ABSTRACT
On May 1, 1960 an American U-2 spy plane piloted by CIA employee Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet air space. For almost five years, these planes, flying at over 70,000 feet, had been photographing the Soviet Union’s most secret installations. Believing the pilot to be dead, the Americans claimed that the plane had gone off course from Iran while investigating weather conditions. The story was almost immediately shown to be false when Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894-1971) produced the pilot with photographs of the crash site near the city of Smolensk, thousands of miles from where the Americans claimed it was supposed to be. Furiously, Khrushchev demanded that US President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) apologize, and, when Eisenhower refused, Khrushchev canceled a summit meeting with Eisenhower that was due to be held in Paris. As this incident illustrated, intelligence gathering was a major activity during the Cold War, and both sides developed sophisticated technological means to help them do so.
