“I was a pilot flying an airplane, and it just so happened that where I was flying made what I was doing spying” (Francis Gary Powers)

The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s was one of contradictions. While both sides were rapidly building stockpiles of nuclear weapons and were highly suspicious of each other, the period was also notable for the efforts made to de-escalate the possibility of armed conflict, led by Nikita Khrushchev’s idea of ‘Peaceful Coexistence.’ This included the resumption of the Four Powers Summit as well as Khrushchev’s visit to the US in 1959. An incident in May 1960, however, derailed these attempts at bridge building between East and West. It was the Soviet shootdown and capture of American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.

In 1955, US President Eisenhower had proposed that the US and the USSR agree to a plan for ‘Open Skies.’ This plan would allow both powers to perform serial reconnaissance over each other’s territories and monitor their respective nuclear facilities in the process. Premier Khrushchev refused the proposal, which prompted Washington to authorize the development of a spy plane that would be virtually impossible to detect. This was the U-2 built by Lockheed Martin and operated by the CIA. The first U-2 mission over Moscow and Leningrad took place on 4th July, 1956, with many more overflight missions being conducted.

How Was the U-2 Shot Down? 

On the first day of May, 1960, leaders of both the Armed Forces and the Communists in Moscow were preparing for the traditional May Parade. However, at dawn, Khrushchev was informed that there was some rather humiliating news: an unknown foreign airplane had trespassed into Soviet territory, and their supposedly superior air force had failed to shoot it down once again. The Premier himself phoned Marshal Miryuzov, Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces, angrily shouting, “Shame! The country was giving air defense everything it needed, and still, you cannot shoot down a subsonic aircraft.” 

This specific subsonic airplane belonged to the U-2 spy class. The plane was flown by Francis Gary Powers, who was a 30-year-old CIA pilot. He had taken off from the runway of Peshawar, Pakistan, on the plane with the designation number 360. What Powers did not know was that his aircraft, which was very hard to detect, had been detected by the Soviet radar as soon as he........

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