Francis Gary Powers (1929–1977) was the American U-2 pilot whose aircraft was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960. He was a 30-year-old Air Force officer serving with the CIA’s elite Detachment A of the Strategic Air Command, based at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was captured alive by Soviet forces, paraded at a Moscow press conference on May 7, 1960, and exchanged for the Soviet illegal Colonel Rudolf Abel on February 10, 1962, on the Glienicke Bridge. For more on the U-2 article; the American agency that ran the program is detailed in the CIA article.
Powers was born on August 17, 1929, in Jenkins, Kentucky, in the coal country of southeastern Kentucky. His father, Oliver Francis Powers, was a coal miner. He attended Millersburg Military Institute in Kentucky and then the University of Virginia, where he studied chemistry and biology. He entered the Air Force in 1950 and was commissioned in 1952 after training at Stead Air Force Base in Reno. He flew F-86 Sabres in the Korean War with the 72nd Fighter-Bomber Squadron, completing 61 combat missions and being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and the Korean Service Medal.
The CIA and the U-2
In 1956, Powers was selected to fly the U-2. He was recruited from the Air Force by the CIA, given a leave of absence from the Air Force, and trained at the CIA’s secret facility at Watertown Strip (now Area 51) in Nevada. He flew his first Soviet overflight in 1956. By the time of his shootdown in May 1960, he had flown more than two dozen deep-penetration Soviet missions, with a total of more than 4,000 hours in the air. He was considered one of the more experienced pilots in the U-2 detachment.
The U-2 program, code-named IDEALIST, was run by the CIA’s Development Projects Staff, with the cooperation of the Air Force, which provided pilots, maintenance, and aircraft. The pilots were nominally under the CIA’s authority but wore Air Force uniforms and were subject to Air Force regulations. The program was concealed from Congress and from the public; the existence of the U-2 was not officially acknowledged by the U.S. government until May 1960. Powers, like all the U-2 pilots, signed a secrecy agreement that, in his case, he had not violated before his shootdown.
The May 1, 1960 mission
Powers’s mission on May 1, 1960, was a deep penetration of the Soviet Union from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Bodø, Norway. The flight was intended to photograph the Plesetsk missile test site, the Severodvinsk submarine yard, and a series of strategic targets. The mission had been scheduled for April 9, 1960, but was delayed by weather. The rescheduled mission of May 1, 1960, was the one on which the Soviets chose to act.
Powers was hit at approximately 8:53 a.m. local time, somewhere over the Ural Mountains. The missile that hit him was an SA-2 Guideline fired by a Soviet air defense unit. Powers survived the explosion; the kill was at altitude — the fuselage was not breached. He bailed out at approximately 75,000 feet, descended by parachute, and landed near the city of Kamensk-Uralsky. He was captured by local civilians and turned over to the KGB within hours. The Soviets recovered most of the aircraft, including the camera, the data-link equipment, flight log. The U-2’s film was exposed and the equipment studied.
Powers was taken to Moscow, where he was interrogated by the KGB and shown his aircraft and the recovered equipment. He was held at the Lubiyanka prison, then transferred to a facility in Vladimir. He was tried in August 1960 in a Moscow military court, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to ten years — three in prison and seven of hard labor. The trial was a major propaganda event for the Soviet Union, which used it to publicize the recovered camera and other equipment.
The exchange and the legacy
The exchange took place on the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam on February 10, 1962. Powers was exchanged for Colonel William Fisher, a Soviet illegal who had been arrested in Brooklyn in 1957 and who had been the subject of the celebrated 1962 trial in New York. (The case was the basis of the 2015 Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies, with Powers’ role fictionalized.) Powers returned to the United States and was welcomed at the White House by President Kennedy.
Powers was awarded the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Air Force’s Distinguished Flying Cross on his return. He rejoined the Air Force and flew for the Air Force Reserve and for a Los Angeles television station, KNBC, as a helicopter pilot. He was killed on August 1, 1977, when his helicopter ran out of fuel while he was on a news assignment in Santa Monica. He was 47. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
The historiography of the shootdown is rich. The U.S. government side is best covered in Michael R. Beschloss’s Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (1986), which used the declassified CIA and State Department files; the Soviet side is detailed in Vladislav M. Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007). The standard technical history of the U-2 is Chris Pocock’s The U-2 Spyplane: Toward the Unknown (2020), most thorough single-volume account of the U-2’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis is Dino Brugioni’s Eyeball to Eyeball (1991).