“But, taking into account Defendant Powers’ sincere repentance, before the Soviet court, of the crime which he committed, I do not insist on the death sentence being passed on him, and ask the court to sentence the defendant to fifteen years’ imprisonment.”
My immediate feeling was elation. It was as if I had been suffocating and was suddenly able to take a big, deep breath. I wasn’t going to be shot!
I looked for my family. There was a disturbance in their box, but because of the popping flash bulbs and crowds of reporters, I couldn’t see what was going on. Upon hearing the sentence, my father had stood up and angrily shouted, “Give me fifteen years here, I’d rather get death!”
The presiding judge declared a thirty-minute recess.
During the adjournment, Grinev tried again to persuade me to amend my statement. I didn’t even bother to answer him.
After the intermission Grinev began his summation for the defense.
At first I couldn’t believe I was hearing him right.
“I shall not conceal from you the exceptionally difficult, unusually complicated position in which the counsel for the defense finds himself in this case.
“Indeed, Defendant Powers is accused of a grave crime—intrusion into the airspace of the Soviet Union for the purpose of collection espionage information and photographing from the air industrial and defense installations and also of collecting other intelligence data….
“The Constitution of the Soviet Union, which, irrespective of the gravity of a crime, ensures every accused the right to defense, makes it our civil and professional duty to render help in exercising this right to those defendants who avail themselves of this right….”
He was defending himself for having to defend me!
But he didn’t stop there. He went on to observe that “the defense challenges neither facts of the charges preferred against Powers or the assessment of the crime given by the state prosecutor.”
Powers was guilty as charged, he emphasized. And then it became clear, for the first time, what his defense was to be: “I shall be right if I say that the Powers case is of international importance, inasmuch as besides Powers, one of the perpetrators of a perfidious and aggressive act against the Soviet Union, there should sit and invisibly be present here, in the prisoner’s dock, his masters, namely, the Central Intelligence Agency headed by Allen Dulles and the American military and with them all those sinister aggressive forces which strive to unleash another world war.”
Powers was, he stated, “only a pawn”; though “the direct perpetrator, he is not the main culprit.”
Since I had refused to denounce the United States, Grinev was doing it for me.
I could barely contain my disgust. On one thing I was determined: when the trial was over, by some manner or means, to make it clear I had no part in this.
There were extenuating circumstances, he asserted: the poverty of Powers’ family; “mass unemployment in the United States”; Powers, “as every other American, was taught to worship the almighty dollar”; “influenced by these ethics, Powers lived under the delusion that money does not stink….”
Interspersed among justifications were more denunciations: “The ruling monopoly circles of the United States could not reconcile themselves to the existence of a socialist country in which the social system is based upon the principles of social justice, on love and respect for the dignity of man.”
Grinev was trying his best to outdo Rudenko. It was as if each time he defended me he had to backtrack, to prove again he was only doing his job, that his feelings and sympathy were with the prosecution.
To those mitigating circumstances we had discussed, he added others: Powers was still young, he had just turned thirty-one; when signing his contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, he did not know the real purpose of the task set before him; poisoned by the lies in the American press, he had been misinformed about the USSR.
With these considerations in mind, Grinev asked the court “to mitigate his punishment” and “to apply to Powers a more lenient measure of punishment than that demanded by the state prosecutor.”
“Your verdict,” he concluded, “will add one more example to the numerous instances of the humaneness of the Soviet court, and will offer a sharp contrast to the attitude to man on the part of the masters of Powers—the Central Intelligence Agency, the ruling reactionary forces of the United States who sent him to certain death and wanted his death.”
Grinev was done. There remained only my final statement and the verdict.
PRESIDING JUDGE: Defendant Powers, you have the word for the last plea.
I stood, facing the judges. The lights of the television cameras were so bright that I had trouble reading the statement. But we had gone over it so often that I knew the words. Some went against the grain; some were deeply felt. I could only hope that in reading them the American people could distinguish among them.
“You have heard all the evidence of the case, and you must decide what my punishment is to be.
“I realize that I have committed a grave crime, and I realize that I must be punished for it.
“I ask the court to weigh all the evidence and take into consideration not only the fact that I committed the crime but also the circumstances which led me to do so.
“I also ask the court to take into consideration the fact that no secret information reached its destination.
“It all fell into the hands of the Soviet authorities.
“I realize the Russian people think of me as an enemy. I can understand that, but I would like to stress the fact that I do not feel nor have I ever felt any enmity whatsoever for the Russian people.
“I plead the court to judge me not as an enemy but as a human being who is not a personal enemy of the Russian people, who has never had any charges brought against him in any court, and who is deeply repentant and profoundly sorry for what he has done.
“Thank you.”
PRESIDING JUDGE: The court retires to determine the verdict.
It was 12:50 P.M. I was taken directly to lunch, but couldn’t eat. Learning that I would see my family directly after the verdict gave me something to look forward to. But my anger with Grinev remained, overwhelming any sense of relief I otherwise would have felt about knowing I wasn’t going to die.
Grinev had gone out of his way to “make” the state’s case. What Rudenko couldn’t prove, Grinev had freely conceded.
Several times he had negated my own testimony. With great care I had thwarted each attempt to extract a so-called “admission” I had been ordered to kill myself. Ignoring this, Grinev had stated that I had been so ordered as if it were an established fact.
He had gone further, implying in closing that the CIA knew I would be shot down, thus setting the stage for the Summit’s collapse.
He had introduced into evidence statements never made. One—“I was deceived by my bosses; I never expected to find such a good treatment here”—wasn’t even the way I talked. Bothering me even more, however, was one statement I had made which, taken out of context of the interrogations, gave an entirely false impression. At one point I had indicated that if I returned to the United States I would probably be tried there also, for revealing the details of my CIA contract. I didn’t really believe this, but had said it to make my answers and my hesitations about answering appear more believable. However, I had gone on to add, “But this worries me little, because I am not likely to return home.”
By this I had meant I was sure of being executed.
Grinev made it sound as if I intended to remain in the Soviet Union.
But worst of all, speaking as my representative, he had given the impression that I authorized and agreed with his attack against the United States.