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?