The one man butterfly effect

Francis Gary Powers is best known as the pilot of the U2 spy plane who was exchanged for Rudolf Abel, the Soviet agent, on Glienike Bridge, better known as “The Bridge Of Spies” in 1962. But he had at least one more major impact on the Cold War.

The U2 spy plane programme had been flying over enemy territory, gathering intelligence on top secret military targets for America since 1957. For three years in provided the CIA with invaluable information about the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and Cuba. Then came Powers.

Powers was a U2 pilot who was supposed to complete the first ever full overflight of the Soviet Union, flying all the way from Pakistan to Norway.

On May 1st, Powers took off from the US airbase in Peshawar. The U2 was immediately detected. Soviet MiG fighters were scrambled and surface-to-air missiles launched. But no one at mission control was concerned. Nothing the Soviets had could reach Powers’ cruising altitude at sixty-five thousand feet. Until one S75-Dvina missile did. 

Powers bailed out over the Urals and was arrested as soon as his parachute hit the ground. A silver dollar containing a lethal toxin-tipped needle had been stitched into his flight suit in case something like this happened, but he didn’t use it.

Four days later, at the CIA’s request, NASA released a statement announcing that one of their planes had gone missing over northern Turkey after its pilot reported difficulties. The agency said it may have accidentally strayed into Russian territory before crashing, and even released images of a U2 painted in NASA colours to back their story. 

Within the week, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had exposed the US’s deceit, announcing that not only had the wreckage of an American spy plane had been recovered deep inside Russia, but so had the pilot, alive and well. President Eisenhower, who had been strong-armed into approving Powers’ mission in the first place, was furious. He immediately shut down the U2 programme. 

With the CIA’s aerial reconnaissance operations shelved, they decided to look to the stars. The agency was already paying close attention to NASA’s Discoverer orbital satellite programme and, while the political ramifications of the U2 incident echoed round Washington, they took it over. Discover was renamed Corona, and given all the budget it needed to finally give the US unassailable global intelligence supremacy.

So, without Powers, there’d be no RED CORONA.