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.
“Mission Control”28 pages
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Secret NOFORN Chapter 3 Operation SOFT TOUCH (4-27 August 1957) proved to be the high water mark of U-2 operations against the Soviet Union. Detachment B staged one more overflight on 10 September 1957, when a U-2 piloted by William Hall flew from Adana to photograph the Kapustin Yar Missile Test Range for the first time since the RAF's overflight in 1953, obtaining photographs of a large medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) on the launchpad. Six days later Detachment C conducted its successful overflight of the ICBM impact site at Klyuchi, and October saw the final two overflights of Detachment A. After these missions, penetration overflights became a rarity. There would be only six more during the next 32 months: one, in 1958; two, in 1959; and three, in 1960 (one of which was unsuccessful). During this period, President Eisenhower did authorize a number of flights along Soviet border areas that occasionally penetrated short distances inside the border, but the Chief Executive had become extremely wary of authorizing "deep penetration" overflights, which invariably brought protests from Moscow. The border flights took place under tight controls. Beginning in the fall of 1957, all messages from Washington to Adana giving coordinates for flights along the Soviet border contained the statement: "This is not a penetration overflight" and warned about flying too close to Soviet borders. The Soviets even attempted to shoot down
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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.