1960 U-2 incident spy aircraft

On this day an American Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile near Sverdlovsk while flying a spy mission from Pakistan toward Norway. The United States first claimed that a weather research plane had strayed off course, until the Soviet government revealed that it held both the wreckage and the pilot. The affair embarrassed President Eisenhower, and it wrecked the Paris summit with Nikita Khrushchev that was due to open a few days later. Powers was convicted of espionage in a Moscow trial and was exchanged in 1962 for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin. The incident hardened Cold War mistrust and led to the end of manned overflights of the Soviet Union.

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