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.
“Nevers”34 pages
On 19 November, the day after Seaberg's briefing, the final decision on the CL-282 came at a luncheon hosted by Air Force Secretary Talbott. The participants—Dulles and Cabell from the CIA; Gardner, Ayer, and General Putt from the Air Force; Kelly Johnson; and Edwin Land—all agreed "that the special item of material described by Lockheed was practical and desirable and would be sought. . . It was agreed that the Project should be a joint Air Force-CIA one but that, regardless of the source of the funds, whether AF or CIA, CIA unvouchered channels would be needed to pass the funds." $ ^{64} $
It is interesting to note that Lockheed, which had originally developed the CL-282 on its own and had devoted considerable effort to promoting it, had to be persuaded to undertake the project in November 1954 because the company had become heavily committed to several other civilian and military projects. When Kelly Johnson received a call from Trevor Gardner on 17 November asking him to come to Washington for conversations on the project, his instructions from Lockheed's senior management were "to not commit to any program during the visit, but to get the information and return." When he returned to California, Johnson noted in his project log that "I was impressed with the secrecy aspect and was told by Gardner that I was essentially being drafted for the project. It seemed, in fact, that if I did not talk quietly, I might have to take a leave of absence from my job at Lockheed to do this special project." 65 Of course, Kelly Johnson did not need to be drafted or persuaded into undertaking such a bold step forward in aircraft design. He used Gardner's statement to convince Lockheed's senior management to approve the project, which they did after meeting with Johnson when he returned to California on the evening of 19 November.
Four days later, on 23 November, the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC) approved DCI Dulles's request to undertake the CL-282 project. The following day Dulles signed a three-page memorandum, drafted by DDCI Cabell, asking President Eisenhower to approve the overhead reconnaissance project. That same afternoon, at a meeting attended by the Secretaries of State and Defense and senior Air Force officials, Dulles and Cabell presented the document to the 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.