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
CO5653421 UNCLASSIFIED 322 (01295111.61011>111<25Yrs (S) technical means of collection. As soon as the U-2 began flying over the Soviet Union, its photographs became the most important source of intelligence available. The flood of information that the U-2 missions gathered led to a major expansion of the Agency's photointerpretation capabilities, which finally resulted in the creation of the National Photographic Interpretation Center to serve the entire intelligence community. The U-2's tremendous success as an intelligence-gathering sys- tem led the Agency to search for follow-on systems that could con- tinue to obtain highly reliable information in large quantities. Thus, the CIA sponsored the development of the world's most advanced aircraft—the OXCART—and also pioneered research into photo- satellites. Less than a decade after the U-2 program began, the Agency's new emphasis on technical means of collection had brought about the creation of a new science-oriented directorate, which would ultimately rival in manpower and budget the Agency's other three directorates combined. The negative aspect of this new emphasis on technology is exploding costs. The Agency's first strategic reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2, cost less than !With the U-2's successor, the OXCART, each aircraft cost more than and the cost explosion has continued with each new generation of reconnaissance satellites. Perhaps the greatest significance of the CIA's entry into the world of overhead reconnaissance in December 1954 was the new na- tional policy that it signaled. Although US military aircraft had fre- quently violated Soviet airspace in the decade after World War II, such shallow-penetration overflights, concentrating primarily on or- der-of-battle data, had been authorized and controlled by US field commanders, not by the President. In the autumn of 1954, however, President Dwight D. Eisenhower—determined to avoid another Pearl Harbor—authorized the construction of a new aircraft desi gned solely to fly over the Soviet Union and gather strategic intelligence. Peacetime reconnaissance flights over the territory of a potential en- emy power thus became national policy. Moreover, to reduce the &n- uer of conflict, the President entrusted this mission not to the armed forces, but to a civilian agency—the CIA. From that time forward, overhead reconnaissance has been one of the CIA's most important missions. 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.