Gary Powers

Francis Gary Powers ( Jenkins , August 17, 1929 - Los Angeles , August 1, 1977 ) was an American pilot who commissioned by the CIA over the territory of the USSR flew to photograph military objects. His U-2 spy plane was on May 1st 1960 brought down with a S-75 Dvina ground-to-air missile . He could with his parachute rescue and imprisoned.

After the CIA had penetrated what had happened, became the NASA forced to give a press conference in which it was stated that a U-2 during a flight for NASA to gather meteorological information was in trouble, because the oxygen supply of the pilot-induced problems. During the press conference was shown a U-2 specifically for this purpose was painted in the colors of NASA.

The Russian-American relations fell below freezing, when party leader Khrushchev demanded apologies from President Eisenhower at a summit of the Big Four in Paris for the flights of the spy planes over the Soviet Union. Eisenhower denied that such flights took place, at which Khrushchev caught the pilot pulled out of the hat.

Powers was sentenced to three years in prison and seven years in labor camp, but after 21 months of detention, he was on the Glienicke bridge between Berlin and Potsdamexchanged for the Russian spy Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, perhaps better known by his alias name Rudolf Abel .

Back in America, he was accountable: he was taken ill that he did not include suicide had committed and why he had his phone, crammed with secret spy equipment, not destroyed? The CIA, who feared he was brainwashed, gave him resign. "They considered me as a kind of traitor because I had stayed alive," he wrote in his book about the affair. "I could kill myself with that special gifnaald they had given me. But I was so fond of life. "

Because it was a spy plane, was asked later often how high he flew. Which he always replied: "Not high enough."

On August 1, 1977, the pilot came on his forty-seventh killed when the helicopter crashed in which he for a local television station in Los Angeles took into account the traffic situation.