Three Crises: Berlin, Cuba and Czechoslovakia » The U2 Incident and the Paris Summit, 1960

Hopes of a thaw, 1959-60

By 1959 relations between the superpowers seemed to be getting a little friendlier. In September 1959 Khrushchev became the first Soviet leader to visit the USA. He toured the country for nearly two weeks and then held private talks with President Eisenhower at Camp David, the President's country retreat. The two men got on well enough for newspapers to talk about a 'spirit of Camp David'.

They agreed that a full summit conference should be held. It was later fixed for Paris in May 1960, with the leaders of Britain and France also present. It was due to discuss the future of Berlin and a ban on testing nuclear weapons. Eisenhower was then invited to tour the Soviet Union in June. For the first time in years, real agreements looked possible.

Key terms:

• Summit conference: a face-to-face meeting of the leaders of the most powerful countries.
• U2: an American spy plane built to fly very high and photograph the ground below.
• Surface-to-air missile: a missile fired from the ground to bring down an aircraft.
• Cover story: a false explanation given to hide a secret operation.

The U2 spy plane

The Soviet Union was a closed country, and American leaders badly wanted to know how many bombers and missiles it really had. Remember, Khrushchev had turned down Eisenhower's 'Open Skies' plan in 1955. So the Americans went ahead in secret.

From 1956 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the American spy service, flew U2 planes across the Soviet Union. The U2 flew at about 70,000 feet, more than 20 kilometres up, and carried cameras that could pick out details on the ground. Eisenhower approved each flight himself.

The Soviets tracked the flights on radar, but for nearly four years their fighters and missiles could not reach that height. Khrushchev was furious, yet he said nothing in public. To complain openly would be to admit that his forces could not defend Soviet skies.

The U2 incident, May 1960

• 1 May 1960: the pilot Gary Powers took off from Peshawar in Pakistan to fly right across the Soviet Union to Norway. Near the city of Sverdlovsk his U2 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile. Powers parachuted out and was captured alive. Much of the plane, including its camera and film, was recovered.
• 5 May: Khrushchev announced that an American plane had been shot down over Soviet territory. He did not say that the pilot was alive. It was a trap.
• The cover story: the Americans, sure that Powers was dead, said that a weather research plane flying from Turkey had gone missing after its pilot reported trouble with his oxygen, and might have strayed across the border by accident.
• 7 May: Khrushchev revealed that the pilot was alive, had admitted he was spying, and that the Soviets had his film. The USA had been caught lying in front of the whole world.
• 11 May: Eisenhower publicly took responsibility. He said the flights were needed to guard against a surprise attack. It was very unusual for a head of state to admit to spying.

Khrushchev had at first suggested that Eisenhower might not have known about the flight. This gave the President a way out: he could have blamed his officials. By taking responsibility, Eisenhower was honest, but he made it very hard for Khrushchev to sit down with him as a friend.

The Paris Summit collapses

The summit opened in Paris on 16 May 1960, only fifteen days after the plane was shot down. Before any business could begin, Khrushchev made an angry speech. He demanded that Eisenhower:

• apologise for the flights
• punish the people responsible
• promise that there would be no more.

Eisenhower said that the flights had already been stopped and would not start again. But he refused to apologise for defending his country. Khrushchev walked out. The next day he stayed away, and the summit was abandoned before it had properly started. Khrushchev also cancelled Eisenhower's invitation to visit the Soviet Union.

The effects of the U2 incident

Overall, the thaw that had begun in the mid-1950s was over. The two sides went back to angry speeches and suspicion. When the new president, John F. Kennedy, took office in January 1961, he inherited a relationship that was worse than it had been a year before.

Powers was put on trial in Moscow in August 1960 and sentenced to ten years. In February 1962 he was set free on a bridge in Berlin, swapped for a Soviet spy held by the Americans, Rudolf Abel.

Was the U2 the real reason the summit failed? The two sides were still far apart on Berlin, so success was never certain. Some historians think Khrushchev used the incident to escape from a summit that might have given him little. But it was the U2 that turned a difficult meeting into an impossible one.

Exam-style question

Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)

The U2 affair was a disaster the Americans made for themselves. With a vital summit only two weeks away, Eisenhower recklessly allowed one more spy flight. When the plane was lost, his officials rushed out a clumsy story about a weather aircraft, a lie that Khrushchev gleefully tore apart by producing the pilot alive. Caught out before the whole world, the President then stubbornly refused to apologise. The Paris Summit, and with it the best hope of a thaw, was thrown away.

What impression does the author give about the way the USA handled the U2 incident? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]