U-2 Spy Plane Incident

U-2 SPY PLANE INCIDENT

On May 1, 1960, an American high-altitude U-2 spy plane departed from Pakistan on a flight that was supposed to take it across the USSR to Norway. Shot down near Sverdlovsk, with its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured, the flight triggered a Cold War crisis, aborted a scheduled four-power summit meeting, and poisoned Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's relations with U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Aware that U-2 spy flights constituted a grave violation of Soviet sovereignty, Eisenhower reluctantly approved them beginning in 1956 to check on the Soviet missile program. Even after the May Day 1960 flight was shot down, Khrushchev hoped to proceed with the summit scheduled for May 16 in Paris. But by not revealing he had shot down the plane and captured its pilot, and by waiting for Washington to invent a cover story and then unmasking it, Khrushchev provoked Eisenhower to take personal responsibility for the flight. After that, Khrushchev felt he had no choice but to wreck the summit, cut off relations with Eisenhower, and await the election of Eisenhower's successor.

It is highly uncertain whether the Paris summit could have produced progress on Berlin and a nuclear test ban. Russian observers such as Fyodor Burlatsky and Georgy Arbatov contend that Khrushchev used the U-2 incident as an excuse to scuttle what he anticipated would be an unproductive summit. More likely, Khrushchev was lured by the flight and its fate into a sequence of unintended consequences that undermined not only his foreign policy but his position at home.

See also: cold war; khrushchev, nikita sergeyevich

bibliography

Beschloss, Michael R. (1986). Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair. New York: Harper and Row.

Taubman, William. (2003). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W. W. Norton.

William Taubman