May 16, 1960—On the first day of an international summit in Paris meant to lower Cold War tensions, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, brought up a spy plane shot down over his country to launch into a tirade against President Dwight Eisenhower, then stalked out of the much-anticipated confab, dealing a grievous blow to the American President’s hopes for a nuclear test-ban treaty.
The disastrous aftermath of the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 plane did more than throw a monkey wrench into Ike’s plans to de-escalate the arms race. It also began what historian Michael Beschloss called “The Crisis Years,” the three-year period of near-constant military and diplomatic thrust and parry that climaxed with the Cuban Missile crisis. It also brought to an end any hope that the U.S.S.R. would be reformed from within until the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev a quarter-century later.
The origins of the U-2 incident lay in the growing Soviet technological capabilities of the early 1950s. By 1954, they had demonstrated a thermonuclear bomb, and the following year they had rejected Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” proposal that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. conduct surveillance overflights of each country’s territory to eliminate the possibility of surprise attacks.
Eisenhower needed assurance that the Soviets weren’t leapfrogging the U.S. in missile science. Moreover, despite his credibility as the leader of the military alliance that took down the Axis powers, he needed a check on his own generals when they pressed for costly weapons systems if he hoped to keep the overall American budget in check.
Traditional reliance on spies, he felt, was inadequate toward meeting this threat. He had become enamored of a high-tech means that, the CIA convinced him, would be undetected by the Soviets: a long-range, high-flying reconnaissance plane beyond the reach of detectors. In addition, its state-of-the-art photographic equipment could take high-resolution pictures.
U-2 flights began in 1956. The CIA began to crow immediately that the flights were successful, but that depended on how “success” was defined. True, the planes were taking great pictures from above, but contrary to one of the agency’s central assertions beforehand, the flights were detected from the start by Soviet air-warning systems. Moreover, even boosters didn’t believe that its useful life could extend much beyond eighteen months to two years.
Khrushchev’s trip to America in 1959 had sparked new hopes for peace. But now, he had an additional concern: fending off Democratic charges that a dangerous “missile gap” loomed between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Eisenhower authorized one more U-2 flight, to be flown no later than May 1 because he didn’t want anything to provoke the Soviets on the eve of the summit. He could not imagine that the young pilot Francis Gary Powers would show up on Soviet air-defense systems; that Khrushchev would feel obliged to issue an order to bring the American plane down at all costs; that the plane would be shredded but that Powers would, amazingly, survive; or that Powers would choose not to use the suicide pill he had been given beforehand.
When Powers disappeared, the CIA reassured the White House that a) the plane would be destroyed if intercepted and b) pilots on such missions had been instructed to kill themselves anyway. So the White House put out a cover story that a weather plane had gone astray over Soviet airspace.
Eisenhower had handed a propaganda coup to Khrushchev, who promptly produced the wreckage of the plane and Powers himself. With egg on his face, Eisenhower had to admit that it was, in fact, a spy plane, though he justified it on national-security grounds.
Nevertheless, the summit planned for Paris—meant to take up the status of Berlin and nuclear-arms control—was set to proceed two weeks later. The Soviet leader had even indicated to his host, French President Charles de Gaulle, that it should continue.
Yet, as soon as the summit began, Khrushchev demanded the floor and began a denunciation of the U.S. that grew more vehement as it went along, at least partly because Ike would not go along with his demand for an apology.
Eisenhower fumed over Khrushchev’s grandstanding while British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was frantic over the end of his best-laid plans to bring East and West together. It was left to de Gaulle to remind the Soviet leader of just how bizarre his behavior looked to the outside world.
After noting that Khrushchev had given his assent to the conference even after the revelation of the plane, even though “You knew everything then that you know now,” he turned on his vitriolic guest in a memorable exchange:
“Yesterday,” deGaulle observed, “that satellite you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France eighteen times without my permission. How do I know that you do not have cameras aboard which are taking pictures of my country?”
“As God sees me,” Khrushchev replied (rather ironically, given that he led an avowedly atheist state), “my hands are clean.”
“Well, then, how did you take those pictures of the far side of the moon which you showed us with such justifiable pride?”
“In that one I had cameras.”
“Ah, in that one you had cameras,” de Gaulle concluded with crushing irony.
Khrushchev did not possess Joseph Stalin's murderous paranoia, but his behavior at the aborted Paris summit brought to a head tendencies that might have made him harder for Western leaders to deal with. His wild mood swings would be characterized, in a secret CIA document of the time, as evidence of “hypomania”; nowadays, “manic depression” or “bipolar disorder” might be the operative terms.
Back at the Kremlin and in Soviet diplomatic outposts, people shook their heads over the mercurial leader’s antics. KGB chief Alexander Shelepin was philosophical: “All I know is that there have always been spies and always will be. So there must have been a way for him to find another time and place to tell off Eisenhower.”
