Foreign News: Was Powers Shot Down?

To the Russians, a humiliating byproduct of the U-2 spy plane incident was the implicit suggestion that foreign aircraft flying high enough could cruise over Soviet territory almost at will, as they had for nearly four years. U.S. experts doubt the Russian claim that the U-2 was blasted from the sky at 68.000 ft., suspect from U.S. radar evidence that Pilot Francis Powers’ jet engine simply flamed out in midpassage. At his Moscow trial, Powers was fuzzy on the point, and his father later hinted that Powers himself doubted he was shot down.

Obviously sensitive on the point, and anxious to squelch the talk of Soviet vulnerability. Tass last week produced new evidence it said came from Powers himself. “Apparently my father misunderstood my answers when I was on trial,” Tass quoted Powers as writing in a letter to the New York Times. “I am sure my plane did not blow up by itself. All the indicators that register the performance of the engine were in good order until the very moment of the explosion which I felt and heard . . . I was at the maximum height when the explosion occurred . . . 68,000 ft.” Not until the plane descended to 14,000 ft. could Powers jump out and parachute to safety.

Had Powers, in the hope of getting his ten-year prison sentence reduced, written the letter to please his jailers? Had they even written the letter for him? No one could say, for Powers himself was nowhere in sight, and the New York Times could find no trace of any such letter in its mailbox.