DEFENSE: Flight to Sverdlovsk

(See Cover)

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...