Over Sverdlovsk, Francis Gary Powers was free-falling through the atmosphere. Somehow, he had detached from the spinning airplane. “My body [was] just falling perfectly free. It was a pleasant, exhilarating feeling,” Powers would later recall. It felt “even better than floating in a swimming pool.” His parachute deployed, and Powers floated into a wide, grassy field. His thoughts during the last ten thousand feet before the ground were sharp and clear. “Everything was cold, quiet, serene. There was no sensation of falling. It was as if I were hanging in the sky.” A large section of the aircraft floated by, “twisting and fluttering like a leaf.” Below him, the countryside looked beautiful. There were forests, lakes, roads, and small villages. The landscape reminded him of Virginia in the spring. As Powers floated down toward Earth, he noticed a small car driving down a dirt road alongside him, as if following his course. Finally, he made contact with the ground. The car stopped and men were helping him. One assisted with his chute. Another man helped him to his feet. A third man reached over to Powers’s survival pack and took his pistol. A crowd of approximately fifty people had gathered around. The men motioned for Powers to follow them. They loaded him into the front seat of a truck and began driving.
The men seemed friendly. One of them offered Powers a cigarette. The emblem on the cigarette pack was that of a dog. Taking it, Powers realized the incredible irony of it all. The brand was Laika, and its emblem was the world’s first space dog. Laika had flown inside Sputnik 2, the second Russian satellite to be launched from the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the CIA target that Powers had photographed a little over an hour before. Gary Powers sat back and smoked the cigarette, noting how remarkably like an American cigarette it was.
With the U-2 spy plane and the SA-2 missile system, the Americans and the Soviets had been playing a game of cat and mouse: constant pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes. Now that game was over. Powers, like the mouse, had been caught. But there was a second, even greater catastrophe in the works. When the White House staff learned Powers’s U-2 had been shot down, they assumed he was dead. This was an assumption based on CIA “facts.” Richard Bissell had personally assured the president that in the unlikely event that an SA-2 missile was able to reach a U-2 and shoot it down, the pilot would not survive. “We believed that if a U-2 was shot down over Soviet territory, all the Russians would have was the wreckage of an aircraft,” Bissell later explained. And so, believing Gary Powers was dead, the White House denied that the airplane was on any kind of espionage mission, in opposition to Khrushchev’s very public accusation. For five days, the White House claimed that Gary Powers had been gathering high-altitude weather data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA.
But Khrushchev had evidence, which he would soon make public. With great bravado, on May 5, he gathered all thirteen hundred members of the Soviet parliament inside the Great Kremlin Palace speaking hall and addressed them from the stage. The United States has been making a fool of Mother Russia, Khrushchev declared. The Americans had been sending spy planes over the Soviet Union for nearly four years. To underscore the significance of what had happened, Khrushchev gave a bold analogy. “Just imagine what would have happened had a Soviet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago or Detroit? That would mean the outbreak of war!” Amid gasps of horror, Khrushchev explained how the Soviet Union had first used diplomatic channels to protest the spy flights. That he had called upon the U.N. Security Council to take action, but nothing was done. Just four days earlier, Khrushchev explained, on May 1, yet another illegal espionage mission had occurred. Only this time the Soviets had succeeded in shooting down the spy plane. The audience broke into wild cheers. Then came the heart of the matter in the form of a question. It was also Khrushchev’s bait. “Who sent this aircraft across the Soviet frontier?” he asked. “Was it the American Commander-in-Chief who, as everyone knows, is the president? Or was this aggressive act performed by Pentagon militarists without the president’s knowledge? If American military men can take such action on their own, the world should be greatly concerned.” By now, Khrushchev’s audience members were stomping their feet.
Halfway across the world, President Eisenhower continued to have no idea that Gary Powers was alive and had been talking to his captors. All the White House and the CIA knew was that the Soviets had a wrecked U-2 in their possession. Khrushchev had laid a dangerous trap, one in which President Eisenhower got caught. The White House sent its press officer Walter Bonney to the press room to greet journalists and to tell the nation a lie. Gary Powers’s weather-sampling airplane was supposed to be flying over Turkey. Instead, it had gone astray. Two days later, on May 7, Khrushchev sprung his trap. “Comrades,” he told the parliament, who’d been gathered for a second revelatory speech. “I must let you in on a secret.” He smiled. “When I made my report two days ago I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane and we also have the pilot who is quite alive and kicking,” Khrushchev said. For the United States, it was a diplomatic disaster of the worst order.