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 Appendix C 336 unit was manufactured by the Granger Company. One of these devices was aboard Gary Powers' U-2 when he was shot down. System-X was a modification of the HRB's System-VII that was specially built in 1962 for a mission over the Soviet Union that never took place. Systems-XI through XV were ECM devices used by U-2s overflying China and North Vietnam during the Vietnam war. System-XVI was a passive ELINT collector. System-XVII was built by HRB-Singer as a result of an October 1963 USIB requirement for the collection of antiballistic-missile (ABM) data from Saryshagan. The system was to be deployed in a U-2 that would fly over western China, along the Sino-Soviet border, collecting data on the ABMs being tested at Saryshagan. By the time the unit was completed in 1965, however, the tipoff time before test launches had been reduced from almost 24 hours to less than an hour, making it impossible to stage U-2 missions in time to collect the data. In the late 1960s, additional ECM systems were needed to counter the increasing threats posed by more accurate SAMs and higher flying aircraft. System-XX was specifically designed to counter the acquisition and guidance radars used by MIG aircraft, and System-XXII was an infrared jammer to counter air-to-air missiles. System-XXI, a COMINT package that replaced the much older System-III, was originally developed for the OXCART program and was later adapted for use aboard the follow-on U-2, the U-2R.
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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.