Hours before the beginning of the annual May Day parade in 1960, Soviet Air Defense forces detected a high-altitude target flying over the Tajik SSR in Central Asia. Its altitude was more than 19 kilometers (around 62,000 feet). It was a U-2, piloted by Francis Gary Powers.
An alert signal summoning staff officers to their command posts was telephoned to the officers immediately. As members of the command element of the Air Defense Forces arrived and went to their workstations, an uncomfortable situation was shaping up. The May Day parade was scheduled to get underway at mid-morning, and leaders of the party, the government, and the Armed Forces were to be present as usual. In other words, at a time when a major parade aimed at demonstrating Soviet military prowess was about to begin, a not-yet-identified foreign aircraft was flying over the heart of the country and Soviet air defenses appeared unable to shoot it down.
The aircraft thus was tracked from the ground in a tense atmosphere. Nerves of military people at airfields, missile positions, command-and-control facilities, the Air Force, and the Air Defense Forces were badly frayed. Marshal Sergei Biriuzov, Commander-in-Chief of the Air Defense Forces, was the target of irate phone calls from Nikita Khrushchev and other Kremlin leaders. The tone of these calls was approximately as follows: "Shame! The country was giving air defense everything it needs, and still you cannot shoot down a subsonic aircraft." Biriuzov responded emotionally, "If I could become a missile, I myself would fly and down this damned intruder."
As often happens at critical moments, unanticipated circumstances interfered with shooting the aircraft down during the Central Asian leg of its overflight of the USSR. A missile battalion whose zone was overflown by the U-2 was not on alert duty that day. The U-2's route was such that a successful missile launch against it did not appear feasible at first. Fighter aircraft were unable to get to the right positions for shootdown attempts. And the U-2 maintained radio silence. (In fact, it had no long-range radio system.)
Khrushchev demanded that the intruding aircraft be shot down at all costs. The Soviet leader and his lieutenants clearly viewed the violation of their nation's skies by a foreign reconnaissance aircraft on the day of a Soviet national holiday, and just two weeks before a summit conference in Paris, as a political provocation.
Powers and his U-2, meanwhile, were heading confidently northward. A Soviet SU-9 Fishpot high-altitude fighter aircraft, which was in the area on an unrelated mission, took off from an airfield at Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) to try to intercept the U-2. The pilot of this aircraft, which was not appropriately armed or equipped for such a mission, was directed to close with and ram the intruder. The risk was enormous and the chances for success were negligible. The pilot managed briefly to gain the necessary altitude, but he did not catch sight of the target, and the attempt was abandoned.
The U-2 then entered the engagement zone of a SAM battalion near Sverdlovsk. The unit's officer in charge issued the order: "Destroy target." At 0853 hours, the battalion's first missile exploded behind the U-2, and its fragments pierced the tail section and the wings without touching the cockpit. Radar operators issued a report that the target "began to blink," either in employing jamming or in breaking up. The latter, it turned out, was the case.
Powers, realizing that he had lost control over the aircraft and had to abandon ship, jettisoned the canopy and crawled from the cockpit with difficulty. He was unable to use the ejection seat because the explosion had shoved his seat forward and his legs were caught beneath the instrument panel. After he abandoned the aircraft and was parachuting to the ground, the U-2 was hit directly by another missile. The fuselage, engine, wings, and cockpit ended up scattered on the ground over an area of several square kilometers.
At first, no one on the ground in Sverdlovsk and Moscow realized that the intruding U-2 had been downed. A target blip reappeared on radar and was immediately hit by a missile from another SAM battalion. But this "target" turned out to be a Soviet fighter jet that had been scrambled to intercept the U-2. The monitor screens then cleared up, and it became clear that the U-2 had been shot down. Marshal Biryuzov phoned the news to Khrushchev, who voiced doubts. Biriuzov immediately ordered a team of officers to fly to Sverdlovsk and get the details. The Marshal then headed for the May Day parade.
Within a few hours, an investigative team flew from Moscow to Sverdlovsk. It included people from the Central Committee apparatus, military counterintelligence, the KGB, the General Staff, and the Air Defense Forces. The investigators began looking for aircraft parts and other items strewn across fields and groves. They found large, wide rolls of exposed film, much of which was developed later almost without losses, enabling the Soviets to see what targets had been photographed and with what quality.
Francis Gary Powers survived the shootdown and was taken to Moscow. During the first several days in May, the Soviets did not acknowledge that he was alive and in their hands.
Soviet and U.S. Maneuvering Over Downed Pilot
The investigative commission compiled a report on the U-2's performance characteristics, equipment, and missions accomplished. Based on recovered parts and equipment, the investigators quickly ascertained some key details about the U-2 camera system and its capabilities.
Washington, meanwhile, issued a cover story on 3 May to the effect that the U.S. Government had been using U-2s in a program for studying meteorological conditions in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and that one such aircraft had disappeared while in Turkish airspace on 1 May. This "report" said the aircraft may have crashed in Lake Van (in eastern Turkey) after the pilot had reported an oxygen equipment malfunction.
At a Supreme Soviet session on 5 May, Khrushchev made public some of the details of the U-2 incident, but he did not reveal that the pilot was alive and that recovered aircraft parts and equipment were already starting to allow conclusions to be drawn about the nature of U-2 missions over the USSR. On the same day, U.S. authorities made further attempts to camouflage Powers' mission. State Department and NASA spokesmen made statements reiterating and embellishing the story issued on 3 May.
At a diplomatic reception on the evening of 5 May, the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, Llewellyn Thompson, overheard Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Yakov Malik tell the Swedish ambassador that "we are still questioning the pilot" of the downed U-2. Two days later Khrushchev announced that the pilot was alive and in the USSR; U.S. government agencies then admitted that the aircraft had deliberately flown into Soviet air space.
President Eisenhower confirmed at a press conference on 11 May that U.S. reconnaissance flights over the USSR were part of the American effort to collect information on the Soviet Union and had been occurring regularly for a number of years. Eisenhower declared that he had "issued orders to use any possible methods to collect information necessary for defending the United States and the free world against surprise attack and to give them an opportunity to prepare effectively for defense." He added that spy methods were necessary because "secrecy and secrets had become a fetish in the Soviet Union."
The U-2 shootdown incident had important consequences. U.S.-Soviet relations worsened. The U.S. halted its manned reconnaissance flights over the USSR; it soon began using Midas and Samos reconnaissance satellites instead. A summit conference slated for mid-May in Paris did not take place, and a visit by Eisenhower to the USSR, planned for 10 June 1960, was canceled.
Thus ended the first phase of U.S. attempts to "open the sky" over the USSR and penetrate the secrets of Soviet weapons programs as the arms race accelerated.
Fate of the Pilot - and of U-2 Overflights of the USSR
In August 1960, Powers was subjected to a three-day open trial in Moscow. He was sentenced to 10 years by the USSR Supreme Court's Military Cases Collegium. Powers was exchanged in February 1962, however, for Soviet intelligence officer Rudolph Abel, who had been arrested in the United States.
Although the U.S. had ended reconnaissance flights deep into Soviet airspace, U-2s continued flying missions close to Soviet territory that were designed to reconnoiter Soviet military sites without actually violating the USSR's borders. Some violations nonetheless occurred. During 1962, for example, one U-2 overflew Sakhalin Island and another violated the Soviet border in the far north. In both instances, the Kremlin sent protest notes and the US apologized.
Nov. 4, 1960 - Kennedy defeated Nixon 34,227,096 to 34,108,546
