CIA twist in '60s Cold War crash (Gary Powers' U-2)

[Robb]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/th_anniversary_of_powers_flight_dNsc6xK9lb5CpxuTlxTxeO">CIA twist in '60s Cold War crash (Gary Powers' U-2)

50th anniversary of Powers' U-2 flight

The reputation of Francis Gary Powers has suffered for a half-century by association with one of the most enduring mysteries of the Cold War.

Fifty years ago today, in a full-body pressure suit and helmet, Powers was slammed forward against the canopy of his U-2 spy plane 70,000 feet above central Russia by a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploding close behind him. The blast wave dismembered the plane, tearing off its tail section and then its wings, but leaving its pilot miraculously unhurt. In an outer pocket of his suit Powers carried a suicide pin that he chose not to use. He hit the ground in shock but with hardly a scratch. By that evening he was at KGB headquarters in Moscow.

What was not known until the recent declassification of CIA documents, was that top US officials never believed Powers' account of his fateful flight because it appeared to be directly contradicted by a report from the National Security Agency.

According to a summary presented this week by Matthew Aid, the world's leading authority on the NSA, the agency's report described Soviet military air-traffic controllers as after an aircraft that -- far from breaking up at close to 70,000 feet, as Powers later claimed -- descended slowly from 65,000 to 34,000 feet, changed course and disappeared from their radar screens.
If true, this would have meant that Powers was at best a liar and conceivably a traitor. According to one rumor, he descended to a safe height, bailed out and spent his first night as a defector in a Sverdlovsk nightclub.....

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/th_anniversary_of_powers_flight_dNsc6xK9lb5CpxuTlxTxeO#ixzz0mgaJh7b4