Instead of coming away with an agreement that might have assured some progress, Khrushchev had done the following:
* broken with the one American leader with the best credibility of selling a disarmament treaty to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the American people;
The disastrous aftermath of the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 plane did more than throw a monkey wrench into Ike’s plans to de-escalate the arms race. It also began what historian Michael Beschloss called “The Crisis Years,” the three-year period of near-constant military and diplomatic thrust and parry that climaxed with the Cuban Missile crisis. It also brought to an end any hope that the U.S.S.R. would be reformed from within until the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev a quarter-century later.
The origins of the U-2 incident lay in the growing Soviet technological capabilities of the early 1950s. By 1954, they had demonstrated a thermonuclear bomb, and the following year they had rejected Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” proposal that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. conduct surveillance overflights of each country’s territory to eliminate the possibility of surprise attacks.
Eisenhower needed assurance that the Soviets weren’t leapfrogging the U.S. in missile science. Moreover, despite his credibility as the leader of the military alliance that took down the Axis powers, he needed a check on his own generals when they pressed for costly weapons systems if he hoped to keep the overall American budget in check.
Traditional reliance on spies, he felt, was inadequate toward meeting this threat. He had become enamored of a high-tech means that, the CIA convinced him, would be undetected by the Soviets: a long-range, high-flying reconnaissance plane beyond the reach of detectors. In addition, its state-of-the-art photographic equipment could take high-resolution pictures.
U-2 flights began in 1956. The CIA began to crow immediately that the flights were successful, but that depended on how “success” was defined. True, the planes were taking great pictures from above, but contrary to one of the agency’s central assertions beforehand, the flights were detected from the start by Soviet air-warning systems. Moreover, even boosters didn’t believe that its useful life could extend much beyond eighteen months to two years.
Khrushchev’s trip to America in 1959 had sparked new hopes for peace. But now, he had an additional concern: fending off Democratic charges that a dangerous “missile gap” loomed between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Eisenhower authorized one more U-2 flight, to be flown no later than May 1 because he didn’t want anything to provoke the Soviets on the eve of the summit. He could not imagine that the young pilot Francis Gary Powers would show up on Soviet air-defense systems; that Khrushchev would feel obliged to issue an order to bring the American plane down at all costs; that the plane would be shredded but that Powers would, amazingly, survive; or that Powers would choose not to use the suicide pill he had been given beforehand.
When Powers disappeared, the CIA reassured the White House that a) the plane would be destroyed if intercepted and b) pilots on such missions had been instructed to kill themselves anyway. So the White House put out a cover story that a weather plane had gone astray over Soviet airspace.
Eisenhower had handed a propaganda coup to Khrushchev, who promptly produced the wreckage of the plane and Powers himself. With egg on his face, Eisenhower had to admit that it was, in fact, a spy plane, though he justified it on national-security grounds.
Nevertheless, the summit planned for Paris—meant to take up the status of Berlin and nuclear-arms control—was set to proceed two weeks later. The Soviet leader had even indicated to his host, French President Charles de Gaulle, that it should continue.
Yet, as soon as the summit began, Khrushchev demanded the floor and began a denunciation of the U.S. that grew more vehement as it went along, at least partly because Ike would not go along with his demand for an apology.
Eisenhower fumed over Khrushchev’s grandstanding while British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was frantic over the end of his best-laid plans to bring East and West together. It was left to de Gaulle to remind the Soviet leader of just how bizarre his behavior looked to the outside world.
After noting that Khrushchev had given his assent to the conference even after the revelation of the plane, even though “You knew everything then that you know now,” he turned on his vitriolic guest in a memorable exchange:
“Yesterday,” deGaulle observed, “that satellite you launched just before you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France eighteen times without my permission. How do I know that you do not have cameras aboard which are taking pictures of my country?”
“As God sees me,” Khrushchev replied (rather ironically, given that he led an avowedly atheist state), “my hands are clean.”
“Well, then, how did you take those pictures of the far side of the moon which you showed us with such justifiable pride?”
“In that one I had cameras.”
“Ah, in that one you had cameras,” de Gaulle concluded with crushing irony.
Khrushchev did not possess Joseph Stalin's murderous paranoia, but his behavior at the aborted Paris summit brought to a head tendencies that might have made him harder for Western leaders to deal with. His wild mood swings would be characterized, in a secret CIA document of the time, as evidence of “hypomania”; nowadays, “manic depression” or “bipolar disorder” might be the operative terms.
Back at the Kremlin and in Soviet diplomatic outposts, people shook their heads over the mercurial leader’s antics. KGB chief Alexander Shelepin was philosophical: “All I know is that there have always been spies and always will be. So there must have been a way for him to find another time and place to tell off Eisenhower.”
Instead of coming away with an agreement that might have assured some progress, Khrushchev had done the following:
* broken with the one American leader with the best credibility of selling a disarmament treaty to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the American people;
* solidified Allied support for the U.S;
* discouraged East German intellectuals who badly wanted a thaw in relations with the U.S.; and
* encouraged East Germany’s Communist leader, Walter Ulbricht, to continue to foment a crisis over Berlin.
Even Khrushchev’s wife—who knew his mood swings as well as anyone—was dismayed at the disastrous consequences of his actions. “Why didn’t you correct him?” she upbraided an aide, according to William Taubman's biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. “If you don’t point out his blunders, who in the world will?”
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