Documents / FOIA release

CIA/CSI/ History Staff Monograph, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 16 July 2002.

Central Intelligence Agency · 406 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a CIA History Staff monograph by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, written in 1992 and approved for release in 2011. It covers the CIA's manned overhead reconnaissance program from 1954 to 1974 and its two aircraft, the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART. It follows their development, the overflights of the Soviet Union, the downing of Francis Gary Powers in 1960, and later operations. One section is titled "U-2s, UFOs, and Operation BLUE BOOK."

  • p. 11 …At great risk, US Air Force and Navy aircraft had been conducting peripheral reconnaissance and shallow…
  • p. 16 …As a result, in the late 1940s, the US Air Force and Navy began trying to…
  • p. 17 …Two months later, on 7 October 1952, Soviet fighter aircraft stalked and shot down a US…
  • p. 72 …agreement with the Air Force and the Navy (which at that time was also interested in…
  • p. 147 …turned to the Navy, which granted permission for Detachment C to use the Naval Air Station…
  • p. 180 …The Army, Navy, and CIA, however, doubted that any had been deployed, because none could be…
  • p. 223 …by Air Force and Navy reconnais- sance aircraft. President Kennedy used NPIC photographs to illustrate his…
  • p. 273 …Charyk, and his Navy counterpart, Garrison Norton. Designers from several air- craft manufacturers also attended some…
  • p. 283 …This engine had originally been developed for the Navy's large, jet-powered flying boat, the…
  • p. 297 …The need for additional buildings on the base was met by the Navy. Three surplus Navy…
  • p. 298 …After hearing Bissell and Holcomb's suggestion that the J58 might be used in future Navy…
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later, at press conferences in February and July 1964, President
Lyndon B. Johnson revealed the existence of the OXCART-type of
aircraft, although only in its military YF-12A (interceptor) and SR-71
(strategic reconnaissance) versions.
The two CIA reconnaissance aircraft have also been the subject
of a number of books, beginning with David Wise's and Thomas B.
Ross's The U-2 Affair in 1962 and then Francis Gary Powers'
memoirs, Operation Overflight, in 1970. Two recent books give many
more details about the U-2 and OXCART aircraft: Michael
Beschloss's Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair
(1986) and William Burrows's Deep Black: Space Espionage and
National Security (1987). Although well written and generally ac-
curate, these books suffer from their authors' lack of access to
classified official documentation. By drawing upon the considerable
amount of formerly classified data on the U-2 now available to the
public, Beschloss has provided an accurate and insightful depiction of
the U-2 program in the context of the Eisenhower administration's
overall foreign policy, but his book does contain errors and omissions
on some aspects of the U-2 program. Burrows's broader work suffers
more from the lack of classified documentation, particularly in the
OXCART/SR-7l section, which concentrates on the Air Force air-
craft because little information about the Agency's aircraft has been
officially declassified and released.
After the present study of the Agency's overhead reconnaissance
projects was completed, a new book on the U-2 was published in the
United Kingdom. Chris Pocock's Dragon Lady: The History of the
U-2 Spyplane knclassified account of the
U-2 program. OCOCK nas Dent awe w Luihensate for his lack of ac-
cess to classified documents by interviewing many former
participants in the program, especially former pilots. Pocock is also
quite familiar with aircraft itself, for he had worked with Jay Miller
on the latter's excellent technical study of the U-2: Lockheed U-2
(1983).
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There has also been a classified official study of the U-2 and
OXCART programs. In 1969 the Directorate of Science and
Technology published a History of the Office of Special Activities by

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About this file

FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.