Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 30, 1990 TAG: 9004300008
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
The U-2, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, was shot down on May 1, 1960, disrupting a summit meeting 19 days later in Paris between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev and forcing the cancellation of another summit planned for later that year.
Red Star, the Soviet army newspaper, said the Soviets lost a MiG-19 and its pilot in the operation.
The paper also disclosed that the Soviets sent up a new fighter plane and ordered its pilot to ram the U-2 in a suicide mission. The new fighter reached the U-2's altitude but failed to ram it.
The article, published three days before this year's May Day festivities, may have been intended to remind Soviet readers that U.S. actions have damaged superpower ties in the past. In recent days, Soviet officials have warned relations might suffer if Washington imposes sanctions on Moscow in retaliation for its crackdown on the Baltic republic of Lithuania.
Red Star said Khrushchev was atop Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square watching the May Day parade when he learned that a new model Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile had brought down the U-2.
The commander of the Soviet air defense forces, Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, climbed the mausoleum "carrying happy news, that the plane had been hit by the first rocket," the article said. "And Khrushchev, standing right there on the tribune, congratulated the marshal."
Khrushchev, in memoirs smuggled to the West and published in 1974, wrote that diplomats watching the parade knew something big had happened because Biryuzov wore a duty uniform rather than the parade dress worn by the other military officers in Red Square.
Soviets hurrying to the May Day parade in the Ural Mountain city of Sverdlovsk saw a far different sight, what appeared to be fireworks high in the air, said the article, signed by a Col. A. Dokuchayev.
The fiery debris was not fireworks, but a Soviet MiG-19 that was hit by the same type of missile that exploded behind Power's U-2 and damaged it, Red Star said in the most detailed version of the Soviet military action.
Powers' mission began in Pakistan and was to have carried him over Sverdlovsk for a landing in Norway.
He used neither the automatic destruction device nor a poison pin he had been given in case the mission failed, and he was captured at a collective farm near Sverdlovsk. He was held for three years, then exchanged for the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel. Powers published his memoirs in 1970.
The Soviet article disclosed that the Soviets had ordered a new model Sukhoi-9 fighter to pursue the U-2 in an unsuccessful ramming attempt. The Su-9 was unarmed, but was able reach nearly to the 70,000 feet at which the U-2 operated, the report said.
The Soviets also scrambled two MiG-19's, which were not capable of flying that high. The pilot of one MiG-19, Boris Ivazyan, reported to ground control that the debris from the U-2 was actually that from an SA-2 that had missed the U-2, prompting the ground battery to fire another.
The next Soviet missile struck the MiG-19 flown by Sergei Safronov, 30, who was killed. He was one of 21 Soviets given medals for their role in bringing down Powers, and the Red Star article disclosed for the first time that he was honored posthumously.
Ivazyan survived and later married Safronov's widow.
The U-2 incident ended a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations and was followed by some of the worst moments of the Cold War: the Bay of Pigs landing of U.S.-backed forces in Cuba in January 1961, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.
by CNB