page_title: Lockheed U-2
section_title: May 1960: U-2 shot down
hierarchical_section_title: Lockheed U-2 / Operational history / United States / May 1960: U-2 shot down
caption_attribution_description: English: Francis Gary Powers (right) with U-2 designer Kelly Johnson in 1966. Powers was a USAF fighter pilot recruited by the CIA in 1956 to fly civilian U-2 missions deep into Russia. Powers and other USAF Reserve pilots resigned their commissions to become civilians. (U.S. Air Force photo)
context_page_description: The Lockheed U-2, nicknamed "Dragon Lady", is an American single-jet engine, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force and previously flown by the Central Intelligence Agency. It provides day and night, high-altitude, all-weather intelligence gathering.
  Lockheed Corporation originally proposed it in 1953, it was approved in 1954, and its first test flight was in 1955. It was flown during the Cold War over the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba. In 1960, Gary Powers was shot down in a CIA U-2A over the Soviet Union by a surface-to-air missile. Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. was shot down in a U-2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
  U-2s have taken part in post-Cold War conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and supported several multinational NATO operations. The U-2 has also been used for electronic sensor research, satellite calibration, scientific research, and communications purposes. The U-2 is one of a handful of aircraft types to have served the USAF for over 50 years, along with the Boeing B-52 and Boeing KC-135. The newest models entered service in the 1980s, and the latest model, the U-2S, had a technical upgrade in 2012.
context_section_description: Eisenhower authorized one more overflight, which was to be made no later than 1 May because the important Paris Summit of the Big Four Conference would begin on 16 May. The CIA chose for the mission—the 24th deep-penetration Soviet overflight—Operation GRAND SLAM, an ambitious flight plan for the first crossing of the Soviet Union from Peshawar, Pakistan to Bodø, Norway; previous flights had always exited in the direction from which they had entered. The route would permit visits to Tyuratam, Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Kotlas, Severodvinsk, and Murmansk. It was expected, given good weather, to resolve missile, nuclear and nuclear submarine intelligence issues with one flight. Francis Gary Powers, the most experienced pilot with 27 missions, was chosen for the flight. After delays, the flight began on May Day, 1 May. This was a mistake because, as an important Soviet holiday, there was much less air traffic than usual. The Soviets began tracking the U-2 15 miles outside the border, and over Sverdlovsk, four and a half hours into the flight, one of three SA-2 missiles detonated behind the aircraft at 70,500 feet, near enough to cause it to crash; another hit a Soviet interceptor attempting to reach the American aircraft. Powers survived the near miss and was quickly captured; the crash did not destroy the U-2 and the Soviets were able to identify much of the equipment.
  Bissell and other project officials believed that surviving a U-2 accident from above 70,000 feet was impossible, so they used the pre-existing cover story. On 3 May, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, the successor to NACA) announced that one of its aircraft, making a high-altitude research flight in Turkey, was missing; the government planned to say, if necessary, that the NASA aircraft had drifted with an incapacitated pilot across the Soviet border. By remaining silent, Khrushchev lured the Americans into reinforcing the cover story until he revealed on 7 May that Powers was alive and had confessed to spying on the Soviet Union. Eisenhower turned down Dulles' offer to resign and publicly took full responsibility for the incident on 11 May; by then all overflights had been canceled. The Paris Summit collapsed after Khrushchev, as the first speaker, demanded an apology from the U.S., which Eisenhower refused.
  U-2 pilots were told, Knutson later said, if captured "to tell them everything that they knew", because they were told little about their missions other than targets on maps. Otherwise, Powers had little instruction on what to do during an interrogation. Although he had been told that he could reveal everything about the aircraft since the Soviets could learn what they wanted from it, Powers did his best to conceal classified information while appearing to cooperate. His trial began on 17 August 1960. Powers—who apologized on advice of his Soviet defense counsel—was sentenced to three years in prison, but on 10 February 1962 the USSR exchanged him and American student Frederic Pryor for Rudolf Abel at Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam, Germany. Two CIA investigations found that Powers had done well during the interrogation and had "complied with his obligations as an American citizen during this period". Although the government was reluctant to reinstate him to the USAF because of its statements that the U-2 program was civilian, it had promised to do so after CIA employment ended; Powers resolved the dilemma by choosing to work for Lockheed as a U-2 pilot.
  The debris of Powers' aircraft was used to design a copy under the name Beriev S-13. That was then discarded in favor of the MiG-25R and reconnaissance satellites.
  The search for operational ballistic missile sites continued focusing on the Soviet railway system using Corona satellite images, with a resolution of twenty to thirty feet compared to two to three feet from U-2 cameras.
caption: Kelly Johnson and Gary Powers in front of a U-2
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