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.
“RAF”18 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 3
boom, which could lift entire airframes 50 feet in the air, technicians could change the airframe's attitude and run radar tests almost continuously without having to fuel and fly the plane. $ ^{78} $
By the summer of 1957, testing of the radar-deception system was complete, and in July the first "dirty bird" (DB) arrived at Detachment B. The first operational use of this aircraft occurred on 21 July 1957 in mission 4030 over Iran, Iraq, and Syria. On 31 July, the same aircraft made a run over the Black Sea. There were a total of nine DB missions over the USSR. The antiradar system did not prove very effective, and its use was curtailed in May 1958. $ ^{79} $
## THE NEW DETACHMENT C
On 8 June 1957, a U-2 took off from Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska to conduct the first intentional overflight of the Soviet Union since December 1956. This mission broke new ground in two respects: it was the first overflight conducted from American soil and the first by the new Detachment C.
Detachment C (known officially as Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, Provisional-3) was composed of the third group of pilots to complete their training in Nevada. In the autumn of 1956, this third detachment needed a new base because Area 51 was about to become the training site for a large number of Air Force pilots who would fly the 29 U-2s purchased by the Air Force. The Agency decided that the best location for Detachment C would be the Far East and began looking for bases there.
Even without the arrival of the Air Force pilots, Detachment C could not have stayed in Nevada much longer. In June 1957, the entire facility had to be evacuated because the Atomic Energy Commission was about to conduct a series of nuclear tests whose fallout was expected to contaminate the Groom Lake facility. All remaining CIA personnel, materiel, and aircraft were transferred to Edwards AFB, California, and became known as Detachment G. 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.