Spying from the Sky: At the Controls of US Cold War Aerial Intelligence [Hardcover]

...an interesting read about an Airmans life in the USAF, spent mostly in strategic reconnaissance from World War II to the 1970s. It is also an excellent history of USAF and CIA strategic reconnaissance in the 1950s and 1960s.  Air & Space Power JournalWilliam Gregory, Greg to all, was born into a sharecropper's life in the hills of north central Tennessee. From the back of a mule-drawn plow, Greg learned the value of resilience and the importance of living a determined life. Refusing to accept a life of continued poverty, Greg sought and found a way outa work-study college program that made it possible to leave farming behind him forever.While at college, Greg completed the Civilian Pilot Training Program and was subsequently accepted into the Army's pilot training program. Earning his wings in 1942, Greg became a P-38 combat pilot and served in North Africa during the summer of 1943a critical time when the Luftwaffe was still a potent threat, and America had begun the march northward from the Mediterranean into Europe proper.Following the war, Greg served with a B-29 unit, then transitioned to the new, red-hot B-47 strategic bomber. In his frequent deployments, he was always assigned the same target in the Soviet UnionTblisi, Stalin's home town. While a B-47 pilot, Greg was selected to join America's first high-altitude programthe Black Knights. Flying RB-57D aircraft, Greg and his team flew peripheral ferret missions around the Soviet Union and its satellites, collecting critical order-of-battle data so desperately needed by the Air Force at that time. When that program neared its design end, and following the Gary Powers shoot-down over the Soviet Union, Greg was assigned to command of the CIA's U-2 unit at Edwards AFB. It was during that five-year command that Greg and his team provided critical overflight intelligence, including during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam build-up. He found time to also become one of the firstló5