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.
CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED Chapter 1 18 defense known as Project LINCOLN, then under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the end of the year, these experts had assembled in Boston to begin their research. Their head- quarters was located over a secretarial school on Beacon Hill, which soon became the codename for the reconnaissance project. The con- sultants were called the BEACON HILL Study Group. The study group's chairman was Kodak physicist Carl F. P. Overhage, and its members included James G. Baker and Edward M. Purcell from Harvard; Saville Davis from the Christian Science Monitor; Allen F. Donovan from the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory; Peter C. Goldmark from Columbia Broadcasting System Laboratories; Edwin H. Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation; Stewart E. Miller of Bell Laboratories; Richard S. Perkin of the Perkin-Elmer Company; and Louis N. Ridenour of Ridenour Associates, Inc. The Wright Air Development Command sent Lt. Col. Richard Leghorn to serve as its liaison officer!° During January and February 1952, the BEACON HILL Study Group traveled every weekend to various airbases, laboratories, and firms for briefings on the latest technology and projects. The panel members were particularly interested in new approaches to aerial re- connaissance, such as photography from high-flying aircraft and camera-carrying balloons. One of the more unusual (albeit unsuccess- ful) proposals examined by the panel was an "invisible" dirigible. This was to be a giant, almost flat-shaped airship with a blue-tinted, nonreflective coating; it would cruise at an altitude of 90,000 feet along the borders of the Soviet Union at very slow speeds while using a large lens to photograph targets of interest!' After completing these briefings at the end of February 1952, the BEACON HILL Study Group returned to MIT, where the panel mem- bers spent the next three months writing a report detailing their recommendations for ways to improve the amount and quality of in- telligence being gathered on the Soviet Bloc. Published as a classified USAF. Project LINCOLN. BEACON HILL Report: Problems of Air Force Intelligence and Reconnaissance. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 15 June 1952. pp. v, xi; app. A (S, downgraded to C). " Allen F. Donovan, telephone conversation with Donald E. Welzenbach, 21 June 1985 (U) James G. Baker, interview by Donald E. Welzenbach, tape recording, Washington. DC, 24 April 1985 (S). 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.