Intelligence : The Russian Behind the Downing of Powers’ U-2

Monday, May 1, will be the 35th anniversary of the shooting down of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, a watershed event in the history of the Cold War.

When Francis Gary Powers, its pilot, was shot down over Sverdlovsk, some 1,200 miles inside Soviet territory, the Eisenhower Administration at first claimed the U-2 was a weather plane that had strayed off course. It clung to that story for seven days--until Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev revealed he had the pilot, “alive and kicking!” Then, on May 9, President Dwight D. Eisenhower admitted the truth: He had approved a program of spy flights over the Soviet Union to guard against surprise attack. For four years, the U-2 had been photographing missiles and other military targets.

The U-2 affair marked the first time that many Americans even realized there was something called the Central Intelligence Agency and that it conducted secret operations around the globe. More important, the public realized, again, in many cases, for the first time, that the government--even a revered President like Eisenhower--sometimes lied to protect those operations.

With Thomas B. Ross, I wrote a book about the case and its dramatic denouement on a bridge in Berlin two years later, when Powers was traded for Rudolf Abel, a KGB colonel who had been arrested in New York and was serving a prison sentence for espionage.

But it was only a little more than a year ago, on a trip to Moscow, that, entirely by accident, I learned the real ending to the U-2 affair. It came about in the most unlikely setting.

I had contacted retired Col. Gen. Georgi Aleksandrovich Mikhailov, who had served in the highly secret GRU, Soviet military intelligence, during the 1980s. I wanted to interview him on a subject related to that period. At first, he refused to see me, but after several requests, he finally agreed.

He suggested we meet in an Italian restaurant that was located, for some odd reason, in the House of Peace, an antiquated building that looked like a hangover from the Stalinist era. At lunch, a bottle of wine was uncorked. In the small talk over the first glass of wine, the general asked me what books I had written. I got no further than my first. As soon as I mentioned the U-2, the general exclaimed:

“I shot it down.”

While he had not personally fired the rocket that brought down Powers and plunged the world into a major diplomatic crisis, Mikhailov was on duty in the Moscow nerve center of the air-defense command when the order was given to launch the SA-2 rocket.

“I was deputy chief of operations for the air-defense command,” the general explained. A full colonel at the time, he had been summoned to a building near Gorky Park shortly after dawn on May 1, when the intruder entered Soviet air space. “I was sitting near our commander, Marshal (Sergei) Biryuzov. I heard all the talks between him and Khrushchev. ‘There is a plane coming,’ Biryuzov told Khrushchev, ‘but it is not shot down. There is no rocket site ready until it gets to Sverdlovsk. At Sverdlovsk, we can try our luck.’ Khrushchev gave the order to shoot it down. Then Khrushchev had to go to Red Square for the May Day parade.

“It was nearly 9 a.m. when the plane was shot down. Marshal Biryuzov ordered me and another officer to take the next flight to Sverdlovsk to investigate what had happened. One of our fighters was unfortunately also shot down. We were not sure whether there was an American plane shot down or not, until Powers was brought to Sverdlovsk. We didn’t know if it was a drone or a balloon or a plane.”

When Mikhailov arrived in Sverdlovsk at noon, Powers had been put aboard a plane that was on the runway and about to leave for Moscow.

“I had to find the wreckage. It was scattered over a wide area. I stayed there for two days. We made sure it was all collected and brought to Moscow.”

The question of what altitude Powers had been flying at when his U-2 was hit had remained a mystery. Now, I might learn the answer.

“We hit him at nearly 22,000 meters (about 72,200 feet) with a C-75 rocket,” Mikhailov said, giving the Soviet name for the SA-2. “Our maximum range was 25,000 meters (82,000 feet) for that rocket in that configuration. His altitude at any given point depended on fuel. As the U-2 burned fuel, it rose to higher altitudes.” At the start of the flight from Peshawar, Pakistan, the general added, “Powers was at 19,000 meters (62,335 feet). By the time he reached Sverdlovsk, he was almost 22,000 meters. Had he reached Norway, he would have been at 24 or 25,000 meters (about 78,700 to 82,000 feet), at the edge of our range.”

After his plane was hit, the CIA pilot parachuted to Earth but never pushed the destruct button that was designed to trigger an explosive charge to destroy his plane, supposedly after a 70-second delay that would allow him to eject. But many U-2 pilots worried about the time lag; they wondered why the CIA would destroy the plane but not the pilot.

There was more.

“I admired Powers for two reasons,” Mikhailov continued. “He never gave away the names of others he worked with, never said more than he should have, and he had warned the peasants who surrounded him when he landed not to touch the silver dollar on his collar, because it contained the poison pin he could have used to kill himself and would harm them. I felt he was honest.”

The years passed. In 1976, Mikhailov was stationed in Washington as the Soviet military attache. The same year, KNBC television, in Los Angeles, hired Powers to pilot a helicopter to cover traffic, fires and police chases. On the morning of Aug. 1, 1977, his helicopter crashed on a baseball field in Encino. Powers was killed. Police said he had run out of fuel.

President Jimmy Carter approved a request by Powers’ widow that he be buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. His body was brought east. “I was not officially invited to Arlington,” the Russian general recalled, “but I went anyway.” He wore civilian clothes and kept some distance from the others.

He was standing there quietly on the hillside in Arlington when they buried Francis Gary Powers.