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For The Record  

FTR #752 The U‑2 Incident Revisited

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. (The flash dri­ve includes the anti-fas­cist books avail­able on this site.)

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FTR #752 (This show is 30-min­utes in length)

Fran­cis Gary Pow­ers’ Book

Intro­duc­tion: Excerpt­ed from The Guns of Novem­ber, Part I, this broad­cast reviews the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the U‑2 inci­dent in May of 1960. On the cusp of a sum­mit con­fer­ence between then Pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­how­er and then Sovi­et Pre­mier Niki­ta Khr­uschev, a U‑2 spy plane pilot­ed by Fran­cis Gary Pow­ers came down in the heart of the for­mer Sovi­et Union. The inci­dent caused the can­cel­la­tion of the sum­mit con­fer­ence, which was to be a pre­lude to detente between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

This pro­gram is a pre­lude to a lengthy dis­cus­sion of “The Adven­tures of Eddie the Friend­ly Spook”–Edward Snow­den. Just before Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s meet­ing with Mr. Xi, head of state of Chi­na, Snow­den decamps to Hong Kong (in Chi­na) and leaks infor­ma­tion about the hack­ing of Chi­nese com­put­ers. This caused enor­mous embar­rass­ment to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, and neu­tral­ized any attempt he might have been able to make to reduce Chi­nese hack­ing of Amer­i­can com­put­ers, as well as oth­er points of dis­pute between the two nations.

Next, Snow­den’s leak­er of choice–“Cit­i­zen Green­wald”–pub­lished arti­cles in The Guardian dis­clos­ing exten­sive NSA spy­ing on Ger­many, which the NSA views as “a third class part­ner.” These arti­cles were pub­lished just before Pres­i­dent Oba­ma was to meet with Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel of Ger­many. Again, it caused enor­mous dam­age to Oba­ma and harmed U.S. rela­tion­ships with Ger­many and oth­er Euro­pean nations. (Note that Green­wald, as an attor­ney, was a fel­low trav­el­er of some of the most heinous and mur­der­ous neo-Nazi and white suprema­cist groups).

Hit­ting the tri­fec­ta, Eddie the Friend­ly Spook [Snow­den] then decamps to Moscow in Rus­sia (like Chi­na, Rus­sia is not renowned as a bas­tion of free speech or inter­net free­dom.) This occurred just before Oba­ma’s meet­ing of the G20 in Moscow and in the run-up to a sched­uled sum­mit con­fer­ence with Putin. That sum­mit con­fer­ence was can­celed.

Snow­den’s trip to Moscow, like his jour­ney to Hong Kong/China could only have been intend­ed to harm Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s admin­is­tra­tion and the Unit­ed States.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er’s order to sus­pend all U‑2 over­flights of the Sovi­et Union (Pow­ers’ flight was dis­patched against Pres­i­den­tial orders); the fact that Fran­cis Gary Pow­ers had poi­son and a nee­dle with which to take his own life, in order to pre­vent cap­ture (which he did not do); the fact that Pow­ers had exten­sive per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion pin­point­ing him as a U.S. intel­li­gence agent, oper­at­ing under civil­ian cov­er (in direct con­tra­ven­tion of stan­dard “san­i­ti­za­tion” pro­ce­dures); the fact that the U‑2 flew at an alti­tude which no Sovi­et or Amer­i­can inter­cep­tor air­craft or sur­face-to-air mis­sile could reach; the U‑2’s use of a spe­cial hydro­gen tech­nol­o­gy to per­mit its engine to oper­ate at that alti­tude; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that hydro­gen star­va­tion forced down Pow­ers’ plane; the rel­a­tive­ly undam­aged state of the U‑2 air­craft, call­ing into ques­tion the asser­tion that a sur­face-to-air mis­sile could have been respon­si­ble for the down­ing of Pow­ers’ plane; Pow­ers’ asser­tion that Lee Har­vey Oswald was respon­si­ble for the down­ing of his U‑2 plane (this pre­sum­ably cen­tered on Oswald’s access to radar fre­quen­cies, which had noth­ing to do with the down­ing of the plane!)

 

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