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.
“Canberra”10 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 4
strengthened when the Soviet Union did not protest the 9 April mission. As Presidential science adviser George Kistiakowsky later remarked about the lack of protest, "This was virtually inviting us to repeat the sortie." $ ^{22} $
Although President Eisenhower had authorized another overflight for April, he left the designation of its targets up to the experts at the CIA. Of the three missions that remained under consideration, one-Operation SUN SPOT-would overfly southern targets, Tyuratam and Vladimirovka, while the other two would cover railroad networks in the north-central portion of the Soviet Union. The intelligence community had been interested in this area ever since late 1959, when there were indications that the Soviets were building an SS-6 launch facility there. This was the first indication that SS-6s might be located anywhere other than Tyuratam testing facility, where the missiles were launched from a general purpose launching pad. The intelligence community was anxious to obtain photography of a
SA-2 surface-to-air missile 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.