Please include this as the description: "On May 1, 1960, the news
that the Soviet Union had downed a CIA high-altitude spy plane
added the names "U-2" and "Francis Gary Powers" to the convoluted
narrative of Cold War espionage. Yet this celebrated episode was
only one aspect of an extraordinary history of covert, high-tech
intrusion of secret U.S. aircraft into other nations' air space
worldwide. Now, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead
Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs offers an official,
comprehensive, and authoritative history of this manned overhead
reconnaissance program. Long classified, it describes not only the
program's technological and bureaucratic aspects, but also its
political and international context. The book begins by carefully
documenting the origins of the U-2, the top-secret testing of the
plane, its specially designed high-altitude cameras and complex
life-support systems, and even the suggested use of potassium
cyanide capsules by the pilots if captured (it was up to each pilot
to decide if he wanted to take one with him?some did, most did
not). Once operational, its flight over the USSR in July 1956
immediately made the U-2 the most important source of intelligence
on the Soviet Union, but its use against the Soviet target for
which it was designed produced a persistent tension between its
program managers and President Eisenhower, with the former much
more eager to expand its use and the latter going along only
reluctantly. After the 1960 U-2 incident and the capture of pilot
Gary Francis Powers, the President forbade any further U-2 flights
over the USSR. This was hardly the end of the U-2's participation
in the Cold War. From the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis
to the skies of Laos and North Vietnam, the U-2 provided the same
top-secret intelligence data as it had in the 1950s on revolts in
Indonesia and Tibet. Even after the end of the U-2 era, the CIA
attempted to continue its work via the Oxcart project?the A-12
surveillance aircraft?until fiscal pressures and CIA-Air Force
rivalry caused its demise. Based upon both full access to CIA
records and extensive classified interviews of its participants,
along with maps, drawings, and low-resolution photographs, this
important study provides an engrossing and timely look into the
development and implementation of a top-secret U.S. intelligence
effort, its technological wizardry, notable accomplishments?and the
worldwide negative repercussions when it was revealed. Both
fascinating history and cautionary tale, The Central Intelligence
Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance will be of immense interest to
students of military aviation, intelligence operations,
international relations, history of the Cold War."
General
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