The 1960 U-2 Crisis Reconsidered: Technology, Masculinity, and U.S. Airpower’s ‘Unmanning’

“It can be said that a man of more heroic mold would have blown up his plane and committed suicide, but perhaps Powers couldn’t and certainly he didn’t do either.”¹ The Chicago Tribune’s emasculating disparagement of captured Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pilot Francis Gary Powers in August of 1960 echoed a conversation that had roiled the United States for months. On May 1, 1960, a surface-to-air missile fired by Soviet military forces shot down Powers near Sverdlovsk, Russia as he photographed military installations from 60,000 feet. Powers miraculously survived his airplane’s destruction and a fall from the upper atmosphere. Yet, living appeared to many Americans an effeminate and unpatriotic act that defied CIA orders. The CIA had provisioned Powers with a lethal injection. His U-2 airplane included a self-destruct mechanism. Officials in U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and U.S. journalists asked a morbid question: Why was Powers still alive? Popular audiences and intelligence officials feared Powers might break under Soviet “brainwash” and expose national security secrets to his interrogators. As U.S. journalists and policy makers disparaged “spy pilot” Powers’s performance they constructed the pilot in the cockpit as an unmanly military liability.

Imprisoned pilot Powers became a pawn in the Cold War during the summer of 1960. His downing and capture helped spur the collapse of a diplomatic summit in Paris and led Soviet United Nations delegates to accuse the United States of committing the crime of aggression. By August, Powers faced trial in Moscow, where he pled guilty to espionage, implicating the CIA and the United States. Far from a moment contained in time suggested by the labels “crisis” or “incident,” the scandal surrounding the Eisenhower administration’s covert aerial surveillance operations retained U.S. and international audiences’ attention for months. As news commenters and policy makers reacted to Powers’s capture, he functioned as a real and imagined figure whose construction in public and private discourse jarred the institutions of U.S. foreign intelligence gathering.

The capture and trial of Francis Gary Powers has long fascinated historians and popular audiences. The Soviets’ downing of a U-2 airplane is often reconstructed as military or diplomatic history told from the top echelons of national leadership.² The Eisenhower administration considered the U-2 surveillance plane a near-invulnerable tool of intelligence gathering. The CIA deployed the U-2 to surveil the world. During the late 1950s, the airplane gathered intelligence by overflying and photographing military bases in the Soviet Union and China. Before having its own “crisis,” the U-2 had surveilled other spaces where Cold War “crises” took place including Egypt and Israel during the Suez Crisis, Lebanon amidst U.S. military occupation, and Vietnam following French defeat.³ Capable of flying above the reach of enemy air defenses, but not outside radar detection, U-2 overflights provoked diplomatic antagonisms and eventually resulted in disaster. Many histories explain how the U-2 crisis disrupted Cold War international relations: pilot Powers’s downing and capture on May 1 ruined the mid-May Four Power Summit that brought leaders from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France together for the first time since the end of World War II to discuss the contentious joint occupation of Berlin and the threat of nuclear war. In Paris, arguments over U.S. aerial espionage devolved into back-and-forth accusations between diplomats, leading the Soviet delegation to flee the summit for French vineyards before returning home. A potential moment for a “détente” in hostile international relations instead escalated tensions, setting the stage for additional hot moments of the Cold War.⁴

This essay draws upon yet departs from that strand of historical literature. I analyze an archive made up of sources of both state and civilian provenance to engage with an expansive historiography that considers discourses of gender and sexuality to be important factors in foreign policy reasoning.⁵ Powers’s capture was not simply a cataclysm in diplomatic history. It was also a moment when perceptions of gender and national technological capacity intimately intertwined. Popular critiques of Powers’s masculinity were primed by a prior decade in which nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union became imaginable and during which cultural contests shook U.S. gender conceptions. Moreover, throughout the 1950s, aeronautical scientists in the United States and across North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations critically studied pilots’ bodies and minds leading many to identify the “human factor” as the primary limitation to air operations. Yet, even as NATO scientists studied airmen’s physiological and psychological limits, few advocated for the use of “unmanned” drone aircraft until after Powers’s 1960 downing crystallized the vulnerabilities of manned airpower. Powers’s capture linked two distinct yet interconnected discourses about masculinity and man’s place within war making, reshaping the institutions of the U.S. intelligence community, and ushering in the United States’ first mass deployment of drone technology in war.

Powers’s downing and capture in 1960 re-invigorated a serious military interest in drones performing battlefield roles that had fallen dormant following World War II. U.S. war planners pursued “pilotless airplanes,” “drones,” and “robot airplanes” long before 1960. During World War I, the head of the U.S. Army Signal Corps described the “pilotless airplane” then being developed to regain the offensive amidst attritional trench war as an “epoch in the evolution of artillery for war purposes, of the first magnitude, and comparable, for instance, with the invention of gun-powder,” yet the weapon entered mass manufacture a mere month before Germany’s surrender, going unused in war.⁶ The U.S. military flew its first drone bombing missions during World War II amidst “Operation Aphrodite,” in which the U.S. Army Air Force retrofitted piloted airplanes deemed too “war-weary” for regular service into remotely controlled flying bombs, each ferrying 18,000 pounds of torpex explosives, to crash into and explode upon a German target.⁷ While drones had performed military functions including bombing runs before 1960, military interest in drone technology waned after each World War. During the 1950s, the primary drones in U.S. military service were “target drones” made to be shot down by anti-aircraft gunners during firing practice. The United States fielded only one experimental reconnaissance drone before 1960, which performed horrendously and sullied drones’ image in the eyes of many U.S. war planners.⁸

Existing historical works posit that Powers’s capture encouraged an embrace of “unmanned” surveillance satellites and drones. Official U.S. government histories document the Eisenhower administration’s creation of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) less than a week after Powers was found guilty of espionage in Moscow.⁹ This new covert institution grew into the central funding and development hub for aerial technologies, especially drones, desired by the military and CIA, becoming the most expensive U.S. intelligence agency.¹⁰ Yet, the existing literature does not analyze the broader discursive contexts and shifts surrounding pilot Powers’s masculinity that conditioned the NRO’s embrace of “unmanned” surveillance technologies, instead taking at face value that the diplomatic crisis and the U-2’s susceptibility to Soviet air defenses necessitated a technological change.¹¹

Despite the Soviet military’s shooting down of a U-2, many opinion shapers and policy makers in the United States blamed Powers for failing to adequately perform as a military man, casting the pilot and a lack of proper masculinity as the real weakness in U.S. airpower. A dichotomy juxtaposing the flawed military man (Powers) with the perfect war machine (U-2) pervaded both the public sphere and private national security discourse. As figures like CIA Director Allen Dulles and U.S. news editors constructed this dichotomous relationship between man and machine, they substituted the U-2 in place of Powers as the true representative of U.S. power and manhood in the world.

I introduce the term “techno-masculinity” as a conceptualization of the ways technology can shape notions of masculinity on an individual and national scale. The U-2’s capabilities structured the gendered critiques of Powers’s military performance. Commenters often presented the plane, rather than pilot, as the emblem of U.S. might. Recognizing the centrality of concerns surrounding manhood alongside the technological fantasies accompanying the U-2 and other war machines helps make sense of the subsequent path paved in U.S. national security policy: the establishment of the National Reconnaissance Office, and the new intelligence agency’s embrace of “unmanned” aerial surveillance technologies like satellites and drones.

