U-2

An American reconnaissance aircraft. The shooting down of a U-2 over the USSR on 1 May 1960 led to the trial of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

Account of the case based on the CIA.¹

The International Spy Museum calls the U-2 the most famous spy plane: it was built to gather information over the USSR from an altitude of about 55,000 feet (about 17 km), and it is still in service.²

According to the US State Department’s Office of the Historian, Powers’s U-2 took off from Pakistan and was meant to fly to Norway; it was brought down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile over Sverdlovsk Oblast. The US authorities first claimed it had been a weather flight, but on 7 May Khrushchev revealed that the pilot was alive and that the aircraft, with its photographic equipment, had been recovered almost intact. The affair wrecked the Paris summit in May 1960. Powers was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and seven years’ hard labour; in February 1962 he was exchanged for Rudolf Abel.³

After the shoot-down, overflights of the USSR were halted, and the CIA pressed on with a faster successor, the A-12 OXCART.⁴

See also: “Bridge of Spies” (2015).