Francis Gary Powers

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Francis Gary Powers (Captive November 1960)

Francis Gary Powers (born August 17, 1929 in Jenkins , Kentucky , USA , † August 1, 1977 in Encino , Los Angeles , California , USA) was an American pilot . He was shot down on May 1, 1960 during a spy flight by the Soviet air defense near Sverdlovsk ( Urals ) with a then new type of anti-aircraft missile , captured and convicted as a spy .

Military service and intelligence work

Air Force

A U-2 with fake markings and a fictional NASA serial number. The aircraft presented on May 6, 1960 was intended to prove that Powers was a NASA pilot and not the CIA.

Powers joined the United States Air Force (USAF) in 1950 and, after training as a jet aircraft pilot, was transferred to the 468th Strategic Fighter Squadron, equipped with F-84 , at Turner Air Force Base , Georgia . He took part in missions in the Korean War, but was then lured away by the United States' foreign intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), because of his outstanding achievements as a pilot. Powers left the US Air Force in 1956 as a captain and became a pilot of the new spy plane U-2 .

CIA

The U-2 was developed by the Lockheed Skunk Works for the CIA in the mid-1950s to carry out reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union at high altitudes . They wanted to find out how far they had come in their rearmament in the Cold War . The first reconnaissance flight took off on July 4, 1956 from the Erbenheim military airfield in western Germany . For almost four years, spy planes flew over the Soviet Union at irregular intervals without the Soviet Union being able to do anything about it.

Spy flight and conviction

Francis Gary Powers in a Pressure Suit (1960)

Francis Gary Powers, who in the 1960 Incirlik airbase in Turkey was stationed, on May 1, 1960 during an espionage flight from Peshawar (Pakistan) to Bodo (Norway) from a newly developed S-75 - surface to air missile south of Sverdlovsk shot down at a height of 20,000 m shortly after flying over the area around the Mayak nuclear power plant . The Soviet air defense fired several rockets, depending on the source up to 14 pieces. It was only decades later that it became known that one of two Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-19 aircraft that had taken off with an interception mission had been shot down. According to Novaya Gazeta, the pilot was killed half an hour after the U-2 was shot down. Furthermore, it is reported in various sources that before the U-2 was shot down, an unarmed Su-9 experimental aircraft was commissioned to ram the U-2.

Because of the centrifugal forces acting on him during the crash, Powers was unable to trigger the detonation of the cameras that were being carried, nor could he move his legs. He only managed to get out at a height of about 10,000 m, the parachute opened at a height of about 5000 m. While still in the air, he tried to get rid of all the materials that were harmful to him. He did not use a deadly poison needle that was hidden in a dollar piece (this was optional for every pilot). Powers was captured and captured in a field by farmers. On August 19, 1960, the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment (seven of them in a labor camp ) for espionage . Powers was sent to Vladimir prison .

The US authorities initially assumed that the plane had been destroyed when it was shot down and Powers had been killed. In order to disguise the espionage activity , the flight was presented as a NASA flight for weather observation. On May 6, the press was presented with a U-2 with forged markings from NASA at the NASA flight test center at Edwards Air Force Base , which was supposed to prove that Powers had also flown such an aircraft for weather reconnaissance. However, on the following day, May 7, the Soviet Union presented the living pilot and spy equipment from the plane wreck and announced that he had already admitted to spying. Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev demanded an apology from US President Dwight D. Eisenhower . On May 9, 1960, US Secretary of State Christian Herter confirmed that such espionage flights had taken place since July 1956. On May 11, 1960, US President Eisenhower, who had to approve every flight, took full responsibility. He rejected Khrushchev's request that the air incident be recognized as an aggressive US act. Thereupon Khrushchev canceled the Paris summit conference of the allied victorious powers scheduled for May 16, 1960 .

release

Negotiations about Power's release broke out, but these were repeatedly delayed. The US negotiator was the lawyer James B. Donovan , who acted on behalf of the CIA employee Milan C. Miskovsky .

Powers should finally against Rudolf Abel , a spy by the Soviet Union are exchanged in the USA, in 1957 by the FBI as a KGB - colonel had been unmasked and arrested. Abel had been investigating the US nuclear weapons projects on behalf of the Soviet secret service since 1950 . He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover classified Abel as a more significant prisoner than the U-2 pilot Powers, which is why he declined the exchange. Only after John F. Kennedy had reorganized relations with the Soviet Union in 1961 did an exchange come within reach. Powers noted in his diary during his imprisonment: “Hope for relaxation and peace politics. It's good for my case. And: I'm sure that I won't stay ten years. "

Powers was exchanged for Rudolf Abel through the mediation of the lawyer Wolfgang Vogel . On February 10, 1962 at 8:44 am Powers was led over the Glienicker Bridge in Potsdam ; six minutes later Rudolf Abel was transferred. Then Powers was initially shielded from the press and questioned by US authorities. The aim was to clarify how the U-2, which was previously considered inaccessible to anti-aircraft weapons at an altitude of 22,000 meters, could be shot down and what exactly Powers had revealed about his activities and the aircraft during his captivity. He was suspected of having said more than his oath of secrecy would have allowed.

Civil life

Powers then worked as a test pilot at Lockheed in Burbank based on his experience with the U-2 . In 1976 he became a helicopter pilot for the California television station K-NBC. He was killed on August 1, 1977 when his helicopter (a modified version of the Bell 206 JetRanger ) crashed while filming a report of a bushfire north of Santa Barbara in Encino . He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Powers in popular culture

In Steven Spielberg's historical drama Bridge of Spies - The negotiators from the 2015 Powers is the actor Austin Stowell played.

See also

Web links

Commons : Francis Gary Powers  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Flight over forbidden land. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. April 30, 2010.
  2. ↑ Veteran Tributes. Retrieved July 10, 2018 .
  3. ^ The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954–1974. (PDF; 9.7 MB) p. 104 ff. , Accessed on March 4, 2019 (English).
  4. ↑ Avalon Project - Soviet Note to the United States, May 10, 1960. on: avalon.law.yale.edu (English)
  5. ^ SA-2 Surface-to-Air Missile. National Museum of the US Air Force, May 18, 2015, accessed June 9, 2020 .
  6. ^ Richard Lee Miller: Under the cloud: the decades of nuclear testing . Two-Sixty Press, 1986, ISBN 0-02-921620-6 , pp. 326 ff .
  7. ↑ a b c "Ramming. Order from Moscow. Told about the dragon "
  8. ^ E. William: Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security . Random House, New York 1986, ISBN 0-394-54124-3 .
  9. ↑ When shelling Powers, the Soviet air defense shot down its own aircraft ( memento from September 23, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Francis Gary Powers: Operation Overflight . Potomac Books, 2004, ISBN 1-57488-422-0 , pp. 158 ff .
  11. ^ The People of the CIA ... Milan Miskovsky: Fighting for Justice. on: cia.gov , accessed June 17, 2014.
  12. ^ The Francis Gary Powers Helo Crash. In: Check-Six.com. 2002, accessed on August 19, 2020 .
  13. ^ Scott Harrison: Francis Gary Powers dies in helicopter crash. (No longer available online.) In: Los Angeles Times . July 31, 2013, archived from the original on July 9, 2018 ; accessed on July 9, 2018 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Powers, Francis Gary
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American pilot
DATE OF BIRTH August 17, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Jenkins , Kentucky
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1977
Place of death Encino , Los Angeles , California