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

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.

Every Monday Ray Goudey would fly from Burbank to Groom Lake with Lockheed’s gung-ho young mechanic Bob Murphy beside him in the passenger seat. All week, Murphy worked on the U-2’s engine while Goudey worked with the other test pilots to achieve height. The pilots wore specially designed partial-pressure suits, tight like wet suits, with most of the tubing on the outside; it took two flight surgeons to get a pilot into his suit. Pre-breathing pure oxygen was mandatory and took two full hours, which made for a lot of time in a recliner. The process removed nitrogen from the pilot’s bloodstream and reduced the risk of decompression sickness at high altitude.

In those early days at Area 51, history was being laid down and records were being set. “I was the first guy to go up above sixty-five thousand feet, but I wasn’t supposed to be,” Goudey recalls. “Bob Mayte was scheduled to do the first high-altitude flight but he had a problem with his ears. So I went instead.” Which is how Goudey ended up becoming the first pilot to ever reach that altitude and fly there for a sustained amount of time — a remarkable fact noted in the Lockheed record books and yet kept from the rest of the world until 1998, when the U-2 program was finally declassified. Goudey explains what the view was like at sixty-five thousand feet: “From where I was up above Nevada I could see the Pacific Ocean, which was three hundred miles away.”

Ray Goudey was also the world’s first test pilot to experience engine failure at sixty-four thousand feet, a potentially catastrophic event because the delicate U-2 is a single-engine airplane: if a U-2 loses one engine, it has lost all of them. In Goudey’s case, he glided down four thousand feet and got the engine to restart by using a tactic called windmilling. “Then it quit again,” Goudey explains. He let the plane fall another thirty thousand feet, more than five miles. Down in lower air, Goudey was able to get the engine to restart — and to stay started. Once Goudey was on the ground, it was Bob Murphy’s job to troubleshoot what had happened on the engine. Of course, in 1955, no mechanic in the world had any experience solving a combustion problem on an engine that had quit unexpectedly at sixty-four thousand feet.

Bob Murphy was a twenty-five-year-old flight-test mechanic whose can-do attitude and ability to troubleshoot just about any problem on an aircraft engine meant he was promoted to engine mechanic supervisor the following winter, in 1956. “The romance of the job was the handson element of things,” Murphy recalls of those early days at Groom Lake. “There was absolutely no government meddling, which enabled us to get the job done.” There was only one man with any kind of serious oversight at Area 51 and that was Richard Bissell, or Mr. B., as he was known to the men. Most of Bissell’s work involved getting Area 51 to run like an organization or, as he put it, “dealing with the policy matters involved in producing this radically new aircraft.” Shuttling back and forth between Washington and Area 51, Bissell seemed to enjoy the base he ruled over. “He moved around the facility somewhat mysteriously,” Bob Murphy recalls. “He would appear briefly out on the dry lake bed to say hi to the pilots and mechanics and watch the U-2 fly,” Murphy remembers. “Mr. B. always expressed enthusiasm for what we were doing and then he’d disappear again in some unmarked airplane.” But for Murphy, the concern was rarely the Customer, which was Lockheed’s code name for the CIA. Murphy was too busy working with test pilots, often finding himself in charge of overseeing two or three U-2 flights in a single day. “My job was to help the pilots to get the aircraft instruments checked out, get the plane to fly to seventy thousand feet, get it to fly for nine and ten hours straight, and then get it to start taking pictures. There was no shortage of work. We loved it and it’s what we did day after day.”

The job of the Lockheed test pilots was to get the U-2 ready as fast as possible so they could turn it over to the CIA’s instructor pilot Hank Meierdierck, who would then teach the CIA mission pilots, recruited from Air Force bases around the country, how to fly the airplane. Bissell’s ambitious plan was to overfly the Soviet Union inside of a year. The Communist advances in hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles had the CIA seriously concerned, as did the hastily hushed Soviet overflight of — and crash in — the West. Human intelligence, or HUMINT, behind the Iron Curtain was at an all-time low. The great news for the Agency was that there was no such thing as an Iron Ceiling. Overhead was what was going to keep America safe. The U-2 was the Agency’s best chance to get hard intelligence on the Soviet Union, considering that one photograph could provide the Agency with as much information as approximately ten thousand spies on the ground.

