“A Bridge of Spies” if realistic and factual is a great Tom Hanks movie about “Wild Bill” Donovan, Francis Gary Powers, KGB Colonel Rudolph Abel, the Berlin Wall, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady. The movie starts off with Col. Abel performing the acquisition of a KGB left dead drop of a message carrying fake coin and a little later getting picked up for espionage by FBI counterintelligence agents. Anyway to cut to the chase and getting to point of this blog entry, Francis Gary Powers, an Air force officer, along with other Air Force officers meet in a no tell motel with a CIA agent to be clandestinely inducted into the CIA as “drivers” (pilots) of “The Article” (CIA lingo for Clarence “Kelly” Johnson’s famous Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady). Meeting away from CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, gave the CIA plausible deniability if one of the drivers was captured. Of course, on Mayday, May 1, 1959, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union from an altitude of 70,000+ feet by a very high-flying Surface to Air Missile (SAM) developed by the U.S.S.R. He failed to destroy his “Article” via the self-destruct switch which was to be activated before ejection from the U-2. Another failure was that Captain Powers did not eat his cyanide pill hidden away in a coin on his person. Anyway, the story has a happy ending with Francis Gary Powers being swapped for Col. Abel on the “Bridge of Spies” near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Please watch the movie for more detail. I just wrote this blog entry to display one method of CIA maintaining plausible deniability.