Three related arguments are woven into this essay’s reconsideration of the aftermath of Powers’s capture. First, surveying NATO research on airmen’s bodies and minds during the 1950s demonstrates that many scientists identified pilots as a hindrance upon military air operations, yet they remained reluctant to embrace unmanned aviation technologies until after Powers’s capture. Second, examining newspapers’ reactions to Powers’s capture shows editors and popular audiences constructed his refusal to take his own life as a failed performance of military masculinity, a failure further exacerbated by juxtaposition with the U-2 plane’s capabilities. Third, reviewing Eisenhower administration officials’ reactions to Powers’s capture shows policy makers engaged with the gendered critiques of Powers and contributed their own denigrations of the pilot’s manhood to the public sphere. This critique by policy makers signals that concern about military masculinity was a defining anxiety of the moment when Eisenhower established the National Reconnaissance Office and as this new intelligence agency embraced “unmanned” drones and satellites in the 1960s.

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In the 1950s, U.S. military scientists and doctors identified the “human factor” as a key limitation to air operations that automation might solve.¹² Being human limited airmen’s military effectiveness. Pilots often died in combat. Flying airplanes tested the limits of human reflexes. As planes flew higher and faster, aviators needed oxygen supply systems or training to endure high-G forces. These factors, and others, had encouraged the automation of air operations since the early days of airpower through two methods. The first approach to automating airpower sought to improve cybernetics, or the relationship between man and machine control systems, through aircraft mechanisms like auto-pilots that lessened the work of flying, creating a more efficient “pilot-aircraft system.”¹³ The second approach to automating aircraft instead sought war machines like “pilotless aircraft” or “drones” that could perform military tasks while distancing airmen from air operations.¹⁴ The best evidence of the transnational discourse surrounding airmen comes from an international intelligentsia who coordinated their aeronautical research through NATO.¹⁵

Hungarian-American aeronautical engineer Theodore Von Kármán lobbied NATO’s Military Committee in 1951 to create an institution that would bring together research directors from member nations to discuss aeronautical research. Von Kármán, founder of Caltech University’s Jet Propulsion Lab and the Chairman of the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, was elected by a multi-national NATO delegation to chair the new Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development (AGARD).¹⁶ Headquartered in Neuilly sur Seine, France, AGARD’s mission objective aimed to bring together the “leading aeronautical personalities of the NATO nations” to “utilize their research and development personnel and facilities for the common benefit of the NATO Community.”¹⁷ Transnational aeronautical research took form through intra-NATO exchanges of scientific personnel, trips to member nations’ military facilities, weapons development on a government-to-government basis, and international conferences. A new publication “AGARDograph” printed conference papers in both French and English for distribution across NATO nations. Within AGARD’s first decade, participating scientists from eleven countries produced more than 2,000 research papers constituting a significant body of knowledge that shaped NATO nations’ developmental priorities for military aeronautics.¹⁸

Pilot selection was a central research interest for AGARD. In 1953, scientists from the United States, Britain, France, Canada, and the Netherlands presented papers addressing the “Methods and Criteria for the Selection of Flying Personnel” at a symposium in Paris.¹⁹ Airmen’s physiological and psychiatric condition was a central concern. Papers examining pilots’ decompression sickness, respiratory or cardio-vascular functionality, and mental or muscular fatigue all highlighted the limitations human bodies imposed on air operations.²⁰

A 1954 symposium held at The Hague, Netherlands, examined the factors of “human engineering” for aviation. Papers emphasized the interconnection of “Anthropometry,” the study and measurement of human bodies, with engineering efforts, including “Human Factors in Aircraft Design,” “Body Measurements in Relation to Work Spaces in Aircraft,” or efforts at “Adapting the Aeroplane to the Pilot.”²¹ Many papers examined how flying harmed the human body. One research paper entitled “Consequences of Loss of Cabin Pressure” described how strong air blasts injured airmen, including dangerous gas expansion within hollow organs, lung damage amidst cabin decompression, or a lacking oxygen supply to the brain.²² Pilots’ minds mattered alongside their bodies. For instance, U.S. Navy researchers argued in their paper that the “military aviator is of such importance that he should warrant close observation and care throughout his career” suggesting psychological strain from flying was a recurrent problem for pilots.²³ While anthropometric studies measuring pilots’ bodies and minds first emerged in U.S., British, and French research, similar studies were later replicated in other NATO nations like Turkey, Greece, and Italy, whose militaries were expanding their capacities to wage air war.²⁴

AGARD research constructed airmen as hindrances to air operations through the late-1950s. A 1957 study written by engineers at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH, claimed that “One major problem facing aeronautical engineers today is whether the human factor should be maintained as a variable in aircraft systems of the future.” Despite interrogating whether maintaining the “human factor” in future air operations was desirable, the study’s authors did not push for total mechanization. They instead suggested their paper helped decide “what to do about the human element in future aircraft systems” and suggested new “techniques for measuring the state of pilots and crews during operations.” Their aim was to better construct the man-machine, writing that “The increasing complexities of flight necessitate that man should function as nearly as possible like a computer.” Yet, they recognized that “the exactness of man’s function” was complicated by “ever-growing stresses… imposed on crews of future aircraft systems.” Unwilling to advocate for airmen’s automation out of air operations, the preferred approach remained training airmen to be as machine-like as humanly possible.²⁵

Many AGARD research papers interrogated the human factor’s limitations while hesitating to remove airmen from air operations. A study on U.S. Navy pilots’ flights in jet aircraft disparaged airmen, claiming “Engineers have begrudgingly admitted that at the present time and for some time in the future, man must usually be included in the control link of experimental and operational aircraft.” Maintaining a human presence in air operations seemed undesirable because “Man has been looked upon as the weak link due to his physical and psychological sensitivity to the abnormal situations and even the usual sensations of flight.” Yet, the study’s author challenged the sentiment that “man is the weakest link” in air operations suggesting this idea was “a point of conjecture, especially when one reviews the numerous accidents caused by material failure or mal-maintenance and mal-servicing of… modern aircraft.” The human condition carried serious limits, but it was not the defining problem of air operations. Instead of removing airmen from cockpits, the author wanted a better man-machine, claiming “our ultimate goal” was to have pilots “as fully instrumented for in-flight monitoring and post-flight analysis, as we now have our airplanes.” Resultant “gains of knowledge” from the monitoring of pilots sought “peak performance” on missions and could “help prevent costly aircraft accidents with attendant loss of life and fantastically expensive hardware.” Rendering the pilot’s body legible was supposed to make handling stressful operations more feasible for airmen, thereby saving lives and aircraft.²⁶

By the end of the 1950s, the discourse from AGARD scientists remained open ended with few advocating for the substitution of airmen with “pilotless,” “drone,” or “unmanned” technologies. Examining the multitudes of reports and research papers written by AGARD scientists I was only able to find reference to a single, unpublished paper concerning “pilotless aircraft” produced in the 1950s.²⁷ Using remotely-controlled aircraft as targets in anti-aircraft training exercises was discussed in one AGARD research paper, but this was an analysis of drones performing a support role, not flying surveillance or combat operations.²⁸

Powers’s capture helped crystallize pilots’ long-observed vulnerabilities and pushed AGARD research towards automating airpower in the 1960s. Less than a year after Powers’s downing, AGARD reports emphasized automatic control and guidance systems that alleviated pilots’ workloads.²⁹ AGARD’s 1961 general assembly, held in Powers’s unreached destination of Norway, focused on satellites, an “unmanned” technology already of interest in the late 1950s made more alluring after Powers’s capture.³⁰ Satellites seemed a means of communication and surveillance that avoided manned overflight’s violation of territorial boundaries by escaping into outer space. This push for satellites appeared alongside AGARD publications that dealt with problems presented by Powers’s shot-down flight including the “Biological Problems of Escape at High Altitude,” “Parachutist’s Spin Problems,” and medical concerns with ejection seats.³¹ AGARD’s 1962 general assembly focused on “Manned Flight Systems: Past, Present, and Future” which in specifying “manned flight systems” pointed to the growing existence of “unmanned” aircraft.³² In 1963, AGARD’s general assembly focused on missiles, a technology only recently seen as distinct from “pilotless aircraft” through the writings of figures like Hugh Dryden, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Deputy Director, who attended the AGARD assembly as lead U.S. delegate in the wake of Von Kármán’s death.³³

Pilot Powers’s downing in May 1960 followed a decade of aeronautical scientists constructing the “human factor” in air operations as a flaw for NATO’s military apparatus. The physiological and psychological limitations of human pilots remained significant to policy decisions, yet the reaction to pilot Powers’s capture in public and private discourse constructed a distinct problem with the pilot centered on his supposed masculine failures. Powers’s refusal to kill himself with a CIA-provided lethal injection, his juxtaposition to the seemingly perfect performance of the U-2 airplane, and anxieties forecasting his mental domination by Soviet captors created a new and compelling gendered rationale for the mass adoption of “unmanned” aircraft after 1960.

