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.
“Headquarters”25 pages
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## APPENDIX E ## Unmanned Reconnaissance Projects ## AQUILINE In the early 1960s, there were many problems in obtaining coverage of hostile territory. The U-2 was too vulnerable to Soviet surface-to-air missiles, as had been demonstrated by losses over the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China. The OXCART was still under development and even when completed might prove vulnerable to Soviet radars and missiles. Although safe from interception, the newly developed photosatellites could not provide coverage of a desired target on short notice. Because several of the intelligence community's primary targets such as Cuba and the new Soviet radar installation at Tallinn (Estonia) were not located deep in hostile territory, CIA scientists and engineers began to consider the possibility of using small, unmanned aircraft for aerial reconnaissance. They believed that recent advances in the miniaturization of electronic technology would make possible the development of a reconnaissance vehicle with a very-low-radar cross section and small visual and acoustical signatures. Such a vehicle could reconnoiter an area of interest without the hostile country realizing that it had been overflown. In mid-1965, David L. Christ, chief of the Office of Research and Development's Applied Physics Division, and Frank Briglia of the same office began working on the concept of a small, inexpensive aircraft that would be about the size of a large bird and could carry various payloads for photography, nuclear sensing, and ELINT collection. ORD soon formed a Special Projects Group to develop the aircraft with Briglia as the project manager. Only one firm—the Douglas Aircraft Company—responded favorably to a request for proposal to study the feasibility of a low-altitude reconnaissance system. On 15 November 1965, Douglas received a study contract. This was followed by two Agency contracts on 21 November 1966 for the development of an operational low-altitude intelligence-gathering system. Further contracts followed in 1968 and 1969. The AQUILINE prototype developed by Douglas Aircraft (which became part of McDonnell-Douglas in 1969 as the result of a merger) was essentially a powered glider with an 8.5-foot wingspan. The aircraft weighed only 105 pounds. AQUILINE's tail-mounted engine drove a two-bladed propeller. Powered by a small 3.5-horsepower two-cycle engine originally developed by the McCullough
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.