The US spy plane shot down over the USSR in 1960 was a U-2. The Lockheed U-2 was a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated on the mission by the CIA and flown by American pilot Francis Gary Powers.
On May 1, 1960, Powers took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, to photograph Soviet military and industrial sites. Soviet air defenses eventually tracked the aircraft near Sverdlovsk and hit it with an S-75 surface-to-air missile. Powers survived his parachute descent but was captured, while the Soviet government recovered parts of the aircraft and evidence of its surveillance equipment.
The United States initially claimed that a NASA weather aircraft had gone missing, but the cover story collapsed when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev revealed that the pilot was alive. The incident embarrassed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, helped derail a planned US-Soviet summit in Paris, and damaged the short-lived “Spirit of Camp David.”
The U-2 is not the same aircraft as the A-12 Oxcart or SR-71 Blackbird. Those later reconnaissance aircraft emphasized extreme speed, while the U-2 relied primarily on exceptional operating altitude.