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Narratives of the 1950s United States have long fashioned the decade as an era of conservatism and conformity. U.S. life during the decade catered to white men who held power over civil society and the state. Most people in positions of authority in the military or news media who reacted negatively to Powers were men who shared a worldview that favored notions of masculinity defined dichotomously against ideas of femininity or queerness. Sociologist R.W. Connell offers a conceptualization of the ways a Gramscian notion of hegemony shapes gender performance. In Connell’s rendering, hegemonic masculinity structures a society’s prevailing ideas about manhood and its proper enaction within a hierarchy that codes certain actions as ideally manly, and others as subordinated, lesser-than, even deviant.³⁴ Many men aspired to an idealized form of manhood in the 1950s even if few matched this ideal. Men’s performance of an idealized manhood came in response to long-standing gender constructions prevailing in popular culture, especially religious beliefs. Hegemonic masculinity was also constructed through overt state actions like the U.S. government’s enaction of the Lavender Scare, the state persecution of homosexuality and queerness among civil servants that signaled to 1950s U.S. society what sort of sexualities and gender performances were acceptable, or unacceptable.³⁵

Critical scholars of gender and sexuality have complicated our understanding of the 1950s as a conformist era by analyzing the ways competing ideas of manhood challenged, and arguably shifted, the moment’s hegemonic masculinity. The “crisis of masculinity” lamented by 1950s social critics stemmed not from their claims of moral rot birthed by post-war social decay, but instead in reaction to the emergence of powerful women and masculine ideals that competed with traditional visions of manhood. As one historian has argued, the 1950s were not only the era of John Wayne, but also of Liberace and Tennessee Williams.³⁶ Where Wayne’s western films fashioned a burly manhood that claimed an absolute right to violence on the “frontier” or against women, Williams’s male characters often questioned their sexuality, or treated women with sensitivity. Other competing masculinities emerged in the 1950s. Sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s studies claimed men had far more homosexual experiences than previously believed. Popular writer A.C. Spectorsky constructed the Playboy philosophy as magazine editor by eliciting anti-feminist articles from fellow misogynists like Philip Wylie, who coined the term “Momism” to attack the supposed deleterious effects overbearing mothers had on their sons.³⁷ Alternatively, evangelist Billy Graham sought a return to “Christian values,” yet in asking men to “submit” to Jesus found his efforts undercut by a conversion experience critics coded as emasculating or feminine. Graham’s public relations efforts sought to overcome this perception through films of idealized male archetypes, including spies, whose conversion to evangelicalism reclaimed a masculine individualism.³⁸

While there are many studies of gender construction and competing masculinities, analysis of how ideas about manhood are shaped by materiality, particularly technology, is less common. Historians have analyzed the intertwine of technology and masculine identity within the U.S. working class, arguing that masculinity defined the culture of automotive shop floors or created “male technical domains” within craftsmen guilds.³⁹ The military too was a site of male-dominated technocratic culture which excluded women from serving except in support roles and often identified soldiers through their relationship with a militant technology: “rifleman,” “machine-gunner,” “airman.” The primary critiques of Powers’s performance as a military man centered on his relationship to two objects, his unused poison pin, and the U-2 airplane. Powers’s shot-down flight crumbled two key symbols of 1950s hegemonic masculinity, the secret agent man, and the military airplane. Throughout the 1950s, spy novels proliferated popular readership, and automobile manufacturers modeled “muscle cars” to resemble fighter jets.⁴⁰ The spy and the airplane were commodified as consumer items allowing men to purchase and vicariously live in the milieu of the military man. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the literal destruction of the U-2 plane and the metaphorical destruction of the spy’s imagined form as hyper-violent and self-sacrificial elicited harsh gender critiques from U.S. commenters and military officials.

I introduce the term “techno-masculinity” to conceptualize the ways that discourse surrounding man and machine shape gender identity on an individual and national level. In the context of Powers’s capture, techno-masculinity refers to the ways the pilot’s gender identity was constructed in relation to the technologies that structured his militant role, as well as the ways his performance as a technical expert reflected back upon the country he served. Editorialists often dichotomously juxtaposed Powers’s apparent failure as a military man with the “high-performance” U-2, using the plane as a means of reclaiming U.S. manhood. Where Powers refused to kill himself, a “heroic” death in the eyes of many, the U-2 crumbled and crashed. Some editorialists suggested the U-2’s self-destruct mechanism proffered Powers a manly way out that he failed to seize. As historian Joan Scott argues, state needs, such as intelligence gathering operations and the encouragement of suicide to avoid enemy capture, construct gender expectations.⁴¹ Yet, as both Scott and Connell argue, there is no fixed meaning of manhood, and the competing performance ascriptions editorialists placed upon Powers reveal how hegemonic masculinity was negotiated.

Six days passed between Powers’s capture and the revelation that he survived his flight. At first, the Eisenhower administration attempted “plausible deniability” claiming the shot-down flight was a wayward NASA aircraft, not a CIA surveillance plane. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exposed this lie by announcing Powers’s survival and displaying his materiel to state media.⁴² Powers’s CIA equipment included a pistol, knife, food, water, compass, first aid kit, jewels, cash in an array of European currencies, and a silver dollar coin hiding a needle laced with neurotoxin. Photos of the U-2’s crumpled airframe, its self-destruct mechanism, and Powers were printed in Soviet newspapers. Khrushchev had the U-2’s remnants publicly displayed in Moscow’s Gorki Park. He also had the lethality of Powers’s poison pin tested on a dog, which died. Seeking a political victory from the first Soviet downing of a U-2, Khrushchev disclosed Powers’s high CIA salary, asserting it revealed “how capital buys life, how it buys people.”⁴³

Powers’s paraphernalia, survival, and juxtaposition to the U-2 shaped editorialists’ critical assessment of his performance as a military man. The most common deficiency in the “spy pilot’s” techno-masculinity centered on his refusal to take his own life.

Reeling from the revelation that Powers survived his CIA mission, New York Times military editor Hanson W. Baldwin asked, “Why did the pilot survive?” He doubted Powers could answer “satisfactorily.”⁴⁴ Baldwin wrote prolifically on military affairs including his then most recent book The Great Arms Race. The militant core of his work helps explain the ways he constructed Powers as a failed military man. Caught in the Cold War’s nuclear standoff, Baldwin escalated the expectation placed upon servicemen to fight and die for their country into a fanatical demand for self-sacrifice in the national interest. His rendering of Powers’s failed performance shows how conceptions of human biology, religion, and the U-2 war machine could all meld into criticism of the pilot’s techno-masculinity.

