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On This Day: Soviets jail U.S. spy pilot Francis Gary Powers
Powers was given three years imprisonment and seven years hard labour after parachuting from a reconnaissance aircraft the Soviets claimed they shot down
AUGUST 19, 1960: An American U2 spy plane pilot was jailed in the USSR on this day in 1960 amid a Cold War scandal that exposed espionage and raised tensions between the two rivals.
Francis Gary Powers was given three years imprisonment and seven years hard labour after parachuting from a reconnaissance aircraft the Soviets claimed they shot down.
The CIA pilot was convicted of espionage three months after he was captured with his intact jet, which could fly at 70,000ft – far beyond the reach of anti-aircraft guns.
It later emerged that the USSR had actually shot down one of their own planes, killing the pilot - and it was this high-altitude flyby that had damaged the U2.
But the Soviets were able to exploit the crash near Ykaterinburg in central Russia to embarrass the Americans just days before a scheduled East-West summit in Paris.
The communists displayed the jet, which contained high-resolution cameras, after exposing America’s weather plane claims as “silly lies”.
The Paris talks later collapsed when U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower refused to apologise to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
To add to the Americans’ humiliation, Powers delivered a public confession after being interrogated and then had to endure a televised show trial in Moscow.
In a British Pathé newsreel, Powers’s parents and his wife were seen arriving along with hundreds of other to the courtroom.
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President Eisenhower was also filmed refusing to comment on the legal proceedings – in case he further fuelled the Soviets’ appetite for embarrassing their rivals.
Powers served 21 months at Vladimir Central Prison, 100 miles east of Moscow, before being released in a spy exchange.
The pilot, along with student Frederic Pryor, were swapped for KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher at the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam in East Germany.
Three other exchanges later took place at this site, which had divided the post-war U.S. and Soviet sectors of occupation and was nicknamed the Bridge of Spies.
Powers was flown back to the U.S., where he faced public suspicion and a grilling by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He faced criticism for failing to trigger the aircraft’s self-destruct mechanism.
Senators also quizzed him about his doubts over the Soviets’ insistence that they had shot down the high-altitude aircraft.
But in 1965 he was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Star and received several more medals posthumously following his tragic death in a helicopter crash in 1977.
After retiring as a Lockheed test pilot in 1970, he became a TV “telecopter” pilot and died while filming Californian brush fires.
His spy plane episode echoes recent Iranian claims of capturing American drones.
The incident has also had its impact on pop culture. The band U2 are named after the now iconic spy plane.
