Chapter Three: The Secret Base
It was a foggy evening in 1951 and Richard Mervin Bissell was sitting in his parlor in Washington, DC, when there was an unexpected knock at the door. There stood a man by the name of Frank Wisner. The two gentlemen had never met before but according to Bissell, Wisner was “very much part of our inner circle of people,” which included diplomats, statesmen, and spies. At the time, Bissell held the position of the executor of finance of the Marshall Plan, America’s landmark economic recovery plan to infuse postwar Europe with thirteen billion dollars in cash that began in 1948. Being executor of finance meant Bissell was the program’s top moneyman. All Bissell knew about Frank Wisner at the time was that he was a top-level civil servant with the new Central Intelligence Agency.
Wisner, a former Olympic competitor, had once been considered handsome. An Office of Strategic Services spy during the war, Wisner was rumored to be the paramour of Princess Caradja of Romania. Now, although not yet forty years old, Wisner had lost his hair, his physique, and his good looks to what would later be revealed as mental illness and alcoholism — but the true signs of his downfall were not yet clear. During the fireside chat in Richard Bissell’s Washington parlor, Bissell quickly learned that Frank Wisner was the man in charge of a division of the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC. At the time, not much was known about America’s intelligence agency because the CIA was only three and a half years old. As for the mysterious office called OPC, only a handful of people knew its true purpose. Bissell had heard in cocktail conversation that OPC was “engaged in the battle against Communism through covert means.” In reality, the bland-sounding Office of Policy Coordination was the power center for all of the Agency’s covert operations. All black and paramilitary operations ran through OPC. The office had been set up by the former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was also the nation’s first secretary of defense.
Seated beside the fire in the parlor that foggy evening in 1951, Wisner told Bissell that the OPC needed money. “He asked me to help finance the OPC’s covert operations by releasing a modest amount of funds generated by the Marshall Plan,” Bissell later explained. Mindful of the gray-area nature of Wisner’s request, Bissell asked for more details. Wisner declined, saying that he’d already said what he was allowed to say. But Wisner assured Bissell that Averell Harriman, the powerful statesman, financier, former ambassador to Moscow, and, most important, Bissell’s superior at the Marshall Plan, had approved the money request. “I could have confirmed Wisner’s story with [Harriman] if I had any doubts,” Bissell recalled. But he had no such doubts. And so, without hesitation, Richard Bissell agreed to siphon money from the Marshall Plan and divert it to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination. Largely unknown until now, this was how a significant portion of the CIA’s earliest covert black budgets came to be. Richard Bissell was the hidden hand.
Equally concerned about the nation’s needs in gathering intelligence was Colonel Richard Leghorn. For Leghorn, the mock nuclear naval battle called Operation Crossroads in 1946 had spurred him to action. Leghorn presented papers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff arguing that overflying the Soviet Union to learn about its military might was urgent business and not just something to consider down the line. He walked the halls of the Pentagon with his papers immediately after Crossroads in 1946, and again in 1948, but with no results. Then along came another war. The Korean War has often been called the forgotten war. In its simplest terms, it was a war between North Korea and South Korea, but it was also the first trial of technical strength and scientific prowess between two opposing teams of German-born scientists specializing in aviation. One group of Germans worked for America now, as Paperclip scientists, and the other group worked for the Soviet Union, and the jet-versus-jet dogfights in the skies above Korea were fights between American-made F-86 Sabres and Sovietmade MiG-15s, both of which had been designed by Germans who once worked for Adolf Hitler.
When war was declared against Korea, Colonel Leghorn was called back into active duty. As commander of the reconnaissance systems branch of the Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio, Leghorn was now in charge of planning missions for American pilots flying over denied territory in North Korea and Manchuria to photograph weapons depots and missile sites. American spy planes were accompanied by fighter jets for protection, but still the enemy managed to shoot down an undisclosed number of American spy planes with their MiG fighter jets. In these tragic losses, Leghorn saw a further opportunity to strengthen his argument for overhead. Those MiGs could reach a maximum altitude of only 45,000 feet, meaning that if the United States created a spy plane that could get above 60,000 feet, the airplane would be untouchable. After the armistice was signed, in 1953, Leghorn went back to Washington to present his overhead espionage idea to Air Force officials again.