Baldwin lambasted Powers for succumbing to the human condition’s “instinctive reaction” that “life was better than death.”⁴⁵ Baldwin’s critique of human biology as an obstacle to effective military performance echoed AGARD’s private policy conversations that deemed the human in the cockpit a military liability. His expectation that Powers kill himself suggested the pilot had failed to “man up.” He argued Powers violated the “unwritten law of every secret intelligence agency” to avoid capture through suicide.⁴⁶ Baldwin claimed it was Powers’s choice to live, and not the conduct of surveillance overflights, which had caused “an international incident of unpredictable consequences” days before the Four Power Summit in Paris.⁴⁷

Baldwin’s decision to blame Powers for impending diplomatic fallout was questionable. The downing of a U-2 plane evidenced U.S. aerial espionage with or without a living pilot. Despite claiming Powers should have killed himself, Baldwin recognized that asking him to do so raised a moral issue, writing “it is contrary to the Judean-Christian and the American ethic to destroy one’s own life.”⁴⁸ Baldwin was among the first to note hypocrisy in the Eisenhower administration’s claims to a “Judeo-Christian” religiosity while asking its spies to sacrifice themselves in violation of those religions’ tenets.

Baldwin juxtaposed Powers’s failures with the U-2, which offered salvation for U.S. military preeminence and techno-masculinity. He constructed a dichotomy between man and machine, delineating how the U-2’s accomplishments balanced out Powers’s shortcomings. The U-2’s five years of aerial espionage proved it was “one of the most successful reconnaissance planes ever built.” The U-2 had an “amazing high-altitude capability” of up to 90,000 feet, far above Soviet jets. The plane’s “high supersonic speed and maneuverability” enabled it to gain a “degree of invulnerability” to Soviet missiles. Baldwin downplayed the Soviet military’s downing of the U-2 insisting their “feat of rocketry, despite the Soviet boasting about it, is not remarkable,” and instead proved to him that Soviet missiles had only just reached equivalency with long-deployed U.S. Nike-Ajax missiles. To Baldwin, Powers’s survival and capture would damage international negotiations, but the U-2 demonstrated U.S. air power’s superiority, providing a silver lining that turned disaster into “the most successful reconnaissance espionage project in history.”⁴⁹ The U-2 seemed perfect compared to Powers’s flaws.

Other editorialists suggested effeminacy and breach of discipline were factors in Powers’s refusal to die. Conservative Chicago Tribune columnist Willard Edwards did not explicitly accuse Powers of homosexuality, but deployed the Lavender Scare’s homophobic logics suggesting the CIA’s “glamor” drew in many, including homosexuals considered “ripe for blackmail.”⁵⁰ To Edwards, improper sexual preference, pathologized by the reigning psychiatric opinion that homosexuality was a mental illness, provided a possible explanation for why Powers failed to adhere to the “grim code imposed on all spies” and kill himself.⁵¹ Edwards veered past Powers to take aim at the Air Force and CIA. He attacked the military branch and intelligence agency for failing to discipline Powers, lamenting he was not “sufficiently indoctrinated to commit suicide rather than surrender.”⁵² He insisted the officials responsible for training Powers needed to be “punished.”⁵³ Powers’s survival suggested instinctive self-preservation was human error while evidencing the limits of disciplinary regimes to control human agents. Despite Air Force and CIA attempts to forge Powers into a programmed man-machine, his refusal to kill himself was exacerbated in Edwards’s view by the U-2’s self-destruct mechanism that offered the pilot another means of achieving an ostensibly heroic death as martyr for the United States.⁵⁴

While many journalists attacked Powers for not killing himself, others defended his survival. These editorialists offered a competing conception of the military man’s ideal performance. Perhaps due to proximity to federal power, the Washington Post’s reporting was more sympathetic to Powers, the Eisenhower administration, and the CIA. Post reporters pointed to a “survival kit” of medical supplies as evidence the CIA equipped Powers for more than suicide in case of operational failure.⁵⁵  Post reporter John Norris wrote that “actual spies” were “supposed to kill themselves to avoid torture or disclosure of secrets,” but questioned whether U-2 pilots drawn from the Air Force considered themselves “undercover agents.” Norris posited Powers was a transitioning serviceman whose prior identity as an Air Force pilot only called for him to risk his life, not sacrifice it. Norris forgave Powers for disclosing his mission details noting “some very effective ‘truth serum’ drugs now exist.”⁵⁶ Though Washington Post reporters did not critique Powers’s masculine performance, their focus on survival gear and truth serums still suggested human agents were faulty instruments of covert operations needing life sustaining supplies and susceptible to chemical manipulation.

The conservative National Review proffered masculine ideals at odds with those expressed in other publications. Editor James Burnham did not discuss the suicide needle at length. Instead, he focused on the weapons Powers possessed and condemned him for failing to resist Soviet capture.⁵⁷ He asked, “If Powers possessed a gun and knife, why didn’t he use them?” Burnham expected a U.S. military man in enemy territory to attack his nation’s foes. Interrogating Powers’s masculine performance, Burnham asked: “Why didn’t he fight to avoid capture by the jolly peasants, and get into the nearby mountains? The chances were a million to one against him? Men have fought on shorter odds than that. And if he died in that fight, he died a hero and his secrets died with him.”⁵⁸ Writing from his desk chair, Burnham expected real men to fend off capture and fight to the end despite impossible odds. Demanding the superhuman in service of a superpower, Burnham envisaged an ideal spy that mirrored fiction’s globetrotting, murderous, lothario James Bond. Though Burnham did not mention Ian Fleming’s spy character, Bond’s emergence in annually released novels from 1953 to 1960 lodged an ultraviolent image of covert agents within the zeitgeist. Powers’s supposed masculine failures remained on National Review founder William F. Buckley’s mind for years. He later re-imagined the Soviet capture of a U-2 pilot in his spy novel Marco Polo, if You Can, where he substituted Powers with a fictional CIA agent who shared Bond’s capacities for violence and womanizing.⁵⁹

Burnham ignored the implications of the acts his violent imagination postulated as ideal spy performance. Caught in what Khrushchev considered an aggressive territorial violation, had Powers fought off and killed his civilian captors he would have exacerbated the calamity’s impact on international relations. By condemning Powers for his surrender, Burnham and the National Review asserted the legitimacy of violence against the United States’ Cold War enemy, no matter the situation or outcome.

Burnham extended Powers’s perceived effeminacy to the CIA and Eisenhower administration, turning an individual failure of techno-masculinity into the nation’s. The National Review editor argued the CIA’s bumbling response to Powers’s capture revealed the intelligence agency was “an organization without either strong faith or clear policy, directed by stuffed shirts and bureaucrats, staffed too often by routine clerks plus activist hired hands.” Burnham’s characterizations suggested that CIA staff were effete pencil pushers. With such men helming the U.S. Cold War struggle, the National Review questioned whether the CIA was “capable of sustaining a continuous war of the kind fought by the Communist World Empire?” Burnham’s claim of CIA staffers leading “soft” lives infused the blame he placed on Powers for failing to fight and die like a man. Despite the CIA’s aggressive pursuit of military intelligence through U-2 flights over other countries, right wing extremists like Burnham questioned the agency’s ability to wage the Cold War.⁶⁰

To Burnham, the U-2 plane’s performance far surpassed its pilot’s. The only compliments Burnham mustered were to the airplane. He argued the U-2 “carried out unscathed for four years one of history’s most remarkable intelligence campaigns.” He gloated the plane “opened the skies that all the might and cunning of the Soviet Union strove to keep shut” outclassing “the boasted Soviet defenses” that took “four years to bring down a single plane.”⁶¹ Burnham divorced the U-2’s accomplishments from the CIA and Powers, accrediting the machine alone with success. His self-congratulation of U.S. technological capacity made sense within a Cold War structured around superpowers’ push for nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and orbital satellites all facilitating a more effective destruction of the enemy. Burnham’s emphasis on the U-2, separated from the institution that made it or the pilots who flew it, displayed how contemporaries allowed themselves to imagine a war machine as a stand-in representative of U.S. techno-masculinity.

