Tracked Toward Trouble

For a man whose profession was synonymous with secrecy, Pilot Francis Gary Powers continued to be the most-talked-about man of the week--in the U.S., in allied countries and in Russia, where his pictures were plastered on exhibition walls and where he would soon oust both Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Twain as the best-known American. Bit by bit, a more complete story of his ill-fated U-2 jet flight to Sverdlovsk emerged from the grim, grey silence of international espionage.

Weather Watch. Powers took off from the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik, near Adana, Turkey. April 27, flew to Peshawar, Pakistan. There he fidgeted nervously, waiting to leave on his biggest mission ever. The demands of diplomacy scarcely figured in the delay; he was looking for perfect weather. He was watching for that rare day when everything would be ideal, when winds aloft promised the necessary boost along the 3,500-mile flight across the Soviet Union toward Norway, when cloud cover would be at a minimum and there would be so little moisture in the upper air that his plane would not form giveaway contrails.

Just five days after he landed at Peshawar, Powers got the go-ahead and took off. Friendly radars tracked him as far as they could across the Soviet frontier; then a U.S. radio watch tuned in on Soviet defense frequencies. The chatter of frustrated Russians was familiar and reassuring to the U.S. monitors as the intruder was passed from one Russian military zone to another. U-2 penetrations were no secret to the Soviets; Powers and other pilots had made them often during the past four years. The Russians had fired rockets, but the rockets had fallen short at some 60,000 ft.; MIG fighter planes had flashed after them and had mushed helplessly at the same altitude, well below the U2's lofty sanctuary of 80,000-100,000 ft.

Direct Hit? This time the pattern changed. Over Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Urals, where his flight plan called for a half-left turn to take him northwestward toward Norway, Powers suddenly ran into trouble--probably an engine failure. "He's coming lower," said excited Russian radiomen. Listeners at U.S. outposts hung helplessly on every word while Russian antiaircraft batteries chattered tersely about the enemy plane spiraling downward into range. When the U-2 dropped to 40,000 ft., the Russians stopped talking.

Proudly, the Russian press later reported how a "rocket rushed into the stratosphere with a powerful roar," how "fragments of the foreign-spy aircraft fell through the rays of the May sun." In an effort to prove that a Soviet rocket had scored a direct hit, Khrushchev himself displayed the picture of a thoroughly wrecked plane, at the same time showed off high-altitude pictures of Soviet installations which he said had been recovered from the U2's cameras. This raised an obvious question: How had the cameras survived such a splintering crash?

The Soviet press had no more trouble changing itstune than the U.S. State Department had forgetting its original "weather-flight" fantasy. The rocket, said a Moscow dispatch, had exploded under the U2's tail, damaging the ejection seat. Pilot Powers had ridden his crippled ship down to 40,000 ft. before bailing out. Presumably, the Russians were claiming that the ship then fluttered in for a not-too-damaging crash landing on its own. Whether it did, or whether Powers flew his plane all the way down, this version neatly demolished Khrushchev's story that Powers had been afraid to pull the pin on his ejection seat for fear that it had been rigged to kill him.

Told to Talk. Despite such discrepancies, there was no doubt that the Russians had bagged the U2. They had Powers, and they displayed some convincing wreckage. The long, gliderlike wings were remarkably intact. The Pratt & Whitney J57 jet engine was easily identifiable, as were the U.S. manufacturers' labels on cameras and electronic gear. Along with the varied supply of foreign money that Khrushchev had reported in the captured pilot's possession, the Soviets also laid out a pistol, a tube of morphine, a flashlight, a half-pack of Kent cigarettes, a Social Security card (No. 230-30-0321), a couple of pocketknives. Powers' suicide needle, they said, had been tested on a dog, and the animal had died in 30 seconds.

They had Powers' "confession," too ("I plead guilty to the fact that I have flown over Soviet territory"), but any suggestion that his prompt admission marked him as a defector was quickly denied in Washington. In an age of such sophisticated third-degree methods as "truth se rums," agents are taught to recognize the inevitable -- and talk. Powers, for one, had little to tell beyond his own personal history. He had been trained as a pilot, not a spy. His instruments did his snooping for him.

Cover Story. Neutral intelligence experts, while admiring the daring of Pow ers' mission, cocked an eyebrow at what they considered poor U.S. intelligence planning. Obviously, the U.S. was using as a "cover" the story that the U-2 was en gaged in weather-reconnaissance work.

This story may have placated allies in case of U-2 trouble, but it was bound to fall apart if both plane and pilot were captured. Conventional cloak-and-dagger types argued that the U.S. should have kept a discreet silence in the face of all talk about the U2. They wondered, too, why the U.S., if it really wanted to ensure against detection, could not have subcontracted the job to a foreign pilot without a country, perhaps a refugee from a Communist satellite.

But such subterfuges would probably not have satisfied critics or kept Khrushchev from making whatever use he wanted of the incident. And for all Khrushchev's claims, the U.S. was convinced that an oxygen-system failure or an en gine "flame-out" had forced Pilot Powers down within rocket range, and, most importantly, that the Soviets still do not have an antiaircraft rocket capable of reaching the U2's operating altitude.

How the CIA will make use of this information, now that the U-2 program has been compromised, is still the CIA's secret.

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