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
200
In-flight refueling of a U-2
NIMBUS. Most of the flights were staged from Laughlin AFB, Texas, but three were flown from Edwards AFB, California, using in-flight refueling to extend the range of the aircraft. By the spring of 1962, having received reports of increased Soviet activity in Cuba, the CIA requested permission for additional photographic coverage of the island. The Special Group authorized increasing the number of Cuban overflights to at least two per month, beginning in May 1962. At the same time, the National Photographic Interpretation Center began publishing a Photographic Evaluation of Information on Cuba series. $ ^{7} $
By early August 1962, CIA analysts had noted a substantial increase in Soviet arms deliveries to Cuba during the preceding weeks. The first U-2 overflight in August, mission 3086 on the 5th, flew too soon to detect the Soviet construction program just getting under way at various sites in Cuba. A second mission (3088) was originally set for 8 August, but bad weather forced repeated postponements until 29 August. This mission's photography provided the first hard evidence 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.