May 1st is 50th Anniversary of the U-2 Spy Plane incident

Powers: I looked up, looked out, and just everything was orange…everywhere…I don’t know if it was the reflection in the canopy itself, or just the whole sky…

American Spy Pilot, Francis Gary Powers

Powers: …and I felt a push…an acceleration just as if someone had put their hand on the plane and given it a shove forward…it set me back in the seat a little bit, and I can remember saying to myself “My God, I’ve had it now.”

Francis Gary Powers, III: Was my granddad a hero?

Francis Gary Powers, Jr.: Well, I consider him a hero, because….

Francis Gary Powers, III, Trey, …is asking his father the same thing it took the United States government 40 years to decide…about a young American pilot who became the key figure in the Cold War’s most infamous spy case…

Levengood: Overnight, this very…sort of ordinary guy…

Paul Levengood, President and CEO of the Virginia Historical Society

Levengood: …never expected to be a part of extraordinary events…became a worldwide figure.

Powers grew up poor, the son of a coal miner in Southwest Virginia…but through intelligence and native abilities, became one of America’s best pilots in one of America’s most secret planes…the high-flying U2, thought to be beyond Soviet Reach…

Powers: I knew I couldn’t get to the destruct switch and I decided well, since there is no need to sit here and struggle and try to do it…I’ve just got to now save myself…

A Soviet SAM Missle brought him down…He was captured, interrogated, tried, imprisoned, and finally exchanged for a Soviet Spy.

But his return home was bittersweet. Some in the CIA thought he should have taken his standard issue poisoned pin, hidden in a silver dollar…

Levengood: The fact that he didn’t use it became a big part of why Powers came home and was treated shabbily by the CIA and by the US government …really… treatment that did not cease until after his death when he was cleared and essentially exonerated of any wrong-doing.

In 1960, nuclear war seemed close at hand. Powers’ mission seemed a reasonable risk that resulted in one of America’s most embarrassing moments….

Francis Gary Powers,Jr.: It was a very controversial incident…

Power’s son, Francis Gary Powers, Jr.

Francis Gary Powers, Jr.: …An American president was caught lying…our enemy was given the upper hand, Khruschev ended up banging his shoe at the UN.

Levengood: Bring your kids or your grandkids…

Paul Levengood

Levengood: …especially if you lived through this area and your remember air raid drills and going under your desk because of danger of being subject to an attack by Soviet bombers at any point…if you remember those times, you owe it to your children to share it with them…your grandchildren to share it with them…. of course we live in perilous times today, but there’s a different kind of peril…the enemy is a much more hard-to-determine one….and there is some value, I think, in reminding people who did not live through the Cold War, of what exactly the stakes seemed to be at the time…that the stakes were not just potential attack…the stakes were potentially mutually-assured destruction, the end of life on the planet as we knew it.

Forty years after the fact, Francis Gary Powers was posthumously awarded the POW Medal, the National Defense Medal and the CIA Director’s Medal for “Extraordinary Fidelity and Essential Service” for his military service… and for never disclosing any classified information. On the 50th anniversary of the day he was shot down… Francis Gary Powers’ exhibit is on display at the Virginia Historical Society. And, his son, Gary Jr., is now working on a permanent home for the collection.

Charles Fishburne, WCVE News.