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.
“Headquarters”18 pages
--geMr1410PGRAL,. Chapter 4 178 ■ripaczaL.... CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED ED 129581.6181111>1010<25Yrs that the Soviets had discontinued radar tracking of the flight's pro- gress two hours earlier (0529Z), southwest of Sverdlovsk. Although there was no word from the Soviet Union concerning the missing U-2, key project personnel assembled in the Agency control center that morning (with the exception of Bissell. who was out of town and did not arrive until 1530) to analyze the latest information and discuss courses of action. They quickly established a new project, known as Operation to gather and evaluate all available informa- tion about the downed U-2." Bissell and the other project officials did not know whether Powers was dead or if the plane and camera had been destroyed. but they believed that there was no way that a pilot could survive a crash from an altitude above 70,000 feet. They, therefore, decided to stick with the standard cover story for U-2 flights: that they were weather flights staged by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—originally the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, renamed in 1958. This cover story had been approved by the President in 1956. By the end of the day, the Operation Dfficials had prepared a statement based on the standard cover story but modified to fit the available information on Powers' flight and to show Adana as the aircraft's base in order to conceal Pakistan's role in the mission. This revised cover story, along with a mission flight plan consistent with it, was sent to the field commander' to replace the cover story that had been prepared and distributed in advance of the mission. The first announcement of the new cover story came late on 2 May by the Adana base commander, but it did not appear in print until the following day. On Tuesday, 3 May, NASA released a state- ment about a high-altitude weather plane that was missing on a flight inside Turkey. The statement had been designed to provide an expla- nation for the presence of wreckage inside the Soviet Union by noting that "the pilot reported over the emergency frequency that he was ex- periencing oxygen difficulties." Thus, if the Soviets protested and pointed to wreckage inside their borders, NASA could claim that the pilot had lost consciousness and the aircraft had then flown into the Soviet Union before crashing. " Geary interview (S). Beschloss. Mayday, p. 39. 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.