down, and the sole survivor told CIA debriefers that he was amazed to be alive because he forgot to turn on his black box. To Kelly, that clinched the case. But we’ll never really know.