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.
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refNQEOORN Chapter 6 308 CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED USS Pueblo in Wonsan Harbor advanced aircraft ever built was to be put out to pasture. The aban- donment of the OXCART did not result from any shortcomings of the aircraft; the causes lay in fiscal pressures and competition between the reconnaissance programs of the CIA and the Air Force. Throughout the OXCART program, the Air Force had been ex- ceedingly helpful; it gave financial support, conducted the refueling program, provided operational facilities at Kadena, and airlifted OXCART personnel and supplies to Okinawa for the Vietnam and Korean operations. Air Force orders for variants of the CIA's A-12— the YF-12A interceptor and the SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft—had helped lower development and procurement costs for the OXCART. Nevertheless, once the Air Force had built up its own fleet of recon- naissance aircraft, bud getary experts began to criticize the existence of two expensive fleets of similar aircraft. In November 1965, the very month that the A-I2 had been de- clared operational, the Bureau of the Budget circulated a memoran- dum that expressed concern about the costs of the A-12 and SR-71 programs. It questioned both the total number of planes required for the combined fleets, and the necessity for a separate CIA fleet. The memorandum recommended phasing out the A-12 program by September 1966 and stopping any further procurement of the SR-71 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.