JFK Conference: David Talbot named Allen Dulles as 'the Chairman of the Board of the Assassination'

[Octafish]

106. Did Francis Gary Powers ever go on record about that possibility?

The U-2 shoot-down destroyed the Eisenhower-Krushchev summit. Fletcher Prouty called it:

The Sabotaging of the American Presidency

The U-2 Debacle

EXCERPT...

Recently, the top secret transcripts of the May 1960 hearings held before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate became available. These transcripts had been obscured by an ambiguous title: Hearings Regarding Summit Conference of May 1960. Neither the title nor the index page give any clues to the casual researcher that the transcripts might have anything to do with the U-2 incident.

These hearings took place right after the U-2 went down, before Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of that plane, went on trial in Moscow. In other words, they took place before we had learned the Soviet side of the story and before Powers came back from prison. Few people even knew about these super-secret hearings.

Those in attendance were, in addition to the full Committee and their staff: Allen W. Dulles, then the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and his Deputy, General S. Warner, and Ed Enck, all from the CIA and the U-2 program. Interestingly, the ostensible director of the U-2 program, Richard Bissell, was not there. Representing the Secretary of State was William B. Macomber; representing the Secretary of Defense was a Navy man, Captain L. Patrick Gray, the man whom Richard Nixon appointed to head the FBI, and later of Watergate fame. Although there were a large number of Air Force officers operating the U-2 program, not a single Air Force man was there.

A few months after the release of the transcripts in 1975, an obscure but authoritative journal, Military Affairs, published for the American Military Institute by the history department at Kansas State University, appeared with the paper, A Fragile Detente: The U-2 Incident Re-examined, by James A. Nathan, a member of the history department at the University of Delaware. This scholarly treatise might have gone unnoticed, except for the fact that the editor of Military Affairs received an angry letter from Francis Gary Powers dated February 6, 1976. In it Powers stated: "Normally I do not comment on articles written about the U-2 incident," but the usually taciturn Powers wrote a rambling, fourteen-page letter. Perhaps someone wrote it for him. That letter is remarkable; the Nathan article is remarkable; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee document, all 195 pages, is astounding; and the whole U-2 affair is unmatched in recent history. It is one of those keystone events that shaped the course of our lives for years afterward.

Contrary to all reports, that U-2 was not on a spy mission. It was not even flown by a spy. Powers' identification papers -- and he was loaded with them -- proved to his captors that he was a pilot working for the U.S. Air Force. He carried no CIA documents. With his Air Force ID and his uniform, military-type pressure suit, there was no evidence to indicate he was a spy. He looked like any other Air Force pilot. Why then was he promptly labeled a spy? What was Powers doing over the heart of the Soviet Union on May Day, and just before the most important summit conference of all?

In 1960 the directive NSC 10/2, published by the National Security Council (NSC) required that any clandestine operation must be operated so that if it failed or was compromised in any way, this country would be able to plausibly deny the existence of the operation. In CIA jargon, the plane and the pilot had to be "sterilized." The CIA and the Department of Defense (DOD) had spent millions of dollars sterilizing aircraft and equipment used in clandestine operations, so that anyone who might uncover an operation would be unable, under reasonable circumstances, to trace it positively to its true origin. Why then did Powers carry ID, and why did this U-2 carry so many identifying marks and decals?

I was the properly designated military officer in the Pentagon for a period of nine years -- including 1960 -- responsible for exactly this function of supporting the clandestine activities for the CIA. Under my direction many aircraft, many items of equipment, and many personnel were properly sterilized and "sheep-dipped" prior to use in secret missions. The U-2's were no exception. As a matter of fact, the entire U-2 program was supposed to have been made sterile from production on up. I must say I knew the CIA to be meticulous about deniability. On regular clandestine overflights to China Tibet, Indonesia, Burma, and other places, they did their best to conform with and obey the NSC directive. The identifying evidence included in Powers' flight violated the NSC mandate. If this was a spy mission, the violation was clearly planned to wreck the upcoming summit conference.

It was normal DOD-CIA practice that pilots engaged in clandestine operations don pressure suits which contained no identification of any kind prior to takeoff. In the process, the pilot was required to strip, and all identity and personal items were removed by the officials in charge of that flight.

Not only was this standard procedure a matter of great care, but in important cases, two or three aircraft and two or three pilots would be readied for each flight. The pilots would not know which plane they might fly, and no pilot would know his mission until the final briefing.

Powers' U-2 had been flown from Turkey to Peshawar, Pakistan on April 30, 1960 just a few hours before Powers took off for the USSR. He had been flown to Pakistan by transport and given only two and a half hours' warning before the flight. He has written: "I did not see the plane at close range."

For some unaccountable reason Powers took off on this, the longest USSR overflight ever planned, and in the seat pack of his parachute was every identification imaginable. If Powers was supposed to play the role of a spy, then in accordance with the script that has historically been passed down, he would be nameless, faceless, a man without a country. He was none of those things. Why not? And who saw to it that he was none of these things?

CONTINUED...

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/SAP.html

Wonder if Dulles and Co. at CIA expected (the then-shoe-in front runner) President Nixon in 1961 to continue destroying peace?

One thing's for certain today: "Money trumps peace" has become the ethos of the United States.