CIA Provides Eisenhower’s Staff a Chronology of U-2 Reconnaissance Flights Over the Soviet Bloc (1956–1960)

Date: August 18, 1960

Created By: Allen Dulles

Original or Replica: Original

Era: The Presidency, The Cold War

Collection: Eisenhower Presidential Library

Citations: Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, Box 15, Intelligence Matters (17); NAID #12008946

This August 18, 1960 Central Intelligence Agency memorandum, sent by CIA Director Allen W. Dulles to Brigadier General Andrew J. Goodpaster of the White House staff, provides a chronological record of U-2 reconnaissance overflights of the Soviet Bloc. Rather than analyzing individual missions, the document lists the dates and countries covered by U-2 flights between June 1956 and May 1960, offering a concise record of the geographic scope and frequency of the secret American aerial reconnaissance program.

The list shows that early missions ranged widely across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, including Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Baltic states, and Soviet territory itself. Later flights increasingly included China and other parts of Asia, with missions covering Tibet, Laos, North Vietnam, Burma, and Mongolia. The chronology therefore demonstrates that the U-2 program was not limited to spying on the Soviet Union but served as a broader intelligence-gathering tool against Communist countries and strategically important regions.

The final page lists several flights over or involving Soviet territory during 1959 and 1960, including missions on December 6, 1959; February 10, 1960; April 9, 1960; and May 1, 1960. The last entry is the mission flown by Francis Gary Powers, whose U-2 was brought down over the Soviet Union and whose capture triggered the international U-2 Incident.

The document provides a valuable overview of the scale, geographic reach, and continuity of the U-2 reconnaissance program, placing Powers’s famous May 1 flight within a much larger intelligence operation that had been gathering information over Communist territory for nearly four years.