1960 U-2 Incident - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Four Power Paris Summit between president Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev, Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle collapsed, in large part because Eisenhower refused to accede to Khrushchev's demands that he apologize for the incident. Khrushchev left the talks on 16 May.

The Soviet Union convened a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on 23 May to tell their side of the story. The meetings continued for four days with other allegations of spying being exchanged, as well as recriminations over the Paris Summit, and a US offer of an "open skies" proposal to allow reciprocal flights over one another's territory, at the end of which the Soviet Union overwhelmingly lost a vote on a concise resolution which would have condemned the incursions and requested the US to prevent their recurrence.

Powers pleaded guilty and was convicted of espionage on 19 August and sentenced to three years imprisonment and seven years of hard labor. He served one year and nine months of the sentence before being exchanged for Rudolf Abel on 10 February 1962. The exchange occurred on the Glienicke Bridge connecting Potsdam, East Germany, to West Berlin.

The incident showed that even high-altitude aircraft were vulnerable to missiles. The United States emphasized high-speed, low-level flights for its bombers and began developing the supersonic F-111. The Corona spy satellite project was accelerated. The CIA also accelerated the development of the Lockheed A-12 OXCART supersonic spyplane that first flew in 1962 and later began developing the Lockheed D-21 unmanned drone.

The incident severely compromised Pakistan's security and worsened relations between it and the United States. As an attempt to put up a bold front, General Khalid Mahmud Arif of the Pakistan Army, while commenting on the incident, stated that "Pakistan felt deceived because the US had kept her in the dark about such clandestine spy operations launched from Pakistan’s territory." The communications wing at Badaber was formally closed down on 7 January 1970.