Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident

FOREWORD

On May 1, 1960—the traditional May Day holiday—an American U-2 spyplane flew high above the Soviet Union photographing strategic targets. It was the twenty-fourth U-2 mission over the USSR since the first overflight almost four years earlier. The pilot of this U-2 was thirty-year-old Francis Gary Powers. A former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, Powers was the most experienced U-2 pilot in the spyplane program with about six hundred hours at the controls of a U-2. He was also one of the most respected spyplane pilots, for his airmanship and for his integrity.

The calm sky more than seventy thousand feet above the USSR, far above the altitude of any Soviet fighter, was suddenly ripped apart as a surface-to-air missile detonated near Powers’s aircraft. Heavily damaged, the plane fell out of control. Unable to use his ejection seat, with great difficulty Powers bailed out of the crippled aircraft as it spun toward earth. He landed safely and was soon captured and flown to Moscow.

The shootdown of the U-2 piloted by Powers had a spectacular impact on the Cold War. In the late 1950s, the United States, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the USSR, under Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, had been moving toward closer relations. Following a successful summit meeting of the two superpower leaders in Geneva in July 1955, there was some thawing of the Cold War. Khrushchev visited the United States in September 1959, seeing Congress and Iowa cornfields and meeting stars on a Hollywood movie set. He invited Eisenhower, his children and grandchildren to visit the Soviet Union.

This superpower warming ended abruptly with the Powers shootdown. American cover stories about a weather reconnaissance plane straying off course were soon revealed to be boldfaced lies. Khrushchev himself went to New York to denounce the overflights at the United Nations. Powers was put on trial and found guilty of spying. Eisenhower, poorly served by the Central Intelligence Agency in the affair, personally took responsibility. The long-planned summit meeting in Paris in mid-May was a disaster as Khrushchev demanded an apology from the president.

The revelations that followed about the overflights were both a triumph and an embarrassment for the Soviet Union: One of the acclaimed American spyplanes had been shot down, but for almost four years—since July 4, 1956—the U-2s had overflown Soviet territory with impunity.

The twenty-three successful overflights had been vital to U.S. national security. Penetrating the “iron curtain” that had descended over the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states, the U-2 provided explicit intelligence of the Soviet manned bomber program and then of its intercontinental ballistic missile program. Further, strategic targets that had been known only from German maps of the early 1940s and even older documentation could be located with accuracy.

In Operation Overflight, Francis Gary Powers provided un-equaled insights into the U-2 program, the training of U-2 pilots, and of spyplane missions—over the USSR as well as over the Middle East and even certain “friendly” countries. His descriptions are vivid and his writing style engrossing.

This book is a significant contribution to the history of aviation.