Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  Before the two fighter pilots arrived at Area 51 to fly the U-2, Bevacqua and Francis Gary Powers were a couple of type A pilots with the 508th Strategic Fighter Wing at Turner Air Force Base in Georgia. They lived in a rented four-bedroom house situated two miles from the main gate. Both had been flying F-84 fighter jets for almost two years when one day Powers, whom everybody called Frank, just up and disappeared. “There were rumors that Frank had gone off on some kind of secret program,” Bevacqua says, “but this was just talk, not something you could really sink your teeth into.” A few months later Bevacqua was approached by a squadron leader and asked if he wanted to volunteer for “an interesting flight program.”

  “About what?” Bevacqua asked. The recruiter said he could not say, only that it would involve flying and that Bevacqua would have to leave the Air Force but could later return. The program, he was told, needed “a volunteer.” It was important, the recruiter said, a mysterious edge to his voice. Bevacqua signed on.

  He was flown to the Berger Brothers Company, located in a nondescript building in New Haven, Connecticut, not far from Yale University, that was filled with seamstresses making girdles and bras. What was he doing in there? he wondered. He was led through the workstations and into a back room. The unlikely supplier had a perfect cover for CIA-contract work: making ladies’ underwear. In reality, the company, later renamed the David Clark Company, had already proven itself thousands of times over. During World War II, it made parachutes for U.S. Army Air Forces and Navy pilots.

  In a clandestine back room, behind the brassiere assembly lines, Tony Bevacqua was fitted for a high-altitude flight suit specifically tailored for his physique. For the duration of his contract, Bevacqua would be required to maintain his weight within ounces. An ill-fitting suit could mean death for a pilot and the inevitable loss of an airplane. Bevacqua understood the concept of need-to-know and was aware that it prohibited him from asking any questions about what the suit was for. But he knew enough about partial-pressure suits to realize that whatever aircraft he was going to be piloting was going to be flying very high indeed.

  His next stop was Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for a battery of physical and psychological procedures. There, Bevacqua underwent a series of endurance tests. Some were familiar but others he found thought-provokingly strange. All U-2 pilots were put into the highaltitude chamber to simulate the experience of sitting in a cockpit in a flight suit that your life depended on. At 63,000 feet, blood boils because there is not enough pressure to sustain oxygen in the bloodstream. There was another test called the Furnace in which U-2 pilots were left in a room that was significantly hotter than a hot sauna. Bevacqua was spared that one but he did have liquids pumped into his every orifice, first water and then some kind of mineral oil. Many U2 pilots were hooked up to odd machines and others were given electroshock. Bevacqua got what he called the dreaded corpse test instead. He recalled how he “was put in a small space, my arms crossed over my chest like I was in a casket at a morgue. It was absolutely impossible for me to move my extremities. I was told to hyperventilate for as long as I could.”

  Bevacqua surmised that he would be chosen for the prestigious, top secret assignment only if he was able to pass every test. He wanted the job badly and was entirely willing to push himself physically to the edge. “I came within a breath of passing out during the corpse test,” he explains. “After they said I could breathe, the attendants then pulled at my arms and legs but there was no way they could move or bend my extremities. As I breathed oxygen back into my body my cheeks loosened and then the rest of my body gradually returned to normal.” After a few minutes Bevacqua’s vital signs stabilized. “Apparently, this test was to see if I would have a seizure,” he explains.

  The next test was a freezing experiment. “I was asked to put my arms in a bucket of ice for as long as I could stand it. I don’t remember what happened exactly. Probably good that I don’t. I remember that I felt like a guinea pig.” Unknown to Bevacqua or the rest of America, the division of the aviation medicine school at Wright-Patterson that was responsible for testing the U-2 pilots was run by Project Paperclip doctors, doctors with controversial histories. The Air Force had been willing to turn a blind eye to the scientists’ past work in order to get where it wanted to go in the future, which was the upper atmosphere and outer space. The work that these Paperclip doctors had done during the war would later become a shameful stain on the Air Force record.

  In 1980, journalist Linda Hunt published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealing publicly for the first time that several of the nation’s leading German American aerospace doctors had previously worked at Nazi concentration camps. There, they had obtained aviation medicine data by conducting barbaric experiments on thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and other people considered disposable. Many newspaper articles and medical papers followed, documenting how Project Paperclip came to be and raising important questions about how much the government had known about the scientists’ sordid pasts. The issues were well reported but often ignored by the public because of the heinous subject matter involved. The idea that the American military and its intelligence agents would overlook war crimes and crimes against humanity in the name of advancing American science was, and continues to be, an odious one. It is likely that this is the reason why the federal government has never fully declassified the Operation Paperclip files. In 1999, a government panel released 126,000 pages of previously classified documents on former German Paperclips, but the panel also revealed that there were over six hundred million still-classified pages waiting “for review.” No significant release has occured since.

