Led by Tompkins, the lynching bee ranged from a syndicated sob sister who described me as a “tower of jelly… who will, when the chips are down, go to any length to save his own neck” and who offered the unsolicited advice that Powers should “save his money and find a nice, pleasant spot outside the U.S. in which eventually to live and spend it,” to Senator Stephen Young, Democrat , Ohio, who said, “I wish that this pilot—who was being paid thirty thousand dollars a year—had shown only ten percent of the spirit and courage of Nathan Hale. If it is up to me, I am going to make sure that he never flies for the U.S. government again.”
Much of the criticism focused on the amount of my pay, the argument apparently being that I had been paid this “fantastically high amount” to kill myself before capture, which I had failed to do. Under the subhead “Mercenary,” one paper reported, authoritatively, that in addition to my twenty-five-hundred-dollar monthly salary, I had received a ten-thousand-dollar tax-free bonus for every flight. Had this been true, and had my major concern been money, I would have been quite happily retired long before May 1, 1960.
None of the accounts mentioned that twenty-five hundred dollars per month was less than the captain of a commercial airliner received for considerably less hazardous work; that the mechanics in the U-2 project and the technical representatives of the various companies which supplied cameras, film, and so forth ended up earning nearly as much, and in some cases more, than the pilots. The pilots were government employees, and as such subject to both federal and state income taxes. The mechanics and technical representatives were not federal employees. If they remained outside the country eighteen months or more, as most of them did, they paid no taxes, greatly increasing their take-home pay. Nor did they mention that the pilots who never made an overflight were paid exactly the same amount as those who did.
It was my “fifty-thousand-dollar” back pay that concerned them most, however. Should I be allowed to receive it?
“Our recommendation would be no,” Newsday editorialized. “He was hired to do a job, and he flopped at that job. He left his U-2 behind, substantially undamaged, so the Reds could copy or improve upon it. Under the circumstances, back pay would be laughable. He is lucky to be home again. Anything he can contribute about the Russians will be willingly received. But he is no hero, and he should not be regarded as one. The White House is eminently right in not bringing him in for a meeting with the President….”
Actually, to set the record straight, the amount of my back pay was not $50,000, but approximately $52,500, or $2,500 per month for twenty-one months.
Again unmentioned was that a total of $10,500 or five hundred dollars per month, had already been paid to Barbara while I was in prison. And that the walloping tax bite would further reduce the amount to less than half the total—or about twenty-two thousand dollars.
In addition, because there was no provision for accumulating it in my contract, I also lost the money ordinarily paid for unused leave time. Fortunately I still had my savings, from the earlier portion of the program.
According to newspapers, one of the major reasons for holding the board of inquiry was to determine whether I should receive my back pay. This was not true. Arrangements regarding payments had been made in my contract, and no one from the agency had indicated differently.
The papers didn’t stop at twisting the “facts” to make their case. In more than one instance, they manufactured them.
“The life of pilot Powers is important,” said an editorial in the Dallas Morning News, which I saw sometime later, “but so are the many lives which may have been lost as a result of his failure to follow orders.”
As far as I knew, no deaths had resulted from the U-2 incident.
“It has been reported,” the editorial continued, “that at least two U-2 pilots blew themselves and their planes up when they ran into trouble. These are the real U-2 heroes, and Powers should not be allowed to join them until he has given a good explanation of why he failed to do the same.”
This too was a complete lie. A number of pilots—including close personal friends—had lost their lives in U-2 crashes. But not one had involved the destruct device, which was carried only on missions over hostile territory. To this date—and over the years I have remained in contact with several people involved with the U-2—the destruct device, for all the publicity it has received, has never been used. Not once.
Yet surely some who read that editorial believed it, felt I was not only a traitor but also a murderer.
After reading such nonsense, I was thankful the agency was keeping me from a face-to-face encounter with the press. It might have made headlines of a different sort.
Not all the fictions were a result of “imaginative reporting.” Some person or persons in the government had been responsible for the dissemination of more than a few. One was the story which had bothered me so much in Russia. I now learned that the editor of an aviation journal had stated on an NBC-TV White Paper on the U-2 that he had been assured by totally reliable government sources that the U-2 had not been hit at sixty-eight-thousand feet but, suffering an engine flameout, had descended to thirty-thousand feet, at which point it was shot down. U.S. intelligence knew this, he said, because (1) I had radioed this information; and (2) the entire flight had been tracked on radar. The story was certainly a nice plug for the effectiveness of our radio and radar. The only trouble was, both claims were not only not true, they were also not possible.
My early suspicions were not certainties. There were some people in the government absolutely refusing to accept the fact that Russia had surface-to-air missiles capable of hitting high-flying aircraft.
It wasn’t until much later, in 1965, with the publication of President Eisenhower’s memoirs, that I was to learn how far up the chain of command this misapprehension apparently extended.
“HERO OR BUM?” asked one newspaper. “Many questions need answering, not the least of which involve Powers’ own conduct,” noted another. “Should he, like Nathan Hale, have died for his country?” queried Newsweek.
I stopped reading the newspapers and news magazines. Yet it wasn’t that easy. For by this time I had heard, from several people in the agency something even more disturbing. Negotiations for the Abel-Powers trade had begun under William P. Rogers, Eisenhower’s attorney general. The current attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, had opposed the trade. Moreover, he had said that upon my return to the United States he personally intended to try me for treason.
For God’s sake, why? I asked the people from the agency. As the President’s brother, he was certainly aware of the true facts of the case, including the importance of the information withheld.
There was no clear-cut answer, only conjecture. Rumor had it that, reacting to criticism of his appointment as attorney general when he had never actually practiced law, Robert Kennedy had wanted to “prove himself” with a spectacular trial.
I felt there must be more to it than that.
They were the experts. They knew what was important and what wasn’t. Yet as the debriefings continued—we had by this time moved to a third “safe” house, near McLean, Virginia, not far from Hickory Hill, the Kennedy estate—I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by their lack of thoroughness, the questioning being neither so intensive nor the queries so probing as I had anticipated.
It seemed to me that some of the information I possessed— concerning what I had observed on the May 1 flight and subsequently during my interrogations, trial, and imprisonment—was of intelligence value. For example, that the KGB had asked me some questions and not others seemed significant, as did whether the question was general or specific, was in the nature of a “fishing expedition” or indicated prior detailed knowledge. Such things, I felt, were important clues as to how good their intelligence was, and, though only bits and pieces, might be helpful in constructing a composite picture of the extent of their knowledge.