Reply #6: Paul also flew Francis Gary Powers out of Germany, back to the U.S.

[trof]

In the back seat of an F-100/F.

In 1962 espionage became big news as the 'U2 Incident' grabbed world headlines. Pilot Gary Powers was shot down as he flew the sinister U2, designed for covert surveillance, over Soviet territory, sparking one of the biggest international crises of the Cold War. The US demanded his safe return. The USSR wanted to know what he was doing up there in the first place.

Shot down on 01 May 1960, Powers was held in prison for two years until 1962, when he was exchanged for Soviet Col. Rudolf Abel in the most dramatic East-West spy swap ever to occur in Cold War Berlin. Powers stepped on to the eastern end of the Berlin's Glienicke Bridge spanning the River Havel on February 10 in 1962. At the other end of the bridge, stood Colonel Rudolf Abel, a heavily muffled Soviet master-spy, seized earlier by US security agents after setting up a red spy network in New York in the late 1950s.

At a precisely arranged signal, the two men strode on to the bridge, marching purposefully towards one another, Powers heading westward, Abel eastwards. In the middle of the bridge they passed each other silently, with barely a nod of their heads. That spy-swap operation was to be the forerunner of many such East-West prisoner exchanges to take place on the Glienicke Bridge over the next 27 years in Berlin

Criticized when he returned to the United States for not ensuring the revolutionary plane was destroyed or killing himself with poison, Powers was cold-shouldered by his former employers at the Central Intelligence Agency and eventually died in 1977 at the age of 47 when a television news helicopter he was piloting crashed in Los Angeles.
http://www.geocities.com/siafdu/powers.html