CONFIRMED
The U-2 Incident: The Spy Plane That Wrecked a Summit
On the morning of 1 May 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft — a strange, glider-winged spy plane built to fly higher than any fighter could reach — was cruising at some 70,000 feet over the heart of the Soviet Union, its cameras photographing military installations, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploded near it and sent it spinning out of the sky. The pilot, a CIA contract flyer named Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to earth and was captured alive near the city of Sverdlovsk. What followed was one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of American Cold War diplomacy. Believing the pilot dead and the plane destroyed, the United States put out a cover story: that a NASA 'weather research' plane had strayed off course after its pilot reported oxygen trouble. Then the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sprang his trap, revealing that the pilot was alive, had confessed, and that the wreckage — cameras, film, and all — was in Soviet hands. President Eisenhower was exposed in a lie before the world, and, breaking with precedent, ultimately acknowledged that the United States had been conducting espionage overflights. The incident detonated days before a long-planned summit in Paris, which it duly destroyed, ending a fragile thaw and plunging the Cold War back into deep freeze. This is the story of the U-2 incident — the secret program, the shootdown, the collapsing lie, and the summit it took down with it.
