This overflight was particularly important to the CIA. Powers would gather valuable photographic information on two key sites. The first was the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the Soviets’ busiest missile launch base. Tyuratam was Russia’s Cape Canaveral, the place from where Sputnik had been launched. For years the CIA was aware of only one launchpad at Tyuratam. Now there were rumored to be two, and a U-2 overflight in April revealed preparations for an upcoming launch—of what exactly, the CIA wanted to know. After Tyuratam, Powers would fly across Siberia and head up to a facility at Plesetsk, 186 miles south of the city of Archangelsk, in the Arctic Circle. Plesetsk was alleged to be the Soviet’s newest missile-launch facility and was dangerously close to Alaska. Powers’s flight would cover a record 3,800 miles, 2,900 of which would be inside the Soviet Union. He would spend nine nerve-racking hours over enemy territory. That would be a lot of time for the Soviets to try to shoot him down. The reverse would have been unthinkable. Imagine a Russian spy plane flying unmolested over the entire United States, from the East Coast to the West, snapping photographs that could provide details at two-and-a-half-foot increments from seventy thousand feet up.
After breakfast, Powers sat in the hangar waiting for a final weather check. He had already sweated through his long johns. Mother Nature always had the final say. For Powers, a slight wind change meant the schedule for his mission flight that morning was disrupted yet again. Not enough to cancel the mission, but enough so that his navigational maps had to be quickly corrected. The waiting was agonizing. It was also necessary. If his photographic targets were covered in clouds, images from the U-2’s camera would be useless. The navigators needed to calculate when and if the weather would clear. As Powers sat waiting it out, his commanding officer, Colonel Shelton, crossed the cement floor and indicated he wanted to speak with him.
Colonel Shelton extended his hand and opened his palm. At the center was a large silver coin. “Do you want the silver dollar?” the colonel asked Powers. What Shelton was offering was no ordinary American coin. It was a CIA suicide gadget, designed to conceal a tiny poison pin hidden inside. The pin, which the pilot could find in his pocket by rubbing a finger gently around the coin’s edge, was coated with a sticky brown substance called curare, the paralytic poison found in lethal Amazonian blowpipes. One prick of the poison pin and a pilot would be dead in seconds.
Gary Powers was one of the Agency’s most accomplished U-2 pilots. He had flown a total of twenty-seven missions, including ones over China. He had once suffered a potentially fatal flameout over the Soviet Union and managed to survive. On many occasions he had been offered the suicide pill, and on each previous mission he had said no. But on May 1, 1960, Powers unexpectedly accepted the pin from Colonel Shelton, then slid it into the pocket of his flight suit. Later, Powers would wonder if he’d had a premonition of what was to come.
At 5:20 a.m., it was go time. The personnel equipment sergeant strapped Powers into the cockpit of the U-2. Two men held a shirt over Powers’s head to protect him from the blaring sun and the heat while he went over radio codes with the Agency officer. Pilots knew never to use their radio while flying over denied territory, but they listened carefully for click codes being sent to them. A single click meant proceed. Three clicks meant turn around and head back to base. From under his heavy helmet, sweat poured down Powers’s face, making him feel helpless. Finally Colonel Shelton came out for a briefing. Powers’s overflight was now awaiting final approval by President Eisenhower himself. A last-minute delay like this had never happened before and Powers became convinced the flight would again be canceled for another day. Instead, at 6:20 a.m. a signal came from an intelligence officer. The two men who had been holding the shirt over Powers’s head climbed down off the ladders; the personnel equipment sergeant closed the canopy, sealing him into the airplane; and Gary Powers was cleared for takeoff.
Up he went. After the U-2’s extraordinarily steep and fast climb, Powers within minutes reached an altitude where it was 60 degrees below zero outside. No longer sweating, Powers switched on the U-2 autopilot mechanism so he could make notes in his flight log. Waiting was always a drag, offset immediately by the excitement of being up in the air. Using a pen, Powers wrote: “Aircraft #360, Sortie Number 4154, 0126 Greenwich Mean Time.” He listened for the one-click signal over the radio, which would let him know he was good to proceed. The click came. Powers settled in for what was supposed to be a total of thirteen hours of flying time. His overflight would be the Agency’s deepest penetration into the Soviet Union so far.