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.
“Mission Control”28 pages
Soviet missile system. As early as 1962, the intelligence community began to be concerned about the actual purpose of new missile installations that first appeared near Tallinn, Estonia, and soon spread along the northwestern quadrant of the Soviet Union. Attempts to photograph the sites using reconnaissance satellites had been frustrated by the prevailing cloud cover in the region. Because of the lack of accurate information about the missile sites, there was a wide divergence of views within the intelligence community about their purpose. These views ranged from the CIA's belief that the installations contained long-range, surface-to-air missiles designed to counter strategic bombers, to the Air Force's contention that Tallinn sites represented a deployed antiballistic missile system. Photointerpreters insisted that imagery with a resolution of 12 to 18 inches was necessary to determine missile size, antenna pattern, and configuration of the engagement radars associated with the system. Electronic intelligence (ELINT) analysts also needed data about the Tallinn radars, but there were no collection sites that could monitor the Tallinn emanations when the radars were being tested. Moreover, the Soviets never operated the radars in the tracking and lockon modes, a fact that prevented analysts from knowing the frequencies or any other performance characteristics of the radar. Secret NOFORN Chapter 6 To settle the question of the purpose of the Tallinn installations, Office of Special Activities planners proposed a mission that would use the high resolution of the OXCART's camera along with the U-2's sophisticated ELINT-collection equipment. This project's unclassified name was Project SCOPE LOGIC; its classified title was Operation UPWIND. The proposed project involved launching an A-12 OXCART aircraft from Area 51 in Nevada and flying it to a Baltic Sea rendezvous with a Project IDEALIST U-2 flying from an RAF facility in Great Britain. The OXCART would fly north of Norway and then turn south along the Soviet-Finnish border. Shortly before Leningrad, the A-12 would head west-southwest down the Baltic Sea, skirting the coasts of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and East Germany before heading west to return to Area 51. The entire flight would cover 11,000 nautical miles, take eight hours and 38 minutes, and require four aerial refuelings. Although the A-12 would not violate Soviet airspace during this dash, it would appear to Soviet radar network operators to be headed for an overflight penetration in the vicinity of Leningrad. It was
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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.