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U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Peter Lemkin - 02-12-2012
CIA documents show US never believed Gary Powers was shot down
U-2 pilot Gary Powers, a few weeks before his suspicious death in a helicopter crash in LA, revealed that he did not believe his plane was shot down by the Soviets and indicated sabotage on the part of the CIA instead, in order to undermine the possibility of detente between Eisenhower and Kruschev. It is not a "conspiracy theory" that Lee Harvey Oswald, one of nine Office of Naval Intelligence fake defectors who went to the USSR in the same month, told ONI's Richard Snyder at the American Embassy in Moscow that he was going to reveal the U-2 secrets to the Soviets. Oswald had been stationed, as a Marine, at every base the U-2 operated from, including Atsugi, Japan and tracked it by radar. He had a Crypto clearance. Those things are in the historical record. It is not likely that he gave up any such information or would have been allowed to. Snyder kept Oswald's proffered passport and did not act on his renunciation of US citizenship. Snyder returned the passport to Oswald on his way out of Russia with his new bride Marina, transportation paid by the State Department. Nice treatment for a defector who gave secrets to the Soviets. Marina even got Oswald's story confused with another ONI defector, Robert Webster, when she testified to the Warren Commission about how her husband got to the Soviet Union and where he lived in Moscow. However if sabotage of the detente was in the planning, it would have been useful to use the Oswald deception to explain how the Soviets could track and shoot down the U-2. This article suggests that Powers himself might have been a false defector as well. What is clear is that Powers did not buy the official story. John Judge
The London Times
May 1, 2010
CIA documents show US never believed Gary Powers was shot down
Giles Whittell, Washington Correspondent
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7113512.ece
PHOTO
The legendary U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers
Gary Powers in his pressure suit in front of his U2 spyplane. His mission was to fly for nine hours across the Soviet Union photographing suspected nuclear weapon sites and bomber landing fields
At 8.52 this morning a normally garrulous American is to observe a moment's silence outside the Lubyanka, headquarters of what used to be the KGB in central Moscow. He will be there to honour the good name of his father, Francis Gary Powers, whose reputation has suffered for half a century by association with one of the most enduring mysteries of the Cold War.
Fifty years ago today, in a full-body pressure suit and helmet, Powers was slammed forward against the canopy of his U2 spyplane 70,000ft above central Russia by a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploding close behind him. The blast wave dismembered the plane, tearing off first its tail section and then its wings, but leaving its pilot miraculously unhurt.
In an outer pocket of his suit Powers carried a suicide pin that he chose not to use. He hit the ground in shock but with hardly a scratch. By that evening he was in Moscow, in the Lubyanka. The shooting down and survival of Powers changed the course of history: it wrecked a superpower summit at which President Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, had hoped to launch a new era of détente.
What was not known until the recent declassification of CIA documents seen by The Times, was that top US officials never believed Powers' account of his fateful flight because it appeared to be directly contradicted by a report from the National Security Agency, the clandestine US network of codebreakers and listening posts.
The NSA report remains classified, possibly to spare the blushes of its authors. For it is now possible to piece together what really happened high over Sverdlovsk on May Day 1960 and to understand why America's most secretive intelligence agency got it so wrong.
According to a summary presented this week by Matthew Aid, the world's leading authority on the NSA, the agency's report described Soviet military air traffic controllers as after an aircraft that far from breaking up at close to 70,000ft as Powers later claimed descended slowly from 65,000 to 34,000ft, changed course and disappeared from their radar screens. If true, this would have meant that Powers was at best a liar and conceivably a traitor. According to one rumour circulated without discouragement from the CIA after the shooting down, he descended to a safe height, baled out and spent his first night as a defector in a Sverdlovsk nightclub.
Newly released documents from a secret inquiry into his conduct carried out in 1962, by which time the CIA had swapped him for a Soviet spy and exhaustively debriefed him, show that some in the agency still believed that the Russians might have hypnotised, drugged or brainwashed him to force him to change his story.