One man in a position to be interested was Lieutenant General Donald L. Putt, the Army commander whose men had captured Hermann Gцring’s Volkenrode aircraft facility in Germany just before the end of the war as part of Operation Lusty. Putt had smuggled one of the earliest groups of German scientists, including V-2 rocket scientists Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff, out of the country and into America. Now, Putt was overseeing the fruits of the scientists’ labor from inside his office at the Pentagon. Putt had been promoted to deputy chief of staff for research and development at the Pentagon, and the three stars on his chest afforded him great power and persuasion about America’s military future involving airplanes. But Putt listened to a presentation of Leghorn’s spy plane idea and immediately said that he was not interested. The Air Force was not in the business of making dual-purpose aircraft, airplanes that carried cameras in addition to weapons. Besides, Air Force airplanes came with armor, Putt said, which made them heavy. Any flier in the early 1950s knew heavy airplanes could not fly anywhere near sixty thousand feet.
Richard Leghorn was undeterred. He went around Putt by going above him, to the commander of the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, his old antagonist from Operation Crossroads General Curtis LeMay. In the winter of 1954, LeMay was presented with the first actual drawings of Leghorn’s high-flying spy plane, conceptualized by the Lockheed Corporation. Whereas Putt was uninterested in Leghorn’s ideas, LeMay was offended by them. He walked out of the meeting declaring that the whole overhead thing was a waste of his time.
But there was another group of men who had President Eisenhower’s ear, and those men made up the select group of scientists who sat on the president’s scientific advisory board, friends and colleagues of Colonel Richard Leghorn from MIT. They included James R. Killian Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Edwin H. Land, the eccentric millionaire who had just invented the Polaroid camera and its remarkable instant film. The president’s science advisers had an idea. Never mind the Air Force. Generals tended to be uncreative thinkers, bureaucrats who lived inside a mental box. Why not approach the Central Intelligence Agency? The Agency was made up of men whose sole purpose was to conduct espionage. Surely they would be interested in spying from the air. Unlike the Air Force, Killian and Land reasoned, the CIA had access to the president’s secret financial reserves. All the overhead espionage program really needed was a team captain or a patron saint. As it turned out, they had someone in mind. It was February of 1954. A brilliant economist who had formerly been running the financial office over at the Marshall Plan had just joined the CIA as Director Allen Dulles’s special assistant. His name was Richard Bissell. He was a perfect candidate for the overhead job.
At least one of Richard Bissell’s ancestors was a spy. Sergeant Daniel Bissell conducted espionage missions for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Generations later, on September 18, 1910, Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. was born into a family of Connecticut aristocrats. Severely cross-eyed from birth, it was only after a risky surgery at the age of eight that Richard Bissell could see clearly enough to read anything. Before that, his mother had read
to him. As a child, Bissell was obsessed with history and with war. His parents took him on a visit to the battlefields of northern France when he was ten years old, and it was there, staring out over barren fields ravaged by firebombs, that Bissell developed what he would later describe as an overwhelming “impression of World War I as a cataclysm.”
Despite great privilege, Bissell struggled through his formative years with intense feelings of inadequacy, first at Groton boarding school, then later at Yale University. But behind his low self-esteem was a great willfulness and burgeoning self-confidence that would emerge shortly after he turned twenty-one. On a weekend trip with family friends at a Connecticut beachhead called Pinnacle Rock, Bissell fell off a seventy-foot cliff. When he woke up in the hospital, he was suffering from a mild case of amnesia. But as soon as he was well enough to move around on his own, which took months, he secretly ventured back to the site of the fall. There he made the same climb again. “My hands were shaking,” Bissell explained in describing the second climb, but “I was glad to have done it and to know that I didn’t have to do it again.” He had gone from unsure to self-assured, thanks to a death-defying fall. Immediately after college, in 1932, Bissell headed to England, where he received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Then it was back to Yale for a PhD, where he wrote complex financial treatises at the astonishingly prolific rate of twenty pages a day. Bissell’s colleagues began to admire him, calling him a “human computer.” His mind, they said, functioned “like a machine.” Soon, the classes he taught were filled to capacity.
