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Francis Gary Powers
FRANCIS GARY POWERS (17 August 1929 - 1 August 1977) was an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet Union ...view moreFRANCIS GARY POWERS (17 August 1929 - 1 August 1977) was an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet Union airspace, causing the 1960 U-2 incident.
Born in Kentucky, he graduated from Milligan College in Tennessee in 1950 and enlisted in the Air Force. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the USAF in 1952 after completing his advanced training at Williams Air Force Base, Arizona. He was then assigned to the Turner Air Force Base, Georgia as an F-84 Thunderjet pilot.
He was discharged from the Air Force in 1956 with the rank of captain and joined the CIA’s U-2 program at the civilian grade of GS-12. The U-2 was equipped with a state-of-the-art camera designed to take high-resolution photos from the edge of the stratosphere over hostile countries, including the Soviet Union.
On 1 May 1960, by then already a reconnaissance veteran, he was flying the U-2 plane over Russian airspace when it was shot down by the Soviet Union, an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missile over Sverdlovsk. He survived and was captured by the Soviets. At first the U.S. government claimed Powers had been conducting weather research, but later admitted that the U-2 was a spy plane. He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was pardoned by the USSR in February of 1962 and sent back to America, in exchange for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.
Powers later became a test pilot for Lockheed and then flew a helicopter for television station KNBC in Los Angeles, where he died on the job in a 1977 a helicopter crash.
PROF. HAROLD J. BERMAN (February 13, 1918 - November 13, 2007) was an American legal scholar and expert in comparative, international and Soviet/Russian law. He was a law professor at Harvard Law School and Emory University School of Law for more than 60 years.view less
Books by Francis Gary Powers
The Trial of the U2: Exclusive Authorized Account of the Court Proceedings of the Case of Francis Gary Powers