Cold War aerial images released

Aerial images taken during secret Cold War reconnaissance missions are now accessible on the NCAP website. Now declassified, over 1,270 of these images, taken during a late-1950's project code-named ROBIN, have been digitised and released.

These missions were flown by a Royal Air Force Canberra aircraft fitted with an American camera system, to enable the collection of long-range oblique photographs of Soviet Bloc and Mediterranean territories from friendly, or neutral, airspace. Early missions covered locations in East Germany, while sorties at the end of the project focused on Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.