Francis Gary Powers was an American pilot who served as 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 down while flying a secret CIA spying mission over the Soviet Union. Powers survived, but was captured and sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison for espionage. He served 21 months of his sentence before being released in a prisoner swap in 1962.
Biography from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Francis Gary Powers in our timeline
Also born on August 17
- Robert De Niro1943 · American actor
- Sean Penn1960 · American actor and filmmaker
- Thierry Henry1977 · French footballer
- Larry Ellison1944 · American businessman
- Jiang Zemin1926 · Leader of China from 1989 to 2002
- Austin Butler1991 · American actor
- Charles I of Austria1887 · Habsburg monarch from 1916 to 1918
- Mae West1893 · American actress and singer
Also born in 1929
- Martin Luther King Jr.1929 · American minister and civil rights activist
- Audrey Hepburn1929 · British actress
- Anne Frank1929 · German-born diarist and Holocaust victim
- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis1929 · First Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963
- Grace Kelly1929 · American actress, Princess of Monaco from 1956 to 1982
- Christopher Plummer1929 · Canadian actor
- Frank Gehry1929 · Canadian and American architect
- Ursula K. Le Guin1929 · American author