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.
“Mission Control”17 pages
005653421 UNCLASSIFIED Se771'e 'ME:W.4Q Chapter 6 313 SUMMARY OF THE OXCART PROGRAM Intended to replace the U-2 as a collector of strategic intelligence, the OXCART was never used for this purpose. Its brief deployment was strictly for obtaining tactical intelligence and its photographic product contributed very little to the Agency's strategic intelligence mission. By the time OXCART became operational, photosatellite systems had tilled the role originally conceived for it. The most advanced aircraft of the 20th century had become an anachronism before it was ever used operationally.'" The OXCART did not even outlast the U-2, the aircraft it was supposed to replace. The OXCART lacked the quick-response capa- bility of the smaller craft: a U-2 unit could be activated overnight, and within a week it could deploy abroad, fly sorties, and return to home base. The OXCART planes required precise logistic planning for fuel and emergency landing fields, and their inertial guidance systems needed several days for programming and stabilization. Aerial tankers had to be deployed in advance alone an OXCART's flight route and be provisioned with the highly specialized fuel used by the 158 en- gines. All of this required a great deal of time and the effort -of several hundred people. A U-2 mission could be planned and flown with a third fewer personnel. Although the OXCART program created a strategic reconnais- sance aircraft with unprecedented speed. range. and altitude, the pro- gram's most important contributions lay in other areas: aerodynamic design, high-impact plastics, engine performance, cameras, electronic countermeasures, pilot life-support systems, antiradar devices, use of nonmetallic materials for major aircraft assemblies, and improve- ments in milling, machining, and shaping titanium. In all of these ar- eas, the OXCART pushed back the frontiers of aerospace technology and helped lay the foundation for future "stealth - research. On 26 January 1967 Kelly Johnson noted in his "Archanizel I think back to 1959. bePre we started this airplane, to discussions with Dick Bissell where we seriously considered the problem of whether there would be one more round of aircraft behre the satellites took over. We jointly agreed there would be just one round. and not two. That seems to have been a very accurate evaluation, as it seems that 30 SR-71s give us enough overflight reconnaissance capability and we don't need the addi- tional 10 Oxcart aircraft. 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.