Your Weekend U-2 History & Triva...
20 June 1956 was the date of U-2 Mission 2003... the very first U-2 operational flight.
Nine days earlier, Det A was opened at Wiesbaden Air Base near Frankfurt. Although the West Germans approved a Soviet overflight, Eisenhower wouldn't approve it because the USAF Chief of Staff was visiting Russia at the time. That would have been a bit rude... and pretty balsy.
But, U-2 pilot Carl Overstreet, the 13th pilot to fly the jet, was allowed to enter East German and Czechoslovakian airspace, right where the borders of East German, West Germany, and Czechoslovakia came together, in thehops that the commie radars wouldn't pass off anything they saw. It worked! Overstreet then turned north and flew over every major city in Poland before backtracking via Prague. Success!
The mission used wet film and SIGINT. The film was immediately flown back to the US and developed by Eastman Kodak in Rochester NY and the results of the new A-2 camera were impressive. It used three 24" focal length lenses to get a 36 mile wide swath of earth.
Iron men, wooden ships. It was a different era, for sure.