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On one detail everyone was agreed: a U-2 reconnaissance plane was brought down over eastern China.

The Nationalist Chinese conceded that the plane was one of two that they bought from Lockheed Aircraft Corp. in 1960. It had taken off on a "routine mission" from Formosa's Taoyuan airbase on the day it vanished, but the Nationalists revealed neither the plane's flight plan nor the pilot's identity. Peking, which last July had offered a reward of 8,000 ounces of gold (value $280,000) to any Nationalist pilot who would defect with his U-2 intact, boasted that this one had been "shot down" by an air force unit, but supplied no glorious details of the feat.

Curiously enough, the fuller and more logical account of the incident came from a Soviet diplomat in India, who said that the pilot was a Nationalist Chinese who had trained for six years in the U.S. By way of deflating Red China's braggadocio, he added that a flame-out had forced the U-2 far below its maximum working altitude of above 80,000 ft., enabling the Chinese to shoot it down. The Russian denied that it was shot down by Soviet-supplied ground-to-air missiles, though Formosa's U-2s reportedly fly over an IRBM range on the mainland.

At week's end, Formosa let it be known that it would like a new supply of U-2s. However, President Kennedy said that "we have no plans" to sell U2s to the Chinese Nationalists or to anyone else.

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