The Russians are at it again

On the seventeenth of August, 1960, Francis Gary Powers was convicted of espionage when his U-2 plane was shot out of the sky by a Russian missile. Here is the story from Encyclopedia Britannica.

(1960), confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that began with the shooting down of a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union and that caused the collapse of a summit conference in Paris between the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France.

On May 5 the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. that an American spy plane had been shot down on May 1 over Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), referring to the flight as an "aggressive act" by the United States.

On May 7 he revealed that the pilot of the plane, Francis Gary Powers, had parachuted to safety, was alive and well in Moscow, and had testified that he had taken off from Peshāwar, in Pakistan, with the mission of flying across the Soviet Union over the Aral Sea and via Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Arkhangelsk, and Murmansk to Bodö military airfield in Norway, collecting intelligence information en route. Powers admitted working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

On May 7 the United States stated that there had been no authorization for any such flight as Khrushchev had described, although a U-2 probably had flown over Soviet territory. The Soviet Union refused to accept that the U.S. government had had no knowledge of the flights and on May 13 sent protest notes to Turkey, Pakistan, and Norway, which in turn protested to the United States, seeking assurances that no U.S. aircraft would be allowed to use their territories for unauthorized purposes. On May 16 in Paris Khrushchev declared that the Soviet Union could not take part in the summit talks unless the U.S. government immediately stopped flights over Soviet territory, apologized for those already made, and punished the persons responsible. The response of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, promising to suspend all such flights during the remainder of his presidency, did not satisfy the Soviet Union, and the conference was adjourned on May 17.

Francis Gary Powers was tried (August 17–19) and sentenced to 10 years' confinement, but he was exchanged for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on Feb. 10, 1962.

Those of us who remember those days recall the tension in the world between the United States and the USSR. Everyone was aware that one mistake could result in a world-wide apocalyptic conflagration that would truly bring the world to an end. Enough atom bombs had been produced to destroy the entire earth 25 times. The story of Powers demonstrates the extent the spy agencies went to in an effort to learn what the other side was doing.

We are facing a new showdown with the Russian bear. The affair in Georgia is just a testing of the waters. Several spoke up for the Georgians, but no one stepped forward to actually stand in defense of the Georgians. There is now a strong likelihood the Russians will invade Poland. WOW! Déjà vu. What will do then? Will we capitulate like Chamberlain did at the beginning of World War 2 and believe that the Russians have good intentions? It is my own belief that the Russians have been preparing for this for years under the radar and now they are ready to make test runs.

We may again wonder why no one listened to a wise military prophet named George Patton who said at the end of World War 2 that we needed to move into Russia and take care of that problem. Fortunately he died before he saw his prophecy come true.