The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Gary Francis Powers.md

category	tags	summary	born	died	location
Nuclear Scientists & Programs	Person Nuclear Israel	Gary Francis Powers was an American pilot whose U-2 Spy Plane was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, leading to a major international incident.	1929-08-17	1977-08-01	Jenkins, Kentucky, USA

Gary Francis Powers was an American pilot whose U-2 Spy Plane was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, leading to a major international incident. Powers and his colleagues continued intermittently to overfly the Middle East, and were steadily back at work in the area in 1958, when the Central Intelligence Agency's photo interpreters began seeing significant activity at an Israeli Air Force practice bombing range south of Beersheba, which turned out to be the early signs of the Dimona nuclear reactor.¹

Footnotes

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1. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 4. ↩︎