Thursday, October 02, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

COLD WAR HISTORY: U-2 pilot's son spreads word

Powers says exhibit about father keeps key chapter of U.S. past from being forgotten

Gary Powers Jr., left, and Steve Ririe hang Cold War history illustrations from American Heritage magazine Wednesday at the Atomic Testing Museum on Desert Research Institute's East Flamingo Road campus. The first public event at the museum's changing exhibit gallery will be Saturday. Photo by Amy Beth Bennett.

While sifting through blown-up photos of the secret U-2 spy plane and his father posing in a pressurized flight suit, Gary Powers Jr. spoke fondly Wednesday about the Cold War exhibit that he brought to Las Vegas.

His idea to heighten awareness about the Cold War, he said, came while he was a student in the early 1990s at George Mason University.

He often was asked to speak at high schools in Virginia about his dad, Francis Gary Powers, the pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 while on a covert CIA mission.

The capture turned into an international incident that led to the elder Powers' release in 1962 in exchange for Soviet citizen Rudolph Abel, who had been caught in the United States and convicted of espionage.

During one high school lecture, Gary Powers Jr. said, "I got these blank stares. They thought I was talking about the U2 rock group. ... That's what gave me the first clue that we need to preserve Cold War history."

After that, he started to piece together the artifacts: his father's childhood photos, yearbooks, squadron patches, survival knife, prison notebooks, medals and flight suit. There are even pieces from the 1977 helicopter crash in which Francis Gary Powers died while working for a Los Angeles television station.

The traveling exhibit began its international journey in 1996, opening at Bodo, Norway, the place where the U-2 was supposed to have landed before a near-miss from a Soviet missile damaged the high-flying plane and forced his father to bail out.

The display is part of a collection of Cold War artifacts that will be featured as a sampler in the first public showing Saturday at the Atomic Testing Museum.

Also on display will be a propeller from the transport plane that crashed on Mount Charleston in 1955 while taking U-2 designers to the secret Area 51 installation at Groom Lake.

The museum's changing exhibit gallery opens at 9 a.m. Saturday in the Frank H. Rogers Science and Technology Building at the Desert Research Institute's East Flamingo Road campus.

Powers and Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, will talk at 1 p.m. about their fathers' roles in the 1960 U-2 incident. The event is free and open to the public.

Powers said when he was old enough to read his father's book, "Operation Overflight," he would ask him repeatedly how high he was flying on that day he was shot down. The answer he always got back was that the altitude was classified.

Then one night, he asked, "How high were you flying?" And his dad replied, "Gary, not high enough."