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.
“United Press”12 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 5
212
Long unhappy with President Achmed Sukarno's perceived sympathy to Communism and his institution of "guided democracy" in Indonesia, the CIA, after consultation with the State Department, began in early 1957 to supply financial assistance to a group of dissident Indonesian Army officers on the island of Sumatra. By 25 September 1957, the National Security Council had become concerned with the course of events in Indonesia and on its recommendation President Eisenhower authorized the Agency to "employ all feasible covert means" to support the dissidents. Planning for increased aid of all types began immediately, and in January 1958 a US arms shipment for the dissidents arrived in Sumatra. Then on 10 February, the situation came to a head. While Sukarno was out of the country on a state visit to Japan, the dissident army colonels, without consulting CIA, organized a Revolutionary Council in Padang, West Sumatra, and demanded the abolition of President Sukarno's "guided democracy." Five days later, this council proclaimed itself the new "Revolutionary Government" of Indonesia. President Sukarno's armed forces responded swiftly to this threat. In late February the Indonesian Air Force began bombing dissident strongholds, and by mid-March government forces were conducting an all-out air-sea-land drive against the rebel-held areas in central Sumatra. Although the Sumatran rebels were falling back, additional unrest broke out over 1,800 miles away in the islands of Celebes (Sulawesi), and CIA quickly began supplying weapons to these dissidents, too. $ ^{22} $
Increasingly involved in Indonesia, the Agency urgently needed accurate information on the situation there. As in previous crises, U-2s flew reconnaissance missions. On 24 March 1958, the Development Projects Staff moved the entire complement of Detachment C's pilots and planes from Japan to a base more easily accessible to Indonesia: Cubi Point Naval Air Station in the Philippines. Cubi Point was far from any facility that could develop and interpret the U-2 photographs, so two Photo-Intelligence Division employees went to Clark Airfield, just 30 minutes by air from Cubi Point, to establish a forward processing center. They arrived on 28 March and had the photo lab ready to go on the following day. $ ^{23} $ 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.