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.
“Sea”26 pages
the task of investigating the nation's intelligence capabilities. Its chairman was Edwin H. (Din) Land, the inventor of the polarizing filter and the instant camera. When James Killian asked Land to head Project Three, Land had to make a major decision about his career. At the time, the 45-year-old millionaire was on a leave of absence from Polaroid and was living in Hollywood, advising Alfred Hitchcock on the technological aspects of making three-dimensional movies. Land decided to give up his interest in cinema's third dimension and return east to Polaroid and the panel appointment. $ ^{47} $
Land's Project Three was the smallest of the three Technological Capabilities Panel projects, for he preferred what he called "taxicab committees"—committees small enough to fit into a single taxicab. The Project Three committee consisted of Land; James Baker and Edward Purcell of Harvard; chemist Joseph W. Kennedy of Washington University, St. Louis; mathematician John W. Tukey of Princeton University and Bell Telephone Laboratories; and Allen Latham, Jr., of Arthur D. Little, Inc., an engineer and former treasurer of the Polaroid Corporation. $ ^{48} $
In mid-August 1954, Land and Baker went to Washington to arrange for the various intelligence organizations to brief the Project Three study group. As the briefings progressed, the panel members became more and more distressed at the poor state of the nation's intelligence resources. Land later noted, "We would go in and interview generals and admirals in charge of intelligence and come away worried. Here we were, five or six young men, asking questions that these high-ranking officers couldn't answer." Land added that the Project Three members were also not overly impressed with the Central Intelligence Agency. $ ^{49} $
Land learned the details of Lockheed's proposed CL-282 aircraft soon after he arrived in Washington. Philip Strong showed him Kelly Johnson's conceptual drawing of the plane and told him that the Air Force had rejected it. Although Land had heard Allen Donovan
Edwin H. Land 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.