DEFENSE: Flight to Sverdlovsk

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The low black plane with the high tail looked out of place among the shiny military jets crowding the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik, near Adana, Turkey. Its wide wings drooped with delicate languor—like a squatting seagull, too spent to fly. Its pilot seemed equally odd: a dark, aloof young man who wore a regulation flying suit and helmet but no markings, and had a revolver on his hip. Pilot Francis Gary Powers, 30, climbed into the one-man cockpit, gunned the black ship's single engine, and as the plane climbed toward take-off speed, the wide wings stiffened and the awkward outrigger wheels that had served as ground support dropped away.

Steadily the plane climbed—beyond the ceiling of transports, beyond the ceiling of bombers and interceptors, up through 60,000 ft., beyond the reach of any other operational craft and, as far as the pilot knew, of antiaircraft fire as well. Back at Incirlik, an operations officer tersely logged the take-off of the high-altitude U-2 weather research flight. If all went well, that was all the official records would ever have to say. Meanwhile, Pilot Powers banked to a course that took him north and east—arcing toward the border of Soviet Russia.

As the world found out last week, Francis Powers, onetime U.S. Air Force first lieutenant, was off on an intrepid flight that would ultimately carry him up the spine of the Soviet Union. From south to north, his high-flying instruments would record the effectiveness of Russian radar, sample the air for radioactive evidence of illicit nuclear tests. The U2's sensitive infra-red cameras could sweep vast arcs of landscape, spot tall, thin smokestacks or rocket blasts—if there were any—on pads far below.

Francis Powers was on an intelligence mission, like many unsung pilots before him. As such, he was as much a part of the long thin line of U.S. defense as G.I.s on duty in Berlin, technicians manning missile-tracking stations behind him in Turkey, shivering weather watchers drifting through a winter on ice islands in the Arctic. As such, he, and they, were engaged in giving the free world the warning it must have if it is to protect itself from Russian attack, and the shield of intelligence it must have if it is to seek peace without the danger of being lured into a fatal trap.

Cloak & Dagger. But Pilot Powers had bad luck: he got caught, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev says that he talked. Thus Khrushchev had the chance to tell the world about the U2's mission last week—with all the embellishment and distortion that best suited his case.