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.
005653421 UNCLASSIFIED THE NEED FOR HIGH-ALTITUDE RECONNAISSANCE For centuries, soldiers in wartime have sought the highest ground or structure in order to get a better view of the enemy. At first it was tall trees, then church steeples and bell towers. By the time of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, ob- servers were using hot-air balloons to get up in the sky for a better view of the "other side of the hill." With the advent of dry film, it became possible to carry cameras into the sky to record the disposi- tion of enemy troops and emplacements. Indeed, photoreconnaissance proved so valuable during World War I that in 1938 Gen. Werner von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the German. Army, predicted: "The nation with the best aerial reconnaissance facilities will win the next war. Iv I By World War II, lenses, films, and cameras had undergone many improvements, as had the airplane, which could fly higher and faster than the primitive craft of World War I. Now it was possible to use photoreconnaissance to obtain information about potential targets be- fore a bombing raid and to assess the effectiveness of the bombing afterward. Peacetime applications of high-altitude photography at first in- cluded only photomapping and surveying for transcontinental high- ways and mineral and oil exploration. There was little thought given to using photography for peacetime espionage until after World War II, when the Iron Curtain rang down and cut off most forms of communi- cation between the Soviet Bloc of nations and the rest of the world. Roy M. Stanley II, World War II Photo Intelligence (New York: Scribners, 1981) p 16 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.