Documents / FOIA release
This is a 1992 CIA History Staff monograph by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, originally classified Secret NOFORN and approved for release in 2013. It covers the CIA's manned overhead reconnaissance program from 1954 to 1974 and the two aircraft it developed, the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART. The history covers the U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union, the 1960 downing of Francis Gary Powers and later operations in Asia and Latin America. It also includes a section on U-2s, UFOs and Operation BLUE BOOK.
“The Advance”35 pages
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later, at press conferences in February and July 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson revealed the existence of the OXCART-type of aircraft, although only in its military YF-12A (interceptor) and SR-71 (strategic reconnaissance) versions. The two CIA reconnaissance aircraft have also been the subject of a number of books, beginning with David Wise's and Thomas B. Ross's The U-2 Affair in 1962 and then Francis Gary Powers' memoirs, Operation Overflight, in 1970. Two recent books give many more details about the U-2 and OXCART aircraft: Michael Beschloss's Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (1986) and William Burrows's Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (1987). Although well written and generally accurate, these books suffer from their authors' lack of access to classified official documentation. By drawing upon the considerable amount of formerly classified data on the U-2 now available to the public, Beschloss has provided an accurate and insightful depiction of the U-2 program in the context of the Eisenhower administration's overall foreign policy, but his book does contain errors and omissions on some aspects of the U-2 program. Burrows's broader work suffers more from the lack of classified documentation, particularly in the OXCART/SR-71 section, which concentrates on the Air Force aircraft because little information about the Agency's aircraft has been officially declassified and released. After the present study of the Agency's overhead reconnaissance projects was completed, a new book on the U-2 was published in the United Kingdom. Chris Pocock's Dragon Lady: The History of the U-2 Spyplane is by far the most accurate unclassified account of the U-2 program. Pocock has been able to compensate for his lack of access to classified documents by interviewing many former participants in the program, especially former pilots. Pocock is also quite familiar with aircraft itself, for he had worked with Jay Miller on the latter's excellent technical study of the U-2: Lockheed U-2 (1983). There has also been a classified official study of the U-2 and OXCART programs. In 1969 the Directorate of Science and Technology published a History of the Office of Special Activities by
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.