1960 U-2 incident

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of May 1960, a United States spy plane took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, bound for a mission the American government would spend days desperately pretending had never happened. The pilot was Francis Gary Powers. His aircraft was a U-2, a sleek, fragile reconnaissance plane designed to fly so high that no enemy missile could touch it. That assumption was about to be proven catastrophically wrong.

  Powers was shot down deep inside Soviet territory, near the city of Sverdlovsk. He parachuted to the ground, was quickly captured, and the world suddenly found itself on the edge of a diplomatic catastrophe. Fifteen days earlier, American and Soviet leaders had been preparing to meet in Paris for a summit that many believed could ease the Cold War. That meeting would never happen.

  What unfolds from this single flight is a story of technological overconfidence, elaborate deception, political miscalculation, and one man stranded in a Soviet prison. It is also the story of a spy plane program that had been running for years in the shadows, and the moment the shadows gave way.

• 2. A Secret Built in Pakistan

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  In July 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Pakistani prime minister Feroze Khan Noon for something extraordinary: permission to establish a secret intelligence facility on Pakistani soil, and to fly U-2 spy planes from Pakistani territory. The facility chosen was Badaber, known as Peshawar Air Station, located 16 kilometres from Peshawar itself.

  Badaber was not just a landing strip. It served as cover for a major communications intercept operation run by the United States National Security Agency, chosen specifically for its proximity to Soviet central Asia. From there, American intelligence could monitor missile test sites, key infrastructure, and Soviet communications in ways that were otherwise impossible in the era before satellite observation.

  The U-2 flew at altitudes Soviet fighter jets could not reach. Eisenhower and his advisers believed it was also beyond the reach of Soviet missiles. They were wrong, but for years the aircraft operated with apparent impunity. When Eisenhower grew cautious about using American CIA pilots, someone proposed using British pilots from the Royal Air Force instead, under a program called Project Oldster. If a British pilot were captured, the United States could deny direct involvement. The British government agreed, and the first two British pilots flew successfully.

  By early 1960, American planners wanted to pin down the exact number of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles before a major summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Two final missions were authorized, to be flown by American pilots. The last of these was assigned to Captain Francis Powers.

• 3. Grand Slam

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  The mission was called Grand Slam. It was designed as a sweeping photographic arc across the Soviet Union, beginning in Peshawar and ending with a landing at Bodo in Norway. The targets included ICBM launch pads at Baikonur Cosmodrome and Plesetsk Cosmodrome, as well as Chelyabinsk-65, a plutonium processing facility that would later be renamed Mayak.

  The operation was plagued by delays from the start. On the 28th of April 1960, a U-2C designated Article 358 was ferried from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to Peshawar by pilot Glen Dunaway. The next morning, the crew learned the mission had been delayed by one day; bad weather over the Soviet Union pushed it back yet again on the 30th. A different aircraft, Article 360, was substituted.

  On the 1st of May, Powers finally took off. The Soviet Air Defence Forces were ready. All units across central Asia, Kazakhstan, Siberia, the Urals, and the USSR's European region had been placed on red alert. Lieutenant General Yevgeniy Savitskiy issued orders for commanders to attack the intruder by any means, including ramming if necessary.

  The U-2 flew so high that Soviet fighter interceptions failed. But near Kosulino in the Ural Region, a battery of S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles commanded by Mikhail Voronov fired a salvo. One of the missiles struck. Powers bailed out, struggling briefly with an oxygen hose before breaking free and parachuting onto Soviet soil. He carried a modified silver dollar containing a saxitoxin-tipped needle, intended as a means of suicide if captured. He did not use it.

  In the confusion of the missile salvo, a Soviet MiG-19 pursuing Powers was also hit and destroyed. The pilot, Sergei Safronov, was killed. The MiGs' identification transponders had not yet been updated to the new May codes because of the holiday.

• 4. The Cover Story Collapses

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  American officials initially believed Powers had died and his aircraft was destroyed. Acting on that assumption, they crafted a cover story: a NASA weather research aircraft had gone missing north of Turkey. On the 5th of May, NASA issued a press release suggesting the pilot might have fallen unconscious while the autopilot was still engaged, falsely claiming the pilot had reported oxygen difficulties over an emergency frequency. A U-2 was quickly painted in NASA colors and displayed to the media.

  That same day, the Senate began its own inquiry. Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Whip, stated publicly that if Eisenhower genuinely had no knowledge of the incident, it raised the question of whether the administration controlled its own federal bureaucracy. Mansfield's words would haunt Eisenhower for weeks.

  Khrushchev had laid a trap. He announced publicly that a spy plane had been shot down, but deliberately withheld the fact that the pilot was alive. American officials, believing Powers was dead, continued to insist the aircraft was a weather research plane. On the 7th of May, Khrushchev sprang the trap, announcing: "I must tell you a secret. When I made my first report I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well... and now just look how many silly things the Americans have said." He released photographs of U-2 surveillance equipment as evidence.

  Khrushchev initially offered Eisenhower a partial way out, suggesting the blame should fall on CIA Director Allen Dulles rather than the president personally. He told US ambassador Thompson that he suspected someone had launched the operation "with the deliberate intent of spoiling the summit meeting". When Eisenhower learned this, his reaction was striking: he went quiet and depressed, and told his secretary "I would like to resign."

  The disclosure came not from the White House but from Congress. On the 10th of May, House Appropriations Chair Clarence Cannon told an open session of the House of Representatives that the U-2 was a CIA aircraft on an espionage mission, operating under the authority of the commander in chief. When Cannon finished speaking, Democrats and Republicans together rose to applaud. Eisenhower, fearing the public perception that he had lost control of his own government, then made an unprecedented decision for a sitting American president: he publicly accepted personal responsibility for the spy flights.

