The Boy from Virginia

Q. What is your profession?

A. Pilot.

Q. What place of work?

A. Detachment 10-10 at Adana. Turkey.

Q. When did you receive the order to fly over Soviet territory?

A. In the morning on May 1.

Q. Where did you receive the order to fly to the Soviet Union?

A. In the town of Peshawar in Pakistan.

Thus, in the flat accents of Pound, Va.,

U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers began to describe his part in one of history's most celebrated--and. until his mishap, most successful--espionage operations.

The many-columned courtroom where Powers was brought to trial after 108 days in solitary confinement had seen history made before: in the days when it was still the Noblemen's Club. Pushkin and Tolstoy relaxed there, later the bodies of Lenin and Stalin lay there in state. But Powers seemed unmindful of history, and the faraway cities of which he talked were apparently little more than dots on the map to him. A man who by his testimony belonged to no political party and had never voted. Powers was simply an expert airplane chauffeur describing his trade. "I don't know." he said when asked about the workings of the U2's phenomenal electronic brain. "I just turned on the switches." How did he get into the spy game? "I felt lucky to get such a good job--flying service with a big salary.''

Showpiece. To demonstrate to the world through this uncomplicated flyer the "insane aggressiveness'' of the U.S., Nikita Khrushchev had set up a show trial that evoked memories of Stalin's purge productions of the 1930s. All morning long in the cold Moscow rain, the black ZIM limousines rolled up to the court to disgorge Soviet Russia's Reddest-blooded aristocrats, including Khrushchev's daughter Elena. Out of the unaccustomed luxury of one of the ZIMs stepped Powers' wife, Barbara, 25. poised and cool in black, flanked by her mother and two lawyers. From another emerged her father-in-law. Oliver Powers, a 55-year-old cobbler whose last trip out of his hill country had been a visit to Atlanta and Washington in 1935. Hopelessly, Powers tried to comfort his wife Ida.

"They'll know he's a good boy like he's always been,'' he said. "We'll have him back real soon."

Inside, under brilliant chandeliers, a theater bell called the audience to their seats, just as for the concerts that often fill the hall. As Powers mounted the six steps to the stage and stood gripping the wooden slats of the defendant's box. his wife, at the opposite end of the hall, buried her face in her hands. But Powers, despite his baggy, Russian-made double-breasted suit, looked fit and to all appearances unbrainwashed. When newsmen murmured about a bruise on his neck, Ida Powers set the record straight. "It's a birthmark," she said. "Yes, indeed, that's the first thing we saw about him when they brought him to the bed in Burdine. Kentucky, 31 years ago today."

With Regrets. Powers began his birthday by pleading "Yes. I am guilty" to a 4,000-word indictment. Acknowledged as a spy by his own Government, he obviously saw cooperation with his captors as the only path to survival and dutifully professed his penitence. In jail, he had been allowed to talk to no one but his captors, had seen no Americans. "I understand that as a direct result of my flight, the summit conference did not take place," he said, "and President Eisenhower's visit was called off. I am sincerely sorry I had anything to do with this." Insistently. Lieut. General Viktor Borisoglebsky, presiding judge of the three-man military tribunal, hammered at the point:

Q. Did you not think your flight might provoke armed conflict?

A. The people who sent me should think of these things.

Q, Did you do your country a good service or an ill service?

A. I would say a very ill service.

Along with his mea cnlpa. Powers calmly described the making of a U.S. aerial spy--a process so casual as to shock British intelligence experts who followed the trial. Toward the end of his Air Force hitch as a first lieutenant in 1956, he was "approached and interviewed" by Central Intelligence agents. He passed medical exams. "A special high-altitude suit was made for me and tested at a special chamber. My pay was to be $2.500 monthly . . . approximately the same as the captain of an airliner.'' (From the Russian audience came gasps of astonishment.) About "six or seven months after the con tract was signed." Powers learned that his duties might entail flights over Russia.

When Prosecutor Roman A, Rudenko (who was chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nlirnberg war crimes trials) asked the size of his unit at Adana. Powers hesitated briefly before answering. "There are six civilian pilots." But he freely gave the name of the unit's commander. Colonel William Shelton, and equally freely confessed that, soaring far above the range of Russian fighters, he made "one or two" trips along the Soviet border in 1956, ''six or eight" in 1957. "ten or fifteen" in 1958 and in 1959, and "one or two" in 1960. When the big order finally came. Powers picked up a sack of sandwiches from his wife and flew southeast with Colonel Shelton to Pakistan, stopping once to refuel along the way. ("I do not remember the name of the airfield. I think it could have been Bahrein.") His briefing from Shelton was short--an hour and a half in which "I barely had time to study my maps." Powers claimed no knowledge of two unmarked survivor maps and the plea in 14 languages ("I need food and shelter; you will be rewarded") that the Russians claimed to have found in his flight suit. Said he: "Someone must have stuck them in my pockets."

