President Eisenhower and the U.S. Delegation, thus placated, proceeded to the summit and were almost immediately confronted by accusations of espionage and intrusion of the sovereignty of the Soviet Union. The U.S. denied the charges for several days saying only that a U.S. weather plane may have accidentally strayed into Soviet air space.



Khrushchev allowed the US to continue the story for nearly a week before announcing that the pilot had survived and was in Soviet custody. Eisenhower then admitted the truth behind the mission and the U-2 program, but refused to publicly apologize to Khrushchev. This refusal caused the Paris Summit to collapse when Khrushchev stormed out of negotiations effectively delaying the hoped for détente for decades.



Three months later in July, 1960, Allen Dulles, then the outgoing CIA chief, would visited John Kennedy to brief the Democratic presidential candidate on national security. Kennedy asked about the “missile gap” — was the US behind the Soviet Union in production of ICBMs. The U2 overflights had not uncovered a single operational Soviet ICBM base but Powers had come down an hour short of the last place the CIA had wanted to photograph, Plesetsk in the Russian Arctic. Without the Plestsk evidence Dullas told Kennedy he could not be certain there was no missile gap.

Mr Kennedy continued to attack Vice-President Nixon for neglecting national security in allowing a “missile gap” and won the White House by the narrowest margin since 1916.

18 months later US spy satellites revealed that the Soviets had only four operational ICBMs. Released Soviet documents now reveal that Mr Khrushchev had been willing, until the U2 affair, to destroy even these four ICBMs and was prepared to embark on a purely peaceful contest of economics. The shooting down of Powers also convinced Moscow that the Americans were not be trusted. an arms race ensued whose legacy haunts the world to this day.

But what about that mysterious East European woman and the Pakistani aircraft mechanics? The U.S. Buba Ber base, Peshawar, Pakistan had no runway and all planes, including the U2s took off and landed at the towns civilian airstrip nearby. The U-2 used by Powers was stored the night before under a tarpaulin at the airstrip and was guarded only by the local Pakistani security, not the CIA. Immediately following news of Power’s disappearance over the Soviet Union there was an investigation at the base where it became common knowledge that two Pakistani mechanics, seen near Power’s U2 the night before, had been picked up and handed over to Pakistani military intelligence. They were executed for sabotage of the U2. At the same time, an East German woman, a stocky 36 year-old woman with dyed-blonde hair who had resided at the Deans Hotel in Peshawar, was arrested as the agent who had hired the Pakistani mechanics. This woman was later taken to a border crossing on the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan and exchanged for an Armenian agent working for U.S. intelligence. The exchange, former Air Force officers report, was organized by the CIA. Seemingly, the CIA, embarrassed at the security foul-ups at Peshawar went along with the missile shoot down story as a cover-up.

The sabotage story however conflicts with those put forward by Powers, the CIA and by the Soviet Union. Power’s reported that there was a flash and his plane went down. But the Soviets and the American CIA had reason to cooperate with the missile story with the Soviets exalting their missilery and the CIA avoiding unwelcome questions about their performance at Peshawar.

Oswald’s significance in history depends upon exactly what happened to the U-2—whether he, indeed, played a crucial role in aborting the Summit Conference of 1960, as well as in later assassinating the President of the United States.

But the greatest impact of this “single event” rests in a change of perception. Following days of denials, when President Eisenhower finally admitted at the UN that he had authorized the U-2 flight, it was one of the first times that the American people knew they had been deceived by their government and lied to by their President.

Now, after Nixon and Watergate, Johnson and Vietnam, Reagan and Iran Contra, Monica and Bill, Bush and Weapons of Mass Destruction, embellishment by Presidents is something the American public now takes for granted.

Regarding the “single events”of history, the more you delve into them, the more they shed their simplicity.

Want to read the CIA's own files on the story? Read it here.

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