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.
“US Navy”15 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 1
18
defense known as Project LINCOLN, then under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the end of the year, these experts had assembled in Boston to begin their research. Their headquarters was located over a secretarial school on Beacon Hill, which soon became the codename for the reconnaissance project. The consultants were called the BEACON HILL Study Group.
The study group's chairman was Kodak physicist Carl F. P. Overhage, and its members included James G. Baker and Edward M. Purcell from Harvard; Saville Davis from the Christian Science Monitor; Allen F. Donovan from the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory; Peter C. Goldmark from Columbia Broadcasting System Laboratories; Edwin H. Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation; Stewart E. Miller of Bell Laboratories; Richard S. Perkin of the Perkin-Elmer Company; and Louis N. Ridenour of Ridenour Associates, Inc. The Wright Air Development Command sent Lt. Col. Richard Leghorn to serve as its liaison officer. $ ^{30} $
During January and February 1952, the BEACON HILL Study Group traveled every weekend to various airbases, laboratories, and firms for briefings on the latest technology and projects. The panel members were particularly interested in new approaches to aerial reconnaissance, such as photography from high-flying aircraft and camera-carrying balloons. One of the more unusual (albeit unsuccessful) proposals examined by the panel was an "invisible" dirigible. This was to be a giant, almost flat-shaped airship with a blue-tinted, nonreflective coating; it would cruise at an altitude of 90,000 feet along the borders of the Soviet Union at very slow speeds while using a large lens to photograph targets of interest. $ ^{31} $
After completing these briefings at the end of February 1952, the BEACON HILL Study Group returned to MIT, where the panel members spent the next three months writing a report detailing their recommendations for ways to improve the amount and quality of intelligence being gathered on the Soviet Bloc. Published as a classified 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.