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’s face, making him feel helpless. Finally Colonel Shelton came out for a briefing. Powers’s overflight was now awaiting final approval by President Eisenhower himself. A last-minute delay like this had never happened before and Powers became convinced the flight would again be canceled for another day. Instead, at 6:20 a.m. a signal came from an intelligence officer. The two men who had been holding the shirt over Powers’s head climbed down off the ladders; the personnel equipment sergeant closed the canopy, sealing him into the airplane; and Gary Powers was cleared for takeoff.

Up he went. After the U-2’s extraordinarily steep and fast climb, Powers within minutes reached an altitude where it was 60 degrees below zero outside. No longer sweating, Powers switched on the U-2 autopilot mechanism so he could make notes in his flight log. Waiting was always a drag, offset immediately by the excitement of being up in the air. Using a pen, Powers wrote: “Aircraft #360, Sortie Number 4154, 0126 Greenwich Mean Time.” He listened for the one-click signal over the radio, which would let him know he was good to proceed. The click came. Powers settled in for what was supposed to be a total of thirteen hours of flying time. His overflight would be the Agency’s deepest penetration into the Soviet Union so far.

In Moscow, two thousand miles to the east, it was still dark outside when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sat upright in bed, awakened by a ringing telephone. Defense minister Marshal Malinovsky was on the line. A high-flying aircraft had crossed the border over Afghanistan and was headed toward central Russia, Malinovsky said. Khrushchev became enraged. Today of all days. May 1 was Russia’s national holiday. The streets were festooned with banners and ribbons for the May Day parade. This could mean only one thing, Khrushchev later told his son, Sergei. Eisenhower was ridiculing him again. The Soviet premier’s Achilles’ heel was his lack of formal education; he’d dropped out of school to work in the coal mines after the fourth grade. With his poor reading and writing skills, Khrushchev hated feeling that a more educated world leader was trying to make him appear the fool.

The Americans were especially duplicitous regarding holidays, Khrushchev believed. Four years earlier, on the Fourth of July, the Americans had double-crossed him with their first overflight of the U-2. If that overflight was a kick in the ribs, today’s overflight was a sharp poke in the eye. “An uncomfortable situation was shaping up,” Russian colonel Alexander Orlov explained in a historical review of the incident written for the CIA in 1998. Orlov, who spent most of his forty-six-year military career with Russia’s air defense force, had been an eyewitness to the event; he was seated at the command post in Moscow when Gary Powers was shot down. “The May Day parade was scheduled to get underway at mid-morning and leaders of the party, the government and the Armed Forces were to be present as usual,” Orlov explained. “In other words, at a time when a major parade aimed at demonstrating Soviet military prowess was about to begin, a not-yet-identified foreign aircraft was flying over the heart of the country and Soviet air defenses appeared unable to shoot it down.”

Not if Khrushchev had his way. “Shoot down the plane by whatever means,” he shouted back at his defense minister. All across the country, the Soviet Air Force went on alert. Generals scrambled their fighter jets to go after Powers. In Siberia, officers from Soviet Air Defense Forces were summoned to their command posts with orders to shoot down the American spy. It was a matter of national pride. The orders came from Nikita Khrushchev himself.

Tucked snugly into the tiny cockpit of his U-2, Gary Powers sailed along. He was one and a half hours into his flight. The weather was proving to be worse than expected but clicks on the radio system indicated that he was to proceed. Over the majestic Hindu Kush mountain range, clouds rose all the way up to the top of the twenty-five-thousand-foot peaks,