Mark I. Kaminsky and Harvey C. Bennett were American tourists who were detained in the Soviet Union in 1960.

Kaminsky was put on trial, sentenced to seven years' jail, then expelled from the Soviet Union as a spy.

[5][6][7] Kaminsky, a 28-year-old single man, spoke fluent Russian from his parents who immigrated to the United States.

Kaminsky told Phillip that they planned to take photographs of a submarine installation which was in a "restricted area" the following day, August 18, 1960.

[6] According to TASS news agency, the two Americans "intentionally deviated from their permitted route near Uzhgorod (near the Soviet Union's Czech-Hungarian frontier) and penetrated a significant distance inside a restricted border area" while on a motor tour of the Soviet countryside".

TASS reported that Kaminsky was "carrying maps on which were marked military installations in the western Ukraine" and "Photographic film and a notebook proving he was collecting intelligence data on Soviet territory".

Kaminsky said that "although I knew that I was being tried under article two of the Soviet Law and that carries the death sentence, I was repeatedly assured by the Russians that they would not execute me."

[16] On September 16, 1960, a military court in Western Ukraine sentenced Kaminsky to seven years in prison.

[6] While in New York, Nikita Khrushchev was asked by NBC's Joe Michaels about the American tourists who were arrested for taking pictures.

He had taken "pictures that would have shown the preparations for war on the Soviet borders facing west where the West has openly charged the Soviets keep 75 divisions at the ready...there are far more soldiers and military installations in the border zone, than there are civilians and farms and towns."

In a contradictory account, Kaminsky said that the only military object he took a picture of was a solitary radar installation in the "haze of the Russian plains about a mile away".

[9][6][11] A lawyer for the Northcraft Educational Foundation refused to name the "group's backers or give the location of its headquarters".