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.
“Mission Control”28 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 5
## Advanced ECM Equipment for Detachment H
Demand for overhead photography of the PRC continued to grow, spurred in part by the results of earlier U-2 missions that revealed the presence of Soviet-made MiG-21s in the PRC. In addition, there were indications that Communist China might be producing its own SAMs. Furthermore, satellite photography revealed that preparations for the first Chinese nuclear test were almost complete at the Lop Nor test site.
The need for photographs of the Lop Nor site was considered so urgent that the Defense Department finally relented and permitted the System-XIII false-angle device jammer to be installed in Project TACKLE aircraft, with the proviso that it not be turned on until after the pilot had been alerted by System-XII that he was being tracked by FAN SONG radars. Photographing Lop Nor, however, was not a simple task. Located more than 2,000 miles west-northwest of Taiwan, Lop Nor lay beyond the round trip range of T'ao-yuan-based U-2s and in-flight refueling was not possible. Lop Nor was closer to Ta Khli, Thailand, only 1,650 miles northwest of that base, and much closer to Charbatia, India, which lay only 1,200 miles south of the testing site.
After refusing DCI McCone's suggestion to stage a Lop Nor overflight from Charbatia using a CIA civilian pilot, President Johnson approved a proposal to send a Project TACKLE unit to Ta Khli for the mission to Lop Nor. A Detachment H U-2 with a Nationalist Chinese pilot deployed to Ta Khli in mid-October to prepare for the overflight. Before mission preparations could be completed, however, the Chinese detonated their first nuclear weapon on 16 October 1964, and the mission was canceled. $ ^{57} $
The first overflight of Communist China since the 7 July 1964 loss was a 31 October mission over Lan-chou. By mid-November, three more overflights had taken place, one over North Korea and northern China and two over southern and central China. An overflight of Manchuria on 9 December 1964 brought back photos of a G-class ballistic-missile submarine. By this time, the mass of data being provided by Project TACKLE overflights was overwhelming the analysts of the Office of Research and Reports (ORR). An ORR memorandum from 11 January 1965 reported that analysis of the "large backlog of unexploited photography on Chinese Communist 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.