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.
“Cooper”11 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
absorption devices for the U-2. Once these devices were installed on the operational U-2s, he explained, the "majority of incidents would be undetected." $ ^{73} $
Work on methods of reducing the U-2's vulnerability to radar detection had begun in the fall of 1956 as the result of President Eisenhower's disenchantment with the overflight program following Soviet detection and tracking of the first series of U-2 missions. The CIA proprietary firm Scientific Engineering Institute was conducting this research under a project codenamed RAINBOW. SEI Chief Engineer Dr. Franklin A. Rodgers, formerly of MIT, converted the theories of Harvard physicist Edward Purcell into systems that could be used on aircraft. SEI's radar-deception system consisted of a series of attachments to the U-2. First bamboo poles and later fiberglass rods were attached to the wings, where they would not interfere with the control surfaces. At the ends of these poles, completely circling
"Trapeze" antiradar attachments to the U-2 Not linked to a story yet.
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.