U-2 Pilot Shot Down: Cold War Tensions Spike

A Soviet SA-2 missile detonated near Francis Gary Powers' aircraft at 70,500 feet over Sverdlovsk, and the most dangerous diplomatic crisis between the Cold War superpowers since Berlin was underway. The CIA pilot survived, his Lockheed U-2 spyplane did not, and the wreckage that fell across Soviet farmland on May 1, 1960, carried enough intact equipment to prove exactly what the Americans had been doing. The U-2 program had been flying over Soviet territory since 1956, photographing military installations from altitudes the Soviets could track on radar but not reach with interceptors. The CIA believed the flights were untouchable. Powers' mission, designated Operation Grand Slam, was supposed to cross the entire Soviet Union from Pakistan to Norway, photographing ICBM sites along the way. Moscow's new S-75 surface-to-air missile system changed the calculus. The explosion damaged the U-2's tail and wings, sending it into an uncontrollable spin. Powers ejected and parachuted to the ground, where collective farm workers detained him. He was carrying a silver dollar containing a poison-tipped needle, which he chose not to use. Premier Nikita Khrushchev played the reveal brilliantly. He first announced only that an American plane had been shot down, letting Washington issue a cover story about a weather research aircraft gone astray. Then Khrushchev produced Powers, alive and confessing, along with the recovered camera equipment. President Eisenhower was caught in a public lie. The fallout was immediate: the Paris Summit collapsed two weeks later, and Eisenhower's planned visit to Moscow was canceled. Powers served 21 months in a Soviet prison before being exchanged for KGB spy Rudolf Abel on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge in February 1962.