The missile threat needed to be addressed, and fast. By 1956 Americans were constantly being reminded about this foreboding Red menace by the media. A January 1956 issue of Time magazine made Soviet missile technology its big story. The cover featured a drawing of an anthropomorphic rocket, complete with eyeballs and a brain, carrying a nuclear bomb and bearing down on a major U.S. city. The magazine’s analysts declared that in a little more than five years, Russians would be winning the arms race. The editors went so far as to prophesize a nuclear strike on the Pacific Ocean that would send a “cloud of radioactive death drift[ing] downwind” over America. Making the threat seem worse was the fact that there was no end to the confidence and bravado projected by the Soviet premier. “We’re making missiles like sausages,” Nikita Khrushchev declared on TV. If Russia succeeded in making these ICBMs, as was feared, then Russia really could place a nuclear warhead in the missile’s nose and strike anywhere in the United States. “I am quite sure that we shall have very soon a guided missile with a hydrogen-bomb warhead which would hit any point in the world,” Khrushchev boasted shortly after the Time magazine article appeared.
While the Soviets were concentrating efforts on advancing missile technology, the powerful General LeMay had convinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff that long-range bombers were a far better way for America to go to war. LeMay was not shy about expressing his disdain for missiles; he brazenly opposed them. LeMay’s top research-anddevelopment commander, General Thomas S. Power, told Pentagon officials that missiles “cannot cope with contingencies” the way bomber pilots could. Another one of LeMay’s generals, Clarence S. Irvine, stated, “I don’t know how you show… teeth with a missile.” While the Joint Chiefs were deciding whether it was better to build up America’s arsenal with missiles or bombers, the nuclear warheads continued to roll off the production lines at Sandia, in New Mexico, with astonishing speed. Ten years earlier, in 1946, the U.S. nuclear stockpile had totaled two. In 1955, that stockpile had risen to 2,280 nuclear bombs. The reason for LeMay’s opposition to the missile programs was obvious: if the Pentagon started pumping more money into missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, LeMay’s bombers would lose importance. As it was, he was already losing money and men to the overhead reconnaissance nonsense being spearheaded by the CIA’s Richard Bissell over at Area 51.
In early 1956, the Air Force retaliated against Khrushchev’s war of words with the kind of response General Curtis LeMay knew best: threat, intimidation, and force. LeMay scrambled nearly a thousand B47 bombers in a simulated attack on Russia using bomber planes that were capable of carrying nuclear bombs. Air Force pilots took off from air bases in Alaska and Greenland, charged over the Arctic, and flew to the very edge of Soviet borders before U-turning and racing home. This must have been a terrifying experience for the Soviets, who had no idea that LeMay’s bombers were planning on turning around. Further provoking them, on March 21, 1956, LeMay’s bomber pilots began flying top secret missions as part of Operation Home Run, classified until 2001. From Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, LeMay sent modified versions of America’s fastest bomber, the B-47, over the Arctic Circle and into Russia’s Siberian tundra to spy. The purpose was to probe for electronic intelligence, or ELINT, seeing how Soviet radar worked by forcing Soviet radars to turn on. Once the Soviets started tracking LeMay’s bombers, technicians gathered the ELINT to decipher back home. Asked later about these dangerous provocations, LeMay remarked, “With a bit more luck, we could have started World War III.”
Sam Pizzo worked as a navigator during the SAC espionage operation, planning flights over nuclear facilities, missile sites, naval installations, and radar sites. The 156 missions took place from March 21 to May 10, 1956, where the Russian landscape meets the Arctic Ocean, which made for total darkness twenty-four hours a day. The temperature outside varied between −35 degrees and −70 degrees Fahrenheit. Sam Pizzo recalls those Cold War missions: “Ambarchik, Tiksi, Novaya Zemlya, these were the territories we covered. This was the real deal. Our missions were not twelve miles off the coastline, to study electromagnetic wave propagation [as was reported]. We went in.” An undetermined number of pilots were shot down. Several were believed to have survived their bailouts, only to be taken prisoner and thrown into the Russian gulags. Everyone knew that suffering a gulag imprisonment was a fate worse than death. The missions were so top secret, Pizzo explained, that very few people at Thule had any idea where the pilots were flying. As a navigator, Pizzo was among the elite group who charted the pilots’ paths. Flying over the Arctic required a very specific expertise in navigation, a different skill set than was used anywhere else on the globe. At the top of the world, the magnetic field fluctuates radically, which means compasses simply do not work. Instead, navigators like Sam Pizzo used celestial shots of the North Star and drew maps accordingly. This was a skill that Pizzo would later use when he was recruited for work at Area 51.
