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.
“Mission Control”17 pages
Chapter 4 175 115c.kts. CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED hours on the ground. Originally scheduled for Thursday, 28 April, GRAND SLAM was canceled because of bad weather over the north- ern Soviet Union. This had been the case for the past several weeks. When this flight was canceled, the U-2 returned to Adana before sun- rise. That evening the U-2 flew for another attempt to stage the mission early on thee z9m, out bac eather again forced cancellation of the mission, and the U-2 returned to Adana. Because of continued bad weather over the target areas, no mission was planned for Saturday, 30 April.6 Meanwhile, the plane ferried tol n 27 and 28 April had accumulated so many hours of tlighttime that it had to be removed from service for periodic maintenance. A different aircraft was, therefore, ferried n Saturday night, 30 April. This aircraft, article 360, had made a crash landing uring the pre- vious September (see chapter 5). Although it haL refurbished by Lockheed and now had the more powerful 175 engine that would give it greater altitude, pilots did not completely trust this aircraft and con- sidered it a -hangar queen." As Powers noted in his memoirs, "Its current idiosyncrasy was one of the fuel tanks, which wouldn't feed all its fuel." 27 The aircraft was equipped with a B-model camera. a System-VI electronic intelligence unit,' Operation GRAND SLAM, mission 4154 and the 24th deep-pen- etration overflight of the Soviet Union, began almost 30 minutes late on Sunday, 1 May 1960, a delay due to difficulty in getting takeoff approval from Washington. This delay was caused by communications problems that are typical at sunrise and sunset during spring and autumn, when the ionosphere will not support reli- able communications. In attempting to relay the authorization mes- sage, the radio operator in Adana was unable to reach Realizin g that neither the prearranged nighttime nor daytime frequencies were working, the operator began sending a messa ge in the clear, using one of the guard frequencies in the transition area between the daytime and nighttime frequencies. The radio operators at :ept hearing the Morse Mission folder 4154 ( I May 1960), OSA records (TS Codeword). Powers, Operation Overflight, p. 76. ED 129581.6MI1l>1010101011110<25Yrs (Si 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.