President Eisenhower put the CIA in charge of the overhead reconnaissance because, as he later wrote, the aerial reconnaissance program needed to be handled in an “unconventional way.” What that meant was that President Eisenhower wanted the program to be black, or hidden from Congress and from everyone but a select few who needed to know about it. He also wanted the U-2 to be piloted by a man who didn’t wear a uniform. Before the U-2, there was no precedent for one nation to regularly spy on another nation from overhead during peacetime. The president’s fear was that if a U-2 mission was exposed, it would be interpreted by the Soviets, and perhaps by the whole world, as an overtly hostile act. At least if the plane had a CIA pilot, the president could deny the U.S. military was involved.

Despite his apparent elusiveness, Mr. B. maintained absolute control of all things that were going on at Area 51. Remarkably, he had been able to set up the remote desert facility as a stand-alone organization; he did this by persuading President Eisenhower to remove the U-2 program from the CIA’s own organizational chart. “The entire project became the most compartmented and self-contained activity within the agency,” Bissell wrote of his sovereign territory at Groom Lake. “I worked behind a barrier of secrecy that protected my decision making from interference.” The Development Project Staff, which was the bland-sounding code name for the secret U-2 operation, was the only division of the CIA that had its own communications office. Bissell saw government overseers as unnecessary meddlers and told colleagues that Congress and its committees simply got in the way of getting done what needed to be done. In this way, Bissell was remarkably effective with his program at Area 51. Each month he summed up activities on the secret base in a five-page brief for the president. But Bissell’s long leash, and the extreme power he wielded over the nation’s first spy plane program, earned him enmity from a top general whose wrath was historically a dangerous thing to incur. That was General Curtis LeMay.

While the CIA was in charge of Project Aquatone as a whole, U-2 operations were to be a collaborative effort among the CIA, the Air Force, and Lockheed Corporation. Lockheed built the airplane and provided the first test pilots as well as the program mechanics. The Air Force was in charge of support operations. It was there to provide everything the CIA needed, from chase planes to tire changers. But Richard Bissell exercised his power early on, making Lockheed, not the Air Force, his original Project Aquatone partner. Bissell worked hand in hand with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson to get the U-2 aloft with as little Air Force involvement as possible. In fact, the Air Force was almost entirely left out of the early planning stages. The first U-2 was built by Lockheed and flight-tested at Groom Lake by Lockheed test pilots before the commander of the Air Force research and development office had ever heard of an airplane called the U-2 or a test-flight facility called Area 51. This overt slight ticked off many top generals, a number of whom developed grudges against the CIA. And yet, by the end of 1955, dozens of active-duty Air Force personnel had been assigned to the U-2 operation. Air Force air expertise was absolutely necessary now that pilot training had begun and multiple U2s were flying multiple practice missions every day, as the CIA readied Project Aquatone for assignments overseas. Richard Bissell, not Curtis LeMay, was now the de facto base commander of a whole lot of Air Force officers and enlisted men. LeMay was, understandably, enraged.

In early autumn of 1955, a conflict erupted between the two men, and President Eisenhower was forced to intervene. LeMay had been raising questions about why he wasn’t in charge of the program. It was now up to the president to decide who was officially in charge of Area 51 and the U-2. Bissell desperately wanted to reign over the prestigious program. “It was a glamorous and high-priority endeavor endorsed not only by the president but by a lot of very important scientific people,” Bissell wrote in his memoirs decades later. LeMay argued that the Air Force should be in charge of all programs involving airplanes, which was ironic, given the fact that LeMay had disliked the U-2 program from the get-go. In hindsight it seems as if LeMay wanted the U-2 program simply because he wanted the control.

