American pilot Francis Gary Powers was flying a high-altitude CIA reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union when a missile brought his U-2 down near Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960. Powers survived, was captured, and later put on trial in Moscow, a humiliating episode for Washington which had initially denied the flight was a spy mission. The incident torpedoed a scheduled Paris summit between Eisenhower and Khrushchev and deepened Cold War distrust.
For four years the U-2's ability to cruise above 70,000 feet had made it seem untouchable, gliding over Soviet military installations while photographing missile sites and airfields with astonishing clarity. Soviet radar had tracked these overflights for years, unable to reach them, until Soviet engineers finally developed a missile with sufficient range.
When Powers's plane went down, the Eisenhower administration initially issued a cover story claiming a weather research aircraft had strayed off course. The story collapsed spectacularly when Khrushchev produced the wreckage, and then the pilot himself, alive and in Soviet custody, contradicting Washington's denials point by point.
Powers stood trial for espionage in a tightly choreographed Moscow courtroom and received a ten-year sentence, though he served less than two before being exchanged in 1962 for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge, an exchange later dramatized in the film 'Bridge of Spies.' The incident poisoned the brief post-Sputnik thaw, forced Eisenhower into an unusual public admission about American espionage, and became one of the era's most vivid demonstrations that Cold War trust remained perilously thin.