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.
“Cooper”7 pages
CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED .-S7Ci-r111.e °KAU Chapter 4 164 mention of overflights by the United States. After the trip was over, Khrushchev and other leading Soviet officials continued to make ex- aggerated claims about the extent of their missile force, adding to the confusion and concern within the US intelligence community. Thus in November 1959, Soviet Premier Khrushchev told a conference of journalists, "Now we have such a stock of rockets, such an amount of atomic and hydrogen weapons, that if they attack us, we could wipe our potential enemies off the face of the earth." He then added that "in one year, 250 rockets with hydrogen warheads came off the as- sembly line in the factory we visited." ' 2 Because the Soviet Union had been launching at least one missile per week since early fall, US policymakers placed great weight on his remarks. Despite the intelligence community's intense interest in the Soviet Union's nuclear and missile programs, President Eisenhower did not authorize any more overflights of the Soviet Union during the remainder of the year. On the other hand, he raised no objections to (and • robabl welcomed) E0 12958 1.61dfi11>101818<25Yrs 181 William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 101. cret UNCLASSIFIED
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.