Eventually, his talents as an economist caught the eye of MIT president James Killian, who recruited Bissell to join the MIT staff. Now, in 1954, here was James Killian recruiting Richard Bissell again, which was how just a few short years after the fireside chat with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell found himself in charge of one of the most ambitious, most secret programs in CIA history, the U-2 spy plane program. Its code name was Project Aquatone.
The following winter, in 1955, Richard Bissell and his fellow CIA officer Herbert Miller, the Agency’s leading expert on Soviet nuclear weapons, flew across the American West in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza in search of a location where they could build a secret CIA test facility, the only one of its kind on American soil. Only a handful of CIA officers and an Air Force colonel named Osmond “Ozzie” Ritland had any idea what the men were up to, flying around out there. Bissell’s orders, which had come directly from President Eisenhower himself, were to find a secret location to build a test facility for the Agency’s bold, new spy plane — the aircraft that would keep watch over the Soviet Union’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program. Accompanying the CIA officers was the nation’s leading aerodynamicist, Lockheed Corporation’s Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the man tasked with designing and building this new plane.
Johnson sat in the back of the Beechcraft with geological survey maps spread out across his lap as the men flew from Burbank, California, across the Mojave Desert, and into Nevada. They were searching for a dry lake bed called Groom Lake just outside the Nevada Test Site, which had had its boundaries configured by Holmes and Narver in July of 1950 during the top secret Project Nutmeg that resulted in Nevada’s being chosen as America’s continental atomic bombing range. Legendary air racer and experimental test pilot Tony LeVier was flying the small airplane. LeVier had a vague idea of where he was going because his fellow Lockheed test pilot Ray Goudey had taken him to Groom Lake on a prescouting mission just a few weeks before. On occasion, Goudey had shuttled atomic scientists from California to the test site and once he had even set down his aircraft on Groom Lake to eat his bag lunch.
“Descending for a closer look, we saw evidence of a temporary landing strip,” Bissell later recalled, “the kind of runway that had been built in various locations across the United States during World War Two for the benefit of pilots in training who might have to make an emergency landing.” The large, hardened salt pan was a perfect natural runway, and LeVier effortlessly landed the plane. The men got out and walked around, discussing how level the terrain was and kicking the old shell casings lying about like stones. To the north, Bald Mountain towered over the valley, offering cover, and to the southwest, there was equal shelter from a mountain range called Papoose. According to Bissell, “Groom Lake would prove perfect for our needs.”
Bissell was acutely aware that Groom Lake was just over the hill from the government’s atomic bomb testing facility, which meant that as far as secrecy was concerned, there was no better place in the continental United States for the CIA to set up its new spy plane program and begin clandestine work. “I recommended to Eisenhower that he add a piece of adjacent land, including Groom Lake, to the Nevada Test Site of the Atomic Energy Commission,” Bissell related in his memoir, written in the last year of his life. Four months after Richard Bissell, Herbert Miller, Kelly Johnson, and Tony LeVier touched down on Groom Lake, Area 51 had its first residents. It was a small group of four Lockheed test pilots, two dozen Lockheed mechanics and engineers, a handful of CIA officers who doubled as security guards, and a small group of Lieutenant Colonel Ritland’s Air Force staff. There was a cowboy feel to the base that first summer, with temperatures so hot the mechanics used to crack eggs on metal surfaces just to see how long it would take for them to fry.
