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.
“Burbank”8 pages
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A-12s at Area 51
Defense McNamara told DCI McCone that he doubted that the OXCART would ever be used and suggested that improvements in satellite reconnaissance would very likely eliminate the need for the expensive OXCART program. Strongly disagreeing, McCone told McNamara that he had every intention of using OXCART aircraft to fly over the Soviet Union.
McCone raised this issue with President Kennedy in April 1963, at a time when the nation's photosatellites were experiencing a great number of failures and the intelligence community was clamoring for better photography to confirm or disprove allegations of the existence of an antiballistic missile system at Leningrad. Unconvinced by McCone's arguments for OXCART overflights, President Kennedy expressed the hope that some means might be devised for improving satellite imagery instead. $ ^{50} $ Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.