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.
“Edwards Air Force Base”7 pages
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Khrushchev and the U-2 wreckage
This revelation completely demolished the US cover story, and senior administration officials then debated what the appropriate course of action should be. Allen Dulles offered to take responsibility for the overflight and resign, but President Eisenhower did not want to give the world the impression that he was not in control of his administration. On Wednesday, 11 May, the President read a statement to the press in which he assumed full responsibility for the U-2 mission but left open the question of future overflights, even though four days earlier he had approved the recommendation of his key foreign policy advisers to terminate all provocative intelligence operations against the Soviet Union. $ ^{35} $
The U-2 affair had its greatest consequences when the long-awaited summit meeting in Paris began less than a week later on 16 May. Soviet Premier Khrushchev insisted on being the first speaker and read a long protest about the overflight, ending with a demand for an apology from President Eisenhower. In his reply 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.