NASA’s hoax U-2

In 1960 the CIA asked NASA to help disguise the true nature of a spy mission. For state security reasons the space agency presented a non-existent plane to the media!

 

NASA’s hoax U-2 was presented to journalists on May 6th 1960 at the Edwards base in California. The aim was to make people believe that the plane shot down a few days earlier in the Soviet Union was an aircraft designed to carry out scientific missions. Credit: NASA

 

To understand the story we need to go back to the 1960s cold war. It was a time when the USSR and the United States were diametrically opposed and spying was commonplace to gain an advantage, under the threat of the nuclear fire power possessed by the two powers.

Spy planes in the days before satellites
Lest we forget space was only in its infancy as Sputnik, the first manmade satellite, had been launched by the Soviets only 3 years earlier in 1957. Flying over enemy territory in a plane loaded with sensors and cameras, even though risky and forbidden by international treaties, nevertheless remained a vital source of information!
To this end high performance planes were designed to imitate the U-2 by the American firm Lockheed. After an inaugural flight in 1955, the aircraft started to perform different missions profiting from what was a very high maximum altitude for the time (over 21 km) which required its single pilot to wear a pressurised suit.
From 1957 onwards, the American president Dwight Eisenhower asked the prime minister of Pakistan, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, to allow him to establish an outpost in Badaber near Peshawar designed for intelligence operations, basically spying. The Americans had even obtained the right to use the military section of Peshawar airport. It was from there that a U-2 piloted by Gary Powers took off on May 1st 1960. Its main objective was to fly over Soviet territory to observe missile sites located around Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) and Plesetsk before landing in Norway. The plane never reached its destination...

Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2 whose interception by the Soviets sparked a diplomatic crisis. Credit: National Air and Space Museum

NASA mocks up a U-2
Detected by the Soviet army, the U-2 was actually destroyed... At the time an important East-West summit was taking place between the American president Dwight Eisenhower and the first secretary of the USSR communist party Nikita Khruschev which meant that the affair caused enormous diplomatic embarrassment. It was exacerbated by the fact that the first secretary very quickly declared that his country’s army had shot down a spy plane without providing any more details. As a result, the Americans did not know whether Gary Powers was still alive. To make matters worse for a secret mission, the unfortunate pilot was unable to activate his plane’s self-destruct system before ejecting. Without this key information, the CIA, the American intelligence agency, launched a misinformation campaign designed to pass the U-2 flight off as a scientific meteorological mission. The scenario advanced was as follows: while flying over Turkey the pilot communicated that he had problems with his oxygen supply. This defect apparently resulted in his death, leaving the plane to continue on its way on automatic pilot until it accidentally crossed the boundaries of Soviet territory. To back up this thesis, the CIA asked NASA to present, to the media, a U-2 with the markings of the space agency (also responsible for aeronautical research) hastily added. On May 6th this non-existent plane was presented to journalists at the NASA centre at the Edwards base in California.
This meant that Nikita Khruschev was able to savour both the success of his tactic and his triumph. The very next day he revealed that not only was the pilot still alive but that the wreck of the U-2 was in sufficiently good condition to show that said apparatus had been performing a spying mission. The East-West summit was cancelled following the refusal of President Dwight Eisenhower to apologise to the Soviet Union.

From 1971 onwards NASA used real U-2s to study the atmosphere or the environment. Credit: NASA

NASA’s real U-2s
The fall-out from the affair was multi-fold and in addition to a deterioration of USA-USSR relations, the affair would give the American military an additional reason to accelerate their future spy plane programme! Gary Powers was sentenced to 7 years hard labour in the Soviet Union, but returned to his country in 1962 after being swapped along with his compatriot Frederic Pryor for Vilyam Fisher, a Soviet agent arrested earlier by the FBI in 1957.
Recently, only a few years ago, it transpired that the USSR had lied about the exact conditions in which the U-2 was intercepted. It was not directly shot down by missiles as claimed in the official version. According to Nikita Khruschev’s son, the missiles exploded some way away from the plane and it was actually their shock wave that had severely damaged it. During the manoeuvre, another round of missiles destroyed a Soviet MiG-19 killing its pilot.
The irony of the tale is that NASA did actually use U-2s as part of its highly official programmes, scientific ones this time. It all started in 1971, i.e. 11 years after the hoax U-2 affair, in order to test instruments which would be on board the Earth observation satellite Landsat. The agency then continued to use U-2s until the beginning of the 1990s for various atmospheric study missions. In 1987 one of them even confirmed the presence of the famous hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole.

Published on 2 June 2009