Scope and Contents

This collection consists of 27 cubic feet of material relating to aerial reconnaissance, including the following types: aerial photography collected by Brugioni; lectures and interviews by Brugioni (on videotape); articles written by Brugioni; and the published secondary sources he collected to write those articles. The collection consists of five series. Series 1 consists of the binders created by Brugioni for his aerial reconnaissance research; Series 2 and 3 consists of subject folders relating to aerial reconnaissance; Series 4 consists of 700 scanned images of original photographs retained by Brugioni as well as copies of the following two reports: "The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex," by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirer, 1979 and "The Tighe Report," 1986; the last series consists of the videotaped lectures and interviews.

Biographical / Historical

Dino Brugioni (b. 1921) is the former Chief of Information at the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). He flew a number of reconnaissance missions during World War II over North Africa, Italy and Germany, for which he received the Purple Heart and many other citations. After the war, Brugioni received BA and MA degrees in Foreign Affairs from George Washington University. In 1948, he joined the CIA and became an expert in Soviet industries. In 1955 Brugioni was selected as a member of the newly formed NPIC that would interpret Lockheed U-2, Lockheed SR-71 (Blackbird), and satellite photography. During Brugioni's 35 year career, he helped establish imagery intelligence as an national asset to solve intelligence problems. Brugioni's aerial reconnaissance work played a major role in discerning the US/USSR bomber and missile camps during the Cold War, and provided evidence for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur War. After retirement, he encouraged the use of declassified photographic intelligence for historical research. Brugioni was one of the first historians to present photographic evidence of Auschwitz in the 1970s when he located film footage from a reconnaissance aircraft photographing a bombing run on a nearby Farben factory. Brugioni is also an authority on contrived or altered photography. He has written numerous books and articles on his field and received numerous citation and recommendations for his role in reconnaissance.