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On This Day: U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers charged with spying at Moscow show trial
The airman was forced to confess to espionage after being captured two months earlier when he parachuted from a U2 jet the Soviets claimed they had shot down
JULY 8, 1960: American CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was paraded in a Moscow courtroom for a dramatic Cold War show trial after being charged with spying on this day in 1960.
The airman was forced to confess to espionage after being captured two months earlier when he parachuted from a U2 jet the Soviets claimed they had shot down.
A British Pathé newsreel filmed Powers, 30, looking nervous as he stood in the dock the great white Hall of Columns in the imposing House of Unions.
He went on to plead guilty and the following month he was sentenced to three years imprisonment and seven years hard labour.
U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower was also filmed accusing the Kremlin of using the court hearings to put America on trial as tensions between the rival superpowers rose.
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 could fly at 70,000ft – far beyond the reach of anti-aircraft guns – and showed off its high-resolution cameras.
They branded America’s weather plane claims as “silly lies” and the talks collapsed when Eisenhower refused to apologise to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Powers served 21 months at Vladimir Central Prison, 100 miles east of Moscow, before being released in a spy exchange.
The pilot was swapped for KGB Colonel Vilyam Fisher at the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam in East Germany.
The Havel River crossing separated Potsdam in communist East Germany from the capitalist enclave of West Berlin.
Powers and Fisher, who ran a spy ring in New York, crossed the border at the same time – 8.52am on February 10, 1962 – after months of negotiations.
At that moment, Frederic Pryor, a U.S. student captured in East Germany a year earlier, was also released to American authorities at another checkpoint.
Three other swaps later took place at the Glienicke crossing, which was nicknamed the Bridge of Spies, a pun on Venice’s Bridge of Sighs.
But the exchange between Powers and British-born Fisher, who used the alias Rudolph Abel to smuggle secrets inside coins, was the most iconic.
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 more 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.
