Mayday is a gripping, thoroughly researched account of one of the most perilous moments of the Cold War. Here is a political history written like a thriller, reconstructing the events surrounding the 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane and the international crisis that ensued. What makes Beschloss’s work so powerful is the way he shows how one covert operation, meant to protect national security, ultimately undermined diplomacy at a crucial moment.
In the last year of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, there were real signs that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union might start to thaw. Both Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had reasons for wanting detente. Eisenhower wanted to diminish the threat of nuclear war and Khrushchev wanted to reallocate Soviet resources from heavy military spending to improving life in the Soviet Union. Ironically, the U-2 program had already demonstrated that fears of a “missile gap” were misplaced, and that the Soviet Union was falling behind the United States in military capability. However, just before a scheduled summit with Khrushchev, Eisenhower reluctantly consented to one final reconnaissance flight, taking the CIA's assurances that the aircraft could not be shot down at face value.
That assumption turned out to be a disaster. Not only did the Soviets shoot the plane down, they captured pilot Francis Gary Powers alive, along with plenty of physical evidence of American espionage. Eisenhower first went along with a cover story that the plane was a weather aircraft because of bad intelligence. When the truth was revealed by the Soviets the United States was the victim of a public lie which seriously damaged the credibility of the United States. The incident effectively killed the Paris Summit, hopes for improved relations, and is an example of how intelligence operations could directly sabotage diplomatic efforts.
Beschloss does an excellent job of communicating the big picture political implications and human side of the crisis. The detailed description of Powers and the other U-2 pilots adds another dimension to the story. The pilots were flying delicate aircraft not meant for combat at altitudes of more than 70,000 feet and in extreme conditions. The book explains that one of the planes had previously fallen apart after being buffeted by the shock waves of nearby fighter jets , because they were so delicate . This fragility highlights the enormous risk each mission entailed.
The psychological pressure on the pilots was exemplified by chilling details such as the notorious "silver dollar". This hollowed out coin held a pin tipped with toxin for suicide in case of capture, a device reputed to cost a fortune to create. Pilots were not specifically told to use it, but were strongly encouraged to do so to avoid capture. Also, each aircraft had a self-destruct mechanism designed to destroy sensitive equipment. But many pilots suspected the timing of the explosion would not allow them to escape, raising the possibility that activating the device could kill them, too. These points highlight the moral and personal dilemmas that those in the covert world have to face.
Beschloss also looks at the wider international implications of the U-2 program, beyond the pilots themselves. Allies of the U.S., like Norway, Pakistan and Iran, permitted their territory to be used as bases for these missions, thus exposing themselves to considerable political risk. They were told that if their part was discovered it would be denied, but the possibility of being found out left them uneasy. Cold War espionage was not just a game of the two superpowers, but also trapped smaller countries in dangerous geopolitical gamesmanship.
The fallout from the U-2 incident was extensive. The humiliation of the espionage disclosure meant that Khrushchev, who had been leaning toward lowering military tensions, was under more pressure to adopt a more confrontational stance. The failure of the summit led to increased mistrust between the two sides and helped usher in a more belligerent period of the Cold War. Beschloss suggests that the impact of this breakdown was felt long after 1960. Tensions increased, with consequences for later events such as the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis as each side sought to show its strength in an increasingly hostile environment.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mayday is the examination of the relationship between intelligence gathering and diplomacy. The U-2 flights yielded intelligence of inestimable value—at one time, the bulk of U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union—but their exposure showed how such operations could boomerang. Secrecy, deception and miscalculation, Beschloss shows, were not the background of the Cold War, but the central forces that shaped it. The book also shows how leaders were often operating with incomplete or misleading information, resulting in decisions with unforeseen consequences.
Written in 1986, before the Cold War ended, Mayday is still a valuable historical analysis. Beschloss may not have had access to all of the Soviet sources, but his use of Western documents, interviews, and archival materials makes for a comprehensive and objective account. He writes clearly and with verve, and makes complex political and military issues comprehensible without making them simple. The story’s mix of rigorous research and dramatic storytelling enables readers to appreciate both the immediate crisis and the long-term ramifications. Beschloss makes a compelling argument that the failure of the U-2 mission was not simply a tactical misstep but a turning point in the Cold War. The book is a reminder of the close relationship between intelligence and diplomacy, and how their collision can have repercussions that reverberate for decades.
With the benefit of over half a century of hindsight I spent a little time looking for follow-up information on the incident. The 1960 U-2 incident has been discussed for decades, but thanks to newly declassified files, newer research has begun to peel back a few more layers, especially in terms of how badly things went wrong diplomatically and how much the U.S. intelligence community was really doing at the time. In a 2021 study, one historian, Adam Boon, took a look at the whole mess, focusing on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final year in office. Eisenhower had been hoping to go out on a high note, even planning a big trip to the Soviet Union. But then the U-2 spy plane was shot down and that plan went out the window. Boon says Nikita Khrushchev felt burned; he’d been opening the door a little bit for better relations and then this happened. That sense of betrayal was not just political, it was personal, and it pretty much killed any chance that Eisenhower would leave a peaceful Cold War legacy.
