Documents / FOIA release
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."
“Headquarters”18 pages
005653421 UNCLASSIFIED .secTee-ragaum.. Chapter 2 66 led Bissell and Cunningham to approach Dr. Alex Batlin of Technical Services Division in the Directorate of Plans ." for ideas to help "cap- tured" U-2 pilots avoid such suffering. Batlin suggested the method used by Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering, a thin glass ampule containing liquid potassium cyanide. He said a pilot had only to put the ampule in his mouth and bite down on the glass; death would fol- low in 10 to 15 seconds. Project AQUATONE ordered six of the poi- son ampules, called L-pills, and offered one to each pilot just before a mission. It was up to each pilot to decide if he wanted to take an L-pill with him. Some did; most did not.38 E0129581.61WI11>10<25Yrs IS' DELIVERY OF THE FIRST U-2 On 25 July, less than eight months after the go-ahead call from Trevor Gardner, Kelly Johnson was read to deliver the first aircraft, known as article 341, to the site. With its long, slender wings and tail assembly remove., the aircraft was wrapped in tarpaulins, loaded aboard a C-124, and flown to where Lockheed me- chanics spent the next six days readying e cra t for its maiden flight. Before -Kelly's Angel" could actually take to the air, however, it needed an Air Force designator. Col. Allman T. Culbertson from the Air Force's Office of the Director of Research and Development pointed this out to Lieutenant Colonel Geary in July 1955, and the two officers then looked through the aircraft designator handbook to see what the options were. They decided that they could not call the project aircraft a bomber, fighter, or transport plane, and they did not want anyone to know that the new plane was for reconnaissance, so Geary and Culbertson decided that it should come under the utility aircraft category. At the time, there were only two utility aircraft on the books, a U-1 and a U-3. Geary told Culbertson that the Lockheed CL-282 was going to be known officially as the " At the time this Directorate was known as the Deputy Directorate/Plans, with the slash interpreted to mean either "for" or "of." Terminology for the major subdivisions of the CIA and their directors has varied over the past four decades. For the sake of consistency. all titles of Directorates and Deputy Directors have been placed in the current Agency for- mat: the organization is known as the "Directorate of X" and the head is known as the "Deputy Director for X." Information supplied by James Cunningham to Donald E. Welzenbach: Sayre Stevens, Memorandum for the Record, "Discussion with Dr. Alex Batlin Re Project MKNAOMI," July 1975 (S). Geary interview (S). ---fberaL 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.