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.
“RAF”18 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 6
models. The Secretary of Defense rejected this recommendation, presumably because the SR-71 would not be operational by September 1966. $ ^{64} $
In July 1966, at the Bureau of the Budget's suggestion, a study group was established to look for ways to reduce the cost of the OXCART and SR-71 programs. The study group consisted of C. W. Fischer from the Bureau of the Budget, Herbert Bennington from the Department of Defense, and John Parangosky from CIA. The study group listed three possible courses of action: maintain both fleets, mothball the A-12s but share the SR-71s between CIA and the Air Force, or mothball the A-12s and assign all missions to Air Force SR-71s. On 12 December 1966, four high-level officials met to consider these alternatives. Over the objections of DCI Helms, the other three officials—Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, Bureau of the Budget Director Charles L. Schultze, and Presidential Scientific Adviser Donald F. Hornig—decided to terminate the OXCART fleet. Concerned that this recommendation would strip the CIA of its supersonic reconnaissance capability, Helms then asked that the SR-71 fleet be shared between CIA and the Air Force. $ ^{65} $
Four days later, Schultze handed Helms a draft memorandum for the President requesting a decision either to share the SR-71 fleet between CIA and the Air Force or to terminate the CIA capability entirely. Having just received new information indicating that the SR-71's performance was inferior to that of the A-12. Helms asked for another meeting to review this data. His concern was that the SR-71 could not match the photographic coverage that the A-12 could provide. Only one of the SR-71's three camera systems was working anywhere near the original specifications, and that was its Operational Objective system which could only photograph a swath 28 miles wide with a resolution of 28 to 30 inches. The A-12's Type-I P-E camera could photograph a swath 72 miles wide with a nadir resolution of 12 to 18 inches and oblique resolution of 54 inches. Thus, the A-12's camera covered three times as much territory as the SR-71's camera and did so with better resolution. In addition, the A-12 could fly 2,000 to 5,000 feet higher than the SR-71 and was also faster, with a maximum speed of Mach 3.1 compared with the SR-71's Mach 3.0. $ ^{66} $ 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.