Soviet technological accomplishments spurred popular perceptions that the United States was technologically behind in the Cold War. Sputnik’s 1957 launch demonstrated Soviet rocket and satellite capabilities to the world. U.S. presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing a disadvantageous “missile gap” to emerge between the U.S.S.R. and United States. The popular debates about pilot Powers’s masculine failures echoed aeronautical scientists’ anxieties about the “human factor” in air operations. Many journalists and administration officials explained away the U-2’s downing by speculating a fault in Powers’s oxygen supply necessitated he fly at a lower altitude bringing him in range of Soviet missiles. Despite the Soviet downing of a U-2, many commenters deemed the preceding years of overflights the greatest intelligence gathering operation in history, thereby dismissing the Soviet threat to U.S. supremacy. While many editorialists lambasted Powers as a failed military man, they also repeatedly constructed the U-2 as an agent in and of itself that reclaimed national power. Powers’s emasculation in popular discourse juxtaposed with the U-2’s perfect image helped construct a techno-masculinity in which a war machine could substitute for a flawed military man as the emblem of U.S. world hegemony.

…

Eisenhower administration officials paid close attention to the debates surrounding Powers and tried to shape public discourse. Staffers routinely prepared summaries of news stories, including press coverage of the U-2 crisis, for Eisenhower and other top officials to review.⁶² In late May, Eisenhower wrote directly to news mogul William Randolph Hearst, Jr. thanking the publisher for his papers’ complimentary coverage of the U-2 crisis in contrast to the harsh criticism his administration faced from other news outlets.⁶³ White House Secretary Ann Whitman noted Eisenhower received “an inundation of letters” concerning the U-2 Crisis.⁶⁴ Within the correspondence sent to the president, Americans expressed a variety of opinions about U-2 operations, the failed Four Power Summit, and Powers himself.⁶⁵ While most mail came from average Americans, the president also received letters from close friends like journalist John Reagan “Tex” McCrary, who had helped convince Eisenhower to run for president, and included a clipped copy of Baldwin’s New York Times article “Intelligence and Survival” in his letter to Eisenhower.⁶⁶ McCrary internalized Baldwin’s critical interrogation of Powers’s refusal to kill himself, suggesting to Eisenhower the real concern for U.S. national security was neither the “missile gap,” nor an “intelligence gap,” but rather a “guts gap.”⁶⁷ No doubt, the popular gendered critiques of Powers shaped the president’s thoughts about overflight intelligence gathering and possible technological solutions to the problems with the pilot.

At the first National Security Council (NSC) meeting since the mid-May collapse of the Four Power Summit, CIA Director Allen Dulles delivered a presentation on “Significant World Developments Affecting U.S. Security” that veered into a critical discussion of Powers.⁶⁸ Dulles forecasted “Khrushchev’s next steps” following the U-2’s downing. He speculated U-2 flights and Powers’s capture sparked divisions between Soviet political and military leaders. He also discussed a statement from Chinese diplomats claiming U-2 overflights did not surprise them as the U.S. surveillance planes often overflew Chinese territory.⁶⁹

Eisenhower interrupted Dulles’s briefing to discuss the U-2’s downing and Powers. The president expressed concerns over a congressional investigation threatening increased oversight of covert operations and delineated what administration figures should, and should not, say publicly about U-2 flights. He then interrogated Dulles about the CIA’s captured pilot. The administration had presumed that no pilot could survive a U-2 downing from the upper atmosphere. Now confronting Powers’s survival, Eisenhower probed Dulles about the pilot’s prior flight record. The president also posed questions about Powers that echoed the critiques of his masculine performance circulating in the U.S. public sphere. Eisenhower complained that “apparently Powers had started talking as soon as he touched the ground” rather than withholding sensitive information about his covert mission. He asked whether Powers was trained to self-destruct his plane and kill himself rather than allowing himself and the airframe to fall into Soviet hands. He also lambasted Powers for not destroying incriminating evidence like his flight plan detailing his takeoff from Pakistan and an expected landing in Norway.⁷⁰ Eisenhower’s critical interrogation of Powers’s techno-masculinity signaled he also considered the pilot a failed military man.

Eisenhower’s harsh questioning forced Dulles to defend Powers’s performance because the pilot’s perceived failures reflected poorly upon his direction of the CIA. Dulles contextualized Powers’s extensive experience flying U-2 missions. He clarified the U-2’s self-destruct mechanism was not meant to kill its pilot and featured a time delay allowing ejection from the airplane. Dulles denied Powers hand-delivered his flight plan to his captors, insisting it was discovered amongst the U-2’s wreckage. Despite Dulles’s defense of Powers, the accusatory tone of the president’s questions evinced disappointment with the pilot’s performance. As the meeting progressed, and recriminations subsided, Eisenhower summarized his feelings about U-2 operations, saying: “we had been the leader for peace in the world. In order to remain the leader, we must remain strong and in order to be strong we must obtain intelligence information.”⁷¹ The president thus interlinked worldwide leadership and national “strength” with U.S. technological capacity to gather intelligence through U-2 overflight. The U-2 embodied U.S. power as the nation checked the Soviets’ competing pursuit of world hegemony.⁷²

Yet, the human factor’s limitations upon aerial intelligence gathering were at the center of popular, administrative, and corporate thinking. The worldwide scandal surrounding Powers’s capture forced Eisenhower to pause U-2 flights over Soviet territory. This pause pushed the administration to pursue a mechanical solution for vulnerable manned flights. In late May 1960, Lockheed aeronautical engineer and U-2 designer Kelly Johnson recorded in his project logs that Eisenhower administration officials asked him to investigate “droning” the U-2.⁷³ A droned U-2 seemed appealing as an “unmanned” surveillance aircraft might avoid the sort of scandal surrounding Powers. After a month of testing by Lockheed engineers, Johnson rejected the U-2’s “droning” because of the plane’s fragile airframe and because no remote-control system could direct the jet at extreme altitudes.⁷⁴ Yet, turning to drone surveillance remained alluring to U.S. policy makers because even if a drone was shot down, an unmanned machine was more disposable and dis-ownable than a manned airplane.

In late May 1960, Dulles attempted to reclaim legitimacy for himself and the CIA’s aerial surveillance operations in closed testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He echoed Eisenhower by presenting the U-2’s “high-performance” capabilities as emblematic of U.S. power following a month that witnessed the Four Power Summit collapse in Paris and journalists denigrate Powers and the CIA as unmanly. Dulles furthered the dichotomy between perfect machine and flawed man emergent in aeronautical research and news media discourse through testimony that celebrated the U-2’s performance, yet condemned Powers’s vulnerabilities.

Dulles framed the United States as a scorned suitor of the Soviet Union whose leaders rejected offers for more intimate diplomatic relations. He insisted the administration desired aerial surveillance “sanctioned on a mutual basis.”⁷⁵ Dulles reminded the senators that the Eisenhower administration proposed a mutual arms inspection regime with the Soviet Union called “Open Skies” and blamed the Soviets for rejecting this offer.⁷⁶ Dulles defended CIA spy flights, insisting foreign intelligence gathering could not be “shackled by traditions.” Instead, Dulles argued “we live in an age when old concepts of the limits of ‘permitted’ techniques for acquiring information are totally outdated. They come from the horse and buggy days.”⁷⁷ He rejected the concept of territorial sovereignty arguing it was an old world idea outdated in the day of the U-2’s “high-performance” surveillance capabilities.⁷⁸ Dulles’s argument thus became self-contradictory, claiming a desire for a diplomatic policy agreement for mutual arms inspection with the Soviet Union through “Open Skies,” while simultaneously suggesting the U-2 made international law and national sovereignty irrelevant.