The truth was less bizarre but no less remarkable. Powers took off from Peshawar in northern Pakistan after three tense days spent waiting for the weather along his route to clear. His mission was to fly for nine hours, on a breakfast of steak and eggs, directly over half a dozen of the Soviet Union's most sensitive nuclear sites, photographing them and landing hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian coast. Within minutes the entire Soviet Air Defence system was being mobilised on an order from Mr Khrushchev to bring him down at any cost. Captain Mikhail Voronov, commander of a missile battalion south of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), was woken by an alarm at 7am.
"At first I thought it was a drill," he said in an interview at his home on the Black Sea. "It was not a drill. I was planning to walk over from the barracks to give my soldiers their traditional May Day congratulations. Instead I ran. We all ran. We rushed to our positions and when we got there I told my commander that my battalion was ready to fire." At about 8.45am Powers appeared as a dot on Captain Voronov's radar screen. A single rocket was launched and minutes later the screen appeared to indicate a direct hit. Yet Captain Voronov could not be sure. He did not report it until word reached his control cabin half an hour later that a pilot had fallen to earth nearby under a parachute.
It is now clear that in that half hour, with the U2 already strewn across the Russian countryside, two Soviet MiG pilots circling over Sverdlovsk were ordered to intercept and ram, if necessary. One of them, Lieutenant Sergei Safronov, was hit by a stray rocket from another battalion. He baled out, dying of his injuries on the way down, but the radar trace created by his plane closely matched the one described by NSA. The agency almost certainly mistook Lieutenant Safronov for Powers. Mr Aid said this week that the NSA misread its own vaunted signals intelligence. The agency has never conceded anything. In the absence of hard evidence from independent witnesses about what happened to
Powers' U2, conspiracy theories have sprouted like weeds. According to one, crucial information on his flight was passed in advance to Soviet intelligence by Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's assassin and a former junior radar operator at a U2 base in Japan. In another, advanced by James Nathan of the University of Alabama, Powers was either a pawn or an accomplice in a US plot to derail détente. Last month Professor Nathan said that he still believed the entire affair was cooked.
Yesterday, in Moscow, Gary Powers Jr said that it had taken the US Government 40 years to set the record straight about his father. He was being generous. It has taken 50, and the record still has kinks in it.
Giles Whittell is Washington Correspondent and the author of Bridge of Spies, an account of the U2 affair and the spy swap that followed it, published later this year.
The man behind the story
Francis Gary Powers, born in Jenkins, Kentucky in 1929, was a combat pilot in the 468th Strategic Fighter Squadron. He was a veteran of covert aerial reconnaissance missions
After the U2 incident he served 18 months of a ten-year sentence handed down by a Soviet military tribunal in 1960 in a prison about 160 kilometres east of Moscow
He was released in exchange for the Russian spy known as Colonel Rudolph Abel
When he returned to the US, Powers worked initially as a test pilot before becoming a helicopter pilot for a Los Angeles television station. He died in August 1977 when his helicopter ran out of fuel
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Tracy Riddle - 14-06-2013
Fletcher Prouty's 1978 article about the U-2 and the virtual certainty that people within the MIC were responsible.
http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/SAP.html
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Tracy Riddle - 04-12-2013
Fletcher Prouty interview about the U2 incident. Eisenhower didn't order the flight and the plane was intended to go down and wreck the summit.
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Peter Lemkin - 04-12-2013
Amazing, isn't it....hardly anything in the standard American High School or University History book is true....just paper with ink forming half-truths on a few; outright lies on most.
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Anthony Thorne - 05-12-2013
Though past history might be keeping some folks on this forum from digging in to them, it's worth noting that one of the Appendix volumes to Walt Brown's JFK chronology is a complete and separate 130,000 word book specifically about Powers, the CIA's role in the shootdown, and how the event links to the later JFK assassination. I'd rank it as being among the most important of Brown's (very long and detailed) supplemental volumes to the project.
[URL="http://www.amazon.com/Master-Chronology-JFK-Assassination-Appendix-ebook/dp/B00G4F1Q5I/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386204394&sr=1-1&keywords=walt+brown+u-2"]
http://www.amazon.com/Master-Chronology-JFK-Assassination-Appendix-ebook/dp/B00G4F1Q5I/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386204394&sr=1-1&keywords=walt+brown+u-2[/URL]
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Magda Hassan - 05-12-2013
Anthony Thorne Wrote:Though past history might be keeping some folks on this forum from digging in to them, it's worth noting that one of the Appendix volumes to Walt Brown's JFK chronology is a complete and separate 130,000 word book specifically about Powers, the CIA's role in the shootdown, and how the event links to the later JFK assassination. I'd rank it as being among the most important of Brown's (very long and detailed) supplemental volumes to the project.Thanks for that info Anthony. An interesting and largely unexplored area and I'm pleased some one has. I have yet to check out WB opus. Sounds very worthwhile.
