Francis Gary Powers, the Lockheed U-Two, and the Seventy-Thousand-Foot Mission That Ended the Paris Summit

On May 1, 1960, CIA contract pilot Francis Gary Powers was flying alone at 70,000 feet over the Soviet Union when a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile destroyed his aircraft near Sverdlovsk. He survived. That single fact - that he survived - unraveled one of the most sensitive intelligence programs in American history and collapsed a superpower summit before it could begin.

Why the United States Needed an Aircraft Like the U-2

By 1954, the Cold War intelligence picture was nearly blank. The United States had almost no reliable information about Soviet bomber bases, missile sites, or nuclear stockpiles. That uncertainty wasn’t just uncomfortable - in a world of nuclear weapons, it translated directly into the risk of catastrophic miscalculation.

President Eisenhower understood war in a way few advisors in Washington did. He had commanded the Allied armies across Europe. He needed eyes over Soviet territory without triggering a third world war. The question was whether an aircraft could fly high enough to be untouchable.

Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works

Eisenhower turned to Kelly Johnson, who ran Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects division in Burbank, California. Johnson’s engineers had nicknamed the facility the Skunk Works, after a moonshine operation in the Li’l Abner comic strip. The name stuck.

Johnson had already delivered the P-38 Lightning, the Constellation, and the F-104 Starfighter. His management philosophy was the inverse of every committee in Washington: small team, tight secrecy, build it, test it, fix it, fly it. Eisenhower gave him eighteen months to build a working prototype. Johnson had one flying in eight.

What Made the U-2 Unlike Any Other Aircraft

The U-2 that emerged from the Skunk Works was essentially a powered glider. Its fuselage was barely 55 feet long. Its wings stretched nearly 104 feet tip to tip - long and slender, built for altitude rather than speed. The engine was a Pratt and Whitney J-57, the same powerplant that flew on B-52 bombers, here pushing a dramatically lighter airframe to altitudes no other military aircraft had reached.

The aircraft cruised at approximately 70,000 feet. At that altitude the sky above the cockpit turns deep violet, nearly black at the edges. The curvature of the earth is visible along the horizon. The pilot wore a pressure suit functionally identical to a spacesuit - without it, low atmospheric pressure would cause the blood to boil. Outside air temperature hovered around 60 degrees below zero.

The aerodynamics at that altitude were extraordinarily unforgiving. The gap between stall speed and airframe-limiting speed was sometimes as narrow as six knots. The autopilot could not hold the aircraft in that envelope unaided. For a nine or ten-hour mission, the pilot flew every minute with full attention.

Who Was Francis Gary Powers?

Powers grew up in the coal country of rural Virginia. His father was a cobbler. He worked his way through Milligan College, earned a commission, got his wings, and was flying F-84 Thunderjets with the Air Force in Germany when the CIA approached him in 1955. They offered him two and a half times his military salary for work they could not describe in detail.

He signed the paperwork.

The CIA ran the U-2 program, not the Air Force. Pilots flew as civilian contract employees with no military markings, no dog tags in the cockpit. The official cover story framed the aircraft as atmospheric research for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. If an aircraft went down, Washington’s position would be that it was a weather plane that had strayed. The planners assumed that if something went wrong at altitude, neither the pilot nor the aircraft would be recoverable.

The SA-2 and the End of Invulnerability

The U-2 program became operational in 1956, and overflights began almost immediately. The early assumption - that Soviet radar couldn’t track the aircraft - turned out to be wrong. Soviet stations painted the U-2 clearly. They simply had nothing that could reach it. Soviet interceptors scrambled repeatedly, burning their engines to the structural limit, and fell thousands of feet short every time.

Khrushchev raised the issue privately with Eisenhower. The overflights continued. The intelligence was too valuable to stop, and every completed mission reinforced the belief that the program was untouchable.

Then Soviet air defense regiments received the SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile system - capable of reaching U-2 operating altitudes. By the spring of 1960, batteries around high-value Soviet sites were equipped and waiting.

Operation Grand Slam: May 1, 1960

Eisenhower approved the Grand Slam mission with genuine reluctance. The Paris Summit - a meeting between Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and Western Allied leaders - was scheduled for May 16, just two weeks away. His advisors maintained that the Soviets posed no threat to the aircraft at altitude.

The mission called for Powers to take off from Badaber airfield outside Peshawar, Pakistan, transit the entire Soviet Union from south to north, and land in Bodø, Norway, photographing Soviet missile sites, bomber bases, and submarine facilities along the route.

He took off before sunrise on May 1. He had been airborne for approximately four hours when, over the Sverdlovsk region at around 68,000 feet, he heard a dull orange flash behind him and felt the aircraft lurch. The tail was gone.

