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
Chapter 1
to do so because the Land committee was part of a panel commissioned by President Eisenhower to examine the nation's intelligence community and recommend changes. The committee thus had a direct line to the White House through James Killian's contacts there.
Land described the [CL-282] system using an unarmed plane and recommended that its development be undertaken. After listening to our proposal and asking many hard questions, Eisenhower approved the development of the system, but he stipulated that it should be handled in an unconventional way so that it would not become entangled in the bureaucracy of the Defense Department or troubled by rivalries among the services.58
Early in November 1954, Land and Killian met with President Eisenhower to discuss high-altitude reconnaissance. Killian's memoirs contain an account of this crucial meeting:
Meanwhile Edwin Land and his Project Three colleagues were working to convince Allen Dulles that the CIA should run the proposed overflight program. On 5 November Land wrote to the DCI strongly urging that the CIA undertake the CL-282 project:
The scientists from the advisory committees and the President were thus in agreement that the new reconnaissance program should be controlled by the CIA, not the military.
## ClA and Air Force Agreement on the CL-282
Here is the brief report from our panel telling why we think overflight is urgent and presently feasible. I [Land] am not sure that we have made it clear that we feel there are many reasons why this activity is appropriate for CIA, always with Air Force assistance. We told you that this seems to us the kind of action and technique that is right for the contemporary version of CIA: a modern and scientific way for an Agency that is always supposed to be looking, to do its looking. Quite strongly, we feel that you must always assert your first right to pioneer in scientific techniques for collecting intelligence—and choosing such partners to assist you as may be needed. This present opportunity for aerial photography seems to us a fine place to start. $ ^{59} $ 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.