The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; the U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974

technical means of collection. As soon as the U-2 began flying over the Soviet Union, its photographs became the most important source of intelligence available. The flood of information that the U-2 missions gathered led to a major expansion of the Agency's photointerpretation capabilities, which finally resulted in the creation of the National Photographic Interpretation Center to serve the entire intelligence community.

The U-2's tremendous success as an intelligence-gathering system led the Agency to search for follow-on systems that could continue to obtain highly reliable information in large quantities. Thus, the CIA sponsored the development of the world's most advanced aircraft—the OXCART—and also pioneered research into photosatellites. Less than a decade after the U-2 program began, the Agency's new emphasis on technical means of collection had brought about the creation of a new science-oriented directorate, which would ultimately rival in manpower and budget the Agency's other three directorates combined.

The negative aspect of this new emphasis on technology is exploding costs. The Agency's first strategic reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2, cost less than $1 million apiece. With the U-2's successor, the OXCART, each aircraft cost more than $20 million, and the cost explosion has continued with each new generation of reconnaissance satellites.

Perhaps the greatest significance of the CIA's entry into the world of overhead reconnaissance in December 1954 was the new national policy that it signaled. Although US military aircraft had frequently violated Soviet airspace in the decade after World War II, such shallow-penetration overflights, concentrating primarily on order-of-battle data, had been authorized and controlled by US field commanders, not by the President. In the autumn of 1954, however, President Dwight D. Eisenhower—determined to avoid another Pearl Harbor—authorized the construction of a new aircraft designed solely to fly over the Soviet Union and gather strategic intelligence. Peacetime reconnaissance flights over the territory of a potential enemy power thus became national policy. Moreover, to reduce the danger of conflict, the President entrusted this mission not to the armed forces, but to a civilian agency—the CIA. From that time forward, overhead reconnaissance has been one of the CIA's most important missions.