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.
“Sea”26 pages
The only time the enemy came close to downing an OXCART was on 30 October 1967. During his first pass over North Vietnam, pilot Dennis Sullivan detected radar tracking. Two SAM sites prepared to launch missiles but neither did. During Sullivan's second pass the North Vietnamese fired at least six missiles at the OXCART, each confirmed by vapor trails on mission photography. The pilot saw these vapor trails and witnessed three missile detonations near but behind the A-12, which was traveling at Mach 3.1 at about 84,000 feet. Postflight inspection of the aircraft revealed that a piece of metal had penetrated the underside of the right wing, passed through three layers of titanium, and lodged against a support structure of the wing tank. The fragment was not a warhead pellet but probably debris from one of the missile detonations that the pilot observed. $ ^{62} $
BLACK SHIELD missions continued during the first three months of 1968, with four missions flown over North Vietnam out of 14 alerts. The last OXCART overflight of Vietnam took place on 8 March 1968. During this same three-month period, the OXCART made its first overflight of North Korea after the USS Pueblo was seized on 23 January 1968. The goal of this mission was to discover whether the North Koreans were preparing any large-scale hostile move in the wake of this incident. When NPIC photointerpreters examined OXCART photography taken on 26 January, they found the missing USS Pueblo in Wonsan harbor.
## THE END OF THE OXCART PROGRAM
Secretary of State Dean Rusk was reluctant to endorse a second mission over North Korea for fear of diplomatic repercussions should the aircraft come down in hostile territory. The Secretary was assured that the plane could transit North Korea in seven minutes and was unlikely to land in either North Korea or China. The 303 Committee then endorsed a second mission over North Korea, which was flown on 19 February. A third and final overflight of North Korea on 8 May 1968 proved to be the last operational deployment of the OXCART aircraft. $ ^{63} $
Almost a decade had elapsed between the time when the concept for the OXCART aircraft was first examined and the first A-12 was operationally deployed. Now after only 29 operational missions, the most
"OXCART Story," p. 28 (S). 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.