In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident
  • John Prados
Francis Gary Powers with Curt Gentry, Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2004. 327 pp. $24.95.

May Day in 1960 became a turning point for many things. The Cold War seemed to spin out of control; a summit conference broke up; and new crises followed within weeks, first in Berlin and then in Laos (which the Eisenhower administration attributed to Soviet meddling more than internal politics or U.S. activities). The most dramatic event of that day occurred over Sverdlovsk in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union, where Soviet air defense missiles downed a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers, who was flying it for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Operation Overflight is Powers's own account of the events of 1 May 1960 and of his role in the CIA program that led up to it.

This book is a reissue of the Powers memoir, originally published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, which had been out of print since the mid-1970s. The new edition includes a brief preface by the esteemed military specialist Norman Polmar and an afterword by Francis Gary Powers Jr., who was five years old when the original edition of Operation Overflight appeared and who has been working over the past decade to create a Cold War museum in the United States. An important book on the subject coauthored by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross appeared even before Powers's memoir was published. In subsequent years, Michael Beschloss, Jeffrey Richelson, and others, including me, have written books on this subject. The Soviet government published the proceedings of the Powers trial. The CIA has declassified Powers's debriefing upon his return from prison in the USSR, reports done on the pilot and the affair, and contemporaneous documents on the treatment of the incident and its antecedents. The agency has also released its official history of the U-2 program and accompanying documents. Aviation technical writers have added a plethora of accounts to this pile. In view of this existing mass of material, the first question has to be: why another U-2 book?

Although at first I was of two minds on this question, re-reading Operation Overflight has brought me solidly around in support of the new edition. The book has stood up well over all this time precisely because of what it is—an aviator's personal [End Page 175] recollection. Powers never had the "big picture," but none of the outside commentators on the subject really had the small one. Snippets of personal U-2 material are out there—occasional interviews, recorded transcripts of radio chatter during the first test flights, accounts from U-2 pilots in the Cuban missile crisis—but Powers is still the only participant in the early overflight program who produced a full account, especially of the events of that fateful May Day. Beschloss may have used the material, but it comes from Powers.

In one fleeting moment on one day, through no fault of his own, Powers went from dedicated secret warrior to orphan of the Cold War. The CIA never really trusted him again, its suspicions a subtext in the declassified record. After returning, Powers was exiled to the CIA training facility at The Farm to talk about responding under interrogation, and he was essentially ignored until he had had enough. He went on to work for Kelly Johnson, the Lockheed aircraft designer who had built the U-2. Francis, Jr., in a significant contribution to the original, tells us from family lore that the CIA secretly paid Powers's salary at Lockheed, cutting him off when the agency learned he was about to publish Operation Overflight. Powers ended up as a helicopter traffic reporter for Los Angeles radio and television stations and died when his helicopter malfunctioned on 1 August 1977. A tragic end for a tragic figure. His book, Operation Overflight, continues to illuminate the issues that existed in the field for intrusive aerial intelligence operators throughout the Cold War and continues to be a crucial resource for...

pdf

Share