CIA Spent $57 Million to Save Aging U-2s From Technical Failure
By Marcus Boone ·
Pilots operated in a void of official existence, using a fake weather squadron to watch the Soviet Union before missile strikes and aging wiring threatened the program.
The aircraft was a glider with an engine, designed to scrape the edge of space where the air is too thin for most things to fly. For the pilots, the cost of that altitude was a full pressure suit and the knowledge that they were operating in a void of official existence. According to a program description mirrored by the FAS Intelligence Resource Program, the Lockheed U-2 was the product of a collaboration between the CIA, the Air Force, and Lockheed's "Skunk Works" in Burbank, California. It was built for a single, desperate purpose: to see what the Soviet Union was hiding while the United States pretended it wasn't looking.
2nd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron
The government’s preferred method for hiding the U-2 was a lie of administrative convenience. In August 1956, personnel began arriving at Adana Air Base in Turkey as part of a unit called the 2nd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional). The FAS record notes that the unit's mission, contrary to its name, "had nothing to do with weather."
Instead, the squadron functioned as a front for Project TL-10 and the Turkey Cover Plan. While the Air Force provided logistics and a commander, the CIA provided the mission planners and the pilots. Within the base, they built a secure compound to shield their work from the very base they occupied—which, at the time, did not even have a perimeter fence.
This was the birthplace of a global surveillance habit. While the main target was the Soviet Union, the U-2 was quickly deployed to watch anyone the National Command Authority found inconvenient. In September 1956, Francis Gary Powers flew over the eastern Mediterranean to track British and French warships during the invasion of Egypt. Similar flights were launched to gather data on crises in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Yemen. The public record knows the U-2 as the "Dragon Lady," but for the people on the ground in those countries, it was an invisible ghost that rendered their borders irrelevant.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
Operation OVERFLIGHT
President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the covert missions over the Soviet Union under the name Operation OVERFLIGHT after the Soviets rejected his "Open Skies" proposal. For years, the U-2 operated in the utmost secrecy, utilizing forward bases in Pakistan—specifically Lahore and Peshawar—to penetrate Soviet airspace. The operation relied on a calculated distraction: for every mission that intruded into Soviet territory, the CIA launched at least one diversionary flight along the border to draw air defense attention away from the intruder.
This game of cat-and-mouse ended on May 1, 1960. Francis Gary Powers, a veteran of 27 missions, took off from Peshawar destined for Norway. His target: two intercontinental ballistic missile test sites at Sverdlovsk and Plesetsk. At 67,000 feet, the Soviets launched a volley of 14 SA-2 surface-to-air missiles. The FAS record notes that while the missiles could not reach the aircraft's altitude, the shock waves from the explosions caused the U-2 to disintegrate. Powers ejected and was held on espionage charges for nearly two years.
The fallout was immediate. The governments of Turkey, Pakistan, and Norway claimed no knowledge of the flights, and the U-2s were quietly withdrawn to the United States. The aircraft returned, however, for the 1962 crisis in Cuba, where Major Richard S. Heyser captured the first photos of Soviet offensive missile sites. That mission set the stage for the death of Major Rudolph Anderson, Jr., who was shot down on October 27, 1962.
Document imagery from irp.fas.org From the files: irp.fas.org
$57 Million for Sensor Upgrades
By the 1990s, the U-2 had transitioned from a Cold War gamble to a permanent fixture of the American surveillance apparatus. The FAS document describes a desperate struggle to keep the aging airframes relevant in a digital age. By 1996, the "special" signals intelligence sensors had not been upgraded since 1991, and the aircraft's wiring had become a chaotic nest of legacy cables. The record states that platform integrators had simply "run out of space and weight to introduce wiring for new components."
To fix this, the House Intelligence Committee directed a budget increase of $57 million for critical sensor upgrades. This funding was meant to solve a fundamental technical failure: the aircraft's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System (ASARS) and its Electro-optical Reconnaissance Systems (SYERS) could not operate simultaneously. The upgrade aimed to downsize the SYERS sensor and add a Global Positioning System to superimpose geo-coordinates directly on images.
Further initiatives, such as the "Lighting Bolt" acquisition reform, sought to install a reprogrammable Radar Warning Receiver and jammer to increase survivability. The goal was to reduce the aircraft's dependence on SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) protection, allowing the U-2 to penetrate hostile territory with greater autonomy. The record details a need to lower the "noise floor" of the platform's electrical emissions by replacing old cabling with shielded copper and fiber optic wiring.
The FAS program page ends abruptly mid-sentence, noting that these rewiring efforts were required to lower the platform electrical emissions "noise" floor and permit advanced sensors to r