In Moscow, two thousand miles to the east, it was still dark outside when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sat upright in bed, awakened by a ringing telephone. Defense minister Marshal Malinovsky was on the line. A high-flying aircraft had crossed the border over Afghanistan and was headed toward central Russia, Malinovsky said. Khrushchev became enraged. Today of all days. May 1 was Russia’s national holiday. The streets were festooned with banners and ribbons for the May Day parade. This could mean only one thing, Khrushchev later told his son, Sergei. Eisenhower was ridiculing him again. The Soviet premier’s Achilles’ heel was his lack of formal education; he’d dropped out of school to work in the coal mines after the fourth grade. With his poor reading and writing skills, Khrushchev hated feeling that a more educated world leader was trying to make him appear the fool.
The Americans were especially duplicitous regarding holidays, Khrushchev believed. Four years earlier, on the Fourth of July, the Americans had double-crossed him with their first overflight of the U-2. If that overflight was a kick in the ribs, today’s overflight was a sharp poke in the eye. “An uncomfortable situation was shaping up,” Russian colonel Alexander Orlov explained in a historical review of the incident written for the CIA in 1998. Orlov, who spent most of his forty-six-year military career with Russia’s air defense force, had been an eyewitness to the event; he was seated at the command post in Moscow when Gary Powers was shot down. “The May Day parade was scheduled to get underway at mid-morning and leaders of the party, the government and the Armed Forces were to be present as usual,” Orlov explained. “In other words, at a time when a major parade aimed at demonstrating Soviet military prowess was about to begin, a not-yet-identified foreign aircraft was flying over the heart of the country and Soviet air defenses appeared unable to shoot it down.”
Not if Khrushchev had his way. “Shoot down the plane by whatever means,” he shouted back at his defense minister. All across the country, the Soviet Air Force went on alert. Generals scrambled their fighter jets to go after Powers. In Siberia, officers from Soviet Air Defense Forces were summoned to their command posts with orders to shoot down the American spy. It was a matter of national pride. The orders came from Nikita Khrushchev himself.
Tucked snugly into the tiny cockpit of his U-2, Gary Powers sailed along. He was one and a half hours into his flight. The weather was proving to be worse than expected but clicks on the radio system indicated that he was to proceed. Over the majestic Hindu Kush mountain range, clouds rose all the way up to the top of the twenty-five-thousand-foot peaks, and the cloud cover made it difficult for Powers to determine exactly where he was on the map. Flying at seventy thousand feet meant the sky above him was pitch-black. Under normal circumstances he would have used the stars to determine where on the globe he was, but today his celestial navigation computations were unreliable—they’d been laid out for a 6:00 a.m. departure, not a 6:26 a.m. one. And so, with only a compass and sextant to keep him on track, Powers flew on. Spotting a break in the clouds, he determined his location to be just southeast of the Aral Sea, high above present-day Uzbekistan. Thirty miles to the north lay Powers’s first target: the Tyuratam Cosmodrome.
Realizing he was slightly off course, Powers was correcting back when suddenly he spotted the condensation trail of a jet aircraft below him. “It was moving fast, at supersonic speed, paralleling my course, though in the opposite direction,” Powers explained in his memoir Operation Overflight, published in 1970. Five minutes passed and now he knew at least one MiG was on his tail. Then he spotted another aircraft flying in the same direction as he was. “I was sure now they were tracking me on radar, vectoring in and relaying my headings to the aircraft” below him. But the MiG was so far below his U-2, it did not pose a real threat. Protected by height, Powers flew on. He felt confident he was out of harm’s way. First he passed over the Ural Mountains, once considered the natural boundary between the East and the West. He headed on toward Sverdlovsk, which was situated thirteen hundred miles inside Russia. Before the Communists took over, Sverdlovsk was called Yekaterinburg. It was there in 1918 that Czar Nicholas II and his family were lined up against a kitchen wall and shot, setting off the Communist Revolution that had made the Cold War a reality. To the Communists, the city of Sverdlovsk played an important role in the Soviet military-industrial complex, a place where tanks and rockets were built. It was also home to the Soviets’ secret bioweapons program, which on the date of Powers’s flight was not yet known to the CIA.