Gary Powers’s Excellent Day Off

File ref. 77/G-Powers indicates a textbook honey-trap operation. The target was Francis Gary Powers, a CIA pilot of minimal intellect and maximal appetites, flying the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. The bait was a woman named Klara, a swallow assigned to the case, whose operational brief noted a frankly heroic bosom and the ability to plausibly admire a man who names his own penis. Powers was cultivated over a series of brief European leaves, fed a standard line about escaping the grim Soviet machine, and given a rendezvous point. This point was a dacha outside Sverdlovsk. The detail he appears to have missed in Klara’s tearful instructions was that it was a KGB dacha. With a fully equipped interrogation suite and a Politburo-grade banya. He was also given a parachute modified by Directorate K specialists to steer him conveniently toward it. The poison pin was, of course, a theatrical detail left in place to reassure Langley. Nobody was ever expected to use it. A man who thinks with his zip fly is not the suicide type. The shoot-down on 1 May 1960 was merely the retrieval mechanism. An SA-2 missile battery was tasked with bringing the aircraft down in a controlled manner—a technical challenge that cost the lives of one of our own fighter pilots, Sergey Safronov, when a second volley of missiles mistook his MiG-19 for the American plane. An acceptable loss, filed under ‘Operational Overenthusiasm’. The Americans, as predicted, assumed a simple shoot-down. President Eisenhower lied, claiming it was a weather plane. We knew he would. It is what we would have done. The lie was the point. While Washington was telling the world the pilot was dead and the plane was lost, Powers was being filmed for three days in a state of what can only be described as post-coital glee. He was fed blini, plied with Armenian brandy, and reunited with Klara, who had been flown in for the occasion. The resulting footage, codenamed ‘The Sverdlovsk Follies’, was a masterpiece of the form. Close-ups of the pilot, a man the US government insisted was a ghost, cheerfully reviewing the previous night’s performance to camera and demonstrating a worrying familiarity with the Kama Sutra. Premier Khrushchev reviewed the reels personally. His only note to the chairman of the KGB was, “More cleavage.” The plan was simple. At the upcoming Paris Summit, Eisenhower would repeat his lie about the lost weather plane. Khrushchev would then play the film. Not the wreckage of the plane, not a sullen prisoner in a courtroom, but a happy, well-fed American spy praising Soviet hospitality and describing, in anatomical detail, exactly what he’d like to do to the First Lady. It would have been a humiliation from which no presidency could recover. It would have been a global laughing stock. It would have been, in the Chairman’s words, “fucking hilarious.” But the film never made it to Paris. The courier, a mid-level GRU apparatchik with a gambling problem, was intercepted at the West German border not by the CIA, not by MI6, but by the French DGSE, who were running their own entirely separate blackmail operation on him over a mistress in Strasbourg. The French, realising the geopolitical dynamite they were holding, classified the film at the highest level—*Secret Défense*—and then lost the file. To this day, it is likely sitting in a mislabelled box at the Château de Vincennes, probably wedged between a file on Algerian counter-insurgency and a catering budget for a state dinner in 1972. The summit collapsed anyway, but into a standard Cold War shouting match. Powers was eventually returned in a prisoner exchange for Rudolf Abel, looking slightly confused and considerably heavier than when he left. Klara was promoted to colonel.