The U-2 is a remarkable plane. It can fly at altitudes above 70,000 feet for hours at a time, surveilling all that lies below. Its debut in 1956, before the United States had launched a satellite let alone made them a mainstay for information gathering, gave the United States an immediate intelligence advantage over the Soviet Union. The plane is so useful that the U.S. Air Force still flies upgraded versions.
Why mention the U-2? Because sixty-four years ago today a U-2 flight uncovered evidence that the Soviet Union was building launch pads in Cuba for nuclear-armed missiles. That was a move the Soviets had repeatedly denied they were making. The discovery triggered what became the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come to nuclear war.
Caught in a Lie
Most Americans first learned of the U-2’s existence in May 1960 when the Soviet military shot down one that Francis Gary Powers was flying for the CIA. Departing from a base in Pakistan with the intent of landing in Norway, the flight was the first U.S. attempt to fly a U-2 across the Soviet Union rather than to dash in and back out. U.S. officials believed that the plane flew so high that Soviet radar would not be able to detect it and that Soviet anti-aircraft missiles could not reach it. Both assumptions were tragically incorrect.
Not knowing at first that Powers had ejected from his U-2 and survived the crash, U.S. officials responded to his failure to land in Norway by announcing that a weather plane had accidentally wandered off course into the Soviet Union. The Soviets then produced Powers and the surveillance equipment from the U-2’s wreckage. Caught in a lie, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took responsibility for the mission, telling a press conference that he had “issued directives to gather, in every feasible way, the information required to protect the United States and the free world against surprise attack and to enable them to make effective preparations for defense.”
By chance, Eisenhower was scheduled to meet Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev just days later at a summit in Paris. The Eisenhower administration hoped to use the meeting to build on the success of Khrushchev’s visit to the United States eight months earlier. Khrushchev, however, demanded an apology for the intentional violation of Soviet airspace, something Eisenhower refused to do. The Paris Summit ended in acrimony.
Ironically, it was another U-2 mission that triggered the greatest crisis of the Cold War.
The Heyser Mission
Maj. Richard S. Heyser’s mission on the morning of October 14, 1962, was remarkable only for its ordinariness. Concerned about the possibility that the Soviets planned to ship—or perhaps had already shipped—nuclear-armed, medium-range ballistic missiles to Cuba, the United States had heightened its aerial surveillance of the island nation. Just three weeks earlier, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had assured the world in a speech at the United Nations that the Soviet Union had no intention of sending weapons to Cuba that might threaten the United States. The speech did nothing to quell U.S. fears.
Heyser took off from Edwards Air Force Base in southern California at 11:30 p.m. on October 13. Bad weather had kept the thirty-five-year-old Air Force veteran and native of Apalachicola, Florida, waiting for four days to begin his flight over western Cuba looking for evidence of Soviet offensive weapons. Heyser and his commanding officers knew he was at risk of being shot down by surface-to-air missiles.
“A Milk Run”
At 7:30 a.m., Heyser he began his reconnaissance run over Cuba, approaching the island from the south. He was flying fourteen miles high, twice the altitude of commercial jet traffic. The weather was picture-perfect. As the U-2 entered Cuban airspace, he switched on the plane’s camera.
Heyser’s job now was to fly a straight and steady course, which meant not letting
his eyes stray far from the circular airspeed indicator. He was flying at an altitude known to U-2 pilots as “coffin corner,” where the air was so thin it could barely support the weight of the plane, and the difference between maximum and minimum speeds was a scant six knots (seven mph). If he flew too fast, the fragile black bird would fall apart. If he flew too slow, the engine would stall, and he would nose-dive.
He scanned the sky for telltale wisps of smoke from Soviet surface-to-air missiles recently deployed on the island. If he saw a contrail heading in his direction, he was trained to steer an S-pattern, into the missile path and then away from it, so that the missile would zip past him, lacking sufficient power to adjust its course.
But no wisps of smoke appeared. The reconnaissance run was uneventful, just a “milk run” as Heyser later described it. After six minutes and 928 photos, he exited Cuban airspace. He adjusted course and headed for his destination, McCoy Air Force Base near Orlando, Florida.
The Calm Before the Storm
After landing, Heyser underwent the standard post-flight debriefing. Most Americans were only just beginning their Sunday. Church pews were filling up. Baseball fans were wondering if the weather would allow the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants to play Game 6 of the World Series at Candlestick Park. Football fans eagerly awaited a slate of seven NFL games, including one that pitted the undefeated Green Bay Packers against the winless Minnesota Vikings. President John F. Kennedy was preparing to fly from Louisville, Kentucky, to Buffalo, New York, where he would speak at the city’s annual Pulaski Day Parade.
What Americans did not know that Sunday morning in October 1962 was that the photos that Heyser had taken were being flown “with all deliberate speed” to the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center in Suitland, Maryland. Once the photos were developed and reviewed, the United States and the Soviet Union would be locked in a confrontation that would take them to the brink of war: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Other Posts in This Series
Oscar Berry and Jack Patton assisted in the preparation of this article.
The United States celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026. To mark that milestone, I am resurfacing essays I have written over the years about major events in U.S. foreign policy. A version of this essay was published on October 14, 2012.