Secret NOFORN
Chapter 1
camera with tremendously improved resolution and film capacity, and the Eastman Kodak company was working on new thin, lightweight film. $ ^{55} $
By October 1954, the Project Three study group had drafted a complete program for an overhead reconnaissance effort based on the CL-282 aircraft. The one remaining question was who would conduct the overflights. The committee's members, particularly Land, were not in favor of the Air Force conducting such missions in peacetime. Firmly believing that military overflights in armed aircraft could provoke a war, they argued for civilian overflights in unarmed, unmarked aircraft. In their view, the organization most suited for this mission was the Central Intelligence Agency. $ ^{56} $
In late October 1954, the Project Three panel discussed the CL-282 system concept with DCI Allen Dulles and the Secretary of the Air Force's Special Assistant for Research and Development, Trevor Gardner. Dulles was reluctant to have the CIA undertake the project. He did not like to involve the CIA with military projects, even ones that the military had rejected, like the CL-282. Furthermore, the DCI strongly believed that the Agency's mission lay in the use of human operatives and secret communications, the classic forms of intelligence gathering. Land came away from this meeting with the impression that Dulles somehow thought overflights were not fair play. Project Three committee members were nevertheless convinced that technology, particularly in the form of the CL-282 and the new camera designs, would solve the nation's intelligence problems. $ ^{57} $
A Meeting With the President
Allen Dulles's reluctance to involve the CIA in the CL-282 project did not stop the Project Three committee from pursuing its aims because it was able to go over Dulles's head and appeal directly to the President. Having participated in the BEACON HILL Study and the Intelligence Systems Panel, several Project Three members had definite ideas on how to improve intelligence collection, ideas that they were determined to present to the highest levels of government. They were able