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.
“Sea”26 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 3
## SOVIET PROTEST NOTE
The 4 and 5 July overflights brought a strong protest from the Soviet Union on 10 July in the form of a note handed to the US Embassy in Moscow. The note said that the overflights had been made by a "twin-engine medium bomber of the United States Air Force" and gave details of the routes flown by the first two missions. The note did not mention Moscow or Leningrad, however, because the Soviets had not been able to track these portions of the overflights. The Soviet note stated that the flights could only be evaluated as "intentional and conducted for the purposes of intelligence." As soon as the note arrived at the White House on the evening of 10 July 1956, Colonel Goodpaster called Bissell and told him to stop all U-2 overflights until further notice. The next morning Goodpaster met with Bissell to review the U-2 situation. Bissell said three additional flights had taken place since the missions mentioned in the Soviet note but added that no more were planned. $ ^{35} $
During these initial overflights, the U-2 flew above 69,000 feet and could be seen only fleetingly by pilots of the Soviet interceptor aircraft. Thus, it appears that the Soviet claim that the intruder was a twin-engine bomber was probably based on the assumption that this was another overflight by a reconnaissance version of the twin-engine Canberra bomber, similar to the RAF overflight of Kapustin Yar in 1953. The US reply, sent to the Soviets on 19 July, truthfully denied that any US "military planes" had overflown the Soviet Union on the days in question. Meanwhile, on 16 July the Polish Ambassador to
Later Eisenhower told Goodpaster that he "didn't like a thing" about the Soviet note and was going to discuss the matter with Secretary of State Dulles. With the strong approval of President Eisenhower, Goodpaster informed DCI Dulles that "there is to be no mention of the existence of this project or of operations incident to it, outside the Executive Branch, and no mention within the Executive Branch to others than those who directly need to know of the operation, as distinguished from output deriving from it."36 Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.