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
Vietnam in January 1973, US military flights in the area were forbidden. The Nixon administration, therefore, tasked the CIA with monitoring North Vietnam's compliance with the cease-fire accords.
The Agency dispatched several pilots to Taiwan under the cover of Lockheed employees working on a government contract to check weather conditions. Their highly sensitive missions had to remain at least 15 nautical miles away from the North Vietnamese coast, and they initially flew at low altitude in a deceptive direction in order to avoid PRC radars. These constraints made the missions difficult because at low altitude the U-2 consumed more fuel and encountered more turbulence and the pilots' pressure suits tended to overheat.
The first mission on 30 March 1973 was only marginally successful because of cloud cover and haze, which prevented it from photographing most of its targets. A second mission on the following day had somewhat better luck with the weather, but problems with the film processing reduced the mission's coverage. Afterward, the monsoon season prevented any further missions until 21 July 1973. This mission obtained usable photography of SAM sites and North Vietnamese supply operations, although the resolution was not as high as it should have been because the H camera lens had not been properly focused. The last SCOPE SHIELD mission, on 6 January 1974, finally succeeded in obtaining high-quality photography. The mission provided complete coverage of shipping in Haiphong Harbor, SAM defenses, and North Vietnamese naval order of battle. $ ^{68} $
## IMPROVEMENTS IN U-2 TECHNOLOGY
## Modification of U-2s for Aircraft Carrier Deployment
In mid-1963, the Office of Special Activities set in motion Project WHALE TALE to examine the possibility of adapting the U-2 aircraft for operations from an aircraft carrier. In the past, protest notes from the Soviet Union to Turkey and Pakistan and from Communist China to India had been responsible for interrupting overflight operations. CIA planners believed that, if U-2s could be modified to operate from aircraft carriers, the United States could avoid the political problems 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.