U-2 Incident

The U-2 incident was a military and geopolitical occurrence and a major public scandal of the Cold War. This international crisis arose when an American reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2, was shot down by Soviet SAM missiles on May 1, 1960. The US Air Force spy plane was flying in the skies deep over Soviet territory. In those days, the U-2 was a top secret aircraft, which was capable of flying at very high altitudes. Nevertheless, Soviet radars spotted it as soon as it entered their air space, and they shot it down right away.

The U-2 had specially been designed for high altitude flights and it had a very long range capability. Equipped with powerful photographic cameras, it was used in reconnaissance missions to take pictures of Soviet military bases, long range missile silos, and other facilities as the pilot secretly flew over Russian territory. Of course, these undercover missions were in violation of the air space of a sovereign State. The US aircraft had taken off from a secret aerodrome in northern Pakistan and then it banked left as it flew in a southeastern-northwestern direction.

When the Soviet head of State, Nikita Krushchev, announced that an American aircraft had been shot down because it was flying over Soviet territory, the Dwight Eisenhower Administration bluntly denied these accusations of illegal intelligence flights. The denial arose out of the American government assumption that the pilot had died. However, the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had managed to bail out and to safely parachute, and he was immediately taken prisoner. When the Soviet television and printing press showed him publicly, the whole world saw the tangible evidence that the government of the United States of America was not reliable. It was a big international scandal as the Americans were put on the international spot as a bunch of liars.

The Soviet government brought charges against the American pilot and he was tried as the wreckage of the U-2 was shown on television. The Paris Summit of superpowers on nuclear weapons reduction, which would take place later that year, failed because Dwight Eisenhower refused to apologize despite the evidence and the serious crisis that the Americans had stirred up. In the Soviet Union, Francis G. Powers fully confessed the undercover operations carried out by the American government as he apologized to the Russian people on public television. In 1962, the US Air Force pilot returned to the United States on a prisoners exchange after intense negotiations.

A American U-2 spy aircraft in 1959 flying over eastern Europe.

Below, the American pilot Francis Gary Powers. When he was shown as a prisoners on mass media, the U-2 incident became a great scandal for the US government.