A beautiful day in Russia. At Adana, Turkey, Francis Gary Powers dresses in his pressurized flying suit, climbs into the cockpit of his plane, and takes off for Bodo, Norway. Midway through an uneventful flight there is a flash, followed by a boom and an explosion. The U-2 rocks, starts to crash. Powers ejects. His parachute opens and he floats to earth near Sverdlovsk. He is immediately captured and taken away for questioning. “THE CIA PROMISED us that the Russians would never get a U-2 pilot alive,” John Eisenhower declared, his eyes flashing. “And then they gave the S.O.B. a parachute!”1 His father put it less vehemently, but was equally firm. The U-2 program, Ike declared in his memoirs, operated under “the assumption that in the event of a mishap the plane would virtually disintegrate. It would be impossible, if things should go wrong, for the Soviets to come in possession of the equipment intact—or, unfortunately, of a live pilot. This was a cruel assumption, but I was assured that the young pilots undertaking these missions were doing so with their eyes wide open and motivated by a high degree of patriotism, a swashbuckling bravado, and certain material inducements.”2 Richard Bissell, too, thought no pilot would ever emerge alive from a crash, whether brought about by a malfunction of the U-2 or as a result of a Russian attack.
