Documents / FOIA release
This is a CIA History Staff monograph by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, published in Washington in 1992 and approved for release in 2011. It covers the CIA's manned overhead reconnaissance program from 1954 to 1974, which developed and flew the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART. It traces the U-2's development, the overflights of the Soviet Union, the downing of Francis Gary Powers on 1 May 1960, and later operations. One section is titled U-2s, UFOs, and Operation BLUE BOOK.
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Colonel Goodpaster with President Eisenhower CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED Chapter 3 98 take it as a certainty that no pilot would survive.., and that al- though they would know where the plane came from, it would be difficult to prove it in any convincing way." CIA assurances that the U-2 would probably not be detected, and that a crashed U-2 could not be traced back to the United States, helped overcome the President's worries about overflights. The most important reason why President Eisenhower decided to send recon- naissance aircraft over the Soviet Union, however, was the urgent need for accurate intelligence to confirm or disprove claims of Soviet advances in long-range bombers and missiles. The initial sighting of the new Soviet Bison bomber in the spring of 1954 had been followed by reported si ghtings of more than 30 of these bombers in the spring and summer of 1955 (in reality these were sightings of the same group of 10 aircraft that circled around out of sight and made several passes during a Soviet air show). Soon members of Congress were calling for investigations into the relative strength of the US and " Quoted in Beschloss, Mayday, p. 118. UNCLASSIFIED
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.