As Operation Home Run continued, the CIA worried that General LeMay’s aggressive missions were a national security threat. “Soviet leaders may have become convinced that the U.S. actually has intentions of military aggression in the near future,” a nervous CIA panel warned the president in the winter of 1956. And President Eisenhower’s science advisers told him that flying U-2s over Russia could not wait. The Agency’s Russian nuclear weapons expert Herbert Miller, the man who accompanied Bissell on that first scouting trip to Area 51, explained that no other program “can so quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and so little cost.”
The CIA planned to have the first U-2 flights photograph the facilities where the Agency believed Russia was building its bombers, missiles, nuclear warheads, and surface-to-air missiles. And the U-2 pilots would seek out the location of the elusive facility called NII-88. Having completed pilot training at Area 51, four pilot detachments were ready to go, fully prepared to penetrate deep into denied Soviet territory. There, they would be able to photograph half of the Soviet Union’s 6.5-million-square-mile landmass. But it had to happen fast.
President Eisenhower was gravely concerned. “I fear if one of these planes gets shot down [we run] the risk of starting a nuclear war,” he wrote in his White House journal. Richard Bissell promised the president that there was no chance of shooting down the U-2 and very little chance of tracking it. Besides, if the U-2 did get shot down, Bissell said, it would most likely disintegrate on impact with the ground, killing the pilot and destroying the airplane.
The Moscow air show on June 24, 1956, foreshadowed the breaking of promises made to the president. In a show of ceremony, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev invited air force generals from twenty-eight foreign delegations, including General Nathan Twining, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff. For all the fanfare and bravado of the bombers and fighter jets sweeping across the skies, the more significant event occurred a few hours later, at a wooden picnic table in Gorky Park. There, General Twining and the leaders of the British and French delegations sat and listened to Khrushchev deliver a long-winded speech. Partway through, the Soviet premier raised his vodka glass and made a toast “in defense of peace.” Years later, retired Russian colonel Alexander Orlov related what happened next: “In the midst of his toast [Khrushchev] turned to General Twining and said, ‘Today we showed you our aircraft. But would you like a look at our missiles?’”
Shocked by the offer, General Twining said, “Yes.” Khrushchev shot back, “First show us your aircraft and stop sending intruders into our airspace.” Khrushchev was referring to the bombers sent over the Arctic Circle by General LeMay. “We will shoot down uninvited guests. We will get all of your [airplanes]. They are flying coffins!”
It was a terribly awkward moment underscored by the mercurial Soviet leader’s abrupt shift in tone, from applauding peace to talking about shooting down American airplanes. General Twining had been set up for a confrontation. Things got worse when Khrushchev looked around the picnic table for reactions and saw a U.S. military attachй pouring his
drink under a bush. “Here I am speaking about peace and friendship, but what does your military attachй do?” Khrushchev shouted at Ambassador Charles Bohlen, then demanded that the attachй drink a penalty toast. Once the man had swallowed his vodka, he got up and quickly left the picnic. If Khrushchev thought the Americans were trying to insult him in the park, he would be even more enraged two weeks later when he learned the CIA had sent a U-2 directly over the Kremlin to take photographs of the house in which Nikita Khrushchev slept.
