On May 1 1960 Francis Gary Powers an American pilot flying for the Cen tral Intelligence Agency CIA took off from Pakistan in an ultra-modern high-powered spy plane known as the U-2 He planned to fly over the Soviet Union at an altitude of more than 70,000 feet 21,336 m to take photo graphs of new Soviet missile sites before landing safely in Norway Sud denly in mid-flight a missile exploded near the aircraft and the U-2 tumbled out of control Powers had been trained to do two things if his top-secret plane was compromised first inject himself with poison and then hit a switch to blow up the plane As the aircraft spun he was unable to do either Instead he was ejected from the plane and para chuted to the ground where he was quickly captured Within days Soviet premier government leader Nikita Khrushchev publicly condemned the United States for heating up the Cold War with such an act of deception AIRBORNE SPY
DIVIDED by an IRON CURTAIN W ORLD WAR II 1939 45 officially ended in Europe in May 1945 But a new and different type of conflict was just beginning In the last years of the war the army of the Soviet Union had pushed the Germans and their allies out of Eastern Europe Although the Soviets were liber ating countries such as Poland Hungary Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia they had other motives They wanted to control those countries politically and establish a buffer zone to keep their country safe from future attacks across its western borders They also wanted to impose their political philosophy known as communism on them Though 1 8 million strong in 1939 the Soviets Red Army was ill-prepared to face Nazi Germany
Major Western nations such as the U S Great Britain and France were nervous about such developments and believed they had to do some thing to limit Soviet territorial expansion and the spread of communism The Soviets had been allies of the Western powers during much of World War II as all were common enemies of the Germans The relationship was not necessarily based on mutual trust though As the Soviets con tinued staking claims throughout Eastern Europe British prime min ister Winston Churchill described their activities as being like drawing an iron curtain or building an iron fence In a March 5 1946 speech Churchill said From Stettin in the Baltic in Poland to Trieste in the Adriatic in Albania an iron curtain has descended across the conti nent Churchill and other Western leaders saw the Iron Curtain as an invisible but very real political barrier separating countries that favored capitalism and democracy from those that believed in communism Starting in 1946 a war was waged across the Iron Curtain for more than 40 years For the most part this war was fought not with tanks fighter planes warships or bombs Instead the Cold War featured build ups of destructive weapons by both sides threatening standoffs and new and inventive methods of spying on each other COVERT OPS FLOATING SPIES During the 1950s the U S tried using unmanned balloons to spy on the Soviet Union As part of Operation Moby Dick balloons with cameras attached were launched from Scotland Norway Germa ny and Turkey The plan was to have them float from west to east across the Soviet Union taking pictures until they reached the Pacif ic Ocean where they would be picked up by American navy vessels Many balloons were lost and at least one camera was recovered by the Russians In the 1950s many people reported seeing unidentified flying objects UFOs in the sky that they thought came from other planets Some of these may have been American balloons 0909
