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
179 CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED This statement had been prepared for a "best case" scenario, that is to say, one in which neither the pilot nor the plane and film sur- vived. However, pilots had bailed out from extremely high altitudes and survived, and there was even evidence from previous U-2 crashes that much of the aircraft itself could be salvaged. The small destruc- tive charge aboard the U-2 was not sufficient to destroy much more than the camera. The tightly rolled film, which could reveal the exact purpose of the mission even if the pilot and aircraft did not survive, was very hard to destroy. Kelly Johnson later conducted an experi- ment that revealed film taken out of a completely burned-out aircraft could still provide usable imagery." After almost four years of suc- cessful U-2 missions, Richard Bissell and the rest of the Development Projects Division had become overconfident and were not prepared for the -worst case" scenario that actually occurred in May 1960. This failure played directly into the hands of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who shrewdly decided to release information about the downed U-2 a little at a time, thereby encouraging the United States to stick with its vulnerable cover story too long. As he later wrote, "Our intention here was to confuse the government circles of the United States. As long as the Americans thought the pilot was dead, they would keep putting out the story that perhaps the plane had acci- dentally strayed off course and been shot down in the mountains on the Soviet side of the border." '4 The first word from the Soviet Union came on Thursday, 5 May, when Premier Khrushchev announced to a meeting of the Supreme Soviet that a US "spyplane" had been downed near Sverdlovsk. He made no mention of the fate of its pilot. Khrushchev's announcement aroused considerable interest in the media in the United States, and that same day the State Department and NASA issued another statement that continued the "weather plane" cover story, adding that the pilot became lost during a routine mission near the Caucasus Mountains. Soon afterward, the US Ambassador to Moscow cabled a report to the State Department indi- cating that the pilot might be alive after all. Two days later, on 7 May 1960, Khrushchev confirmed this report by revealing that the U-2 pi- lot was alive and had admitted his mission of spying on the Soviet Union. " Geary interview. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, p. 507. Se et 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.