U-2 Incident
In May 1960 the USSR shot down an American U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, wrecking a superpower summit and exposing years of overflights.
On May 1, 1960, a black American spy plane was cruising more than twelve miles above the Soviet Union when a missile turned it into falling wreckage and handed Nikita Khrushchev a propaganda gift. For four years the CIA's U-2 had flown over the USSR photographing missile sites and airfields, confident it flew too high to be touched. That confidence, and a summit meant to thaw the Cold War, came down with pilot Francis Gary Powers.
A plane built to fly too high
The U-2 was a strange machine, essentially a jet-powered glider with enormous wings, stripped of weight so it could reach around 70,000 feet, above the ceiling of any Soviet interceptor. From there its cameras photographed factories, launch pads, and airfields across a country the West could barely see into. The trade-off was fragility: the aircraft was hard to fly and carried no defenses. For years its altitude was armor enough. On May 1, 1960, it stopped being enough. Powers, flying from Peshawar in Pakistan toward Bodo in Norway, was hit near Sverdlovsk by the first of three S-75 missiles. He bailed out and was captured; in the same salvo the Soviets accidentally downed one of their own MiG-19 fighters, killing its pilot.
The lie that blew up a summit
Washington assumed Powers was dead and the plane destroyed, so it floated a cover story: NASA announced that a 'weather research' aircraft had strayed off course after its pilot lost oxygen. Khrushchev let the Americans commit fully to the lie, then sprang the trap on May 7, revealing that Powers was alive, talking, and that the Soviets had the wreckage and its cameras. Eisenhower was left holding a fabrication. Two weeks later, at the Paris summit that was supposed to ease tensions over Berlin, Khrushchev demanded an apology; when Eisenhower would not give one, the Soviet delegation walked out and the meeting collapsed after a single day.
Prisoner, then vindication
A Soviet court convicted Powers in August 1960 and sentenced him to ten years, three in prison and seven of hard labor. He served less than two. On February 10, 1962, at the Glienicke Bridge between Potsdam and West Berlin, the two sides traded him for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy the FBI had caught in New York; the exchange on the 'Bridge of Spies' became one of the Cold War's enduring images. The U-2 itself was far from finished. In October 1962, one of its cameras photographed Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba, the discovery that touched off the Cuban Missile Crisis. The same fragile spy plane that humiliated a president in 1960 may, two years later, have kept the next crisis from catching him blind.