Dulles’s arguments advanced the notion of techno-masculinity in which a war machine like the U-2, not its problematic pilot, functioned as the real measure of U.S. power and manhood. Dulles infused his Senate testimony with gendered and sexualized language. He claimed the U-2 performed a castrating role against the Soviet military by “penetrating” their airspace with “impunity” rendering “their vaunted fighters… useless.” He boasted U-2 flights gathered vital military intelligence despite the Soviet military’s best efforts at resistance, demonstrating that Soviet “ground-to-air missile capability was inadequate.”⁷⁹ Dulles noted Khrushchev never dared to tell the Soviet people about U.S. surveillance during the prior years of U-2 overflights suggesting he was afraid to reveal Soviet military incapacity compared to U.S. “capability.” Dulles argued that in a Cold War structured by superpowers’ competing technological prowess, demonstrations of the United States’ “relative strength” emphasized comparative Soviet weakness to the world. He fashioned the U-2’s downing as a boon to U.S. alliances because now the world knew about the years of uninterrupted U-2 overflights, demonstrating a disparity in airpower between the two superpowers that favored the United States. He asserted that the U-2 inflicted psychological wounds upon a “frustrated” Soviet military whose leaders were “far less confident today than they otherwise would have been.”⁸⁰ The CIA director claimed Benthamian results from a panoptic U-2, suggesting the plane’s surveillance disciplined the Soviets being watched by threatening them with punishment thereby helping contain communism.⁸¹ In Dulles’s rendering, U-2 flights “made the Soviets less cocky about their ability to deal with what we might bring against them.”⁸² Aiming to counter the masculine critiques directed at Powers and the CIA, Dulles boasted the U-2’s “high flying, high performance” capabilities to reassure senators that the intelligence agency was cocksure of its ability to wage the Cold War.

Dulles claimed victory from a moment of defeat, declaring the U-2 program was “one of the most valuable intelligence collection operations that any country has ever mounted at any time.”⁸³ U-2 pilots took innumerable photographs of the Soviet Union’s bomber force production, airfield locations, nuclear weapons storage facilities, intercontinental ballistic missile test programs, atomic energy development, and nuclear weapons testing grounds. Dulles insisted this information gathered by the spy plane was a defensive check to a surprise nuclear attack. However, he revealed “the most important intelligence obtained” was of offensive value through the identification of targets for potential bombing.⁸⁴ Thanks to the U-2, Dulles boasted the U.S. Strategic Air Command could “make a more efficient and confident allocation of aircraft, crews and weapons” should nuclear war erupt.⁸⁵

While Dulles championed the U-2’s contributions to the Cold War, he fashioned Powers as a scapegoat for CIA policy. Dulles only defended Powers enough to shield the CIA from sharing blame while still suggesting the pilot underperformed and was a security liability as Soviet captive. He characterized Powers as a capable pilot who had flown “technically similar flights” demonstrating a “high degree of reliability.”⁸⁶ He emphasized Powers was trained as a pilot, not as an “agent,” and that agent training was “incompatible” with the “technical demands” of flying the U-2. He claimed Powers’s lethal injection was an optional means of suicide made available to avoid torture if captured. Dulles’s attempts to absolve Powers of wrongdoing served to rehabilitate the CIA’s image for choosing to employ him and made its policies seem less macabre.⁸⁷ Yet, while the CIA director exclusively praised the U-2’s “high performance,” he spared no critique of Powers’s performance. He insisted the pilot’s most important “duty” was the “destruction of the aircraft and its equipment,” actions he doubted Powers attempted.⁸⁸ Dulles told senators that Powers was trained to “attempt escape and evasion so as to avoid capture,” yet was captured immediately. He alleged that CIA policy instructed Powers to honestly discuss his mission if captured to avoid a torturous extraction of information. Yet, CIA policy also expected Powers “to delay as long as possible the revelation of damaging information,” a contradictory dictate which might encourage captors to forcefully extract information.⁸⁹ To Dulles, the U-2 accomplished the greatest feat of intelligence gathering in human history, while its pilot failed to escape capture or avoid revealing sensitive information which he hinted might have been avoided if Powers had just killed himself.

Dulles concluded his Senate testimony professing worry that by the time Powers faced trial for espionage, the Soviets “will have had a more thorough opportunity for a complete brainwashing operation.” By insisting Powers would be “brainwashed,” Dulles enunciated a resonant phrase still new to U.S. discourse that insinuated Powers’s inability to resist the mental domination imposed upon him by Soviet men and carried with it broader anxieties concerning U.S. military masculinity and sexuality.⁹⁰

Most Americans encountered the phrase “brainwashing” for the first time following the Korean War when twenty-three U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) refused repatriation. These soldiers shocked military officials and contemporary audiences by rejecting their country as the land of “KKKism and McCarthyism.”⁹¹ Journalists and military leaders sought to explain away these critiques of U.S. society by latching on to the idea of “brainwashing.” Also referred to as “coercive persuasion” or “menticide” by 1950s psychiatrists, brainwashing was believed to be a form of mental domination that broke victims through extended isolation, assignment of repetitious tasks, sleep deprivation, violent threats, and physical assaults.⁹² Military leaders refused to acknowledge that many soldiers cooperated with their captors to survive horrible prison camp conditions. Deemed a failure of discipline, “brainwashed” soldiers faced dishonorable discharges or courts-martial as punishment for submitting to their captors’ ideological impositions.⁹³ Military officials’ condemnation of POWs led civilian observers to rationalize soldiers’ anti-American sentiments. Many editorialists linked prisoners’ rejection of the United States to the “crisis of masculinity” and the supposed moral weakness of post-war U.S. culture.⁹⁴ Journalists speculated that servicemen’s behavior stemmed from a “lavender menace” imposed in prison camps where soldiers “dressed in women’s clothes” and were “bound together more by homosexualism than Communism.”⁹⁵ Sexual “deviancy” infused the definition of “brainwashing” in the 1950s United States as military psychiatrists construed a pathologized understanding of soldiers’ actions as submission to mental domination from another man and suggested this capitulation was something akin to a homosexual practice.⁹⁶

Dulles’s insistence that Powers would face a “complete brainwashing operation” played upon popular anxieties surrounding military masculinity and sexuality. On one level, the CIA director’s discussion of “brainwashing” functioned to dismiss the legitimacy of Powers’s impending court testimony, insisting whatever he uttered in Moscow would be “a mixture of truth and fiction.”⁹⁷ But Dulles’s anxieties about Soviet brainwashing were not simply an effort to disavow Powers’s impending statements. Dulles had worried about Soviet brainwashing since the Korean War POW scandal. In April 1953, he delivered a speech entitled “Brain Warfare” to Princeton University alumni that concocted a fantastical notion of brainwashing, claiming it was “the perversion of the minds of selected individuals who are subjected to such treatment that they are deprived of the ability to state their own thoughts.” To Dulles, brainwashing victims became “parrot-like” and conditioned to “repeat thoughts which have been implanted in their minds by suggestion from outside.” Brainwashing made a person’s mind like “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.”⁹⁸ Here stood a serious concern for the intelligence community. What secret information might be extracted from a captured spy pilot like Powers? How might U.S. soldiers be used to embarrass their home nation or enunciate Soviet propaganda? Once “brainwashed,” could a soldier ever be trusted if he returned home? Captured Powers’s malleable mind made him a manipulable security liability.

News of Dulles’s claims that Powers faced Soviet brainwashing sparked a public obsession. Some commenters like James Burnham at National Review wrote about brainwashing before Dulles made it an issue. But Burnham had insisted that “Brainwashing is a matter of weeks, more often of months” and suggested a sign of Powers’s weakness was his immediate revelation of information to Soviet captors.⁹⁹ The CIA director’s insistence Powers would be brainwashed, however, spurred popular conspiracies.¹⁰⁰ Hollywood screenwriter James Clavell, made famous by the 1958 film The Fly, and himself a World War II POW, approached Barbara Powers for the movie rights to her husband’s story. Clavell suggested a film might help Powers gain his freedom, while also answering burning questions like: “Did he land in Russia purposely? Was he a Russian agent? Was he double-crossed by a counter-spy? Why didn’t he use the suicide kit?”¹⁰¹

Over the summer months of 1960, conspiracies about Powers’s brainwashing or being a Russian double-agent evoked literary works like Richard Condon’s best-selling novel The Manchurian Candidate, published just one year before Powers’s capture. The ways U.S. audiences worried about Powers’s duplicity or complicity appeared something akin to a real-life stand-in for the novel’s protagonist Raymond Shaw, a Korean War POW brainwashed by Soviet and Chinese psychiatrists to assassinate the U.S. president. More than pulp fiction, Condon’s novel combined anxieties over a communist “fifth column” with ideas about domineering mothers, gender troubles, and homosexuality into a morality play satirizing the McCarthy era’s political hysteria.¹⁰² Powers’s capture made life as strange as fiction to Americans prone to conspiratorial thinking.

