The U-2 Affair: A Foot in A Quagmire

At 5 o'clock on the morning of May 1, 1960, my telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, and the voice on the other end said, "Minister of Defense Marshal Rodion Malinovsky reporting." He went on to tell me that an American U-2 reconnaissance plane had crossed the border of Afghanistan into Soviet airspace and was flying toward Sverdlovsk. I replied that it was up to him to shoot down the plane by whatever means he could. Malinovsky said he'd already given the order, adding "If our antiaircraft units can just keep their eyes open and stop yawning long enough, I'm sure we'll knock the plane down." He was referring to the fact that already in April we'd had an opportunity to shoot down a U-2 but our antiaircraft batteries were caught napping and didn't open fire soon enough.

Khrushchev then explains that the Soviet Union had several times protested to the U.S. about U-2 overflights, but the protests were brushed aside. Soviet fighters could not fly high enough to intercept the American reconnaissance planes, and it was not until surface-to-air missiles were developed that the Russians had what Khrushchev calls "the answer to our problem."

Later on in the day, the annual May Day military parade took place in Red Square. In the midst of the proceedings Marshal [Sergei] Biryuzov, commander in chief of our antiaircraft defenses, mounted the reviewing stand on top of the Mausoleum and whispered in my ear. He informed me the U-2 had been shot down; the pilot [Francis Gary Powers] had been taken prisoner and was under interrogation.

The next day the American press published the story that a U.S. plane based in Turkey had disappeared while flying over the Caucasus Mountains--but on the Turkish side of the border. We smiled with pleasure as we anticipated the discomfort which the spies who cooked up this false statement would feel when confronted with the evidence we already had in our pocket.

Two or three days later, after they talked themselves out and got thoroughly wound up in this unbelievable story, we decided to tell the world what had really happened.

I went out of my way not to accuse President [Dwight D. Eisenhower] in my own statements. As long as [he] was dissociated from the U-2 affair, we could continue our policy of strengthening Soviet-U.S. relations, which had begun with my trip to America and my talks with Eisenhower.

But the Americans wouldn't let the matter rest there. One day in May we got a report that President Eisenhower had publicly acknowledged that he had known about the U-2 flight in advance, and he had approved it. He argued that he was forced to resort to such means because the Soviet Union was, as they used to say, a "closed society."

This was a highly unreasonable statement, not to say a foolish one. It was as though Eisenhower were boasting arrogantly about what the United States could do and would do. Eisenhower's stand canceled any opportunity for us to get him out of the ticklish situation he was in. It was no longer possible for us to spare the President. He had, so to speak, offered us his back end, and we obliged him by kicking it as hard as we could.

The U-2 affair was a landmark event in our struggle against the American imperialists who were waging the cold war. My visit to the United States the preceding fall had seemed to herald a promising shift in U.S. policy toward our country, but now--thanks to the U-2 --the honeymoon was over.

[A few days later] after we were already in the air flying toward Paris for the [four-power] conference with Eisenhower, [Foreign Minister] Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko, Malinovsky and I began to think over the situation. We felt our responsibility--and the tension that went with it--more acutely than ever before. We were haunted by the fact that just prior to this meeting, the United States had dared to send its U-2 reconnaissance plane against us. It was as though the Americans had deliberately tried to place a time bomb under the meeting, set to go off just as we were about to sit down with them at the negotiating table. What else could we expect from such a country? Could we really expect it to come to a reasonable agreement with us? No! So the conference was doomed before it began. These doubts kept nagging at my brain. I became more and more convinced that our pride and dignity would be damaged if we went ahead with the meeting as though nothing had happened. Our prestige would suffer, especially in the Third World. After all, we were the injured party. We simply could not go to Paris pretending everything was fine.

Our reputation depended on our making some sort of protest. I saw that the only way out was to present the United States with an ultimatum: the Americans would have to apologize officially for sending their spy plane into the U.S.S.R., and the President of the United States would have to retract what he said about America's "right" to conduct reconnaissance over our territory.

After consulting with Gromyko and Malinovsky, Khrushchev decided to draft a tough new declaration, which was transmitted to Moscow for approval by the collective leadership in the Kremlin.

We received an answer right away; the comrades in the leadership gave their complete approval to our new position.

When we arrived, I thought to myself, "Well, here we are, ready to demand an apology from the President. But what if he refuses to apologize? What if he doesn't call off reconnaissance flights against us?" I remembered that when we were Eisenhower's guests in Washington, we had given him an invitation to pay a return visit to the Soviet Union. He had accepted our invitation with thanks. But under the conditions that had developed, with our relations falling to pieces, we couldn't possibly offer our hospitality to someone who had already, so to speak, made a mess at his host's table. To receive Eisenhower without first hearing him apologize would be an intolerable insult to the leadership of our country.

I demanded an apology from Eisenhower, as well as assurances that no more American reconnaissance planes would be permitted to fly over Soviet territory. My interpreter, Comrade [Viktor] Sukhodrev, told me he noticed, while reading the English translation of my statement, that Eisenhower turned to his Secretary of State, Christian Herter, and said, "Well, why not? Why don't we go ahead and make a statement of apology?" Herter said no--and he said it in such a way, with such a grimace on his face, that he left no room for argument on the issue.

As a result, Eisenhower refused to apologize. Thus, once again, Eisenhower showed himself to be under the strong influence of his Secretary of State. At the earlier four-power meeting in Geneva in 1955, Eisenhower took all his cues from the late John Foster Dulles.

Now he was following instructions from Herter. To me, this incident meant that if Eisenhower had followed his own good instincts and used his own considerable intelligence, he would have done the right thing and given in to our demand; he knew it was possible for him to give us the apology and assurances we were asking for. But unfortunately, Eisenhower wasn't the one who determined foreign policy for the U.S. He let himself be pushed around by his Secretaries of State, first Dulles and now Herter.

Many years have passed since then, but I'm still convinced that we handled the matter correctly. Moreover, I'm proud that we gave a sharp but fully justified rebuff to the world's mightiest state. There's an old Russian saying: Once you let your foot get caught in a quagmire, your whole body will get sucked in. In other words, if we hadn't stood up to the Americans, they would have continued to send spies over our country.

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