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
Secret NOFORN
Chapter 2
66
led Bissell and Cunningham to approach Dr. Alex Batlin of Technical Services Division in the Directorate of Plans $ ^{37} $ for ideas to help "captured" U-2 pilots avoid such suffering. Batlin suggested the method used by Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering, a thin glass ampule containing liquid potassium cyanide. He said a pilot had only to put the ampule in his mouth and bite down on the glass; death would follow in 10 to 15 seconds. Project AQUATONE ordered six of the poison ampules, called L-pills, and offered one to each pilot just before a mission. It was up to each pilot to decide if he wanted to take an L-pill with him. Some did; most did not. $ ^{38} $
## DELIVERY OF THE FIRST U-2
On 25 July, less than eight months after the go-ahead call from Trevor Gardner, Kelly Johnson was ready to deliver the first aircraft, known as article 341, to the "Paradise Ranch" site. With its long, slender wings and tail assembly removed, the aircraft was wrapped in tarpaulins, loaded aboard a C-124, and flown to Groom Lake, where Lockheed mechanics spent the next six days readying the craft for its maiden flight.
Before "Kelly's Angel" could actually take to the air, however, it needed an Air Force designator. Col. Allman T. Culbertson from the Air Force's Office of the Director of Research and Development pointed this out to Lieutenant Colonel Geary in July 1955, and the two officers then looked through the aircraft designator handbook to see what the options were. They decided that they could not call the project aircraft a bomber, fighter, or transport plane, and they did not want anyone to know that the new plane was for reconnaissance, so Geary and Culbertson decided that it should come under the utility aircraft category. At the time, there were only two utility aircraft on the books, a U-1 and a U-3. Geary told Culbertson that the Lockheed CL-282 was going to be known officially as the U-2. $ ^{39} $ 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.