what happened to guy who was tradedfor gary powers

Legendary U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers standing in front of a U-2 reconnaissance plane. Powers and Rudolf Ivanovich Abel were released from their prison terms for espionage and were exchanged secretly at the border between West Berlin and East Germany on Feb. 10, 1962. [Gary Powers, Jr. / Cold War Museum via AP]

Correction: Francis Gary Powers Jr.'s speeches are non open up to the public. An earlier version of this story was incorrect.

SARASOTA — The son of the world's nigh famous spy pilot was out of the loop when give-and-take of the tragedy made news on Aug. 1, 1977.

"I'm only offset to become aware of my begetter'due south role in history, but I don't understand the whole attribute of it," he recalls. "Then all of a sudden, I'one thousand told my father was in a crash, and I'chiliad thinking broken arm, broken leg, he'due south in the hospital. Merely I'm taking all these phone calls and people are coming over, and suddenly on the evening news they're talking virtually the death of my dad.

"Nobody told me he was expressionless. And I'1000 thinking, oh my God, what does this mean? Information technology means you're never going to run across him once more."

At age 12, Francis Gary Powers Jr. was merely beginning to inquire questions almost what happened in the skies above the Soviet Union in the leap of 1960, five years before he was born. Just after his namesake was killed during the crash of a news helicopter covering wildfires outside Los Angeles, Junior would begin a lifelong quest to find out, once and for all, if dad was coward and a collaborator, equally some charged. He would visit libraries and national archives, file Freedom of Information Human activity requests, and interview as many of his father'due south peers every bit he could find.

Seven years ago, that trail would lead him to retired CIA psychologist Ken Bradt, who briefly worked with Powers to establish guidelines for noncombatant spies facing captivity in a hostile nation.

This week, Junior and Bradt volition meet confront to face up for the start time at Bradt's Sarasota residence in Bay Village, where he will address residents nearly his just-published journey through the by, "Spy Pilot: Francis Gary Powers, the U-two Incident, and a Controversial Cold State of war Legacy." He will also speak at St. Marker's Episcopal Church building in Venice. Neither effect is open up to the public.

Though Bradt, 91, left the CIA in 1981, he all the same feels obliged to clear certain perspectives with the agency. "What I can tell y'all," he says, "is that Gary was only a plain, ordinary guy, and equally patriotic as they come. It was really terrible, the way people questioned him the fashion they did."

In 1960, the U-2 spy airplane was the acme of U.S. surveillance technology, and information technology flew and then high that mission planners considered information technology beyond the range of Soviet air defenses. Only on May ane that twelvemonth, soon before a much-anticipated summit between Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev and President Dwight Eisenhower, the unthinkable happened. The Russians fired a volley of surface-to-air missiles so fierce that one destroyed a MiG interceptor and killed its pilot. But another exploded well-nigh Powers and the supposedly invulnerable U-2.

The elevation was canceled, the Soviets reaped an intelligence windfall from the wreckage, and Moscow scored a major propaganda coup. Powers was given a show trial and convicted of espionage. In 1962, he returned to the U.South. in substitution for a Russian KGB amanuensis, a drama most recently popularized in the Steven Spielberg film "Span of Spies." (Contrary to a scene in the moving-picture show, Powers was never tortured.)

As he languished for nearly two years in a Russian prison, Powers' reputation was assailed by criticism that he had failed to activate the plane'south cocky-destruct machinery before bailing out, and that he should've committed suicide rather than become a prisoner. Behind closed doors, some intelligence analysts were convinced that Powers lost his plane because he broke from the script and descended to 34,000 feet. Rumors persisted that Powers had landed the U-two intact, that he had defected and was seen drinking vodka with his captors. Attorney General Robert Kennedy reportedly wanted Powers tried for treason.

Past the time Junior was onetime enough to read, Powers had been thoroughly exonerated, merely Inferior kept bugging dad with questions. Adhering to what he told the Soviets, Powers maintained he was at the aircraft'south maximum ceiling of 68,000 feet when the missile took him out, simply Junior wasn't convinced.

"I said 'Dad, come on, you can trust me, I'g your son,'" Junior remembers from his dwelling in Virginia. "But he always said, 'Gary, I tin can't tell you that. If I tell you lot, and y'all tell your friends, and the friends tell someone else, then I could exist endangering other pilots, and I can't do that.' But I kept on request and finally, he said, 'Gary, I wasn't flight high enough, or else I wouldn't have gotten shot downward.'"

Years later, a declassified document would reveal that Powers was at seventy,500 anxiety when the SAM struck.

