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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in the Far East were less risky than those conducted by Detachment A. Finally, the main target of U-2 photography after the bomber issue receded was Soviet missile and nuclear progress. The testing areas for these weapons were located in the vast open spaces of the south-central and eastern portions of the Soviet Union, which lay beyond the range of Detachment A's aircraft.
The decline in importance of Detachment A had begun with the President's standdown order of 10 July 1956. During the next three months, the detachment conducted only 11 missions, all over the Mediterranean region rather than the original target of the Soviet Union, and the slow pace of activity and change in mission adversely affected pilot morale. One of the detachment's aircraft was lost in a crash on 17 September, killing pilot Howard Carey and garnering unwanted publicity. Conditions improved when the detachment moved to the newly renovated facility at Giebelstadt in early October 1956, but security now became a problem there. Detachment A personnel discovered that a long, black Soviet-Bloc limousine was parked at the end of the Giebelstadt runway whenever the U-2s took off. $ ^{88} $
During the next year, Detachment A mounted only four overflights. The first two were over Eastern Europe: one over Bulgaria on 10 December 1956 and the other over Albania on 25 April 1957. Then a long period of inactivity followed, ending with a third mission on 11 October 1957, which conducted electronic surveillance of Soviet naval maneuvers in the Barents Sea. The final overflight of Detachment A. mission 2040 on 13 October 1957, flew north over
Although the final missions of Detachment A achieved excellent results, project headquarters had already decided that Western Europe was not a satisfactory location for overflights of the Soviet Union and had notified Detachment A on 20 September 1957 that its operations would cease in November. By 15 November 1957, all of the detachment's personnel and aircraft had returned to the United States. During Detachment A's 17-month period of operations, seven pilots 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.