EXECUTIVE SESSIONS OF THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE (HISTORICAL SERIES) VOLUME XII EIGHTY-SIXTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION 1960 MADE PUBLIC NOVEMBER 1982 Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON: 1982 HOWARD H. BAKER, JR., Tennessee CLAIBORNE PELL, Rhode Island PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland EDWARD G. SANDERS, Staff Director PREFACE While effective foreign policy is the product of long-range planning and carefully crafted diplomacy, the makers of foreign policy need always to expect the unexpected and to be prepared to react immediately to an unanticipated turn of events. For both the Eisenhower administration and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1960 was to have been a year devoted to lessening the tensions of the Cold War, finding means of suspending nuclear testing by the Soviet Union and the United States, reaching a new mutual security accord with Japan, shoring up old alliances with Latin American nations, and building new relations with the emerging nations of Africa and Asia. Instead the focus of the year became the crash of an American U-2 photo-reconnaissance plane. For nearly 4 years the United States had secretly conducted high-altitude flights across Soviet territory, taking photographs of objects as small as 12 inches from a height of 80,000 feet. Equipped with enough film to photograph an area 750 miles wide, each U-2 brought back a staggering amount of information for the Central Intelligence Agency to interpret, and provided invaluable data on Soviet missile launches and military activity. In effect, the U-2 flights permitted the United States to adopt unilaterally President Eisenhower's "Open Skies" proposal, which Soviet leaders had rejected at the 1955 Geneva Summit. Then on May 1, 1960, the Soviets announced that they had shot down a U-2 near Sverdlovsk. Operating under the assumption that the pilot had died in the crash, American officials offered a pre-arranged cover story to explain the incident. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) claimed that the U-2 had strayed off course during a routine weather research flight. State Department press officer Lincoln White insisted that there was "absolutely no-NO-deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace." However, on May 7, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the pilot was still alive and would stand trial for espionage. The administration was forced to retract and repudiate its cover story. The crash of the U-2 had immediate repercussions on the Paris Summit Conference between the heads of the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, scheduled to begin on May 16. Premier Khrushchev refused to participate in the talks unless President Eisenhower apologized for the U-2 flights, ceased all future flights, and punished those "directly guilty" for initiating the flights. President Eisenhower rejected this ultimatum, saying that the flights had not been aggressive and had already been suspended. He also took personal responsibility for ordering the flights, for which he would not apologize. Khrushchev angrily denounced the United States and walked out of the Summit Confer |