DonHollway.com: Mayday for the U-2

	Mayday for the U-2
	by Don Hollway
	Originally published in AVIATION, January 1994

After a Russian missile made “just one more” U.S. spy plane flight the last, American pilot Gary Powers found himself facing KGB interrogators in Moscow while Dwight Eisenhower faced possible embarrassment at home.

For an interrogation chamber in Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison, headquarters of the KGB, the room was surprisingly roomy and well-lit. The prisoner bore a freshly-blackened eye and, to replace his confiscated flight uniform, a shabby, too-large suit, pants without a belt and shoes without laces to prevent him hanging himself. He was brought in and seated at one end of the long table, the interpreter on one side and the KGB interrogators on the other.

The stenographer entered the date—1 May 1960—and, as the questions and answers began, started typing:

What is your name?
Francis Gary Powers.
What is your nationality?
American.
What type of aircraft were you flying?
A Lockheed U-2.
Why did you fly over Russia?

Powers had insisted he'd simply wandered off course and crossed into the Soviet Union unintentionally. But he'd been shot down over Sverdlovsk, over 1300 miles from the border, and his captors had recovered a wealth of incriminating evidence from his person and the wreckage of his aircraft: detailed flight maps, a Department of Defense/Department of the Air Force ID, Russian rubles, gold francs, a hunting knife, a silenced .22 pistol, and a seemingly innocuous pin found in the prisoner’s pocket. Powers warned his captors to handle this last with extreme caution.

Closer examination revealed the pin to be a sheath for an even smaller, extremely sharp needle—tipped with curare.

In 1956 1st Lt. Francis Gary Powers, son of a Virginia coal miner, had been a 26-year-old Air Force fighter pilot flying F-84G Thunderjets. He excelled at aerial gunnery, had training in photo work and atomic-weapon delivery, and a corresponding Top Secret rating. But he’d graduated from high school too late for World War II and from Air Cadet training too late for Korea, and still felt he had something to prove.

On Soviet Aviation Day 1955 Western observers in Moscow had watched awestruck as formation after formation of new B-4 “Bison” bombers thundered overhead. Washington then had no means to dispel such fear of a “Bomber Gap”; despite secret, short-range incursions by USAF fighters and bombers, which frequently did not return, the Soviet interior was as unknown to America as the New World to medieval Europe. President Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” policy, an effort to bare both countries’ military programs to international scrutiny, had been rebuked by Kremlin strongman Nikita Khrushchev. The CIA issued a requirement for an airplane that could overfly Russia, with or without Soviet permission.

In answer Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” produced a jet-powered sailplane weighing just six tons empty, with a fuselage barely half the length of the wingspan, wrapped around a tremendously powerful Pratt & Whitney J57 jet engine. The “Q-bay” below and behind the cockpit carried a massive “Hycon B” camera with six times the resolution of a human eye, able to shoot a newspaper page from 13 miles up or record a view 750 miles across on Mylar film no thicker than plastic wrap. The project was codenamed “Aquatone,” and the plane “Idealist.” The Lockheed designers called it the “Angel,” but its official designation was “Utility-2.”

The CIA offered crack fighter pilot Francis Gary Powers $30,000 a year—today worth well over three times that amount—to fly their top-secret bird higher than anyone had ever flown before. Over Soviet Russia.

Where did you learn to fly the U-2?
In the United States.
Where in the United States?
A base on the West Coast.
What is it called?
Watertown.

To insiders Watertown Strip, in the remote Nevada desert, was known simply as “the Ranch.” A 1956 press release had admitted its existence, as well as that of the U-2, under the cover of “upper atmosphere research.”

The only research Powers and the rest were doing was in stretching the U-2’s flight envelope. In thin stratospheric air the margin between its top and stall speeds amounted to just a few knots, known to the pilots as the “coffin corner.” The J57, capable of just 6% of its sea-level thrust, became susceptible to flameouts, necessitating a 30,000-foot dive to achieve a restart. And all that lift made the plane reluctant to land; it tended to porpoise just above runway unless the pilot put it into a stall. Then, unless he’d perfectly balanced his fuel load, the plane would tip over on its bicycle landing gear, dig in one of the wingtip skids and ground-loop. The previous class had suffered a fatality when a pilot miscalculated his approach and crashed on the strip.

