Undetected Media

Abstract

During the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began formulating plans for a photographic reconnaissance aircraft designed to gather information about the Soviet Bloc. By looking at a collection of redacted and declassified CIA documents, this article analyzes the media apparatus of the spy plane, which materialized during the Cold War as the U-2 jet glider. This study delves into how a specific and professional type of knowledge practice known as “intelligence” has shaped and been shaped by aerial media politics and centralized its own vein of critical visuality. At once initiating a timely shift toward a more technological way to produce strategic knowledge, the CIA simultaneously situated the spy plane as a new media apparatus within the human parameters of planning, piloting, and interpretation. This article examines the professional deliberative practices that arose, largely within the CIA and centered on the U-2, to support aerial espionage and institutionalize analysis of its imagery to argue that the spy plane's media ushered in a rupture in photoreconnaissance analytics as well as technologies.