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.
“RAF”18 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 5
Nothing came of the proposal to resume overflights in the fall of 1961, as both the USIB and the Special Group came out against it, but, as long as U-2 photography remained clearly superior to satellite photography, the thought of obtaining U-2 coverage of the Soviet Union remained tempting. In February 1962, the USIB seriously considered a COMOR proposal to send a U-2 over Kamchatka to photograph Soviet antiballistic-missile facilities but finally decided to wait for the results of an Air Force peripheral mission. The board later accepted DCI McCone's recommendation to seek satellite rather than U-2 coverage of the area. $ ^{4} $
With both the CIA and the State Department strongly opposed to sending the highly vulnerable U-2 over the Soviet Union, prospects for resuming flights remained slight unless the international situation worsened to such a degree that overflights would be worth the risks involved. Since this never happened, Francis Gary Powers' flight on 1 May 1960 proved to be the last CIA overflight of the Soviet Bloc. Yet, the U-2 remained useful, for it could operate successfully in other areas with less developed radar and air defense systems. After May 1960, the main focus of U-2 activity shifted to two new areas: Latin America, where U-2s would play an extremely important role during the early 1960s, and the Far East, where CIA U-2s were active from 1958 until 1974, when the Agency's involvement in manned reconnaissance finally ended.
## U-2 OPERATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA
## U-2 Support to the Bay of Pigs Invasion
During late summer 1960, the Directorate of Plans was planning a counterrevolutionary invasion of Cuba for the following year. To support this effort, the Agency asked the National Security Council's 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.