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.
“Headquarters”25 pages
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 4
190
Most military reconnaissance missions were approved or disapproved at the JCS level, but the most sensitive missions were submitted through the Secretary of Defense to the Special Group for approval. In addition to this Department of Defense approval path, the military services could also submit requirements through the DCI using their representatives on COMOR. As a result, the military services had two channels for submitting reconnaissance missions to the Special Group. The Agency had only one—COMOR. $ ^{53} $
The main conflicts between the requirements committee and the military services arose over missions in the Far East. In the early 1960s, North Vietnam had not been designated a denied area by the US Intelligence Board (USIB), so the military services could plan missions there without consulting COMOR. Such missions, however, came very close to China, which was a denied area and, therefore, came under COMOR's area of responsibility. Once the war in Southeast Asia escalated in 1964, the military services received responsibility for the entire area (see chapter 5).
To reduce the number of disputes between the competing CIA and Air Force reconnaissance programs and to manage the growing satellite program, the two agencies worked out an agreement to provide overall coordination for reconnaissance activities at the national level. The first such interagency agreement came in the fall of 1961, and it was followed by three additional agreements during the next four years. $ ^{54} $
Interest in coordinating the reconnaissance efforts of the military services and the CIA also affected the field of photographic interpretation. In the wake of the loss of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 on 1 May 1960, the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PFIAB) had urged the establishment of an interagency group to study ways to improve the entire US intelligence community. Formed on 6 May 1960, the Joint Study Group on Foreign Intelligence Activities met for the next seven months under the leadership of Lyman Kirkpatrick, CIA Inspector General. One of the study group's key recommendations in the report it issued in December 1960 was the creation of a national photointerpretation 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.