In spite of that, or maybe because of it, Powers and the rest loved the U-2. It could take off in less than 1000 feet, climb at better than 45° to 80,000 feet, and maintain that altitude for 4000 miles. Once, from high above the Colorado River in Arizona, Powers could see the California coast from Monterey halfway down Baja. They made it daily practice to exceed the international altitude record, set in 1955 by a British Canberra at 65,889 feet, though of course the U-2 flights weren’t publicized. “There was only one thing wrong with flying higher than any other man had ever flown,” he recalled later. “You couldn’t brag about it.”

Eisenhower had the same problem. He could imagine the headlines in the New York Times—let alone Pravda—if the world discovered benevolent Uncle Sam was violating Soviet airspace. The CIA assured him the plane had two or three years before Soviet antiaircraft technology caught up with it, that in the unlikely event of an accident the Russians would be left with no proof of American duplicity: neither the U-2 nor its pilot would survive. In fact, arguing it would never be so safe again, the CIA advocated an initial mission over Moscow itself.

When were the first U-2s shipped to Europe?
I have no idea.
When did the first U-2 overflight take place?
I have no idea.

On 4 July 1956, a U-2A out of Wiesbaden, Germany, overflew both Moscow and Leningrad. The CIA had hoped the U-2—with wings so long they reflected primarily high-frequency, rather than radar, waves—would prove immune not only to attack but to detection. But National Security Agency listening posts in Europe could track the plane’s progress, as measured by the activation of Soviet radar stations.

Unable to admit American planes (conceivably carrying nuclear weapons) could overfly the motherland at will, Khrushchev did not publicize the incident. He did, however, make his feelings known to Eisenhower. Neither man deluded himself that was the end of it. For his part Eisenhower opted to approve further overflights only on a contingency basis; Khrushchev issued an immediate directive to his armed forces: “Improve rockets! Improve fighter planes!”

What is your unit called?
Detachment 10-10.
Where is it based?
Incirlik.
Where is Incirlik?
Adana, Turkey.

Powers and his squadron mates, now given the CIA redesignation “Detachment 10-10,” found southern Turkey remarkably like southern Nevada, except more remote. In August ’56 Incirlik was primarily a refueling stop for USAF planes passing through to more important destinations. Housed in an isolated hangar away from the main base, 10-10 kept up the pretense of weather research but functioned as a combined USAF/CIA operation, with an Air Force colonel commanding officer, a CIA exec, and suspiciously tight security.

At 70,000 feet U-2s could see over 300 miles into the USSR. From Incirlik they ranged eastward as far as Pakistan, as far west as Albania. During the Suez Crisis of ’56 they monitored the troop movements of America’s allies, Britain and France—a secret which, if discovered and made known by the Soviets, might rupture the NATO alliance—and Powers himself overflew the first daylight fighting in Sinai.

How many missions did you fly along the border?
One or two in 1956, maybe six to eight in 1957, ten to fifteen each in 1958 and 1959, and several in 1960.
How many flights have you made over Russia?
This was my first.
How many?
Just one.

Actually Powers made his first overflight—the first out of Incirlik—in late 1956, to determine Soviet intentions in the wake of the Hungarian uprising. He remembered later, “There was no abrupt change in the topography, yet the moment you crossed the border you knew the difference.” In years ahead he would come to know the feeling well.

No sooner did U-2s reveal the myth of the Bomber Gap (it was now thought the Bison formations were one and the same, just circling out of sight and back again) than the Russians successfully fired an ICBM and a pair of Sputniks. From on high U-2 pilots had a spectacular view of night launches lighting up the cloudscape for hundreds of miles in all directions. The Bomber Gap became the Missile Gap.

When the pilots were asked to extend their contracts another year they insisted their families be allowed to join them at Incirlik. Powers’ wife Barbara, much to the annoyance of his superiors, had already followed him to Athens, where he’d told her he was stationed. The Agency had stashed her in an out-of-the-way job at Wheelus AFB, Tripoli. The Powers marriage, never solid, was not strengthened by close proximity. There were problems with alcohol and extramarital affairs; an ugly scene in a Tripoli hotel room. But Powers hoped moving her to Adana would save their union.

