The U-2 was shot down on May 1, 1960 by an SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile because the Soviet air defense force had finally developed the ability to reach the U-2’s operating altitude, and because the Soviet leadership, under Premier Nikita Khrushchev, made a deliberate decision to use that new capability to inflict a political defeat on the United States just before the Paris Summit of May 1960. The shootdown was not an accident; it was a planned escalation. For more on the U-2 article; the CIA’s U-2 program is detailed in the CIA article.
The technical preconditions for the shootdown were set in the late 1950s. The SA-2 Guideline had been in service since 1957, but the early versions of the missile were unable to reach the U-2’s normal operating altitude of 70,000 feet. By 1959, the Soviets had deployed improved versions of the SA-2 with a ceiling above 80,000 feet — the missile had been deployed in significant numbers around the Soviet Union’s high-value military and industrial targets. The Soviet air defense force had also deployed the P-30 “Thirty” radar, designed specifically to detect high-altitude targets, in 1959. By the time of the May 1, 1960 mission, the U.S. intelligence community was aware that the SA-2 threat was increasing, but the U-2 program continued, with the assumption — mistaken, as it turned out — that the U-2’s high altitude would still provide protection.
The political decision
The political decision to use the new capability was more complicated. Khrushchev had, from the beginning of the U-2 overflights in 1956, declined to order the shootdown of a U-2 over Soviet territory. The reasoning was twofold. First, the Kremlin’s military intelligence (the GRU) had warned that the shootdown of an American aircraft over the Soviet Union would be politically inflammatory. Second, the KGB’s chairman, Alexander Shelepin, had argued that the U-2 overflights were useful to the Soviet Union, in that the U.S. intelligence community’s perception of the Soviet threat — exaggerated by the overflights — was a useful cover for the Soviet military build-up. Shelepin’s argument was that the U-2 overflights were making the Americans nervous enough to spend money on weapons they did not need.
In 1959, this calculation changed. The successful test of the SA-2 in 1959, and the development of the radar, gave the Soviet military the capability it had previously lacked. Khrushchev, increasingly worried about the U-2 overflights as a direct threat to Soviet security, ordered the air defense force to use the new capability against any future overflight. The May 1, 1960 mission was the first one to be hit.
The timing was deliberate. The Paris Summit was scheduled to begin on May 16, 1960. Khrushchev saw the shootdown as an opportunity to derail the summit and to obtain a propaganda victory at a moment when the United States was politically vulnerable. He also wanted to send a signal to President Eisenhower, whom he had recently met at Camp David in September 1959, that the thaw in Soviet-American relations would not include tolerance of American espionage. The shootdown was timed so that the incident would dominate the news cycle leading into the summit and would force Eisenhower into a public admission of the U-2 program.
The cover-up and its failure
The CIA’s first response was the cover story. The State Department, on the instructions of the CIA’s press office, issued a statement on May 3, 1960, asserting that a “civilian research aircraft” had strayed off course and that the pilot had been identified as Francis Gary Powers, who had been a “research pilot” for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The Soviet government, having produced the aircraft, the pilot, the camera, and other equipment, was able to refute the cover story within forty-eight hours. On May 7, 1960, Khrushchev produced the aircraft and the camera at a press conference in Moscow. The cover story was abandoned.
The political consequences were severe. Eisenhower, on May 11, 1960, accepted responsibility for the U-2 program but refused to apologize. Khrushchev demanded an apology. Eisenhower refused. The Paris Summit collapsed on the eve of its opening. The U-2 program continued, but its political utility was over. The shootdown was, in the assessment of the historian Vladislav Zubok, the moment when the post-Camp David thaw in Soviet-American relations ended, period of the deepest Cold War crisis of the early 1960s — culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 — began.
The lessons
The shootdown taught the U.S. intelligence community three lessons. First, the U-2 was now vulnerable to the SA-2. The aircraft could still fly, but each Soviet overflight would now carry a serious risk of loss, and the political consequences of another shootdown were unpredictable. Second, the cover-up had failed. The lesson, absorbed painfully in 1960, was that covert programs that the U.S. government intended to acknowledge eventually had to be acknowledged proactively; cover stories built to be replaced in a few days often failed within hours. Third, the satellite was now the right answer. The Corona program, which had been under development since 1958, was on a path to its first successful mission on August 19, 1960; the U-2 would continue to fly, but it would no longer be the primary means of gathering intelligence about the Soviet Union’s military and industrial secrets.