Spy-plane pilot is one of the few professions we should strongly discourage our sons from developing an interest in. Rich in experience, critically important and thrillingly challenging, it is, nevertheless, a career charged with personal and collective disaster. Along with the ongoing anxieties of parents and spouses, there are potential complications for one's nation as a whole and even, occasionally, for world politics.

The first thing that springs to mind in connection with the affair of the U.S. Navy EP-3 electronic spy plane this week is the famous U-2 incident of 1960. At the peak of the Cold War, realizing the urgent necessity of monitoring the Soviet military buildup closely, the CIA launched the U-2 program. The U-2 spy planes were the technological marvel of the day. Taking off in Pakistan, they would cross the whole territory of the Soviet Union from south to north at an altitude beyond the range of Soviet missiles or jets. The buffoon Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev kept boasting that the Soviet Union was producing missiles "like sausages" -- but apparently Soviet missiles were just as bad as Soviet sausages. For years, no one could reach a U-2. Only on May 1, 1960 did a Soviet missile hit a U-2, piloted that day by Gary Powers. Powers survived the crash, but Washington, presuming him dead, immediately denied that espionage had been the purpose of the flight. Having waited long enough for the Americans to construct a web of blatant lies, the triumphant Khrushchev eventually presented the pilot the way a circus magician pulls a rabbit from his sleeve. The result was an enormous loss of face for the Eisenhower administration and cancellation of the Paris summit at which the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France were to discuss the future of the world.

The U-2 and EP-3 stories have a lot in common. In both cases, the U.S. intelligence community was dealing with a technologically inferior totalitarian challenger. Both in 1960 and now, the totalitarian side resorted to bluff, bullying and -- maybe even worse -- enigmatic silence. No international summit is going to collapse in 2001 because of a spy-plane incident, but the consequences of the current crisis will still be grave.