The Black Lady over Russia

1st May 1960 proved fatal for Lieutenant Francis G. Powers of the American secret service, the CIA. As the pilot of what was, at the time, the most technologically advanced spy plane, known by the acronym U-2, he failed to complete his assigned mission. After taking off from a military base in Peshawar, Pakistan, he was supposed to fly over the territory of the Soviet Union. For the entire duration of the flight, he was to photograph potential military bases of the vast country from high altitude and land at a NATO military base in Norway. However, his plane was shot down by two Soviet missiles at an altitude of nineteen kilometres over the Ural city of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). Few at CIA headquarters, led by the then-director and fervent anti-communist Allen Dulles, had anticipated this. And if they had, the “solution” was supposed to be simple. The pilot would commit suicide.

He must not fall into the hands of the Soviet authorities.

He did not follow the order.

Michal Havran Sr. (1945, Rybník nad Hronom) is a foreign policy commentator and publicist. He studied journalism at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. During his studies, he worked for the daily newspaper SMENA and co-founded the daily newspaper SME. He also worked at the University of Maryland and for the magazine CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY. He specialises in American foreign policy and Arab countries. He described his observations and experiences from this part of the world in the book From the Arab Spring to the Islamic State. He is the author of commentaries and reports, wrote the book The Saga of Bill and Monica about President Clinton's love scandal, and the novels The Agent with a Diplomatic Passport, The Russian Spy, The Stolen Speech of Nikita Khrushchev, and The Hunt for Che Guevara. He lives and works in Bratislava.