[URL="http://www.amazon.com/Master-Chronology-JFK-Assassination-Appendix-ebook/dp/B00G4F1Q5I/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386204394&sr=1-1&keywords=walt+brown+u-2"]
http://www.amazon.com/Master-Chronology-JFK-Assassination-Appendix-ebook/dp/B00G4F1Q5I/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386204394&sr=1-1&keywords=walt+brown+u-2[/URL]
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - David Guyatt - 05-12-2013
Anthony Thorne Wrote:Though past history might be keeping some folks on this forum from digging in to them, it's worth noting that one of the Appendix volumes to Walt Brown's JFK chronology is a complete and separate 130,000 word book specifically about Powers, the CIA's role in the shootdown, and how the event links to the later JFK assassination. I'd rank it as being among the most important of Brown's (very long and detailed) supplemental volumes to the project.
[URL="http://www.amazon.com/Master-Chronology-JFK-Assassination-Appendix-ebook/dp/B00G4F1Q5I/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386204394&sr=1-1&keywords=walt+brown+u-2"]
http://www.amazon.com/Master-Chronology-JFK-Assassination-Appendix-ebook/dp/B00G4F1Q5I/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386204394&sr=1-1&keywords=walt+brown+u-2[/URL]
My guess would be that this incident was the genesis of Eisenhower's military-industrial speech and was a pre-cursor to the provocations enacted by the Pentagon during the Cuba missile crisis that almost destabilised the Kennedy Administration.
War war, not jaw-jaw is what makes loadsa money.
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Anthony Thorne - 05-12-2013
Quote:My guess would be that this incident was the genesis of Eisenhower's military-industrial speech and was a pre-cursor to the provocations enacted by the Pentagon during the Cuba missile crisis that almost destabilised the Kennedy Administration.
Yes - Brown's book concurs with all those points - and Oswald's activities in Russia match up with key events of the Powers trial, to the extent that he may have been present there as an unused patsy in case the American public needed an ex-Atsugi communist 'defector' familiar with the U-2 to take the blame for the Powers shoot-down - a role eventually not taken by him, but his status as a patsy ready to be deployed elsewhere may have stuck in the minds of some particularly important people.
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - David Guyatt - 05-12-2013
Thanks for that Anthony.
I'm probably the least knowledgeable person on this forum when it comes to the whole JFK story, but it has struck me a number of times that there probably had to be like-minded men in the Soviet military and intelligence community who saw eye to eye with the Curtis LeMay's in the Pentagon, and wanted war - not peace. The fact that Oswald left Russia so easily, together with his Russian wife, simply shouts cooperation to my inexpert mind.
I can also say that it is my view that we can draw a straight line between the U2 affair, JFK assassination and 911 and conclude it was the same mindset and military-intelligence- corporate-financial interests (albeit different people obviously) who enabled all such events.
I believe I am still correct in thing that the Council for Foreign Relations War & Peace Studies Project remains confidential and is not generally accessible. I would dearly like to be able to see the full report, as I continue to hold a suspicion that all the foregoing activity stemmed from this studies project that planned the US post WWII world. And Allen Dulles, as well as being a lawyer who favoured large corporate clients (at Sullivan Cromwell) was a Director of the CFR for the period 1927-69.
U2 Pilot Powers Likely Was Murdered by plane too - Tracy Riddle - 06-12-2013
David - Yes, Khrushchev faced his own hard-liners in the Kremlin who removed him from power in late 1964. They were not quite as eager for war, because the Soviets at that time were behind the US in nuclear weapons.
I'm of the opinion that Marina was a "honey trap" who really spoke English, and was allowed to marry Oswald and go back to the US with him so she could become a sleeper agent. Nothing came of this because she was cut loose by the Soviets after the assassination.