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
select a group of pilots for the U-2 project. MacDonald agreed to Bissell's proposal and began recruiting RAF pilots to fly the U-2. $ ^{110} $
In June 1958, representatives from the British Air Ministry came to project headquarters for an orientation and then sat down with CIA officials to work out an agreement on plans and procedures for the joint project. The two sides decided to establish a small RAF contingent that would be integrated into and supported by Detachment B at Adana. The British missions would be operationally controlled by CIA project headquarters. Soon afterward four British pilots began training in Texas. One of these pilots, Squadron Leader Christopher H. Walker, died in a training accident in July 1958. Because of the addition of RAF officers to the program, Project AQUATONE received a new codename, CHALICE. By the end of November 1958, three RAF pilots and a flight surgeon joined Detachment B at Adana with Turkish approval.
Formal approval by the political leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States had come several months earlier. On 27 August 1958, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his approval to British participation in the project as long as he had the right to approve or disapprove all operational flights by RAF pilots. On the same day, President Eisenhower gave his approval in principle for the joint project.
Both sides stood to gain from the joint nature of the U-2 project. For Richard Bissell, British participation was a means to gain an additional source of authorization for overflights of the Soviet Union. Six months earlier, Bissell had cabled to that he wanted British participation because it would "facilitate operations by them at times or under circumstances beyond the scope of authority accorded by US political authorities." $ ^{112} $
President Eisenhower viewed British participation as a way to confuse the Soviets as to the sponsorship of particular overflights and also to spread the risk in the event of a loss. Furthermore, he was used 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.