  In March of 1957, Bevacqua finally passed his tests and arrived at Area 51, where the living conditions had improved. The canvas tents had been upgraded to Quonset huts. There were working showers. The mess hall had been expanded, and someone had built a makeshift bar. But the protocols for flying were as undeveloped as they’d been when Ray Goudey and others were first figuring out how to get the U-2 to fly high. The training that Tony Bevacqua experienced at Area 51 was unlike anything he had ever seen on an Air Force base. The CIA method to train pilots on the U-2 was as radical and as unorthodox as an Air Force pilot could imagine. At Turner Air Force Base, Bevacqua had learned to fly F-84s the Air Force way. That meant first diligently studying the aircraft manuals, then practicing in a flight simulator, then practicing in a trainer, and finally going up in the airplane with an instructor. At Area 51, there was no manual for the U2, no flight simulator, no trainer, and no instructor. “The original U-2s had only one seat and one engine, which meant the CIA instructor pilot gave you a lesson with your feet on the ground,” Bevacqua explains. Flying this strange and secret spy plane came without a morsel of bureaucracy, never mind basic rules, making the overall experience profound. “You were basically given a talk by an instructor pilot. Then you were given a piece of cardboard with a checklist on the front side, and fuel and oxygen graphs on the back. Then it was time to fly. And that was that.”

  Coupled with the secrecy protocols, the experience for pilots at Area 51 verged on sublime. No one but his old roommate from Turner AFB, Francis Gary Powers, knew who Tony Bevacqua really was. At Area 51 he went by only a pilot number and his first name. His family members had no idea where he was, nor would they find out about his secret missions for decades to come. As for future assignments, very few people were told where Air Force pilots were headed in the U-2— including the pilots themselves. What everyone knew was that pilots who got shot down over enemy territory were almost always tortured for information. This meant that the less you knew as a pilot, the better it was for everyone involved.

  Bevacqua couldn’t wait for an assignment. For this small group of pilots — only 25 percent of candidates passed the physical tests — a U2 mission carried with it a sacred sense of national pride. Tony Bevacqua was living the American dream and protecting it at the same time. He was not someone who ever forgot for a moment how
lucky he was. “Always make the most of your opportunities,” Bevacqua’s Italian-speaking father had told him as a child. Tony Bevacqua had done just that. He couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. He was one of America’s most important spy plane pilots. He was helping to save the free world.

  By the winter of 1957, the Boston Group had completed what Richard Bissell wanted in radar-absorbing paint. Bissell received the paint and gave it to Lockheed engineers at Area 51. He asked them to coat the fuselage of several U-2s with it, which they did. Bissell understood that Kelly Johnson disapproved of the radar-absorbing-paint program, which he said made his U-2s “dirty birds.” But Bissell was under too much presidential pressure to deal with the watchful eye of Kelly Johnson at this point. To measure how the dirty birds performed against radar, Bissell hired a different company to measure the radar returns, the defense contractor EG&G.

  EG&G is an enigma in its own right. Beginning in 1947, EG&G was the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of. In many ways, this still remains the case in 2011. The early anonymity was intended. It was cultivated to help make secretkeeping easier. Originally called Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, EG&G had once been a small engineering company run by three MIT professors. In 1927, Dr. Harold “Doc” Edgerton invented stop-motion photography, which utilized another of his patented inventions, the strobe light. Edgerton’s famous stop-motion photographs include one of a bullet passing though an apple, a drop of water splashing on a countertop, and a hummingbird frozen in flight. Edgerton was fond of saying that his career began because he wanted to make time stand still. EG&G got its first known set of defense contracts during World War II, when Doc Edgerton’s strobe lights and photographer’s flashbulb were used to light up the ground during nighttime aerial reconnaissance missions, rendering the age-old flare obsolete. Thanks to Doc Edgerton, fliers like Colonel Richard Leghorn were able to photograph Normandy before D-day.

  Kenneth J. Germeshausen worked in high-energy pulse theory at MIT. He held more than fifty patents, including a number in radar. Together with the company’s third partner, Herbert Grier, Germeshausen developed the firing system for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs. The Manhattan Project contracts came to the three professors because of their affiliation with Vannevar Bush, the former dean of engineering at MIT and later the man in charge of the Manhattan Project.

  In addition to the firing systems on the nuclear bombs, which were based on a simple signal-switching relay system called the DN-11 relay, EG&G handled the defense contract to take millions of stopmotion photographs of nuclear bomb explosions in the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site. It was from these photographs, and from these photographs only, that EG&G scientists could determine for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense the exact yield, or power, of an exploded nuclear bomb. For decades a great majority of the most highly classified engineering jobs related to nuclear weapons testing went to EG&G. In the 1960s, when special engineering teams were needed to clean up deadly radioactive waste that was the result of these nuclear tests, the contracts went to EG&G as well. They were trusted implicitly, and EG&G’s operations were quintessential black. They also had other businesses, such as radar testing. In the early 1950s, EG&G ran a radar-testing facility approximately thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. Very little information is known about that period or about what EG&G was working on, as the data remains classified in EG&G’s unique Restricted Data files. At Bissell’s behest, in 1957 EG&G agreed to set up a radar range on the outskirts of Area 51 to measure radar returns for the dirty-bird project. In a CIA monograph about the U-2, declassified in 1998, the EG&G tracking station just outside Groom Lake is alleged to be “little more than a series of radar sets and a trailer containing instrumentation” where engineers could record data and analyze results. And yet the exact location of this “small testing facility” has been redacted from the otherwise declassified U-2 record. Why? The key term is EG&G. Giving away too much information about EG&G could inadvertently open a can of worms. No one but an elite has a need-to-know where any exterior EG&G facilities are located at Area 51—specifically, whether they are located outside the blueprint of the base.

