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
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 5
196
overflights of the Soviet Union during the Berlin Crisis in the summer and fall of 1961. On 14 September 1961, Kelly Johnson noted in his project log:
Have had request from Mr. Bissell to propose ways and means for increasing safety of the U-2 on probable overflights. It seems that President Kennedy, who publicly stated that no U-2's would ever be over Russia while he was president, has requested additional flights. Some poetic justice in this. $ ^{2} $
One week later Colonel Geary called to order Lockheed to upgrade six older U-2s into U-2Cs with the more powerful engines on a priority basis, even if it meant taking people off the work on the successor aircraft in order to speed up the conversions.
Shortly thereafter, the resumption of overflights became a major topic of discussion within the intelligence community. On 25 September 1961, the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance prepared a detailed "Justification for U-2 Photography over the USSR," which argued in favor of U-2 missions over selected, high-priority targets such as ICBM complexes. The COMOR paper stated that satellite photography did not provide sufficient detail to answer many critical questions about the Soviet ICBM program. To back up this contention, the report placed U-2 and satellite photography of the same Soviet targets side by side, clearly demonstrating the far superior resolution of the U-2's cameras. Not all members of COMOR supported the resumption of overflights, however. When COMOR formally recommended this course of action to the USIB on 1 October 1961, the State Department and CIA members dissented, having found "insufficient justification for resuming U-2 overflights of the USSR at this time." $ ^{3} $ 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.