Area 51 had a Washington, DC, complement for the U-2 program, an office on the fifth floor of an unmarked CIA facility at 1717 H Street. This served as the command center for Project Aquatone’s first, secret missions over the Soviet Union. It was from this clandestine facility that, shortly before midnight on July 3, 1956, Richard Bissell made a historic telephone call over a secure line. He reached the U-2’s secret base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, and gave the commander the authorization to proceed. There, in a nearby room, Hervey Stockman sat breathing pure oxygen from a ventilator as a flight surgeon monitored the levels of nitrogen in his blood. Outside the door, CIA men armed with machine guns stood guard. Given the time difference, where Stockman was sitting it was already the following morning, making it the anniversary of America’s independence. The nation was 180 years old. If all went well, Stockman was about to become the first pilot to penetrate the Iron Curtain’s airspace. He would fly all the way to Leningrad, around the coast, and back down, putting him forever in the record books as the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2.
Stockman and his U-2 took off from Wiesbaden a little after 6:00 a.m., the pilot and his airplane moving skyward in a dramatic incline. The U-2 rose at a remarkable fifteen thousand feet a minute, so steep a gradient that for airmen on the ground who were unfamiliar with the airplane, it must have looked like Stockman was about to pitch back and stall. Halfway to altitude, Stockman briefly let the fuselage even out, allowing his body fluids and the fluids in the fuel tanks to expand and adjust. Once, a U-2 pilot had ascended too quickly, and his fuel tanks exploded. The pilot was killed. After a few additional minutes of ascent, Stockman arrived at cruising altitude. The sky above him was black and he could see stars. Below him, the Earth curved. It would be an eight-and-a-half-hour journey without a sip of water or a bite of food. In the U-2’s camera bay, Stockman transported a five-hundred-pound Hycon camera fitted with the most advanced photo lenses ever devised in America. To prove how accurate the camera was, Bissell had sent a U-2 from Groom Lake on a flight over President Eisenhower’s Pennsylvania farm. From thirteen and a half miles up, the U-2’s cameras were able to take clear photographs of Eisenhower’s cows as they drank water from troughs.
After several hours, Stockman approached Russia’s submarine city. “I was supposed to turn the cameras on when I reached Leningrad,” Stockman recalls. “I was to fly along photographing the naval installations there as well as a couple of airfields that were all part of what we had been led to believe might hold long-range Soviet bombers.” But there were no long-range bombers to be found. The famous bomber gap, it turned out, was false. What Stockman filmed on the first overflight into Russia provided the CIA with critical facts on an issue that had previously been the subject of contentious debate. Russian weapons expert Herbert Miller wrote a triumphant memo to Eisenhower after the film in Stockman’s camera was interpreted, explaining just how many “new discoveries have come to light.” Stockman’s flight provided the Agency with four hundred thousand square miles of coverage. “Many new airfields previously unknown, industrial complexes of a size heretofore unsuspected were revealed… Fighter aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows as if for formal inspection on parade.” What astonished Miller was just how current the information was. “We know that the guns in the anti-aircraft batteries sighted were in a horizontal position rather than pointed upwards and ‘on the ready.’ We know that some harvests were being brought in, and that the small truck gardens were being worked.” They denoted “real intentions, objectives and qualities of the Soviet Union.” Hervey Stockman explains it this way: “What it portrayed was that as a people they were not all geared up to go to war. They were leading a normal Russian life, so that behind this ‘Iron Curtain’ there wasn’t all this beating of drums and movement of tanks and everything that was envisioned. They were going about their way over there.”
Stockman’s photos made the CIA ecstatic and justified the entire U-2 program, as a flurry of top secret memos dated July 17, 1956, revealed. “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union, on July 4, 1956,” Miller wrote. But as beneficial as Stockman’s flight was for the CIA, the results proved disastrous for President Eisenhower’s relationship with Nikita Khrushchev. Despite Bissell’s assurances to the contrary, the U-2s were tracked by the Soviets’ air-defense warning systems from the moment they hit the radar screens. Once the film from Stockman’s flight was developed, CIA photo interpreters determined that the Soviets had attempted more than twenty interceptions of Stockman’s mission. “MiG-17 and MiG-19 fighters were photographed desperately trying to reach the U-2, only to have to fall back to an altitude where the air was dense enough for them to restart their flamed-out, oxygen-starved engines,” photo interpreter Dino Brugioni told Air and Space magazine after the U-2 program was declassified, in 1998.