The pilots’ tours were extended, a year at a time, in ’57, ’58, and ’59. U-2s alerted Strategic Air Command to 17,000 new potential targets and revealed the Missile Gap to be as much a Soviet propaganda coup as the Bomber Gap. Many Soviet rocket launches failed explosively and production was proceeding at nowhere near the pace claimed by Moscow; by late 1959 the Russians still didn’t have a single operational ICBM. Eisenhower, however, couldn’t dispell American fears without divulging violations of Soviet airspace. It was a crazy, Cold War situation: neither side happy with the continuing overflights, neither side able to stop them. Neither side could even admit the existence of the U-2.

Publicly both sides attempted to reach détente. In 1959 Khrushchev visited the USA and Vice-President Nixon the USSR, and a major summit was scheduled for Paris in May 1960. There Eisenhower hoped to reach a major arms-limitation agreement—his crowning achievement in two terms as President, almost guaranteeing a Republican victory in the 1960 election and his own place in history. To avoid sullying this rosy picture he forbade further U-2 missions over Russia.

Why was this flight flown so close to the summit meetings? Was this a deliberate attempt to sabotage the talks?

“Operation Overflight” was nearly through. With the impetus of Soviet competition America’s own space program was moving ahead, if only in fits and starts; by the end of the year, it was hoped, all overflights of Russia could be made by spy satellites. The Air Force (which had turned down Lockheed’s original design) was now angling for control of all U-2 operations; the KGB had compromised the German detachment, forcing the agency to move those pilots to Incirlik.

The CIA, however, wanted a last look at suspected new ICBM sites under construction in the areas of the northern Ural Mountains and White Sea; at Tyuratam, Sverdlovsk and especially Plesetsk, 600 miles north of Moscow, where it believed ICBMs already operational. At that latitude the angle of sunlight allowed effective photography only from April though July; if a U-2 didn’t make the flight now it would have to wait until 1961.

Eisenhower would allow only two overflights, in April 1960, well in advance of the Paris summit. The first, on the 9th, received surprisingly little attention from Moscow. (It’s possible Khrushchev, who’d been extoling Eisenhower’s virtues to the Communist élite, was humiliated before his still-considerable Kremlin opposition by this latest example of American deceit and withdrew from public view to consider his options.)

Russian silence encouraged the CIA, which seemed determined to make its last mission a big one.To compensate for the loss of the German operation and to increase coverage of Red China the agency had set up bases in Taiwan, at Atsugi in Japan, Lahore and Peshawar in Pakistan, and Bodö in Norway. Now they proposed to send a U-2 completely across the USSR, Peshawar to Bodö. And they wanted Francis Gary Powers to fly it.

By that time Powers was the most experienced U-2 pilot in the world; for him overflights had become routine. In the beginning he’d worried about the possibility of being shot down. Horror stories of Korean War POWs—brainwashing and torture—had led the Agency to furnish U-2 pilots with cyanide capsules and the infamous poison needle, hidden in a bisected silver dollar. Powers never took them along. Like the other pilots, he understood their use as optional, not mandatory.

Ironically, as the threat increased Powers had become more and more cavalier. The morning of his departure for Peshawar he even packed his wallet, with an assortment of American, German and Turkish money, for his layover in Norway; his wife packed him lunch for the shuttle flight to Pakistan. Their main concern was whether he’d be back in Incirlik in time for a party on Sunday night, the first of May, in honor of the base communications officer, who was leaving for the States. The overflight was scheduled for Thursday, 28 April; Powers figured he’d be back in plenty of time.

Bad weather along the planned route caused a 24-hour delay, and then another, and then another. On Sunday morning Powers started the pre-flight procedure still figuring the mission would be scrubbed.

He awoke at 2 AM to a breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast—high protein, low residue; to save weight the U-2 carried no provisions for pilot relief. Powers spent a half-hour or so, as he had so many times before, getting worked into a primitive, rubberized partial-pressure suit, and prebreathing pure oxygen to prevent the bends. His commanding officer asked if he wanted to take the needle along. Powers had already ascertained it made a satisfactory, if one-use, weapon; this time something made him say yes.

