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.
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 2
his research associate duties at Harvard and his service on government advisory bodies, Baker established a small firm known as Spica, Incorporated, on 31 January 1955.
The A-1 camera system consisted of two 24-inch K-38 framing cameras. One was mounted vertically and photographed a $ 1 7. 2^{\circ} $ swath beneath the aircraft onto a roll of 9.5-inch film. The second K-38 was placed in a rocking mount so that it alternately photographed the left oblique and right oblique out to $ 3 6. 5^{\circ} $ onto separate rolls of 9.5-inch film. The film supplies unwound in opposite directions in order to minimize their effect on the balance of the aircraft. Both cameras used standard Air Force 24-inch focal-length lenses adjusted for maximum acuity by Baker. The development of the special rocking mount by Perkin-Elmer's Dr. Roderic M. Scott was a major factor in reducing the size and weight of the A-1 system, because the mount provided broad transverse coverage with a single lens, ending the need for two separate cameras. $ ^{16} $
A-1 camera Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.