Collins also informed me he would be in communication when necessary. If for any reason I had to reach him, there was a telephone number to memorize. There would be an answer at all hours of the day or night.
During our meetings I had several times referred to the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA. Each time, Collins had winced slightly. When he or the other men referred to it, it was always “the government,” or, most often, “the agency.” Almost automatically, I fell into the same habit.
I was learning.
Thus, I suppose, spies are made.
ONE
THE AGENCY
One
I have never thought of myself as a spy, yet in a certain sense this attitude is probably naïve, for Operation Overflight was to change many of the traditional definitions of espionage, providing a bridge between the age of the “deep-cover” cloak-and-dagger agent and that of the wholly electronic spy-in-the-sky satellite.
Although as a boy I had dreamed of myself in many roles, interestingly enough, being a spy was not one of them. Looking back, however, I can see almost an inevitability in the events that led me to that motel door.
Born August 17, 1929, in Burdine, Kentucky, in the heart of the Appalachian coal-mining country, I was the second of six children of Oliver and Ida Powers. The other five were girls. The lone boy was not to follow in his father’s footsteps, however. From as early as I can remember, I was to become a doctor, not through any choice of my own but because that was what my father had decided I was to be.
His reasons were simple: doctors made money, their families suffering few hardships. A coal miner most of his years, he had known only the harshest kind of life.
A close call in the mine while I was a child had cemented his resolve. While he was working as brakeman on a “motor,” an electric engine used to pull strings of coal cars, another motor had rammed his, the force of the collision pinning him against the roof of the mine. When other miners finally extricated him, his hip was badly injured. Neither the resultant limp nor the recurrent pain kept him out of the mines, however; it was the only work available. One of my first jobs as a boy, in Harmon, Virginia, had been to walk up to the mine each morning to see if there was work that day. These being years of the Depression, more often than not there wasn’t. Sometimes at night I could hear my parents talking, not about where the next dollar was coming from, but the next nickel. Many days there wasn’t enough money for a loaf of bread.
Fortunately my sisters and I were spared the agonies of envy. None of our friends and neighbors had much more. It was a poor region.
Growing up the only boy in a family of five girls made me something of a loner. Reading was my main pastime. History, historical fiction—other times, other places—fascinated me. One of my greatest disappointments as a boy occurred when I read of Admiral Byrd’s discovery of Antarctica. It seemed there were no new worlds left unfound, that all the great discoveries had been made.
Much of the time that I wasn’t reading I spent outdoors. Although, together with the other boys, I swam in the local rivers and streams, did some fishing and a little hunting—rabbit, squirrel, bird—I most enjoyed getting off by myself and tramping the Cumberland Mountains. Best of all was to sit on the edge of a high cliff on the side of a mountain and look out over the valleys. It seemed to give me a perspective I couldn’t find in my daily routine.
Green, hilly, with abundant trees, it was beautiful country, the Virginia-Kentucky border territory—or would have been, except for the mines. Their presence poisoned everything, the water in the streams, the hope in the miners’ lives. They scarred the landscape, made people like my mother and father old before their time.
Yet even on the mountaintop I couldn’t see any other horizons for myself. An obedient son, I had accepted my father’s decision that I was to be a doctor, though the prospect interested me not at all.
My father had a second dream—to get out of the mines himself. He tried repeatedly, even enlisting as a private in the Army for three years, at twenty-one dollars per month. But always he returned underground.
I had the same restlessness. Two incidents during my teens contributed to it.
When I was about fourteen my father and I took a short trip through West Virginia, passing an airport outside Princeton. A fair was in progress, a large sign offered airplane rides for two and a half dollars. I begged my father to let me go up. He finally relented. The war was on now, the mines operating at full capacity, and money was no longer quite so scarce.
The plane, which seemed incredibly large to me at the time, was a Piper Cub. The female pilot, viewed from the vantage point of my fourteen years, seemed like an old woman, but was probably about twenty. My enthusiasm was so obvious that she kept me up double time. As my father remembers it, when we returned to earth I told him, “Dad, I left my heart up there.” I don’t recall saying it, but I probably did, since it came as close to describing my feelings as anything could. There was something very special about it. Like climbing mountains, only better.
Much as I enjoyed it, however, it led to no great decision regarding my future; that was already decided.
In 1945, during my junior year in high school, my father took a job at a defense plant in Detroit and moved the family there. It was a world apart from Appalachia. The patriotic fever of the times was contagious, and everyone seemed to be doing something for his country. Except me. Though I was certain my father would never give his permission, I was determined, on finishing high school the following year, to enlist in the Navy.
But the war ended in 1945, and we returned to the Cumberlands, where I finished my last year of high school, at Grundy, Virginia.
I was keenly disappointed to have missed World War II.
This feeling was compounded when I started college the following fall. The school, Milligan College, near Johnson City, in east Tennessee, was, like all colleges at the time, packed with returning veterans, each with stories of his wartime exploits. I envied them. It seemed I had been born too late for the important things.
I hadn’t really wanted to go to college, but was simply going along with my father’s intention that I become a doctor. I got through the premed courses, but barely; the interest wasn’t there. Too, at home nearly everyone had been poor. At college this wasn’t the case. Others had cars, new clothes, spending money. What money I earned—waiting table, washing dishes, scrubbing and waxing floors, all the typical college chores—went toward my expenses. Now in my late teens, I wanted to get out on my own, cut parental ties, be independent.
My youthful rebellion didn’t take place all at once, but in stages, the first actually occurring the summer between high school and college, when, knowing I would need money to supplement my father’s savings, I took the only work available that paid a decent wage. It was also the one thing my father had vowed his son would never do: work in a mine.
In high school I had played left guard on the football team. At Milligan I went out for track, running the 100-yard dash, 220, broad jump, 440- and 880-yard relays. Caves abounding in the area, I took up “spelunking.” It didn’t satisfy my yearnings for adventure, only fired them.