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In 1956, the CIA came up with what they thought was a rather clever plan.
The agency wanted to conduct a major spying operation on the Soviet Union.
But sending a military plane into someone else’s country would be an act of war.
So the agency decided to send a spy plane high above the clouds—to a height of 21 kilometers above the ground.
Their special high-altitude plane, called a U-2, would simply be too far up to be spotted by Russian radar.
They decided to try it.
On the fourth of July that year, 1956, a CIA pilot took a plane illegally into Soviet airspace. It flew over Moscow and St. Petersburg, had a look round, and then went home, unmolested. Mission accomplished.
They repeated this many times over the following years.
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AGENT POWERS’ PROBLEM
On May 1, 1960, a CIA pilot found himself with a long-haul job to do. Francis Gary Powers was an agent whose cover story, even to his own family, had been that he was a NASA meteorologist studying the weather.
The “weatherman” had to fly from a US military base in Pakistan to another one in Norway – even then, the world was covered with hubs for US armed forces.
He was flying a U-2, so believed he could fly over the Soviet Union. He’d be travelling across 4,667 kilometers (2,900 miles) of Soviet airspace.
This was both illegal and an act of war, but the US had long decided that international law did not apply to them.
The CIA plane was promptly shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile in the Ural Mountains of Russia.
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INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT
When the Russians complained that they had had to shoot down a US aircraft which was very clearly well inside their territory, the US government spun a tale that the U-2 had been conducting a routine weather flight outside Soviet airspace.
But there had been a malfunction of the oxygen delivery system in the cabin, they said. The weatherman blacked out and the plane had – entirely accidentally – drifted over into Soviet air space.
And that’s when the Russians had blown it up.
Whole thing was a mistake.
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TRUTH COMES OUT
The Russians considered this—and then sent a reply which shocked the US leadership. The Soviets said they were in possession of both the pilot and the remains of the plane.
Gary Powers had clearly not blacked out—he had parachuted to land, and was alive and well.
And the damaged aircraft, which was fitted for spying, not monitoring the weather, had been recovered too.
The Russians had been watching the spy plane program all along, for years—and had missiles that could bring down the CIA aircraft.
This was deeply embarrassing to the US, since its CIA program was exposed, and it had been caught lying to the world.
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OPPORTUNITY FOR PEACE
But Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wanted peace. He suggested that the United States could simply apologize and pledge to make no further illegal incursions.
Furthermore, he said that if U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower denied any knowledge of the spy planes program, he would accept that.
But Eisenhower did not like being caught in a lie—and turned even more hostile. He responded that he personally knew full well about the illegal spy plane incursions from day one.
Furthermore, he considered that flying into Soviet airspace was a necessary element in maintaining the US’s national defense—and CIA pilots would continue to violate Soviet airspace whenever they liked.
East-west relations crashed.
This was one of a number of incidents in which Russia clearly tried to turn a bad incident into an opportunity to make a positive agreement, but the US chose to escalate hostilities instead.
By 1960, the US military-media-industrial complex was already taking control of the nation.
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Full details of the U-2 spy plane incident are in the archives of the US Office of the Historian. Link provided separately.
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