As the inevitability of losing a plane and causing an international incident increased, Eisenhower stopped authorization for flights in March 1958. In September of that year, a US C-130 reconnaissance plane flying along the Turkish–USSR border strayed into Soviet air-space and was shot down, with a loss of all seventeen aboard.
And then, the Soviets launched a propaganda campaign claiming they had a superior number of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). “We are making missiles like sausages,” boasted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in December 1958. It was pure bombast, but in the wake of Sputnik, the US Congress, the press, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, and what Eisenhower would ultimately call the “military-industrial complex” all began to bemoan a nonexistent “missile gap.” U-2 overflights were resumed to track Soviet ICBM numbers, which were shown to be way overblown.
Route taken by the U-2 spy plane shot down by the Soviet Union in 1960. via Wikimedia Commons
Powers’s mission, code-named Grand Slam, was a 3,800-mile route from Pakistan to Norway, with 2,900 of those miles across Soviet territory. It was supposed to take just under ten hours, at a crushing height of 70,500 feet. About four hours in, his plane was hit by a SA-2 surface-to-air missile. Schell notes that another SA-2 fired at the U-2 accidentally destroyed a Soviet jet scrambled to intercept the overflight. (An SA-2 also destroyed a U-2 over Cuba in October 1962, resulting in the only known US fatality from enemy action during the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
After Powers’s plane went down, the US claimed it was an off-course weather research flight. Since the Soviets initially made no mention of the pilot, Powers was presumed by the US to be dead. In fact, he had managed to get out of the cockpit and parachute down.
Khrushchev let the US broadcast its tale until May 7, when he revealed that Powers was in custody. The American government was caught with its pants down and Cold War egg on its face. Khrushchev then dramatically walked out of a scheduled Paris summit that had been designed to continue the thaw ignited at Camp David with Eisenhower eight months before. The Cold War froze up all over again.