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From the document
By August 1956, Richard Bissell was so concerned about the U-2's vulnerability that he despaired of its ability to avoid destruction for six months, let alone two years.
Up to 80 percent of the early deliveries from Titanium Metals Corporation had to be rejected. It was not until 1961, when company officials were informed of the objectives and high priority of the OXCART program, that problems with the titanium supply ended.
When NPIC photointerpreters examined OXCART photography taken on 26 January, they found the missing USS Pueblo in Wonsan harbor.
The most advanced aircraft of the 20th century had become an anachronism before it was ever used operationally.
Excerpts are passages from a US government work (public domain), quoted exactly as they read in the scan, and checked against the full text on every rebuild.
The CIA's History Staff wrote this chapter as part of a classified history of the agency's spy planes, The CIA and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974, completed in 1992 by Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach. A heavily redacted version of the U-2 part appeared as a book in 1998, and the whole study had been released in redacted form before; this substantially less redacted copy, including the chapter on the A-12, the aircraft the CIA called OXCART, was approved for release in June 2013 under a 2005 FOIA request from the National Security Archive, and was noted for its open references to Area 511,2. It draws on the Office of Special Activities' own classified history, on a 1971 Studies in Intelligence article, on interviews, and heavily on Kelly Johnson's "Archangel" project log at Lockheed1.
From RAINBOW to the A-12
The chapter opens with the problem. By August 1956, weeks after the first U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, Richard Bissell doubted the plane would survive six months; an attempt to mask its radar image, Project RAINBOW, failed and was cancelled in May 19581. A panel under Edwin Land sifted proposals, including a Navy balloon-launched inflatable craft that Johnson calculated would need a balloon a mile across. Convair's FISH, a parasite aircraft to be launched from a B-58B bomber, died when the Air Force cancelled that bomber in June 1959. In August 1959 a joint panel chose Lockheed's A-12 over Convair's KINGFISH, despite KINGFISH's smaller radar cross section, because of Convair's B-58 overruns and Lockheed's secure Skunk Works1.
The engineering sections are concrete: radar tests on a pylon at Area 51 from November 1959; the chines and wing "teeth" that gave the plane its cobra shape; titanium so poor at first that up to 80 percent of deliveries were rejected; leaking fuel tanks never cured. Bissell authorized 12 aircraft on 26 January 1960 at a quoted $96.6 million, a figure that later more than doubled1. The first official flight was on 30 April 19621.
Surfaced, deployed, retired
To cover rising spending and the risk of exposure, President Johnson announced the "A-11" on 29 February 1964, really the Air Force's YF-12A, and the SR-71 that July; the CIA's A-12 stayed secret. By then a computer-assisted Soviet radar, TALL KING, had undercut the idea of overflying the USSR1. The aircraft was finally used in Operation BLACK SHIELD from Kadena, Okinawa: the first mission over North Vietnam on 31 May 1967, a missile fragment lodged in a wing on 30 October 1967, and flights over North Korea after the Pueblo seizure, the first of which found the ship in Wonsan harbor1. In all it flew 29 operational missions1.
The end was budgetary. President Johnson approved termination in December 1966; a November 1967 fly-off against the SR-71 was inconclusive; Clark Clifford reaffirmed the decision in May 1968. On 4 June 1968 an A-12 was lost east of Manila with its pilot, Jack Weeks, and the rest went into storage at Palmdale1.
Reading it
This is the agency's own account, written to record a programme it was proud of. Its verdict is unsentimental: OXCART never did the strategic job it was built for, because satellites had taken over, but it advanced titanium work, materials and antiradar design1. Some passages and captions remain blacked out, including the names of officials briefed on the Okinawa deployment. The last page is the opening of the next chapter. The illustrations include Lockheed and Convair design drawings and two of Kelly Johnson's handwritten design sheets; those seven pages are contractors' work rather than the government's, so the copy hosted here leaves them out (the full release has them). For the aircraft's later life as the SR-71 family, see Wikipedia's summary3; for the U-2 that OXCART was meant to replace, The U-2 program and the 1960 shoot-down.
Sources
- CIA Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, The CIA and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954–1974, Chapter 6 (C00190094), Central Intelligence Agency, via the National Security Archive (1992).
- National Security Archive The Secret History of the U-2, and Area 51 (Electronic Briefing Book No. 434, ed. Jeffrey T. Richelson), National Security Archive (2013-08-15).
- Wikipedia Lockheed A-12, Wikipedia.