When Khrushchev learned the Americans had betrayed him, he was furious. After the picnic at Gorky Park, Khrushchev had agreed to spend the Fourth of July at Spaso House, the official residence of Ambassador Charles Bohlen, located just down the street from the Kremlin. When Khrushchev learned that while he had been celebrating the American Independence Day with the country’s ambassador, a U-2 had been soaring over Russia, he was humiliated. “The Americans [are] chortling over our impotence,” Khrushchev told his son, Sergei, a twenty-one-year-old aspiring missile designer. But in addition to the personal affront they caused Khrushchev, the U-2 overflights greatly embarrassed the Soviet Union’s military machine. Soviet MiG fighter jets couldn’t get a shot anywhere near Hervey Stockman’s U-2, which flew miles above the MiG performance ceiling, just as Colonel Leghorn had predicted. In 1956, the land-based Soviet surface-to-air missiles could not get a shot up high enough to knock the airplane out of the sky. America’s spy plane had flown over Russia with impunity. And if that fact became known, the Soviet Union would look weak.
Weighing the options — embarrass his own military, embarrass the American president, or say nothing — Khrushchev chose to remain silent, at least as far as the international press was concerned. As a result, the first U-2 overflights were kept secret between the two governments. But they seriously strained already tenuous relations. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to stop all overflights inside the Soviet Union until further notice. Even worse, the president told Richard Bissell that he had “lost enthusiasm” for the CIA’s aerial espionage program.
Back at Area 51, Bissell had a lot to worry about. Concerned that his U-2 program was going to be canceled by the president, he hired a team to analyze the probability of a Soviet shoot-down of the U-2. The news was grim: the Soviets were advancing their surface-to-air missile technology so rapidly that in all likelihood, within eighteen months they would be able to get their SA-2 missile up to seventy thousand feet. Bissell decided that the only way to keep his program aloft was to hide the U-2 from Soviet radar by inventing some kind of radar-absorbing paint. Bissell shared his idea with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, who told him that painting the U-2 was a bad idea. Paint was heavy, and the U2 flew so high because of how light it was, Johnson explained. The weight that paint would add to the aircraft would result in a loss of fifteen hundred feet of altitude. Bissell didn’t want to hear that. So he went to the president’s scientific adviser James Killian and asked him to put together a group of scientists who could make the CIA some radar-absorbing paint. These scientists, who worked out of Harvard University an
d MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and were called the Boston Group, told Bissell they could get him what he wanted. It was a radical idea that had never been tested before. The scientists and engineers at MIT prided themselves on meeting challenges that other scientists believed were impossible.
There was a second serious problem facing Richard Bissell in the summer of 1956 and that was General LeMay. Impressed with the spy plane’s performance, LeMay was now angling for control of the airplane. Under a program called Project Dragon Lady, LeMay ordered a fleet of thirty-one U-2s specifically for the Air Force. To keep the program secret from Congress, the Air Force transferred money over to the CIA, which meant that while working to head off LeMay’s usurpation, Bissell simultaneously had to act as the go-between between the Air Force and Lockheed for the slightly modified U-2s. With these new Air Force airplanes came a demand for more “drivers,” which meant the arrival of two new groups of pilots at Area 51—those picked for CIA missions and others chosen for Air Force ones. Among those selected for Air Force missions was Anthony “Tony” Bevacqua.
“I may have been the only U-2 pilot at Area 51 who never made a model airplane as a kid,” Bevacqua recalls. Instead, he had spent all his time devouring books. His obsessive reading of paperbacks, usually those by Zane Grey or Erle Gardner, helped offset his fear that he be unable to read English, like his father. The son of Sicilian immigrants, Bevacqua was the youngest pilot to fly the U-2 at Groom Lake, which he did in the winter of 1957 at the age of twenty-four. But before the handsome, vibrant Bevacqua wound up at the CIA’s secret base, he was the roommate of another dashing young pilot whose name would soon become known around the world.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 10