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.
“Canberra”10 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 3
116
October 1956. This unit's timely and accurate information enabled the PARAMOUNT Committee to predict the joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt three days before it took place.
During the rest of the month, Detachment A pilots flew another eight missions over the Middle East. By this time, the new Detachment B in Turkey was ready for operations, and it was better positioned to provide coverage of the Middle East. Detachment B began flying missions in September and soon became the primary detachment for Middle East overflights, conducting nine out of the 10 such missions flown in October. $ ^{48} $
Detachment B's first U-2 flight, on 11 September 1956, made passes over The next flight, more than two weeks later, covered much the same ground but flew as far west as Both were "special" missions aimed at
Other U-2 photographs revealed the presence 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.