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 5 210 Soviet MRBM site in Cuba, 1 October 1962 thousands of feet of film returned by Air Force and Navy reconnaissance aircraft. President Kennedy used NPIC photographs to illustrate his address to the nation on 22 October 1962, when he revealed the Soviet missile buildup in Cuba and declared his "naval quarantine" to prevent the shipment of offensive weapons to Cuba. On 27 October, at the height of the crisis, one of the U-2Cs lent by the Agency to the Air Force was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot, Maj. Rudolph Anderson. This loss again illustrated the U-2's vulnerability to the SA-2 missile. Nevertheless, SAC U-2 overflights continued, both during and after the crisis. Responsibility for photographic coverage of Cuba remained with the Air Force; Agency pilots never flew another mission over the island. Although SAC carried out most of the U-2 activity during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Agency's U-2 missions had made vital contributions during the initial stages of the crisis. In all, Project IDEALIST pilots had spent 459 hours overflying Cuba during 1961 and 1962. They had provided concrete evidence of the Soviet buildup on the island, evidence that was simply not available through any
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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.