SPY SWAP

A few days before Glenn’s historic mission, another historic event was underway on the Glienicke Bridge, linking Potsdam to West Berlin, as the Soviet intelligence officer Colonel Vilyam Fisher was exchanged for the American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Two years earlier, in May I960, Powers had been shot down near Degtyarsk in the Urals by a salvo of S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles. He had been despatched from an American communications facility at Badaber, close to Peshawar in Pakistan, to photograph Soviet ballistic missile sites and was scheduled to land at Bodo in Norway. The incident came two weeks before the opening of a major East-West summit in Paris – a summit which Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev would leave in disgust when Dwight Eisenhower refused to apologise – and proved hugely embarrassing for the United States.

Powers had succeeded in ejecting from his stricken aircraft and parachuted to the ground, whereupon he was captured and placed on trial in Moscow. Khrushchev, meanwhile, announced to the world that a ‘‘spyplane’’ had been shot down, but deliberately omitted to detail the fate of its pilot. The Eisenhower administration, assuming that Powers had been killed, set to work creating a cover story that he had actually been flying a ‘‘weather research aircraft’’, which accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace after the pilot had reported ‘‘difficulties with his oxygen equipment’’ over Turkey. No attempt, continued Eisenhower, was made to deliberately violate Soviet territory. On 7 May, Khrushchev proved this to be a lie, revealing that the pilot was indeed alive and the remains of his largely-intact spyplane were displayed at the Central Museum of Armed Forces in Moscow. Powers’ survival pack, hardly representative of a weather research pilot, included 7,500 roubles in cash and jewellery for women and was also placed on display.

He was convicted that August of espionage and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and seven years’ hard labour, but on 10 February 1962 was exchanged for Fisher. The latter, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne of Russian-German parentage, had moved from England to the Soviet Union with his Bolshevik-sympathising parents in the early Twenties, where he became a translator and, after military duty, trained for the secret services. Sent to Canada and, later, the United States, to recruit and supervise intelligence agents, he was captured by the FBI in June 1957 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. His exchange for Powers and an American economics student named Frederic Pryor was followed by continued service with the KGB until his death in 1971.

Powers, meanwhile, was criticised upon his return to the United States for having failed to activate the U-2’s self-destruct charge, which would have eliminated the camera, photographic film and other classified components. He had also not used a CIA-provided suicide pin, secreted inside a hollowed-out silver dollar, to avoid capture and the possibility of torture. Three weeks after his release, as John Glenn paraded in triumph through the streets of Washington and New York, Powers testified before the Senate Armed Services Select Committee and was found to have followed orders appropriately and praised “as a fine young man under dangerous circumstances”. He subsequently worked for the U-2’s contractor, Lockheed, as a test pilot and was later hired by the Los Angeles television station KNBC to fly its new telecopter. In August 1977, returning from an assignment to cover brush fires in Santa Barbara, his telecopter ran out of fuel and crashed, killing both Powers and KNBC cameraman George Spears.