DEFENSE: No Answer

What is the U.S. doing to help captured U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers? Like any other U.S. citizen in trouble in a foreign country, he is entitled to all the help his Government can give him—but as of this week, that has been very little. The State Department has made four attempts. On May 6, the day Khrushchev announced that a U.S. plane had been shot down. the U.S. embassy in Moscow delivered to the Soviet Foreign Ministry a note asking for details about both plane and pilot. No answer. On May 10, after Khrushchev announced that Powers was alive, another note asked permission to see him. Again no answer. Twice since then, the U.S. embassy has renewed the U.S. request to see Powers. Still no answer.

Whatever happens to Powers in Russia, the story of what happened to him over Russia is gradually coming clear. Competent U.S. observers are now convinced that he was not shot down by rocket fire at all. Backing up its case with photographs of the U-2 wreckage on exhibition at Moscow's Gorky Park, the current Aviation Week argues persuasively that Pilot Powers must have "made a controlled emergency landing."

Backing down, the Russians have revised their original claim that the plane was hit and destroyed by a high-altitude rocket. Now the party line, as told to Gorky Park visitors, is that the rocket scored a near miss, that the damaged plane began to "disintegrate" as it fell. But in revising the original lie. the Russians bumbled into another one. To explain why the crash did not shatter the plane into small fragments, they said that the U-2 was largely built of unusually lightweight metal (i.e., titanium), and therefore did not fall so very hard. Fact: the U2's frame was not built of titanium, but of ordinary aircraft-grade Duralumin.