Shortly after 5AM, lugging a portable oxygen bottle, he was driven out to his plane. Since 1957 the U-2s’ natural metal finish had been covered in blue-black, radar-absorbent ferrite paint, devoid of distinguishing insignia. This was Aircraft #360, USAF serial #56-6693, a U-2B (essentially a U-2A up-engined with the new Pratt & Whitney J75 powerplant to compensate for the ever-increasing mission load). Powers had originally been slated to fly the unit’s best aircraft, but in the constant shuttling back and forth to Peshawar during the previous days’ delays it had accumulated excessive flight hours and been grounded for routine maintenance. The U-2s’ individualized construction emphasized each plane’s particular vices and virtues; #360 was known among the Incirlik pilots as a dog, with chronic fuel-feed problems. The previous September, during a record-high flight over Japan, it had flamed out ten miles short of Atsugi and crash-landed on a glider-club strip. A crowd of camera-wielding Japanese had to be chased off at gunpoint by American military police in an incident not conducive to airtight security.

Powers sweltered in its cramped cockpit while the ground crew finished their checks of the aircraft and Q-bay. The last system activated was the 2.5-pound explosive self-destruct charge behind the pilot’s seat, which in the event the plane went down would be armed and set to explode, after a 70-second delay, from the cockpit. (The Russians and American cynics would later suggest the timers were set to zero to destroy both planes and pilots, but the delay interval was checked and verified to the pilot’s satisfaction before every flight.) By 6 AM all systems were go. Powers awaited only permission for takeoff, which he understood to be held up in Washington. (In fact a communications glitch resulted in final permission being transmitted to Adana via open phone line. If tapped by the KGB, this compromised the mission from the start.) By 6:20 Powers was certain the mission had been scrubbed and was looking forward to getting out of his sweat-soaked flight suit when word came in: Go for takeoff.

The J75 fired up with its distinctive scream. Instruments reading properly, canopy down and locked, Powers gathered speed down the runway and lifted off, the mid-wing outrigger “pogo” wheels dropping clear, the U-2 soaring up the characteristic parabolic climb.

The Khyber Pass dropped below. On his right the Himalayas stretched away toward Red China; on his left the Hindu Kush, toward the Middle East. Down there it was still night; up here the sun shone white-hot and sharp, in a sky gone from blue to blue-black. Outside the temperature dropped to sixty below, air pressure so low his blood would boil and his body burst if his suit lost its integrity. Up, up, up. 30 minutes after takeoff he checked in with Peshawar—two clicks on the transmitter to signal all systems A-OK. One click in reply would mean proceed as planned; three, mission scrubbed.

One click.

Now at his operational height, Powers crossed the border near Dushambe, ex-Stalinabad. Far below, clouds lay up against the mountains’ north faces like a frothy sea against a shore. In the slightest turbulence the U-2’s fragile wings flapped like a bird’s; in September ’56 two curious Canadian fighter planes, buzzing a low-flying U-2 over Germany, had inadvertently destroyed it with their shock waves. But up where Powers was flying there was no weather. Just miles and miles of smooth, uniform air.

His course was marked in blue on his route maps, with target areas—including camera-control instructions—in red, and escape routes to alternate bases in brown. Flying by time and compass, Powers steered over the socked-in landscape toward Tyuratam, about 30 miles east of the Aral Sea.

Though the clouds obscured the ground, they could not mask him from Soviet radars. In Moscow Nikita Khrushchev was awakened by a phone call from his Defense Minister, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky. “If our anti-aircraft units can keep their eyes open and stop yawning long enough, I’m sure we can knock the plane down.”

Powers was an hour and a half into the flight when he saw the first sign he’d been spotted: a white streak of contrail below, stretching out behind an invisibly small, supersonically fast jet fighter, coming toward him. Within a few minutes he saw it again, this time going in the same direction, clearly tracking him.

He had little to fear from Soviet fighters, though the new MiG-21 could in a zoom-climb carry AA-2 “Atoll” air-to-air missiles to 70,000 feet. More worrisome was the new SA-2 “Guideline” surface-to-air missile, with a ceiling reportedly comparable to the U-2’s. Experts believed all these weapons’ control surfaces too small to permit maneuver in the thin air at 70,000 feet; coasting along unguided, ballistic flight paths, they would simply be out-turned by the U-2. They had, however, also installed a jamming device in the spy planes’ tails which would defeat a radar-guided air-launched missile. Powers continued undisturbed.

