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.
“Hill”14 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 5
240
With their demands met, Nationalist Chinese officials again consented to overflights by Detachment H, and operations resumed in February 1965 with three missions over the mainland. By this time US interest in the People's Republic of China was very high because of the PRC's development of nuclear weapons. The Special Group, therefore, approved an extensive reconnaissance program directed against the PRC. By the end of the year, Detachment H had flown 30 missions, the highest annual total during the entire program.
The level of activity declined during 1966, with only 10 missions flown over the mainland. Detachment H also suffered the loss of two more aircraft and pilots in crashes during training missions in 1966. In the fall of that year, joint US-Nationalist Chinese relations in the field of overhead reconnaissance were further strained by the unilateral US decision to kill the longstanding program of low-altitude nighttime overflights of the mainland (STPOLLY). $ ^{61} $ 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.