WASHINGTON – The CIA extended a rare invitation to the media to visit its Langley, Va., headquarters and view an A-12 reconnaissance plane as part of the agency's 60th anniversary celebrations last month.

The A-12, resembling a giant praying mantis, was on display in the CIA's "green" parking lot next to a large tent in which a short ceremony and reception were recently held.

The spy plane was developed in the 1960s to replace the fabled U-2. If you've never heard of the A-12, that's because it was developed, deployed, and eventually retired in secrecy.

"The goal was an aircraft that could outrun any Soviet missile," CIA Director Michael Hayden told several hundred people at the ceremony. "A long-range, radar-evading plane that would fly three miles higher, and more than four times faster, than the U-2."

Close call
Twice during test flights, pilots had to eject at less than 200 feet. Over its 10-year-history, five A-12s were lost in crashes, killing two CIA pilots and two Air Force pilots in chase planes. The photographs from the A-12's maiden operation were hand-carried by CIA analyst Tom Farrell on a commercial flight from Rochester, N.Y., to Washington, D.C.

"As fate would have it, there were 12 Cubans aboard," Hayden said. "All the way, he worried how he would get rid of this classified carry-on if the flight were hijacked to Cuba, a distinct possibility at the time."

Farrell made it through, but for all of the ballyhoo, the A-12 was in operation for less than a year, flying reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam and North Korea in 1967 and 1968. It was never used for its intended purpose of overflying the Soviet Union. Instead, it was grounded in favor of the Air Force's SR-71.

"The most advanced aircraft ever built was decommissioned after less than a year in service, not from any shortcomings in its design but because of fiscal pressures and competition between the reconnaissance programs of CIA and the Air Force," according to a booklet handed out at the ceremony.

The A-12 on view at the CIA will remain there as part of the agency's collection of historical artifacts.