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.
“US Navy”15 pages
Secret NOFORN Appendix E Project AXILLARY ## AXILLARY While Project AQUILINE was still under development, its chief aerodynamicist, Charles N. Adkins, left the program because he believed that its escalating costs would prevent it from ever producing a deployable aircraft. He wanted to build a small, inexpensive remote-controlled aircraft to test a low-cost lightweight autopilot currently being developed by ORD. Under a $5,000 time-and-materials contract with Melpar, Incorporated, Adkins hired a local model aircraft builder to assemble and modify a standard Hawk-750 glider kit and power it with a rear-mounted engine and pusher propeller. Following a series of successful test flights, Adkins installed a small camera and took a number of aerial photographs. By this time the effort to build a "Miniature Multi-Purpose Airborne Vehicle" had become known as Project AXILLARY. Melpar, Inc., received a second contract for $50,000 to install ORD's autopilot in the aircraft, and the project managers now began searching for a use for their vehicle. The two main possibilities were (1) as a short-range reconnaissance vehicle for use in a peace-monitoring or intelligence-gathering system and (2) as a short-range warhead delivery system. In 1971 the Office of Special Activities evaluated AXILLARY flight-testing and determined that the small model aircraft was not suitable for use as a covert reconnaissance vehicle because of its large radar cross section and significant acoustical signature. The aircraft's radar signature made it potentially useful as a weapons systems, however. ORD suggested that AXILLARY be equipped with a radar-homing unit which would make it an inexpensive means for surface-to-air missile systems in North Vietnam. The Director of
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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.