[Fiji Hill]

On May 1, 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a CIA U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. It was an international crisis for America’s intelligence agencies.

A planned summit between Pres. Dwight Eisenhower and Premier Nikita Khrushchev was scuttled, much to Eisenhower’s embarrassment and to the fury of the Pakistanis, from whose territory the flight had been launched.

Khrushchev's outrage over this incident was rather phony--at the time, he was running a swarm of espionage agents in the West. Nonetheless, the Powers affair provided a convenient pretext to cancel the summit, which would probably have embarrassed Khrushchev by showing the world how tough the US and its NATO allies were hanging in opposing his efforts to force us out of West Berlin.

[Brad from Tennessee]

Powers plane was hit at 68,000 feet by an advanced Soviet surface to air missile. For quite some time the Pentagon refused to believe the Soviets had a SAM that could reach that altitude. They insisted Powers’ U-2 had experienced a flame-out forcing him to descend to 30,000 feet where the missile could reach him. After Powers bailed out and parachuted to the ground he saw another parachute descending in the distance. He surmised that a Soviet fighter plane, attempting to track him, had been hit by the same volley of missiles fired at the U-2. Under interrogations and during his trial Powers repeatedly told the Russians that the U-2’s maximum altitude was 68,000 feet. In fact it was approximately 90,000 feet.