Francis Gary Powers

Francis Gary Powers   ( spook,  pilot,  HSCA/Premature death)
Born	August 17, 1929
Died	August 1, 1977 (Age 47)  Los Angeles,  California,  USA
Cause of death	helicopter crash
Nationality	US
Victim of	premature death
Died in a helicopter crash before he could testify to the HSCA

Francis Gary Powers was an American pilot who was a United States Air Force officer and a CIA employee. Powers is best known for his involvement in the 1960 U-2 incident, when he was shot on 1 May 1960 while flying a secret CIA spying mission over the Soviet Union.

U-2 incident

Powers was discharged from the Air Force in 1956 with the rank of captain. He then joined the CIA's U-2 program at the civilian grade of GS-12. U-2 pilots flew espionage missions at altitudes of 70,000 feet (21 km), supposedly above the reach of Soviet air defenses. He was shot down while flying an unusually long reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union. This caused the 1960 U-2 incident, which conveniently sabotaging a summit between Dwight Eisenhower, who had decided to take a decisive step towards ending the Cold War, with Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union on 16th May, 1960.

Powers survived, but was captured and sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison for espionage. He did 21 months of his sentence before being released in a prisoner swap in 1962.

Death

Powers died in August 1977 in a helicopter crash in Los Angeles, as he was covering a brush fire for KNBC news in their helicopter that he was piloting. Seventeen years prior, he had named in a court in Moscow in 1960, the U. S. Marine responsible for his capture as Lee Harvey Oswald.^{[A bit unclear]} Powers died shortly before he was to answer a subpoena to testify to the HSCA.

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