It was 1987 when Mathias Rust, a teenage German amateur pilot, flew his four-seat Cessna private plane from Helsinki to Moscow but instead of landing at the airport, he parked it on a downtown Moscow bridge adjacent to Red Square, steps away from the Kremlin. He flew through some of the most heavily defended airspace on Earth. Surface-to-air missiles stood at the ready but military trackers assumed the plane was no threat.
He was convicted in court of “adventurism” and sentenced to four years of hard labor – later reduced to 14 months – but more to the point, a furious Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev cleaned house at the upper echelons of the country’s defense and intelligence departments.
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