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.
“Cooper”11 pages
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 1
President and received verbal authorization to proceed. Eisenhower told Dulles that the project was to be managed by the Agency and that the Air Force was to provide any assistance needed to get it operational. $ ^{66} $
Thus, it was that the CIA entered into the world of high technology primarily because of decisions and actions taken outside the Agency: the Air Force's refusal to build the CL-282 aircraft, President Eisenhower's desire to have a sensitive overflight project conducted by a civilian agency rather than the military, and, above all, the determination by a small group of prominent scientists that the Lockheed design represented the best possible overhead reconnaissance system. $ ^{67} $ 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.