The recently declassified reports from Project ‘Oldster’, the RAF element of the CIA’s U-2 programme, reveal more detail on life with the Turkey-based detachment than has ever been public before
“At the moment I am only writing to let you know that we arrived securely and are busy settling in. There were no big snags on the way out. We were delayed five hours for fog and arrived in Ankara in the early hours. It’s as well we were met as, of course, the hotel had never heard of us and we had to go elsewhere!”
It sounds like a holiday postcard, but it’s marked ‘Top Secret’ and is, in fact, the first — informal — report back to the Air Ministry from one of the RAF’s most clandestine operational commitments. The author is given as Mr M. G. Bradley, writing from Adana, Turkey on 20 November 1958. To be more accurate, he was Flt Lt Michael Bradley, one of four RAF pilots then assigned to fly the Lockheed U-2 with the US Central Intelligence Agency, under the cover of working as civilians for the Meteorological Office. His handwritten note was addressed to the Air Ministry, and specifically Wg Cdr Colin Kunkler, the staff officer in the Directorate of Operations — Bomber and Reconnaissance. This, too, was a euphemistic title. Kunkler…
