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.
“Headquarters”25 pages
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## DETACHMENT B FLIGHTS FROM PAKISTAN
The most important series of overflights in the summer of 1957 were those that Detachment B staged to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union's guided missile and nuclear programs. President Eisenhower had approved these overflights at the meeting on 6 May 1957, pro-
The airfield at Peshawar, a more desirable location, was not available because of repair work. Detachment B at Ankara ferried four of its U-2s, two of which were dirty birds, to Lahore. A C-124 brought in eight pilots and ground crews to prepare for missions over the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) beginning on 4 August (Operation SOFT TOUCH). During a 23-day period, these aircraft made nine flights: seven over the USSR and two over the PRC. Although one of the seven flights over the USSR was a failure because the camera malfunctioned after taking only 125 exposures, the remaining missions over Central Asia were a complete success, producing a bonanza of information that kept scores of photointerpreters busy for more than a year. $ ^{82} $
The 5 August flight, a dirty bird piloted by Buster Edens, was the first to photograph the major Soviet space launch facility east of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan. None of the mission planners was certain just where the range was located, so the U-2 pilot followed the rail lines in the area. As a result, the plane did not pass directly over the rangehead and obtained only oblique photography.
Although known in the West today as Tyuratam, this missile installation had no name when it was first photographed in August 1957. In preparation for a briefing to President Eisenhower on the SOFT TOUCH photography, Dino Brugioni, an assistant to PID chief Arthur Lundahl, examined all the existing maps of the area to see if he could find a place name for the missile base. Only one map, made by the Germans during World War II, showed a community in the vicinity of the missile facility. The settlement's name was Tyuratam, which means "arrow burial ground" in the Kazakh language, and this 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.