An SA-2 had detonated close enough to destroy the empennage. The aircraft entered an immediate uncontrollable gyration. Powers attempted to reach the self-destruct switch but could not do so without losing the ejection seat. He was partially thrown clear of the tumbling aircraft, separated manually, deployed his parachute, and came down in a farm field outside Sverdlovsk. He was surrounded by Soviet citizens within minutes.

He was unhurt. He was alive. He was carrying a suicide pin tipped with shellfish toxin.

He did not use it.

The Cover Story That Collapsed

CIA mission controllers marked Powers as overdue and then lost. The standard assumption held: the aircraft was down, the pilot almost certainly dead. The United States issued its cover story - a NASA weather research aircraft had gone missing near Turkey, the pilot having reported oxygen trouble and possibly straying unconscious into Soviet airspace.

The State Department added more detail to the story than it should have.

Khrushchev let it run for four days. Then he appeared before the Supreme Soviet Presidium and announced that an American spy plane had been shot down over Soviet territory on May 1. The pilot had survived, had confessed to espionage, and the Soviet Union was in possession of the wreckage, the camera equipment, and the photographs. He held up the photographs.

The cover story had no ground left to stand on. Eisenhower, refusing to blame subordinates, acknowledged the overflight program personally - the first time an American president had publicly admitted to authorizing aerial espionage over a foreign country.

The Paris Summit Collapse

The Paris Summit convened on May 16. Khrushchev arrived with demands: an American apology, a permanent end to overflights, and a public condemnation of the intelligence program by Eisenhower himself. Eisenhower offered a suspension of flights but would not deliver an apology. Khrushchev walked out. The summit ended before its first working session.

A meeting some historians believe could have meaningfully reduced Cold War tensions was over before it began - ended by a single missile finding its target on a May morning over the Urals.

Trial, Conviction, and the Bridge of Spies

Powers went to trial in Moscow that August. He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to ten years: three years’ imprisonment followed by seven years in a labor camp.

He served one year and nine months.

In February 1962, Powers was driven to the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin - the crossing between West Berlin and East Germany that intelligence services on both sides called the Bridge of Spies. Walking from the eastern end was Rudolf Abel, a Soviet intelligence officer who had run networks inside the United States before his arrest in 1957.

The two men crossed from opposite ends, passed each other somewhere above the water, and did not speak.

A Complicated Homecoming

The official CIA assessment was that Powers had performed his duties professionally. The Senate Armed Services Committee investigated and cleared him of any misconduct. But the whisper campaign persisted for years. He had survived when surviving wasn’t part of the plan. He had not destroyed the aircraft. He had not used the suicide pin.

Powers wrote a book about the mission - Operation Overflight - and lectured extensively about the experience. He worked as a test pilot for Lockheed, then flew traffic helicopters for a television station in Los Angeles, reporting freeway accidents and brush fires over the San Fernando Valley.

In August 1977, inbound from a news flight over fires north of the city, his helicopter ran low on fuel. He diverted toward Van Nuys Airport and came down short, in a field in Encino. He was 47 years old.

The Air Force gave him a full military burial at Arlington National Cemetery. In 2012 - more than fifty years after the fact - he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Prisoner of War Medal, and the National Defense Service Medal.

The U-2 Still Flies

The aircraft the Air Force operates today is essentially the same design Kelly Johnson drafted in 1954. Upgraded engines, modern sensors, improved materials - but those extraordinary 104-foot wings, that knife-edge operating envelope, that solitary vigil at the edge of the atmosphere. The fundamental aircraft is unchanged.

There are pilots today doing what Powers did. They know his name, even if the country that sent him up there took half a century to properly remember it.

Primary sources for this article include Powers’ memoir Operation Overflight, Chris Pocock’s research on the U-2 program, and declassified CIA records available through the National Security Archive. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum displays a U-2.

Key Takeaways

Francis Gary Powers was a CIA contract pilot shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, while flying a Lockheed U-2 on a reconnaissance mission called Operation Grand Slam.
The U-2 cruised at approximately 70,000 feet - an altitude that made it untouchable until the Soviet SA-2 missile system came online in 1960.
Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works team at Lockheed built the U-2 prototype in eight months, against an eighteen-month deadline.
The collapse of the U.S. cover story forced Eisenhower to become the first American president to publicly admit authorizing aerial espionage over a foreign country.
The incident directly caused Khrushchev to walk out of the Paris Summit on May 16, 1960, ending a diplomatic meeting some historians believe could have altered the trajectory of the Cold War.
Powers was exchanged for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin in February 1962, having served less than two years of a ten-year sentence.