New crises through the late summer of 1960 continued to intertwine with the scandal surrounding Powers. On July 1, the Soviet military shot down another U.S. surveillance plane flying near Russian waters. Soviet forces captured the two surviving crew members from this RB-47 plane, but four others died. U.S. officials protested that the plane was conducting legitimate operations far removed from Russian territory. Khrushchev, however, seized on the Soviet downing of another U.S. plane and linked it to Powers’ U-2 flight as Soviet United Nations delegates introduced a charge of aggression against the United States.¹⁰³

Imprisoned, Powers remained unaware of the controversy birthed by his failed flight. Perhaps hoping to elicit a condemnatory testimony from the CIA pilot, Soviet interrogators waited until days before Powers’s trial to tell him about the ways U.S. newspaper editorialists had critiqued his military masculinity.¹⁰⁴ Powers detailed his struggle over using the CIA-provided lethal injection in his autobiography. He also claimed to consider other ways of ending his life or escaping Soviet custody. For example, he describes a plot to leap from the twelfth-story roof of the Soviet prison amidst an exercise break from his interrogations, but reasoned jumping before guards stopped him was impossible.¹⁰⁵ Despite contemplating suicide, Powers’s testimony in Moscow spurred editorialists to harshly critique his masculinity and wish him dead.

CIA pilot Powers drew world attention as he took the stand in mid-August facing a possible death sentence. Seeking a lesser punishment, he pleaded guilty to spying for the U.S. government, professing he was “profoundly sorry I ever had any part” in CIA operations. Powers insisted he “was not asked whether I wanted to take the flight.” He presented himself as duty-bound by state employment claiming he “could not refuse” his mission because “it was an order.” Powers insisted if he refused to fly he would be considered a “coward by all of my associates” while also committing “an unsuccessful completion of my contract.”¹⁰⁶ Powers’s legal counsel defended him by emphasizing his working class origins, insisting he was a pilot not a trained spy, noting he had no role in U.S. policymaking, and claiming he simply followed CIA orders.¹⁰⁷ This defense of “just following orders,” however, faced critique from Soviet Prosecutor Roman Rudenko, made famous during the Nuremberg trials for countering Nazi leaders’ similar claims.¹⁰⁸

As Powers testified and appeared coherent the U.S. and international press agreed he was not brainwashed.¹⁰⁹ The CIA director was less sure. In a private memo to Eisenhower, Dulles suggested that while Powers may not be “brainwashed,” he still seemed “brain conditioned.”¹¹⁰ The pilot’s malleable mind and open mouth remained a source of anxiety for the administration as Powers’s testimony exposed its cloak-and-dagger practices.

As Powers testified in Moscow, U.S. journalists attacked his performance as a military man. The hawkish Chicago Tribune proved the newspaper most critical of Powers during the trial. A Chicago Tribune editorial responding to Powers’s first day of testimony painted the trial as Soviet propaganda and Powers as weak. The Tribune writer complained Powers “didn’t have to be beaten to make him plead guilty” suggesting U.S. embarrassment might have been avoided as “a man of more heroic mold would have blown up his plane and committed suicide.”¹¹¹ The Chicago Tribune’s aviation correspondent quoted an anonymous “high ranking air force pilot” who deemed Powers a coward and suggested he breached his high-paying CIA contract by refusing to take his own life. The anonymous Air Force pilot dubbed Powers a “soldier of fortune” whose $30,000 salary ($300,000 in 2024) was awarded to “very high caliber individuals with a special kind of courage to make these very high altitude, long range, and extremely hazardous flights alone.” The Air Force officer insisted “Powers was not the right man to have drawn the assignment” because “in all such matters the life of any individual is at stake. Recruits are told this at the outset and this fact of life… is fully understood by everyone.”¹¹² Powers’s Air Force peer suggested the CIA’s lucrative contracts entailed mortal obligations for pilots, making Powers’s self-preservation a masculine failure that exhibited excessive greed and lacking patriotism.

A soldier for capitalism fighting a war against communism demonstrated that economic incentives could not overcome the human will for self-preservation. As contemporaries lambasted Powers for not living up to his self-sacrificial side of a lucrative CIA contract, their critiques put teeth in Khrushchev’s claim that the captured pilot, his high pay, and his suicide needle showed “how capital buys life, how it buys people.”¹¹³

The idea that Powers should have killed himself for his nation remained controversial. Chicago Tribune reader Jeanne Barry wrote a letter to the paper’s editor rejecting the construction of suicide as being “heroic” or “manly” while raising larger questions about U.S. covert operations. Barry asked “Since when is suicide considered heroic? What kind of philosophy are you advocating?” She invoked religion, objecting “This course is contrary to the historic teachings of the great Christian and Jewish religions.” Disturbed by CIA policy, she insisted “The hint that the United States government is not opposed to the suicide of its airmen is a matter for open hearing, thorough investigation, and a close examination of the principles by which these secret governmental agencies are operating.¹¹⁴ Here lay the greatest threat to an intelligence agency: civilian oversight. Covert operations were meant to remain hidden. The U-2’s downing exposed the Eisenhower administration’s aggressive pursuits of military intelligence while displaying the limits to U.S. technological might. Yet, the biggest danger to this regime of power was not the USSR, but rather a public interrogation of whether the United States was on the right path as it pursued world hegemony.

The scandal surrounding Powers and his shot-down U-2 shaped the context during which President Eisenhower considered the future utility of “unmanned” surveillance technologies. On August 25, 1960, only six days after Powers’s trial concluded in Moscow, a top-secret report from the Special Panel on Satellite Reconnaissance reached President Eisenhower. The panel’s science advisors pitched satellite reconnaissance as a key component of future U.S. intelligence gathering. Yet, they admitted creating digital networks of communication between earth’s orbit and surface was an expensive and long-term project. The president’s science advisors proposed creating a network of surveillance satellites over the coming decade while relying on piloted and drone flights for immediate intelligence gathering.¹¹⁵ Following this meeting on satellite reconnaissance, Eisenhower transitioned to a NSC meeting, where he approved the creation of a new intelligence agency: the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).¹¹⁶ The NRO became a covert central hub that coordinated and funded the research and development of aircraft for the U.S. armed services and intelligence community. As the Cold War grew hotter in the 1960s, the NRO took on an outsized significance through its development of U.S. military aircraft, especially drones.

Military historians and former CIA intelligence analysts have written about the National Reconnaissance Office’s prioritization of the development of “unmanned” satellite and drone technologies in the 1960s.¹¹⁷ The NRO and other covert government agencies like the Advanced Research Projects Agency became the primary institutions funding drone development in the 1960s as the U.S. war in Vietnam ushered in drones’ first mass deployment.¹¹⁸ Yet, existing historical literature is silent on the discursive contexts that help explain this policy shift favoring drone technology following Powers’s capture.