Ultimately, the president’s decision came to rest on one significant quality that the CIA possessed and the Air Force did not: plausible deniability. With the CIA in charge, if a U-2 were to get shot down, the government could claim the spy plane program didn’t exist. Air Force fliers flew in uniform, but U-2 pilots working for the CIA would wear civilian garb. The cover story for such a mission would be weatherrelated research; at least, that was the plan. And so, in late October of 1955, the dispute was settled by President Eisenhower. He directed Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining to give the CIA control over the spy plane program and Area 51. The job of the Air Force, Eisenhower said, was to offer all necessary operational support to keep the program aloft.

One of the Air Force’s designated jobs was to handle flights to and from Area 51. Because the project was so secret, Bissell did not want personnel driving in and out of the base or living in Las Vegas. As far as Bissell was concerned, men cleared on the project were far more likely to draw attention to themselves driving to and from Sin City than they would be if they lived out of town and came in and out by airplane. Locals had friends in the area, whereas out-of-towners did not. This meant that each day, a C-54 transport plane shuttled workers from Lockheed’s airport facility in Burbank, California, to Area 51 and back. Ray Goudey and Bob Murphy had enjoyed four months of Goudey’s flying the pair back and forth between Burbank and the Ranch. Now they would have to commute on the Air Force’s C-54 like everyone else.

Bob Murphy was well versed in the mechanics of the C-54 aircraft. He’d been an engineer on that aircraft in Germany during the Berlin airlift of 1948–1949, the first major international crisis of the Cold War. From a military base in Wiesbaden, Murphy serviced the C-54s that ferried coal and other supplies into Berlin. Flying back and forth between Burbank and the Ranch, Bob Murphy would often chat with George Pappas, the experienced Air Force classified-missions pilot who flew the shuttle service. Pappas and Murphy spent hours talking about what an interesting aircraft the C-54 was.

On the night of November 16, 1955, Pappas flew Murphy, Ray Goudey, and another Lockheed pilot named Robert Sieker from the Ranch to Burbank so the men could attend a Lockheed party at the Big Oaks Lodge in Bouquet Canyon. For Bob Murphy, it would be a onenight stay; he was scheduled for the early-morning flight back with Pappas’s C-54 Air Force shuttle the following day. But Murphy drank too much at the party and overslept. As Bob Murphy was sleeping through his alarm clock, eleven men assigned to Richard Bissell’s Project Aquatone walked across the tarmac at the Burbank airport and boarded the C-54 transport plane where Pappas, his copilot Paul E. Winham, and a flight attendant named Guy R. Fasolas prepared to shuttle everyone back to Area 51. The manifest listed their destination as “Watertown airstrip.” A little over an hour after takeoff, Pappas broke his required radio silence and called out for assistance with his position in the air. It was snowing heavily where he was, somewhere north of Las Vegas, and Pappas worried he had strayed off course.

Nearby, at Nellis Air Force Base, a staff sergeant by the name of Alfred Arneho overheard the bewildering transmission. There was no record of any flight, military or civilian, scheduled to be in his area this time of day. Arneho listened for a follow-up transmission but none came. Puzzled, Arneho made a note in a logbook. Just a few minutes later the airplane Pappas was flying crashed into the granite peak of Mount Charleston, killing everyone on board. Had Pappas been just thirty feet higher, he would have cleared the mountaintop.

Back in California, Bob Murphy awoke in a panic. He checked his alarm clock and realized that he had missed the flight back to Area 51 by three hours. Murphy was furious with himself. Getting drunk and oversleeping was completely out of character for him. He had never missed a single day of work in his four-year career at Lockheed. He’d never even been late. Murphy knew there was no sense going to the airport; the airplane would have long since departed. He got himself together and went out to find some breakfast. Bob Murphy was sitting in a restaurant listening to the radio playing behind the counter when the music was interrupted with breaking news. A C-54 transport plane had just crashed into Mount Charleston, north of Las Vegas. The newscaster said that reports were sketchy but most likely everyone on board had been killed. Murphy knew immediately that the aircraft that had crashed into Mount Charleston was the C-54 he would have been on had he not overslept.

