Powers was immediately flown back to the United States for a comprehensive debriefing, convening what the agency called a 'damage assessment team' to determine what damage Powers' shootdown and subsequent interrogation/imprisonment had done to US airborne intelligence efforts. On February 1962 following President Kennedy's final approval, at a bridge in Berlin that connected East and West sides of the city, Francis Gary Powers was traded for the spy Rudolf Abel. In November 1961 acting Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Charles Cabell notified Secretary of State Dean Rusk of the CIA's support of a trade. Interestingly, the idea for the trade originated with Powers' father, Oliver. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for espionage.ДЇor the next 18 months Powers was in prison, the US government negotiated for his release and settled upon a trade for convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Powers survived and was promptly apprehended by Soviet authorities and in one of the dramatic moments of the Cold War, was tried in the Hall of Columns at the Kremlin in a highly-publicized proceeding that began on August 17, 1960. Halfway through his flight before reaching Sverdlosk at an altitude of 70,500 feet, an SA-2 surface-to-air missile exploded aft of his aircraft, sending it spiraling downward.

Powers' mission was to take him on a marathon mission over several reconnaissance targets of interest, from the Baikonur missile test facility, the Sverdlosk industrial center, the ICBM bases at Plesetsk, the submarine construction yards at Severodvinsk, and the Soviet Northern Fleet base at Murmansk before recovering at the NATO base at Bodo, Norway. After over 5 years of uneventful US overflights of the Soviet Union, this mission, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, would change the strategic balance of the Cold War. On a lone CIA U-2 spyplane took off from a forward operating base in Peshawar, Pakistan for what would be one of the most fateful flights of the Cold War era.

Gary power spy trade