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
005653421 UNCLASSIFIED SecreTTQ Chapter 1 19 document on 15 June 1952, the BEACON FULL Report advocated radical approaches to obtain the information needed for national intel- ligence estimates. Its 14 chapters covered radar, radio, and photo- graphic surveillance; examined the use of passive infrared and microwave reconnaissance: and discussed the development of ad- vanced reconnaissance vehicles. One of the report's key recommenda- tions called for the development of high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft: We have reached a period in history when our peacetime knowl- edge of the capabilities, activities and dispositions of a poten- tially hostile nation is such as to demand that we supplement it with the maximum amount of information obtainable through aerial reconnaissance. To avoid political involvements, such aerial reconnaissance must be conducted either from vehicles flying in friendly airspace, or—a decision on this point permitting—from vehicles whose performance is such that they can operate in Soviet airspace with greatly reduced chances of detection or interception. 1: Concern About the Danger of a Soviet Surprise Attack The Air Force did not begin to implement the ideas of the BEACON HILL Report until the summer of 1953. By this time interest in recon- naissance had increased after Dwight D. Eisenhower became President in January 1953 and soon expressed his dissatisfaction with the quality of the intelligence estimates of Soviet strategic capabilities and the paucity of reconnaissance on the Soviet Bloc." To President Eisenhower and many other US political and mili- tary leaders, the Soviet Union was a dangerous opponent that ap- peared to be moving inexorably toward a position of military parity with the United States. Particularly alarming was Soviet progress in the area of nuclear weapons. In the late summer of 1949, the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb nearly three years sooner than US experts had predicted. Then in August 1953—a scant nine months after the first US test of a hydrogen bomb—the Soviet Union deto- nated a hydrogen bomb manufactured from lithium deuteride, a tech- nology more advanced than the heavy water method used by US BEACON HILL Report, pp, 164, 167-168 (C). This section of the report was written by Allen Donovan and Louis Ridenour. " Lundahl and Brugioni interview (TS Codeword). 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.