"It was a cold day like this," Powers recalled. "But, lucky for me, not so windy." The filming brought back memories of his capture, trial and 21 months' imprisonment. "I told Lee he doesn't look scared enough," Powers said. "But then, I was also trying not to be afraid because if I showed fear I was admitting guilt. I was doing some pretty good acting there myself for a while." Powers was advising director Delbert Mann on minute details of his imprisonment—the food, the cell, the location of its window, how he stood on tiptoes during his daily walk in a small courtyard to catch sunlight on his face. "I lost between 20 and 30 pounds the first month," Powers said. "I still have a nervous stomach."
Powers recalls his work with the CIA with pride and some bitterness. "I knew how badly we needed information about the Soviet Union. We didn't even have any recent maps," he says, adding that he believes he was unjustly maligned by the press and public for pleading guilty and for not killing himself when the mission was aborted. He carried a tiny poisoned needle in a coin. "I was told to use it only if I was tortured so bad I couldn't stand it." Powers will not join in the chorus of criticism of the CIA, however, even though it strongly opposed his writing a 1970 book about his experiences, Operation Overflight. "Whatever anybody thinks," he says, "there are good people there."
Today Powers, 46, who left the CIA in 1962 to test U-2 planes for Lockheed, is still flying reconnaissance missions of a sort. Twice every weekday he zips over the Los Angeles freeways in a single-engine Cessna and broadcasts traffic conditions on KGIL radio. He is known on the air and to all his friends as "Frank," not "Gary," as the public (and the film script) call him.
What his present line of work lacks in adventure, it makes up for in time to spend with his family. Powers divorced his first wife shortly after his return to the U.S. and met his second wife, Sue, while both were working for the CIA in Washington. They now live in Sherman Oaks with their son Gary, 10. Powers raises vegetables in his backyard, plays golf and rarely misses the Little League when Gary's team is competing. Frank has legally adopted his wife's daughter by a first marriage, Dee, 19, and the young woman has followed him into aviation. Enlisting in the Air Force Reserves in 1974, Dee is a vocational nurse stationed at March AFB.
Perhaps understandably, Powers is suspicious of Russian intentions in this era of détente. "They haven't changed their goals. They're still going to 'bury us.' " His view of his own role as a footnote to history has not changed. "I never thought of myself as a spy," he insists. "I just flew an airplane."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
