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
138
Semipalatinsk Nuclear Weapons Proving Ground, 22 August 1957
part of the world." $ ^{84} $ The Soviet announcement made the intelligence community want even more information on Tyuratam, and a second U-2 piloted by Edwin K. Jones flew over the area on 28 August 1957, just one week after the Soviet ICBM launch. This mission obtained excellent vertical photographs of the main launch complex, and photointerpreters soon determined that the Soviets had only one launchpad at Tyuratam. The base was not photographed again until 9 July 1959, at which time it still had only one launch pad, although two more were under construction. $ ^{85} $
On 20 and 21 August 1957, U-2s conducted the first overflights of the Soviet nuclear testing grounds at Semipalatinsk, north-northwest of Lake Balkhash. The first mission, piloted by Sammy V. C. Snider, passed over part of the proving grounds, flew on to Novokuznetsk, and then proceeded to Tomsk, where it began its return leg that included coverage of a very large uranium-processing facility at the new city of Berezovskiy. In the second mission, James Cherbonneaux flew directly over the Semipalatinsk proving grounds only four hours before a half-megaton device was detonated. In fact, the U-2 unknowingly photographed the aircraft that was to drop the 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.