Documents / FOIA release

The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; the U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974

Central Intelligence Agency · 1900-01-01 · 406 pages · text by OCR

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.

  • p. 6 …U-2 Support for DDP Operations in Tibet...216 U-2Cs for Detachment C...217 U…
  • p. 170 …Detachment C mainly collected high-altitude weather data, although it also flew two missions over Tibet…
  • p. 229 …One important area of DDP activity during this period was Tibet. In March 1959, the PLA…
  • p. 231 Chapter 5 Lhasa, Tibet, November 1959 Although the plane was equipped with a camera, it carried…
  • p. 232 …Flights by Detachment C U-2s over Tibet and western China continued during the first half…
  • p. 245 …Khli when it staged four sorties over Tibet from 29 September to 10 November 1963. In…
  • p. 398 …301-302, 304, 307 Thule, Greenland 172 Tibet 157, 216, 219, 232 Time 99 TIME STEP…
invention of synthetic lubricants. Lockheed also had to search long and hard for a hydraulic fluid that would not vaporize at high speed but would still be usable at low altitudes. Finding a suitable hydraulic pump was just as difficult. Kelly Johnson finally modified a pump that was being developed for North American's B-70 bomber project. $ ^{21} $

Some of the greatest problems related to the high speeds and high temperatures at which the OXCART operated resulted from working with the material chosen for the airframe—titanium. After evaluating many materials, Johnson had chosen an alloy of titanium

OXCART production facilities

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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.