U-2 Spy Plane Shot Down Over Soviet Union

Context

By the mid-1950s the nuclear arms race had made reliable information on Soviet missile and bomber forces a central concern for American planners. President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed mutual aerial inspections under an “open skies” plan at the 1955 Geneva conference, but Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev rejected the idea. The Central Intelligence Agency therefore developed the Lockheed U-2, an aircraft designed to fly above the reach of contemporary Soviet interceptors and surface-to-air missiles. The first U-2 overflight of Soviet territory occurred in July 1956, and subsequent missions from bases in Pakistan and Turkey photographed military installations across the USSR.

What Happened

On the morning of May 1, 1960, CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers departed Peshawar, Pakistan, in a U-2C aircraft on a mission code-named Grand Slam. The planned route crossed roughly 2,900 miles of Soviet airspace, with camera targets that included ICBM launch pads at Baikonur and Plesetsk as well as plutonium-production facilities near Chelyabinsk. Soviet air-defense units, already on heightened alert for the May Day holiday, tracked the aircraft by radar almost immediately. Fighter intercepts failed at the U-2’s extreme altitude, but a battery of S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles near Sverdlovsk scored a hit. Powers parachuted safely and was taken into custody; one Soviet MiG-19 pursuing the intruder was also destroyed, killing its pilot.

Aftermath

American officials first described the missing aircraft as a NASA weather-research plane that had drifted off course. On May 5 Khrushchev publicly announced that both the pilot and the largely intact wreckage, complete with cameras and exposed film of Soviet military sites, were in Soviet hands. Eisenhower acknowledged on May 11 that he had personally authorized the overflight program and defended it as necessary in the absence of open-skies inspections. The Soviet delegation walked out of the Paris summit before substantive talks began, canceling the meeting that had been expected to address arms control and Berlin.

Legacy

The incident ended the brief thaw that had followed the 1959 Camp David meeting and reinforced mutual suspicion between Washington and Moscow. Both superpowers accelerated the development of satellite reconnaissance to replace vulnerable manned flights. Powers was convicted of espionage and sentenced to ten years in prison; he was released in February 1962 in exchange for convicted Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel. The episode later figured in the background of negotiations that produced the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, illustrating both the risks of aerial espionage and the value of verifiable arms-control measures.