OPERATION OVERFLIGHT

by Francis Gary & Curt Gentry Powers ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1970

On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia in a U-2 surveillance-equipped aircraft, captured and served up as a dish of crow by Khrushchev in some elaborate summitry complete with trial, sentencing and imprisonment. Dishonored, unsung in his own country, when in those pre-Cuba-Vietnam-Pueblo years, captured Americans were expected to orate like Henry and die like Hale, Powers still smarts from what he considers to be a scapegoat's burden. What apparently rankled others at the time was that Powers turned up alive and did not ""self-destruct""; that he seemed to have sung like a bird about the secret flight; that he humbly confessed his sins at the trial. Yet the only instructions he had received pertaining to capture were: ""You may as well tell them everything, because they're going to get it out of you anyway.' He did however withhold information on his own initiative primarily in regard to the plane's altitude. There was no efficient equipment to destroy evidence. Furthermore ""confession"" was the primary defense in the Soviet court system, and Powers faced possible execution. Powers recalls the events from his capture through his release and interrogation at home, where he was a political untouchable, with considerable bitterness. He has a good deal to say about messes in high Washington places. These revelations, skillfully transmuted by Mr. Gentry, are a moving study, with some pathos, of an earnest, unsophisticated, honest and wounded man who had been expected to perform as something more (or less) than human.

Pub Date: May 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION