Blogging from A to Z April Challenge - Letter U

Trucking along to the letter U during this week's Blogging from A to Z April Challenge posts.

There were more items of interest under the letter U than I thought: Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Underground Railroad, United States Women's Bureau, and urban renewal to name a few. I finally settled on something I knew very little about. My hubby would be so disappointed, since this hails back to one of his favorite interests: the Cold War.

The U-2 Affair took place on May 1, 1960 during the Eisenhower administration. A United States reconnaissance plane flying at high altitudes was downed over the Soviet Union. U. S. officials denied the plane's mission, stating it was a weather plane that strayed off course. When the Soviets produced the pilot and the mostly intact plane, the United States admitted it had been engaged in intelligence activities.

A summit conference scheduled between President Eisenhower, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and France's Charles de Gaulle, collapsed because Eisenhower, though accepting full responsibility for the intelligence gathering program, refused to apologize for the incident. The pilot, Gary Powers, pleaded guilty and was convicted of espionage. He served almost two years of a ten-year prison sentence before being exchanged for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet intelligence officer, in February 1962.