  And so, in April of 1957, with EG&G radar specialists tracking his aircraft’s radar returns, Lockheed test pilot Robert Sieker took one of the newly painted U-2s to the skies over Groom Lake. His orders were to see how high he could get the dirty bird to climb. Sieker took off from Area 51 and flew for almost ninety miles without incident when suddenly, in a valley near Pioche, the Boston Group’s paint caused the airplane to overheat, spin out of control, and crash. Sieker was able to eject but was killed when a piece of the spinning aircraft hit him in the head. Kelly Johnson was right. It was a bad idea to try to retrofit the U2. CIA search teams took four days to locate Sieker’s body and the wreckage of the plane. The crash had attracted the watchful eye of the press, and the U-2’s cover story, that it was a weather research plane, wore thin. Halfway across the country, a headline at the Chicago Daily Tribune read “Secrecy Veils High-Altitude Research Jet; Lockheed U2 Called Super Snooper.”

  A pilot was dead, and the camouflage paint had made the U-2 more dangerous, not more stealthy. Bissell knew he needed to act fast. He was losing control of the U-2 spy plane program and everything he had created at Area 51. His next idea, part genius and part hubris, was to petition the president for an entirely new spy plane. The CIA needed a better, faster, more technologically advanced aircraft that would break scientific barriers and trick Soviet radars into thinking it wasn’t there. This new spy plane Bissell had in mind would fly higher than ninety thousand feet and have stealth features built in from pencil to plane. Bissell was taking a major gamble with his billiondollar request. Bringing an entirely new black budget spy plane program to the president’s attention at a time when the president was upset with the results of the previous work done at Area 51 was either madness or brilliance, depending on one’s point of view. But just as Richard Bissell began presenting plans for his radical and ambitious new project to the president, a national security crisis overwhelmed the country. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched the world’s first satellite, a 184-pound silver orb called Sputnik 1. This was the secret that Sergei Korolev had been working on at Area 51’s Communist doppelgдnger, NII-88.

  At first, the White House tried to downplay the fact that the Soviets had beat the Americans into space. Eisenhower, at his country home in Pennsylvania for the weekend, didn’t immediately comment on the event. But the following morning, the New York Times ran a headline of half-inch-high capital letters across all six columns, a spot historically reserved for the declarations of war.

  SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 MPH; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.

  A satellite launch meant the Russians now had a rocket with enough propulsion and guidance to hit a target anywhere in the world. So much for the Paperclips Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff being the most competent rocket scientists in the world. “As it beeped in the sky, Sputnik 1 created a crisis of confidence that swept the country like a windblown forest fire,” Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian later recalled. British reporters at the Guardian warned, “We must be prepared to be told [by Russia] what the other side of the moon looks like.” French journalists homed in on America’s “disillusion and bitter[ness]” at the crushing space-race defeat. The French underscored America’s scientific shame. “The Americans have little experience with humiliation in the technical domain,” read the article in Le Figaro. Because members of the public had no idea about the CIA’s U-2 spy plane program, they believed that with Sputnik, the Russians could now learn all of America’s secrets, while America remained in the dark about theirs. For twenty-one days, Sputnik circled the Earth at a speed of 18,000 mph until its radio signal finally faded and died.

  In deciding the best course of action, the president turned back to his scie
nce advisers. In the month following Sputnik, a new position was created for James Killian — special assistant to the president for science and technology — and for the next two years Killian would meet with the president almost every day. This became a defining moment for Richard Bissell. For as depressing as his Area 51 prospects had seemed only a month before, the news of Sputnik was, ironically for the CIA, a harbinger of good news. James Killian adored Richard Bissell; they’d been friends for over a decade. Immediately after the Russians launched Sputnik, Killian and Bissell found themselves working closely together again. Only this time, they weren’t teaching economics to university students. The two men would work hand in glove to launch America’s most formidable top secret billion-dollar spy plane, to be built and test-flown at Area 51. Advancing science and technology for military purposes was now at the very top of the president’s list of priorities. With James Killian on his side, Bissell inadvertently found himself in the extraordinary position of getting almost whatever he wanted from the president of the United States. And as long as what Richard Bissell built at Area 51 could humiliate the Russians and show them who was boss, this included a bottomless budget, infinite manpower, total secrecy, and ultimate control.

  Chapter Six: Atomic Accidents

  Richard Bissell once said that setting up Area 51 inside a nuclear testing facility kept the curiosity-seekers at bay. With Operation Plumbbob, a 1957 atomic test series that involved thirty consecutive nuclear explosions, he got more than he bargained for. With the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. In the twenty-first century, this kind of weapon would be referred to as a dirty bomb.