Originally the base consisted of one airplane hangar and a handful of tents, called hooches, constructed out of wooden platforms and covered in canvas tops. Sometimes when the winds got rough, the tents would blow away. Thunderstorms were frequent and would render the dry lake bed unusable, temporarily covered by an inch of rain. As soon as the sun returned, the water would quickly evaporate, and the test pilots could fly again. Power came from a diesel generator. There was one cook and a makeshift mess hall. It took another month for halfway-decent showers to be built on the base. The men could have been at an army outpost in Egypt or India as far as amenities were concerned.
Residents were issued work boots, to defend against rattlesnakes, and hats with lights, to wear at night. When the sun dropped behind the mountains in the evenings, the sky turned purple, then gray. In no time everything was pitch-black. The sounds at night were cricket song and coyote howl, and there was barely anything more than static on the radio and definitely no TV. The nearest town, Las Vegas, had only thirty-five thousand residents, and it was seventy-five miles away. At night, the skies at Area 51 glittered with stars.
But as rustic as the base was as far as appearance, behind the scenes Area 51 was as much Washington, DC, as it was Wild West. The U-2 was a top secret airplane built on the covert orders of the president of the United States. Its 1955 budget was $22 million, which would be $180 million in 2011.
Each U-2 aircraft arrived at Area 51 from Lockheed’s facility in Burbank in pieces, hidden inside the belly of a C-124 transport plane. The pointy fuselage and long, thin wings were draped in white sheets so no one could get even a glimpse. “In the very beginning, we put Ship One and Ship Two together inside the hangar so nobody saw it before it flew,” recalls Bob Murphy, one of the first Lockheed mechanics on the base. From the moment the CIA began operating their Groom Lake facility, they did so with very strict protocols regarding who had a need-to-know and about what. All elements of the program were divided into sensitive compartmented information, or SCI. “I had no clue what the airplane looked like until it flew directly over my head,” recalls security guard Richard Mingus.
Getting the U-2 operations ready was a dream job for the daring experimental test pilot Ray Goudey. “I learned to fly an airplane before I could drive a car,” Goudey explains. As a teenager, Goudey joined the flying circus and flew with Sammy Mason’s famed Flying Brigade. After the war, he became part of a daredevil flying team called the Hollywood Hawks, where his centrifugal-force-defying outside snap made him a legend. In 1955 he was thirty-three years old and ready to settle down, in relative terms.
Getting Lockheed’s tricky new spy plane ready for the CIA
was not a terribly daunting task for a flier like Goudey. Still, the U-2 was an unusual airplane, with wings so long their ends sagged when it sat parked on the tarmac at Groom. To keep its fuel-filled wings from tipping side to side on takeoff, mechanics had to run alongside the airplane as it taxied, sending huge dust clouds up from the lake bed and covering everything in fine sand. The aircraft’s aluminum skin was paper-thin, just 0.02 inches thick, which meant the aircraft was both fragile on the ground and extremely delicate to fly. If a pilot flew the U-2 too slow, the airplane could stall. If he flew too fast, the wings could literally come off. Complicating matters was the fact that what was too slow at one altitude was too fast at another height. The same variable occurred when the weight of the plane changed as it burned up hours of fuel. For these reasons, the original flights made by the test pilots were restricted to a two-hundred-mile radius from the center of Groom Lake. The likelihood of a crash was high, and the CIA needed to be able to keep secure any U-2 wreckage.
“In the beginning, all we did was fly all day long,” Goudey recalls. At Area 51 “we’d sleep, wake up, eat, and fly.” Soon, the base expanded and one hundred more people arrived. Navy Quonset huts were brought in and two additional water wells were dug. Commander Bob Yancey located a pool table and a 16-millimeter film projector in Las Vegas; now the men had entertainment other than stargazing. By September, there were two hundred men on base from three organizational groups: one-third were CIA, one-third were Air Force, and one-third were Lockheed. Everyone had the same goal in mind, which was to get the U-2 to sustain flight at seventy thousand feet. This was a tall order and something no air force in the world had been able to accomplish.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 6