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.
“Cooper”11 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 5
250
December 1963, France had announced its intention to detonate a hydrogen device over Mururoa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago area of French Polynesia but had given no specific date for the event. The Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance had been following French nuclear developments since September 1963, when it had apprised the USIB of the need for overflights of this South Pacific area. At that time the USIB decided against recommending such overflights because of State Department concern about potential political difficulties with France in the event the mission was discovered.
Following reports of a buildup of French troops and technical personnel in neighboring Tahiti, the Special Group on 24 April 1964 approved a mission to overfly the atoll to check for activity. This required photography with a resolution better than the 3 to 5 feet possible with the standard B-model camera that had been in use since October 1956. Work on a very-high-resolution camera had begun in early 1963, when the Agency contracted with the Itek Corporation to modify for placement in the U-2 a camera that had been developed for the satellite program. Known as the Delta-II, or the 112A, this device could photograph a 28-kilometer swath with $ 2 6^{\circ} $ convergent stereoscopic lenses, resulting in a $ 7 0^{\circ} $ lateral coverage and a ground resolution of 10 inches. This camera was installed in a Detachment H U-2 and used on two missions conducted over Indochina in late December 1963. Resolution was not as high as had been expected, and the unit was returned to Itek for modifications. By early 1964, the 112A had been reworked and was now known as the 112B. In tests it had proved capable of providing photography with resolution in the 10- to 12-inch range.
Detachment G conducted Operation FISH HAWK in May 1964 by sending two pilots, an NPIC photointerpreter, and a U-2G equipped with the Itek 112B camera to make the first operational U-2 flights from an aircraft carrier. On 19 May the U-2 took off from the USS Ranger and overflew the French atomic test area. As soon as the aircraft returned to the Ranger, the film was developed in the carrier's photo lab, and the NPIC photointerpreter then read out the film to see if the photography met the requirements for resolution and quality. A second U-2 flight carried out a similar mission on 22 May. The photography provided all the detail needed to identify the preparations for the nuclear test that occurred later that year. $ ^{70} $ 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.