Still wounded

Though Powers' service was praised as exemplary in congressional hearings, and onetime CIA manager Allen Dulles commended him publicly in 1964, Inferior says his father was still wounded by the grapheme slurs, long after he left the government and entered the individual sector. The former Lockheed test pilot was flying a news helicopter for KNBC in Los Angeles when a faulty fuel gauge led to the fatal crash.

"I did non outset my research to vindicate my father. I did not start my research to honor Common cold War veterans," says Inferior. "I started my research to notice out the truth, so I knew how to answer questions."

He got more than he bargained for. In 2011, Powers organized his discoveries for brandish inside a 2,000 square-foot facility once used by the U.South. Ground forces Security Agency to eavesdrop on foreign communications in Washington, D.C. Located in Vint Hill, Virginia, the nonprofit Cold State of war Museum he founded also has some other 2,000 foursquare-foot warehouse jammed with related artifacts in storage, with hopes of expanding.

A brick extracted from the palace of executed Romanaian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a prison door used by Due east Germany's Stasi underground police, antiquated spy satellite hardware, the type of SAM that downed his male parent's U-2, banners, flags, uniforms and propaganda by Due east and W bloc nations — Powers' collection is deep, expanding, and now affiliated with the Smithsonian.

But Inferior also wanted to retrace his tardily mother's steps besides. A CIA employee, she met his male parent before long after Powers' release in 1962. Inferior discovered the email address of mom's former boss at the CIA, and followed up. On March 17, 2012, he received a reply that began this way: "Gary, I am ane who considers myself fortunate to have known both your mom and dad, both of whom I came to admire …"

Ken Bradt had been with the agency from 1955-81. His unit was charged with doing psychological workups on potential recruits and identifying their vulnerabilities. Experiments to harness mind control and brainwashing were underway on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but Bradt says programs similar Projection MK Ultra — notorious for the clandestine apply of drugs like LSD to manipulate behavior — occurred outside his department.

"We'd hear from fourth dimension to fourth dimension about unethical things going on elsewhere," he says. "We were not happy with that, and I'thousand glad we were not involved in information technology."

Bradt did not participate in Powers' debriefing. By the time the U-two airplane pilot was dispatched to his office, Bradt'due south counterparts had gotten all the intelligence information they needed. The outstanding issue was how, unlike U.S. military regulations that provide conduct guidelines for prisoners of war, no equivalents existed for civilian spies.

Bradt says American strategists wanted spy planes to be civilian operations, which would constitute espionage but not acts of state of war, as military missions might. Powers was a 2nd lieutenant in the Air Strength when he was recruited by the CIA in 1956.

Although he possessed a poison-tipped pin concealed inside a argent dollar issued by the CIA, Powers was never direct instructed to impale himself in the effect of capture. Because how Powers had few secrets to protect since the Soviets had possession of the U-2 hardware, Bradt says the pilot performed equally well as could be expected. For example, he never divulged the specifications or capabilities of the aeroplane's equipment, telling the Russians that all he knew was how to fly the bird.

Later applause

Bradt would later play his recorded interviews with Powers every bit a primer for a select group of CIA employees — pilots flying the U-two and the SR-71 Blackbird.

The biggest takeaway, he says, was the importance of analogous a decent cover story and sticking with information technology. Earlier announcing they had destroyed the aircraft and captured Powers, the Soviets waited for an American bookkeeping showtime. The U.S. told the world information technology had lost a NASA weather condition plane over Turkey.

Ultimately, Bradt says, the spy airplane pilot training produced no results. "We had no evidence we did anything worthwhile," he says, "considering thankfully, nobody else got defenseless."

Half a century after, Bradt still remembers how Rudolf Abel, the alias of the KGB mole traded for Powers at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, received a public hero's homecoming in Russia for operating undetected in America for nine years.

Just it wasn't until 1998 that declassified documents revealed that Powers' mission over Russia was a joint CIA-USAF operation. Two years later, Powers was posthumously awarded a Pw Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and a National Defence force Service Medal. He would somewhen receive the CIA Director's Medal, likewise equally the prestigious Silver Star.

Gary Powers Jr. would likewise observe, through declassified files, that the CIA, Lockheed and the USAF tried to make things right past extending a retirement bundle to his father.

"At that place'due south always going to be a few secrets that volition never publicly be revealed, for case, how they were trying to communicate with my father in prison house," Junior says. "But the CIA was very good to me. I was allowed in their historical intelligence collection, which has the declassified files within their internal library. I was able to constitute a U-two Incident exhibit and was able to requite briefings to their retired association members."

Ken Bradt is looking forward to finally coming together the man who worked so diligently to uncover the truth nigh his father.

"I told him the only thing I ever held against Gary was the fact that he married our best secretary," Bradt says, "and carried her off to California."