There was a gap in the clouds near, but not over, Tyuratam. For what it was worth Powers duly tripped the plane’s cameras and turned north. He was still 50 miles short of Chelyabinsk when the U-2’s nose suddenly lurched upward.

The autopilot had malfunctioned. A lesser pilot might’ve lost control then and there, as the plane faltered near stalling. Powers disengaged the autopilot and brought the nose down again, but he could not get the autopilot to work for more than a few moments.

Missions had been aborted for less. Going on meant manual control: 2,500 miles of navigation by dead reckoning, switching the cameras on and off at estimated intervals and making notes for the debriefing, all the while keeping the aircraft within the few knots between top and stall speeds. Aborting meant 1,500 miles back to Peshawar, then Adana and ultimately the States as “Operation Overflight” wound down.

But he was past the worst of the weather. And ahead was Sverdlovsk, the small village on the Volga now grown into the USSR’s tenth largest city, an industrial/transportation center over which no U-2 had flown. “I decided to go on and accomplish what I had set out to do.”

Once past Chelyabinsk he made a 90° port turn—gingerly, as the U-2’s speed margin was so narrow, and its wingspan so large, that in a turn its outer wingtip could experience Mach buffeting even as the inner stalled—and rolled out in position to pass over the city’s southwest quarter.

MiG-19s were already attempting zoom-climb intercepts. Later it was thought the plane’s radar jammer, proof against air-launched missiles, may actually have helped the SAM-guidance radar lock on. No less than 14 SAMs were fired, simultaneously, at the U-2.

Powers had noted an airfield below not marked on his maps. He was set to pass over it when he felt a thump from behind knocked him back in his seat. An orange glow filled the cockpit, and Powers blurted, “My God, I’ve had it now!”

None of the missiles had hit, but a near-miss had caused the plane’s right stabilizer to fail. (One SAM did manage to down a MiG-19.) The U-2 started to dive, gently at first. Then its fragile wings snapped off and it began to tumble wildly. Powers’ suit inflated—the cabin had lost air pressure. The plane was done for.

Hurled about the cockpit, Powers managed to flip up the safety covers on the destruct switches. Realizing he might be trapped in the plane decided he’d better be ready to eject first.

He’d never trusted the ejection seat. To save weight it had been deleted from the original design; then it was found that at the U-2’s extreme altitude the plastic canopy froze so hard a pilot would be killed if his seat fired him against it. The seat had been redesigned to punch through the glass but not, as were later models, to pull the pilot’s limbs in tight before firing. Legs forced out by the plane’s spin, Powers estimated the canopy rail would cut both off about three inches above the knee.

Very near panic, he forced himself to stop and think, only then realizing he could simply climb out.

Nose up and spinning, the plane was passing 34,000 feet. Powers released the canopy. Again he thought of the destruct switches, but decided to release his belt first—and was hurled halfway out onto the windscreen, held only by his air hoses. His facemask frosted over; he tried to feel his way to the switches, but now couldn’t reach them. How far had the plane fallen?

“I‘ve just got to save myself now,” he thought, and tore himself free.

Then he was floating, until the jerk of his parachute opening automatically brought him up at 15,000 feet, low enough to breathe. He opened his faceplate, saw the remnant of his plane fluttering downward, and below the Russian countryside, looking very much like his Virginia home.

He tore up his maps and, realizing a coin would be the first thing taken from him, pocketed the poison pin and threw the ersatz silver dollar away. Narrowly missing a set of power lines, he came down hard in a plowed field near a town and was immediately surrounded by curious villagers.

Within hours he was in Moscow.

The preliminary interrogation was over. The weary prisoner was taken to his new home: an 8x15-foot cell, with a steel-reinforced oak door pierced by a peephole, lit by a naked light bulb, its only accommodation a lumpy, steel-slatted bed.

Powers lay down and tried to rest. By admitting to what the Soviets probably already knew, or could easily find out, he hoped he could continue to conceal greater secrets: the missions against France and Great Britain; the U-2’s true performance; the real extent and results of American spy flights.

Yet he hadn’t realized until now how little training the U-2 pilots had in counterinterrogation. And he could not forget the counsel of Detachment 10-10’s intelligence officer: “You may as well tell them everything, because they’re going to get it out of you anyway.”

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