On This Day: American U2 spy pilot Gary Powers captured after crashing in USSR

MAY 1, 1960: An American U2 spy plane crashed in the USSR on this day in 1960 – bringing international espionage into the open and significantly raising Cold War tensions.

Pilot Gary Powers, who parachuted from the reconnaissance aircraft, was captured along with the intact jet, which the Soviets claimed they had shot down.

Days before a scheduled East-West summit in Paris, the Soviets paraded the CIA aircraft to the world after exposing America’s weather plane claims as 'silly lies'.

The talks collapsed when U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower refused to apologise to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Powers, who was aged 30 when captured, was convicted of espionage after a thorough interrogation by the Communist state.

But he was sent back to the U.S. 21 months later following a spy exchange.

Yet, as the British Pathé film report from 1962 reveals, he still faced a grilling by his own countrymen after being questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In particular, the Senators quizzed him about his doubts over the Soviets’ insistence that they had shot down the high-altitude aircraft.

Afterwards, a slightly dazed-looking Powers is captured telling a trench coat-wearing pack of reporters: 'They said it so often that I was inclined not to believe it.

'If they’d used a rocket, then it seems to me that the act would have spoken for itself.'

'All I know is that there seems to have been an explosion. I don’t know what caused it. But it was not in the aircraft itself. I think that it was external.'

It later emerged that the Soviets had actually shot down one of their own planes, killing the pilot - and it was this high-altitude flyby that had damaged the U2.

The episode echoes recent Iranian claims of capturing American drones.

The incident has also had its impact on pop culture. The band U2 are named after the now iconic spy plane.