Subsequently, at the cemetery prior to the burial, Mom told me that my father was being buried in a section of Arlington that was off the beaten path. It was a spot on top of a hill that the tour buses didn’t visit. She also said that it was the section of Arlington where several CIA heroes were buried. At the funeral a man walked up to me and put a coin in my hand. He said that “Zigurd” wanted me to have this. Zigurd had been my Dad’s cellmate in prison in the Soviet Union. I turned around to show my mom, saying, look what this man gave me. She asked, “What man?” When I turned around to point him out he had disappeared into the crowd.
On the flight back to California, as I was looking out the window in a clear blue sky there was one dark cloud in the distance. As we flew by the dark cloud took on the shape of a silent U-2 floating in the sky. Several minutes passed, and I asked Mom if she had seen what I had seen. She nodded her head yes, and fought to hold back tears. I said, “Mom, don’t cry. It’s Dad’s way of letting us know it will be all right.”
Series Editors
Walter J. Boyne and Peter B. Mersky
Aviation Classics are inspired non-fiction and fictional accounts that reveal the human drama of flight. The series covers every era of military and civil aviation, is international in scope, and encompasses flying in all of its diversity. Some of the books are well-known best-sellers and others are superb, but unheralded, titles, which deserve a wider audience.
Other Titles in the Aviation Classics Series
Ploesti: The Great Ground-Air Battle of 1 August 1943 by James Dugan and Carroll Stewart
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo by Ted W. Lawson
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by Claudia E. Powers and Curt Genry
Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Powers, Francis Gary, 1929–
Operation Overflight: a memoir of the U-2 Incident / Francis Gary Powers with Curt Gentry.
p.cm.
ISBN 978-1-57488-422-7 (alk. paper)
1. Powers, Francis Gary, 1929– 2. U-2 Incident, 1960. 3. Cold War. I. Gentry, Curt, 1931– II. Title.
DK266.3 .P64 2002
973.921’092—dc21
2002071149
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.
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