The Black Cloth. To some of his countrymen. Powers seemed all too ready to name names and divulge secrets. But not all the victories in the trial went to Prosecutor Rudenko. Powers, wrote British Reporter James Morris in Manchester's Guardian, "presented himself as a poor deluded jerk from Virginia, a part that I suspect did not require much playing. But there are moments when he is suddenly master of the court, summoning from some unsuspected source of strength a remnant of good oldfashioned, down-to-earth American guts."

With unexpected wisdom. Powers avoided the worst sin a witness can com mit: getting smart with the court. But when Prosecutor Rudenko seized on the fact that Cardinal Spellman had visited Adana to sneer "So Cardinal Spellman is interested in military bases," Powers replied quietly: "I would say Cardinal Spellman was interested in military personnel, not military bases." Despite all Rudenko's pressure. Powers refused to agree that his U-2 had no U.S. markings. And when Rudenko suggested that a mysterious piece of black cloth found in Powers' plane had been intended to serve as a kind of password when he reached the Norwegian airport of Bodo. Powers said dryly: "My plane was password enough."

When Rudenko tried to establish Khrushchev's boast that a Soviet rocket had scored a direct hit on the U-2 at 68.000 feet over Sverdlovsk. Powers did not fdare to contradict the Russian claim directly, but stubbornly insisted that he had "no idea" what hit him. All he would say was "I heard and felt a hollow-sounding explosion. It seemed to be behind me and I could see an orange-colored light." To U.S. officials, who had heard Soviet radar stations track Powers' plane on a leisurely descent to 40,000 ft., this sounded like a guarded description of a jet flameout, which is often accompanied by a jolting explosion of escaping gases at the plane's tail. It was noteworthy, too, that the prosecutor never brought up another sore point with Khrushchev & Co.: how many flights Powers' fellow U-2 pilots at Adana had made over the Russian heartland.

Socialist Humanitarianism. The summing up was the predictable set propaganda piece--one that the London Times dismissed as "crude stuff" and a "charac teristic mistake by the Russians." To Prosecutor Rudenko, the trial "unmasked completely the criminal aggressive actions of the U.S. ruling quarters" and the "savage, man-hating ethics of Allen Dulles & Co., placing the dollar, this yellow devil, higher than human life." By way of defense, Powers' court-appointed attorney. Mikhail Grinev, who makes a good living losing cases he is expected to. tried to outdo the prosecution in attacking the U.S. Powers, he said, "should be joined in the dock by his masters, who attend this trial invisibly." Grinev in friendly fashion had told Powers' parents that "social factors are very important with our judiciary" and in his argument he stressed the family's hardscrabble hill-country life. Powers, he said, went to work for the CIA only because of "mass unemployment" in the U.S. Against Rudenko's suggested sentence of 15 years, Grinev asked for the minimum sentence, seven years. At the end Powers himself got a brief chance to plead, and said that he had never felt "any enmity whatsoever toward the Russian people." His voice was clear and strong. He did not join in his counsel's attack on the U.S., but neither did he disavow it. Apparently not aware that in Russia his defense attorney was as much the agent of the state as the prosecutor, he had let himself be persuaded to be pictured as a helpless tool of forces beyond him.

Having made its case, having denounced the act while seemingly showing its charity to the defendant, the court quickly sentenced Powers to ten years, which it called an example of "socialist humanitarianism." By no coincidence, the trial wound up in exactly the three days for which the hall had been leased by the court.

Only then did Francis Powers get to meet his family. They sat about a small room behind the court for an hour, and though the Russians had laid out tea and caviar sandwiches, nobody had much appetite. Powers cried as he kissed Barbara. They talked glumly about mundane things: how to ship the furniture from Turkey to the U.S., whether to sell their car. For the next three years, Oliver Powers explained afterward, his son "will be working in a factory and confined to prison. After that he will serve seven years in a work camp studying the Communist system." But, deep in his heart, Oliver Powers clearly still hoped that an appeal to Nikita Khrushchev, off vacationing in the Crimea, might get Francis off much earlier.

No Nathan. What kind of welcome would Pilot Powers get when he finally makes it back home? "He's no Nathan Hale," grumped one U.S. official.

But the State Department quickly announced that it saw "nothing in his conduct to warrant prosecution," and President Eisenhower publicly "regretted the severity of the sentence."

As for Oliver Powers, he got fighting mad when his son's patriotism was even questioned. "I never wanted him to be a flyer," snapped Powers. "If he had told me the kind of work he was going to do in all those foreign countries, I'd have hallooed, 'Don't do it.' " Francis himself was apparently nervous about the nature of his defense and particularly about his lawyer's attacks on the U.S. "After all, I'm still an American," he told his family unhappily. But to Oliver Powers, such considerations seemed irrelevant. Breaking down at last, the father of the most notable U.S. spy since the Revolution sobbed bitterly: "God knows, I don't want to leave my boy in this country."

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