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.
“Nevers”34 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 4
The Prettyman Board's finding was based on a large body of evidence indicating that Powers was telling the truth about the events of 1 May 1960: the testimony of the experts who had debriefed Powers after his return; a thorough investigation of Powers' background with testimony by doctors, psychiatrists, former Air Force colleagues, and his commander at Adana; Powers' own testimony before the board; the results of a polygraph examination that he had volunteered to undergo; and the evidence provided by photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft, which Kelly Johnson had analyzed and found consistent with Powers' story. Nevertheless, DCI McCone remained skeptical. He asked the Air Force to convene its own panel of experts to check Johnson's assessment of the photographs of the U-2. The Air Force quickly complied, and the panel supported Johnson's findings. McCone then seized upon the one piece of evidence that contradicted Powers' testimony—a report by the National Security Agency (NSA) that suggested that Powers may have descended to a lower altitude and turned back in a broad curve toward Sverdlovsk before being downed—and ordered the Prettyman Board to reconvene on 1 March for another look at this evidence. The board remained unconvinced by NSA's thin evidence and stuck to its original findings. A few days later, on 6 March 1962, Powers appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which commended his actions. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also held brief hearings on the U-2 Affair, with DCI McCone representing the CIA. $ ^{44} $
Although all of these inquiries found Powers to have acted properly, they did not release many of their favorable findings to the public, which had received a very negative image of Powers' behavior from sensational press reports and statements by public figures who were not aware of (or chose to ignore) the truth about Powers' actions while in captivity. One member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator John J. Williams, expressed concern about the impact of this silence on Powers' reputation in a question to DCI McCone on 6 March 1962: "Don't you think he is being left with just a little bit of a cloud hanging over him? If he did everything he is supposed to do, why leave it hanging?" $ ^{45} $ Doubts about Powers did remain in the public mind because he received no public recognition for his efforts to withhold information from the Soviets. He was also 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.