FOIAWEAR — MAY DAY OVER MOSCOW / Francis Gary Powers Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 013

On the morning of May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers climbed into a U-2 at 5:20 a.m., sealed in an airtight partial-pressure suit after two hours of prebreathing. The mission was to be the first U-2 flight across the whole of Russia. It turned out to be the last.

Powers was the most experienced U-2 pilot in the program, 30 years old. Thirteen hundred miles inside the Soviet Union his autopilot failed, and he flew on manually to finish the mission. Then, almost four hours in: a dull thump, a lurch, and a bright orange flash as a surface-to-air missile detonated near the plane. The right wing drooped, the nose went down, and he lost control.

Pinned by g-forces, he chose to climb out rather than eject — at 34,000 feet he popped the canopy, was thrown half out, and kicked free as his oxygen hoses finally broke. His parachute opened, and he drifted down over the Soviet Union with nothing but his chute and a poison pin concealed in a silver dollar — a coin he tossed into the fields below. On the ground, on May Day, he was taken by the KGB.

Held in Lubyanka, questioned eleven hours a day for weeks, he was tried for espionage — the trial began on his 31st birthday — and sentenced to ten years in Vladimir Prison. On February 10, 1962, he was traded on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin — the Bridge of Spies — for Soviet spy Colonel Rudolf Abel. His father had quietly proposed the swap.

Powers was cleared of all misconduct and honoured with the CIA's Intelligence Star in 1965 and, posthumously, the Director's Medal in 2000. He died in 1977 while flying a news helicopter over Los Angeles.

The artwork is a stylised tribute — the U-2 and the missile that brought it down. It is not a technical drawing.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's article on Francis Gary Powers, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/may-day-over-moscow-the-francis-gary-powers-story/

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the artwork in its light print on Black, Navy, Espresso, and in a matching dark-ink print on Mustard, Chambray, Ivory.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Offered here in Black, Espresso and Navy, sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

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