For the last time they traced his route on the maps. From Peshawar he would cross Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush and enter Soviet airspace near Stalinabad. Then over the Aral Sea, the Turyatam missile testing base, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Archangel, Kandalaksha and Murmansk on the Kola peninsula, then across the Barents Sea to the north coast of Norway and Bod. The flight would take nine hours, and for three-quarters of the time would be inside the USSR. During the nine-hour flight there would be complete radio silence.
The only qualms the twenty-seven-year-old pilot had were about the plane itself. The plane which had previously been reserved for the flight had been grounded at the last moment for a maintenance check, and its substitute, Number 360, was what the pilots referred to as a “dog.” There was always something going wrong with it, most recently its fuel tanks had malfunctioned and wouldn’t feed fuel to the engine. It was a single-engined turbojet.
May 1, 1960 was a Sunday and the pilot got into the plane at 5.30 a.m. for the pre-flight check. The scheduled take-off time was 6 a.m. but it came and went without the signal to go.
The cockpit was like a furnace and the pilot sat with his long underwear drenched in perspiration as he waited. A senior officer came over to apologise for the delay and to explain that they were awaiting final approval for the flight from the White House. Presidential approval normally came through well before the pilot was locked in his seat.
It was twenty minutes later when the plane took off and when it was at flight altitude the pilot completed his flight log entries: aircraft number 360, sortie number 4154 and the time was 6.26 a.m. local time, 1.26 Greenwich Mean Time, 8.26 p.m. in Washington and 3.26 a.m. in Moscow.
As he crossed into Soviet territory he saw several con trails of aircraft way below him but he knew they wouldn’t even be able to get near him. He guessed that Soviet radar might have picked him up on their screens and were sending up scouts. A waste of time at his altitude.
Some thirty miles east he could see the launching pads of the Turyatam Cosmodrome where they launched the Soviet Sputniks and ICBMs. He flipped the camera switches to “on” and only switched them off when the cloud cover thickened again. Fifty miles south of Chelyabinsk the skies cleared and he got a wonderful view of the snow-capped Urals.
It was then that the trouble started; the auto-pilot seemed to have gone berserk and the plane was pitching and yawing nose-up. He switched off the auto-pilot and drove the plane manually for twenty minutes before he switched to auto-pilot again. And again the plane was pitching nose-up. He tried it again at intervals and always with the same result. He decided to stay on manual and make long zigs and zags. He was making notes in his log of the engine and instrument behaviour when he felt a dull thud. The plane bucked forward and a blinding flash of orange light flooded the cockpit.
He reached for the destruction switches and then decided to get into position to use the ejection seat first, but the metal canopy rail was trapping his legs. Ejecting in those conditions would slice off both his legs about three inches above the knee. The plane was already down to 30,000 feet when he released his seat-belt. The force of gravity snatched him half out of his seat, only his oxygen hoses were holding him back. He had forgotten to release them. He kicked and wrestled in panic until he was sucked out of the cockpit and found himself floating free. At the moment when he realised that he had not pulled the ripcord his body jerked as, at 15,000 feet, his parachute opened automatically. At that moment he saw his plane hurtling past him, intact, towards the earth.
The following Thursday Nikita Khrushchev showed all the peasant cunning that had been rather admired in the West. He addressed the Supreme Soviet for over three hours during which he announced that Soviet gunners had shot down a US plane violating Soviet airspace. He went on to denounce the United States in aggressive abuse, accusing them of deliberately trying to wreck the forthcoming summit conference between the four heads of government.
The following day, to the delight of the Kremlin, Lincoln White, the State Department’s spokesman, announced to crowds of journalists in Washington, that “There was absolutely no—N—O—no deliberate intention to violate Soviet airspace, and there never had been.” President Eisenhower confirmed the statement later the same day.
The next day Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet what some of them already knew—a Soviet rocket had brought down the plane from an altitude of 65,000 feet. And then the final blow for the White House, the US pilot had been taken prisoner “alive and kicking” and had made a complete confession about his spying mission.
A few days later Khrushchev said, at a display of the U-2 wreckage, “The Russian people would say I was mad to negotiate with a man who sends spy planes over here.”
The turmoil and embarrassment in the White House and the State Department were there for all to see. Not only had they put the summit conference at risk but had been caught out in a flagrant lie. And the President of the United States had himself lied in public.
Nevertheless, on May 14 Khrushchev arrived in Paris. His first move was to announce that he would not participate in the summit unless the United States stopped all U-2 flights, apologised for past aggressions and punished those responsible for the flight.
President Eisenhower said in public that the flights had been suspended and would not be resumed. But even the humbling of the President was not enough for Khrushchev. At the opening session of the conference at the Elysée Palace with President Eisenhower, President de Gaulle and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Khrushchev
