On the morning of May 1, 1960, a single-engine U-2 reconnaissance aircraft operated by the CIA took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, on a routine overflight of the Soviet Union. It never returned. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive near Sverdlovsk. The wreckage of the aircraft, its camera — the pilot’s survival pressure-suit were presented to the world at a Soviet press conference in Moscow three days later. The shootdown ended one era of aerial espionage and opened another — and it destroyed the Paris Summit that was supposed to defuse the Cold War. For more on the intelligence and espionage overview; the American agency that ran the program is detailed in the CIA’s history and operations; the Soviet response was organized by the KGB and the Soviet air defense command covered in the KGB’s history and operations.
The U-2 program
The U-2 was designed in 1954 by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson and a small team at Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects unit, better known as the Skunk Works, in Burbank, California. Johnson had eleven months from the Air Force’s formal request to first flight, which came on August 4, 1955. The aircraft was a glider-like single-engine jet with a bicycle-gear undercarriage and a 105-foot wingspan — so long that it had to be carried in sections. Its service ceiling was above 70,000 feet, well above the operational altitude of any contemporary Soviet interceptor and beyond the reach of early surface-to-air missiles. It carried a single pilot in a spacesuit, for the cabin was unpressurized, and a bay of cameras capable of resolving objects less than two feet across from 60,000 feet.
The program was run by the CIA, with the Air Force providing pilots, training, and maintenance support, and was concealed from Congress and from the public. The first Soviet overflight took place on July 4, 1956; flights were run from bases in Turkey, Pakistan, Norway, Japan, and the United Kingdom. By the time Powers was shot down, the U-2 had flown more than two dozen deep-penetration missions over the USSR, and a much larger number over other denied territory, including China and North Vietnam. The imagery was processed at a CIA facility at Westcott, England, and then at the National Photographic Interpretation Center in Washington.
The U-2 produced intelligence that the rest of the American government had not imagined was available. It confirmed that there was no missile gap in 1957: the Soviet ICBM force numbered four missiles, not several hundred. It mapped the bomber force that the United States had previously estimated in the tens of thousands and discovered that the Soviet long-range bomber force, while real, was smaller and less capable than U.S. Strategic Air Command had warned. It photographed the new missile test sites at Plesetsk and Tyuratam, the nuclear submarine pens at Severodvinsk, and the production lines at the Khrunichev plant. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was preceded by U-2 flights over western Cuba in August and September that established the nature of the surface-to-air missile sites there; the iconic low-level flight of October 14, 1962, that produced the photographic evidence of MRBMs at San Cristóbal, was flown by Major Richard Heyser, USAF.
May 1, 1960
Powers’s mission on May 1, 1960, was a deep penetration of the Soviet Union from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Bodø, Norway. Its purpose was to photograph the Plesetsk missile test site, the Severodvinsk submarine yard, and a series of strategic targets. He took off at 6:26 a.m. local time. About an hour and a half into the flight, somewhere over the southern Urals, his aircraft was hit by an SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile fired by a Soviet air-defense unit. Powers survived the explosion — the kill was at altitude, fuselage was not breached — and parachuted to the ground. He was captured by local civilians and turned over to the KGB within hours. The Soviets recovered most of the aircraft, including its high-resolution camera and its data-link equipment, and they were able to reconstruct the film and the equipment themselves.
The U-2 had been vulnerable for some time. The SA-2 had been deployed in significant numbers around the USSR from 1958 and had reached operational capability in 1959. Soviet radar coverage of the U-2’s profile had been improved; the “13-20” radar, designed specifically to track high-altitude targets, had entered service in 1959. Khrushchev had authorized the air defense command to use force against future overflights — an authorization he had not previously been willing to give, on the explicit advice of the KGB’s chairman, Alexander Shelepin, who had warned that an overflight would produce a major propaganda loss if responded to violently.
The timing was deliberate, and not only on Khrushchev’s part. President Eisenhower had agreed to the May 1 overflight in part to provide photographic coverage before the Paris Summit, scheduled to begin on May 16, 1960, and to give the President a quiet briefing advantage in his meetings with Khrushchev. The flight on April 9 had been delayed by weather; the May 1 flight was the rescheduled mission. The Soviets chose to wait until the aircraft was deep inside Soviet airspace — past the recovery lines that would have given Powers a chance to escape into Iran or Afghanistan — before firing.
The diplomatic crisis
The U.S. State Department, on the instructions of the CIA, initially issued a cover story: the aircraft was a civilian weather-research plane that had strayed off course; the pilot’s survival was not mentioned. The cover collapsed within forty-eight hours when Khrushchev announced, on May 5, that the pilot was alive and had confessed. On May 7, Khrushchev produced the aircraft’s camera and other equipment, and the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, advised Washington to stop lying.
Eisenhower’s response was to accept responsibility, on May 11, and to refuse to apologize — a position Khrushchev could not accept if the summit was to proceed. Khrushchev withdrew his invitation to Eisenhower and insisted that the United States condemn the overflights, pay compensation, and punish those responsible. Eisenhower refused. The Paris Summit collapsed on the eve of its opening.
The effect on East-West relations was immediate. The Paris Summit had been intended to address Berlin, the German question, nuclear testing, and the broader arms control agenda. None of these moved forward. The nuclear test ban negotiations, which had been making progress in Geneva, were suspended. The U-2 became the symbol of what the Soviet bloc called American “imperial espionage,” and the issue festered in Soviet press commentary for the rest of the year.
The trial of Powers and the prisoner exchange
Powers was tried in Moscow in August 1960, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to ten years — three in prison and seven of hard labor. The sentence was lighter than the prosecutor had requested, in part because the Soviet government wanted the door open for an exchange. The exchange came on February 10, 1962, on the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam. Powers was exchanged for Colonel William Fisher, known as “Rudolf Abel,” an illegal KGB officer who had been arrested in New York in 1957 and who had served as the model for the character in the 1960s television series and the basis for the 2015 film Bridge of Spies. Fisher went home to a Soviet pension and a quiet life in Sverdlovsk. Powers went home to a Medal of Freedom, a CIA Distinguished Intelligence Medal, and a long, second career as a pilot.
The end of manned overflight
The U-2 program did not stop. The aircraft continued to fly over the Soviet Union, and on October 27, 1962 — the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis — a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson. The U-2 also flew extensively over North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and over the Soviet Union itself on selected missions until 1968. The aircraft remains in service in 2025 in a series of modernized variants.
But the program could no longer be relied on for the deep Soviet overflights that had been its Cold War mission. The future belonged to the satellite. The Corona program — the first American photo-reconnaissance satellite system — had been under development since 1958. Its first successful mission, the recovery of a film capsule over the Pacific, came on August 19, 1960, less than four months after the Powers shootdown. By 1972, when Corona was retired, it had flown 145 successful missions, returned more than 800,000 photographs, and covered more than 1.5 million square miles of denied territory. Corona’s images resolved the missile gap (there was none), confirmed the size of the Soviet strategic force, and verified the SALT I limits in 1972. The high-altitude U-2 had given way to the low-Earth-orbit Corona, and the Corona had given way, in turn, to the digital-transmission systems that succeeded it.
Key sources
- Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (1986). The most detailed narrative of the 1960 shootdown, based on the U.S. and Soviet documents available at the time.
- Chris Pocock, The U-2 Spyplane: Toward the Unknown (2020) and his earlier 50 Years of the U-2 (2005). The standard technical and operational history.
- Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954–1974 (1998). The CIA’s own declassified history of the program.
- Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1991). The definitive account of the U-2’s role in October 1962, by the founding deputy director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center.