U-2 Incident

The 1960 shootdown of Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union

Overview

On 1 May 1960 a Soviet surface to air missile brought down a CIA U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flown by Francis Gary Powers near Sverdlovsk. Washington, believing the pilot dead, issued a cover story about a lost weather research plane, and Nikita Khrushchev then revealed that Powers was alive and the wreckage recovered. The scandal wrecked the Paris summit later that month. Powers was convicted of espionage in Moscow and exchanged in 1962 for the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin. The episode accelerated the shift to satellite reconnaissance.