U-2: How the Plane No One Wanted was Built

This is the first in a five-part series I’m doing about Cold War aerial espionage.

During the Second World War, the Soviet Union and the United States were united against fascism, but that cooperation deteriorated once the common enemy was defeated. With the war over, the nations’ ideological differences surfaced — the United States’ democracy marked by capitalism and the Soviet Union’s communist system — and a new conflict was born. The Cold War became a standoff with both nations positioning themselves as technological leaders, and both needed ways to check and see if the other was telling the truth. This became harder once the Iron Curtain cut off communication between the Soviet Bloc and the western world. Classical forms of espionage with embedded spies became impossible, and rumours swirled that the Soviets were building an arsenal of high-performance interceptor planes, bombers, submarines, missiles, and potentially even nuclear weapons under its shroud of secrecy. America needed to know what was really happening to prepare for the possibility of the Cold War turning hot, and for the first time, talked turned to peacetime aerial photoreconnaissance.

Aerial Espionage from War to Peace

During the American Civil War, Union forces had aeronauts rise above the countryside to get a sense of the enemy army’s artillery and plans. The advent of aviation in the early 20th century meant members of the air corps could scope out enemy setups in planes rather than…