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.
“Mission Control”28 pages
Developing the U-2
## THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE U-2 PROJECT
On 26 November 1954, the day after Thanksgiving, Allen Dulles called his special assistant, Richard Bissell, into his office to tell him that President Eisenhower had just approved a very secret program and that Dulles wanted Bissell to take charge of it. Saying it was too secret for him to explain, Dulles gave Bissell a packet of documents and told him he could keep it for several days to acquaint himself with the project. Bissell had long known of the proposal to build a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, but only in the most general terms. Now he learned in detail about the project that proposed sending aircraft over the Soviet Union.
Late on the morning of 2 December 1954, Dulles told Bissell to go to the Pentagon on the following day to represent the Agency at an organizational meeting for the U-2 $ ^{1} $ project. Before leaving, Bissell asked Dulles which agency was to run the project. The DCI replied that nothing had been clearly decided. Bissell then asked who was going to pay for the project. Dulles answered: "That wasn't even mentioned. You'll have to work that out." $ ^{2} $
Bissell was accompanied by Herbert I. Miller, chief of the Office of Scientific Intelligence's Nuclear Energy Division, who soon became the executive officer of the overflight project. When Bissell and Miller arrived at the Pentagon on the afternoon of 3 December, they
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 2 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.