Lifeless machines do not need suicidal injections that spark controversy or a call for oversight of the intelligence community. Machine substitutions for piloted aircrafts, like drones, provided a malleable and controllable war machine that escaped human vulnerabilities like death, capture, and interrogation, rendering personal or masculine performance irrelevant. Satellites and drones feel no pain and have no mind. The threat of torture or brainwashing poses no threat to a mechanical agent. Within a few years of Powers’s capture, a sitting president could disown and ignore a lost drone far more easily than a killed or captured U.S. pilot. Substituting an autonomous or remotely controlled machine for a manned aircraft became the ideal means of sustaining the national security state imperative of intelligence gathering while hiding the U.S. surveillance regime from the gaze of a critical civilian populace. The debate surrounding CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers demonstrated that characteristics of the human condition like self-preservation and an open mind were unacceptable flaws in the eyes of the Cold War state. Only an automaton could serve as the ideal spy.

…

Controversy hovered over Powers and U.S. aerial surveillance for years after 1960. Khrushchev refused to return the two surviving RB-47 airmen until a new U.S. administration was sworn in. Negotiations for Powers fell to the Kennedy administration which orchestrated his exchange for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in 1962. Despite renouncing his CIA service amidst his espionage trial, Powers tried to fly the U-2 for the CIA once home but was turned down. He worked for Lockheed as a test pilot until 1970 when fired, seemingly in response to the publication of his book detailing his CIA service and prisoner experience. Drawn to flying, Powers found work as a television news helicopter pilot, but died in a crash in 1977. Some editorialists announced his death while critiquing his masculinity suggesting he was a “coward” who should have killed himself back in 1960.¹¹⁹ Powers’s return to the United States from the Soviet Union preceded the theatrical release of The Manchurian Candidate starring Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra by mere months. Unlike the best-selling novel, the film adaptation was not a blockbuster and failed to garner significant audience interest, even in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, which seemed to have brought the film to life. As Sinatra would soon sing, “That’s life”—you might be “riding high in April,” yet get “shot down in May,” and despite trying to “get back in the race,” repeatedly “falling on your face,” might make you want to roll yourself “up in a big ball and die.”¹²⁰

Manned U-2 surveillance flights remained vulnerable to U.S. adversaries’ anti-air defenses making drones more attractive. The U-2 was the instrument of photographic intelligence gathering that alerted the Kennedy administration to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. However, when Cuban forces shot down a U-2, its pilot died. The Kennedy administration considered flying surveillance drones over Cuba amidst the missile crisis but canceled the operation on the verge of the drones’ deployment.¹²¹ The growing dangers of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to overflight surveillance amplified drones’ allure but did not always secure their use.

In May 1964, as U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration considered options for surveilling Cuba, the scandal that surrounded Powers and his downed U-2 remained on the minds of the NSC. John McCone, who replaced Allen Dulles as CIA director, enunciated the key advantage of using drones being “the shootdown of a drone would not create an incident exactly paralleling the shootdown of a U-2.”¹²² There would be no dead or captured pilot, making a drone easier to disown even if it got shot down. Fears about another U-2 downing led NSC members to also consider equipping the plane with more advanced electronic countermeasures that could disrupt a SAM’s trajectory. Yet, this possibility faced reservations as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara noted similar equipment was on Powers’s U-2 leading McCone to question “why he [Powers] did not turn it on when he had received the warning” of an enemy missile lock-on.¹²³ Techno-masculinity retained salience in policy discourse as Powers’s performance as a military man was again deemed lacking due to his apparent failure to adequately wield the military technology entrusted to him.

The NSC eventually rejected the idea of flying surveillance drones over Cuba for several reasons, including drones’ limited functionality, but the deciding factor was that using a drone seemed to signal U.S. weakness. As the NSC considered surveillance drones, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy “expressed himself very positively against changing to drones as it would represent an unacceptable retreat.”¹²⁴ As emblematic representations of U.S. manhood and military might, drones seemed unmanly compared to the associative dangers of a piloted U-2 facing down Cuban missiles. While some policy makers believed drones might avoid embarrassing moments like Powers’s capture, others like Robert Kennedy argued unmanned surveillance technologies amounted to emasculating cowardice that failed to maintain U.S. techno-masculinity.

Despite a long history of U.S. military interest in drone technology extending back to the earliest days of air power, the technology’s mass adoption faced obstacles not overcome until after Powers’s capture. While the embrace of drone technology might seem like it was a strategic inevitability, a seemingly natural extension of air war’s logics of distanced destruction which had seen bomber planes, then missiles, arise as a means of removing soldiers from the space of danger, this is a teleological presumption. NATO nations’ aeronautical scientists had spent much of the 1950s identifying the physiological and psychological problems of the “human factor” in air operations, often fantasizing the allures of automated airpower, yet few were ready to embrace drone technology until after Powers’s capture infused the problems with pilots with gender critique. Powers’s capture, and the prevalent denigrations of his performance as a military man, undercut longstanding notions of airmen as idealized masculine figures that extended back to the days of World War I’s “Knights in the Air.” Critiques in public and policy discourse of pilot Powers’s manhood provided the defining context during which the Eisenhower administration created the National Reconnaissance Office and as this new institution ushered in the United States’ first mass deployment of drones in war.

The National Reconnaissance Office contracted the Ryan Aeronautical Company to re-engineer its “Firebee” target drone into the “Lightning Bug” surveillance drone in 1962, initiating the most significant U.S. surveillance drone program of the twentieth century as measured in dollars spent and missions flown.¹²⁵ For comparison, the sole U.S. reconnaissance drone fielded during the 1950s had drawn $50 million in Army funding, whereas the NRO-backed Lightning Bug program drew in $1.1 billion over the course of its operations from 1962 through the Vietnam War era, an increase in spending of 2,100 percent.¹²⁶ The Lightning Bug surveillance drone flew thousands of surveillance missions over Vietnam including deployment amidst the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Chinese nuclear weapons development also became a key target for U.S. Lightning Bug surveillance. As CIA Director McCone had predicted, when Chinese anti-aircraft defenses shot down a Lightning Bug drone in late 1964 there was minimal press coverage of the incident and no resulting political controversy.¹²⁷

Drones emerged as a key method of de-politicizing U.S. covert surveillance operations by avoiding the controversies sparked by the death or capture of a pilot. Though the Eisenhower administration paused U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union after Powers’s downing, the high-altitude plane remained active over many parts of the world less equipped for air defense, and still flies today. Powers’s capture did not end manned surveillance. It made deploying a drone instead of a manned surveillance plane alluring because this machine substitution reduced the risk of international scandal and national embarrassment, arguably emasculation. Even as drones violated rival countries’ territorial sovereignty and got shot down, few people paid attention to these incidents. Machine substitution with drones was only one strategy alongside the development of even higher flying airplanes like Lockheed’s SR-71 “Blackbird” and new training regimes for pilots like the Navy’s “Top Gun” school that inscribed a hyper-masculine identity to pilots in its public imagery.¹²⁸ Re-reading the “1960 U-2 Crisis” through the lenses of technology and gender shows concerns about manhood were at the forefront of popular and private national security discourse. The unmanning of pilot Francis Gary Powers emerges as an inseparable part of U.S. policy makers’ rationales for unmanning U.S. air power.

Author Biography

Garrett McKinnon is an assistant teaching professor in North Carolina State University’s history department, in Raleigh, NC, United States. He completed a BA and MA in history at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA, United States) under the direction of David Culbert and a PhD in history at Duke University (Durham, NC, United States) under the direction of Dirk Bönker.

Acknowledgement

This article benefited from research funding provided by the Eisenhower Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, and the Linda Hall Library. Dirk Bönker, Nancy MacLean, Reeve Huston, Evan Hepler-Smith, Robert McKinnon, Jolie Olcott, and Amy Laura Hall helped improve the quality of this work, as did participants at the 2022 SHAFR Conference and works-in-progress seminars at Duke, North Carolina State University, and the Linda Hall Library. Diplomatic History referees and editors also offered constructive criticism that made this article better.

Footnotes