At the same time, recent documents from the National Security Archive and elsewhere show that the flights were not solely for the purpose of taking pictures from high altitudes. There was a whole other dimension to them: signals intelligence, or SIGINT, where the U.S. was picking up electronic communications and radar data. By the late ’50s, more than 250 of these missions alone had been undertaken, and historians are still trying to figure out just how big and ambitious that program really was. The repercussions of the incident were immediate, and fairly brutal. The big summit in Paris in 1960? Dead on arrival. The prospect of easing of tensions or working towards disarmament disappeared overnight. Khrushchev had solid evidence on the Soviet side - documents and data that proved the flight wasn't some accident - and used it to publicly embarrass the U.S. on the world stage. To make matters worse, later U.S. records suggest that the Soviets may have shot the plane down while it was still in the air, possibly tampering with its self-destruct system. That meant they could salvage more of the wreckage—and more intelligence—than the Americans had ever hoped. More damage to an already disastrous situation.
All of these sources indicate that the effects of the event were twofold: a complete breakdown of trust at the executive level and a massive change in the way the U.S. conducted surveillance. The Russian documents, and later investigations show, reveal Khrushchev had indisputable proof that the flights were a systematic, long-term violation of sovereignty and not an accidental straying of a "weather plane." This led the U.S. to speed up its shift to satellite intelligence gathering.
Today historians tend to view the 1960 U-2 mess as more than a Cold War blunder. It was one of those game-changing moments. It didn't just blow up a summit or make Dwight D. Eisenhower the laughingstock of the world for a couple of weeks. It ended up changing the way countries think about spying, technology, and even the rules of the sky. Until all this, no one had really nailed down where a country’s airspace stopped and outer space started. Strangely enough, the whole debacle settled that. When Eisenhower admitted the US had been flying spy missions (something leaders almost never did), it forced everyone to face the reality of reconnaissance. And when the U.S. began employing satellites such as CORONA a little while later, the Soviets didn’t object nearly as much. It was as if everyone had already exhausted their outrage on the U-2, and satellite spying quietly became “okay” in a way airplane spying had not.
The episode also brought about technological change. The whole pathetic “weather plane” cover story fell apart so badly that it was crystal clear that putting a human pilot in a spy plane was a tremendous political risk. So the focus quickly shifted — from pilots to machines. Programs like CORONA -- Dudley Buck worked on this project - see my review in a previous post -- suddenly received increased funding and attention, and the U.S. doubled down on unmanned surveillance. At the same time, the fact that the U-2 could be shot down forced engineers to think out of the box. Which led to futuristic aircraft like the A-12 and the SR-71. They not only flew high, they flew really fast and they were hard to detect, so nothing like the Francis Gary Powers shoot-down would ever happen again. Satellites soon made them obsolete.
The whole episode left a lasting damage to public trust at home. At first, the government tried to pass the whole thing off as a NASA weather plane that just wandered off course, until Nikita Khrushchev basically pulled out the receipts and proved that wasn’t true. Such a very public lie helped set the stage for what people later called the “credibility gap,” something that would only get worse during Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. And then Congress began demanding, at least a little more, to be kept in the loop about intelligence operations, and to not have the White House running risky spy missions in complete darkness.
On the Soviet side, the fallout created ripple effects of its own. In fact, Khrushchev had been trying to trim military spending somewhat and concentrate on the economy, but the U-2 incident made that a much tougher sell. It gave ammunition to hard-liners in Moscow who said the West clearly could not be trusted. So, there was a new push to beef up defenses, especially things like surface to air missiles. And this made the Cold War just a bit more tense and a lot more heavily armed .
James Reston wrote at the time, “What troubled Paris tonight was not primarily what President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev would do now, which nobody knows, but the realization that the two most powerful nations in the world are also the least experienced of the great powers—both subject to the element of accident, to the ingrained habits of the past and to the whims of personal pride and caprice.” This was “the conference that everyone lost.”
References
Boon, A. (2021). ‘A Dear and Hoped-For Guest’: Eisenhower’s Cancelled Visit to the Soviet Union and the Final Year of His Presidency. Diplomacy & Statecraft, 32(3), 509-530. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2021.1961488
CORONA Project: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/corona-americas-first-imaging-satellite-program/
The National Security Archive. 2 March 8, 2022. Collection of signals intelligence from U-2s, 1956-1960, CIA. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-nuclear-vault/2022-03-08/cia-u-2-collection-signals-intelligence-1956
