Francis Gary Powers Jr. says the Cold War did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and that in fact, the danger now is greater than ever.
Powers Jr. is the son of Francis Gary Powers, the American spy pilot whose downing over the Soviet Union in 1960 led to the "U-2 Affair," which ruined a super powers summit meeting and vastly intensified the Cold War.
"I think the Cold War is still going on, only now it's not the United States vs. the Soviet Union, but rather the United States vs. any country with nuclear capabilities," the 32-year-old former Las Vegas resident said.
"There are more dangers not knowing who our foe is."
Powers, who now resides in Fairfax, Va., will be in Las Vegas Thursday night to address the Blackbird Reunion of Cold War U-2 and SR-71 pilots, at the Plaza Hotel.
He will speak about his traveling Cold War Museum and the exploits of his father.
Powers lived in Las Vegas briefly in the 1980s. He has attended every Blackbird Reunion for the last 16 years. The group meets every other year in Las Vegas. This will be his first lecture to the group.
Powers, whose mother, Sue Powers, is a Las Vegas resident, often visits on holidays and says he hopes to one day bring exhibits from his Cold War Museum here, possibly to Nellis Air Force Base.
He says it is vital that Americans do not forget this dark part of history.
"When I say U-2 today, most people think I'm talking about the rock band," Powers said Tuesday in a phone interview from his home in Virginia. "They don't realize what the Cold War was all about."
Powers, who is executive director for Old Town Fairfax, says the Cuban missile crisis "is the closest we came to World War III. The potential destruction (of the world) was very real."
Powers says Americans often do not take into consideration just how frightened the Russians were of Americans and the U.S. government, which had already dropped two atomic bombs on an enemy.
"When we elected Dwight Eisenhower, a general and war hero, as president, the Soviet government and people were sure that was a sign we wanted to invade them," Powers said. "The Cold War came down to a lack of communication and a lack of trust."
Powers says that does not mean we should be totally trustful of today's Russia because there is a deadly combination of a strong black market and a surplus of old Soviet war power.
Powers says that, for the right price, nations unfriendly to the United States could get their hands on some of those military wares, particularly nuclear weapons.
Powers says he was very proud of his father even though much of the news media, upon his return to the United States, painted him as a failure because he got caught. There were also accusations then that he gave away secrets of the U-2 program, although history has exonerated him of that charge.
"My father never thought of himself as a hero -- only a pilot doing his job," Powers said. "The average folks I have talked to consider him a hero.
"Since Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandals, we have come to accept that the government lies to us. But, when my father was captured, it marked the first time an American president was caught lying to the people. It marked an end to the age of innocence."
Powers' father, a former Air Force pilot, was recruited by the CIA for the top-secret U-2 program. His cover was that of a civilian weather researcher. On the day of his fateful flight, May 1, 1960, he was classified as a civilian government employee. This avoided the flight being labeled an act of war in the event the plane was shot down. He was taking pictures of Soviet missile installations from 70,000 feet when he was shot down by a Russian missile.
Because Eisenhower had been advised that Powers could not possibly have survived, he authorized an elaborate lie that backfired when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev triumphantly produced the pilot, exposing the lie and the United States to international embarrassment. A summit meeting among the super powers -- the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France -- was cancelled.
A show trial ensued in the Soviet Union, with Powers being found guilty of espionage in August 1960 and sentenced to 10 years in Vladimir prison.
A short time later, Powers' dad, Oliver, a coal miner, led the charge for a spy swap -- his son for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.
Although that personal crusade angered U.S. officials, the spy exchange occurred almost two years after Powers took off in his U-2 from Peshawar, Pakistan.
Powers worked as a test pilot for Lockheed until 1970, the year his book, "Operation Overflight," was published. In 1977, while flying a helicopter for a Los Angeles TV station, he died at age 47 when the craft crashed after running out of fuel.
His son's museum, which could have a permanent home in the nation's capital in about five years, features many of his father's possessions, including letters, his Distinguished Flying Cross and a piece of his downed plane.
One exhibit piece, a small poison pin, is a haunting reminder of just how dangerous the mission was. Powers said his father opted not to use it on himself because the Soviets did not torture him.
Powers hopes to make his project a more complete museum, including materials from such Cold War events as the Cuban missile crisis, Bay of Pigs, President Reagan's Star Wars, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet breakup.
In recent years, Powers has developed a close friendship with Brown University professor Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita's son. The unlikely duo worked to bring the Cold War Museum to fruition.
Powers' favorite items in the exhibit are a piece of his father's downed plane and a Latvian style rug his father wove in prison with dyed wool yarn on a burlap potato sack.
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