• 5. Paris and Its Wreckage

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  The Four Powers Summit in Paris brought together Eisenhower, Khrushchev, French President Charles de Gaulle, and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. It was the first conference between Soviet and western leaders in five years. The mood before the U-2 incident had been cautiously hopeful. The May Day celebrations on the 1st of May had, paradoxically, been notably stripped of military symbolism: no artillery, no armor, only children, white doves, and athletes, reflecting Khrushchev's public advocacy for peaceful coexistence.

  By the time talks finally began on the 15th of May, those hopes had dissolved. Khrushchev demanded that Eisenhower condemn the spy flights and pledge they would never be repeated. Eisenhower refused to apologize, though he acknowledged the flights had been suspended. During the meeting Khrushchev also rescinded the invitation he had previously extended for Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. The talks ended on the 16th of May, barely one day after they began.

  Broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite later reported that Khrushchev himself came to see the incident as the beginning of his own decline as party chairman, partly because he appeared unable to navigate both the international arena and the pressure from communist hardliners at home. In the aftermath, anti-American sentiment within the Kremlin had surged in the weeks before the summit, with the Soviets blocking a planned Washington trip by a Soviet air marshal, inviting Mao Zedong to Moscow, and launching a press campaign against American aggression.

  The fallout spread beyond the two superpowers. In Japan, the U-2 revelations energized the ongoing Anpo protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty. Japan's government was forced to admit that U-2 planes were also based at American facilities on Japanese soil, raising fears that Japan could become a target in any conflict between the superpowers.

• 6. Pakistan, Norway, and the Wider Damage

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  Khrushchev threatened to drop a nuclear bomb on Peshawar, directly warning Pakistan that its cooperation with the United States had made it a Soviet nuclear target. General Khalid Mahmud Arif of the Pakistan Army later said Pakistan felt deceived because the United States had kept it in the dark about the spy operations launched from its territory, though Pakistan's president Muhammad Ayub Khan may have been aware of the program.

  Khan visited the Soviet Union in 1965 and apologized for Pakistan's role. When he later invited Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko to visit Pakistan, noting that Gromyko had never been there, Gromyko replied with pointed sarcasm: "I always keep ahead of the U-2."

  The communications wing at Badaber was formally closed on the 7th of January 1970. In Norway, authorities had given the United States permission for a temporary base at Bodo during 1960, on the condition that U-2 flights only cross international waters. The request had passed through chief of intelligence Vilhelm Evang, defense minister Nils Handal, and then to the cabinet's security committee, which included prime minister Gerhardsen and foreign minister Lange. The incident caused what Norwegian military sources described as dirty laundry being aired, though no blame was formally assigned. As of 2022, the archives of the Norwegian Intelligence Service from 1960 had not been declassified.

  On the 23rd of May, the Soviet Union convened a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. The session lasted four days and included exchanges over other alleged spying incidents and recriminations over Paris. The United States proposed an open skies agreement allowing reciprocal overflights of each other's territory. The Soviet Union lost a vote on a resolution that would have condemned the incursions.

• 7. Powers Behind Bars

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  Gary Powers told his Soviet captors what his mission had been and why he had been in Soviet airspace. He did this, the source indicates, in accordance with orders he had received before the flight. On the 19th of August, he pleaded guilty and was convicted of espionage, sentenced to three years of imprisonment and seven years of hard labour.

  He served one year and nine months before being exchanged for Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel on the 10th of February 1962. The exchange took place on the Glienicke Bridge connecting Potsdam in East Germany to West Berlin.

  A large section of the wrecked U-2 and many items from Powers' survival pack are on display at the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow. A small piece of the aircraft was returned to the United States and is now held at the National Cryptologic Museum.

• 8. What Came After

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  The shootdown forced a fundamental rethinking of American reconnaissance strategy. The U-2 had proven that high altitude alone was not sufficient protection. In response, the United States shifted its bombers, including the B-47, B-52, and B-58, toward high-speed, low-level flight profiles. Development of the supersonic F-111 was begun, with a strategic variant designated the FB-111A planned for the Strategic Air Command.

  The Corona spy satellite project was accelerated. So was the development of the Lockheed A-12 OXCART, a supersonic spyplane that first flew in 1962. The CIA also began developing the Lockheed D-21, an unmanned drone. The Russians, for their part, reverse-engineered the captured U-2 and produced the Beriev S-13, though that program was cancelled after Powers was released.

  Alternate accounts of how the aircraft was actually brought down circulated for decades. The original explanation, that a salvo of 14 S-75 missiles hit the plane, was traced to Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet GRU officer who was secretly spying for British intelligence. In 1996, Soviet pilot Igor Mentyukov claimed that it was actually the slipstream of his unarmed and modified Sukhoi Su-9, which he flew to altitudes beyond its standard ceiling of 55,000 feet, that caused the U-2 to flip and break its wings. He argued that Soviet generals suppressed this account to protect Khrushchev's confidence in Soviet air defences. In 2010, declassified CIA documents revealed that American officials had doubted Powers' own account because NSA tracking data seemed to show the aircraft descending sharply before disappearing from radar; one later interpretation is that the NSA had mistakenly tracked the falling MiG-19 piloted by Sergei Safronov.

  The 2015 Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies dramatized the prisoner exchange, with Tom Hanks playing James B. Donovan, the negotiator who arranged Powers' release. The film depicted Powers being tortured by his captors, a detail the source notes was invented; in reality he was treated well and spent much of his captivity doing handicrafts.