The U-2 incident occured in 1960, during the Cold War. The U.S. requested to build a secret intelligence facility in Pakistan. The Pakistani President accepted. U-2 planes flew from this facility when going on surveillence missions to the Soviet Union. The Soviets picked up the planes on radar, but did not try to intercept them. On May 1, 1960, a U-2 plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union while on a mision to take photos of Russia to assess their military strength. When the Soviets picked up the plane on radar, they sent fighter planes to intercept it. This failed because U-2 could fly at a much higher altitude than the fighter planes. After the Soviets found out about this, they launched several surface-to-air missiles from a station commanded by Mikhail Voronov. One of them hit U-2. Some of the others hit the Russian fighter jets. Gary Powers successfully bailed out of the plane, parachuting down to safety. The plane crashed near Degtyarsk, in the Ural Region. Soon after he landed, Powers was captured. While the U.S. government was waiting to hear from Powers, Nikita Krushchev, a Soviet leader, wrote a letter to the U.S. addressing the U-2 incident and telling what happened. However, he deliberately did not mention the pilot, which led the U.S. government to believe that he died in the crash. The U.S. government then covered up the incident because they did not want to be embarrassed by the outcome of the mission. Their story was that U-2 was a weather research plane that had gone missing over Turkey. This is when Nikita Krushchev told the U.S. that Gary Powers was alive and well. He also showed them the wreckage of U-2 and the photos that it took. The purpose of this was to provide irrefutable evidence so that the U.S. government had to admit what really happened with U-2. This embarrassed the government immensely. Francis Gary Powers was sentenced to 3 years of imprisonment and 7 years of hard labor for espionage. On February 10, 1962, Francis Gary Powers was exchanged for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on the Gleinicke Bridge in Berlin. This exchange was negotiated by Milan Miskovsky, a CIA lawyer^[1]. Powers met U.S. officials on the other side of the bridge and returned to the U.S.

U-2 wreckage^[2]

Importance

     The U-2 incident was an impotant event of the Cold War. During the Four Powers Paris Summit, Nikita Krushchev demanded an apology from President Eisenhower. He refused and immediately after, exited the summit. This also increased tensions between the countries of the world. The Soviet Union was mad at Pakistan for allowing the U.S. to build the intelligence facility. Also, projects to create satellites to take photos of different places accelerated because people did not want a repeat of the U-2 incident. The same was true about the acceleration of supersonic spy plane development. In short, the U-2 incident was an important event of the Cold War and history.