Overwhelmed with grief and in a state of disbelief, Murphy went back to his apartment. He paced around for some time. Then he decided to locate a bar and have a drink. “As I opened the front door to my apartment, this guy from Lockheed was raising his hand to knock on it,” Murphy explains fifty-four years later. “I looked at him and he looked at me and then he turned white as a ghost. I had been listed on the CIA flight manifest as having been on that airplane. The security officer on the tarmac had marked me off as having checked in for the flight. This man from Lockheed had come to inform my next of kin that I was dead. Instead, there I was.”

Two hundred and fifty miles to the east, on top of Mount Charleston, the wreckage of the airplane still burned. Smoke from the crash was visible as far away as Henderson, ten miles south of Las Vegas. That afternoon, a CBS news team was halfway up Highway 158, headed to the crash site, when the newsmen met a military blockade. Armed officers told the news crew that a military plane had crashed on a routine mission heading to the base at Indian Springs. The road into Kyle Canyon was closed. Meanwhile, Bissell had U-2s dispatched from Area 51 to help pinpoint the exact location of the Air Force airplane — an impromptu and unorthodox first “mission” for the spy plane, triggered by tragic circumstances. But there were briefcases full of secret papers that needed to be retrieved, and the U2’s search-and-locate capabilities from high above were accurate and available. It was Hank Meierdierck, the man in charge of training CIA pilots to fly the U-2, who ultimately located the remains of the airplane.

The crash was the first of a series of Area 51-related airplane tragedies that would occur over the next decade. Airplane crashes, sensational by nature, risk operational exposure, and between crash investigators and local media, there are countless opportunities for leaks. That first airplane crash, into Mount Charleston, set a precedent for the CIA in an unexpected way. The Agency did what it always does: secured the crash site immediately and produced a cover story for the press. But an interesting turn of events unfolded, ones that were entirely beyond the CIA’s control. Hungry for a story and lacking any facts, the press put together its own, inaccurate version of events. One of the city’s leading papers, the Las Vegas Review Journal, reported that the crash was being kept secret because the men on board were most likely nuclear scientists working on a top secret new weapons project at the Nevada Test Site. Reporters stopped asking questions and the speculative story quickly became accepted as fact. The CIA would learn from this experience: it could use the public’s preconceptions as well as the media’s desire to tell a story to its own benefit. Civilians could unwittingly propagate significant disinformation on the CIA’s behalf.

In Central Intelligence Agency parlance, there are two kinds of strategic deception: cover and disinformation. Cover induces the belief that something true is something false; disinformation aims to produce the belief that something false is in fact true. In other words, cover conceals the truth while disinformation conveys false information.

When the CIA disseminates false information, it is always intended to mislead. When the press disseminates false information that helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles. The truth about the crash at Mount Charleston, the single biggest loss of life for the U-2 program, would remain hidden from the public until the CIA acknowledged the plane crash in 2002. Until then, even the families of the men in the airplane had no idea that their loved ones had been working on a top secret CIA program when they died.

As a result of the crash, the Air Force lost its job as the air carrier for Area 51. For the next seventeen years, commuter flights in and out of the base would be operated by Lockheed. Starting sometime around 1972, the CIA began turning control of Area 51 over to the Air Force, and the Department of Defense took charge of commuter flights. But rather than running military aircraft to and from the clandestine facility, the DOD hired the engineering company EG&G to do it. It made sense. By 1972, EG&G had gotten so powerful and so trusted in the uppermost echelons of the government, it was even in charge of some of the security systems for Air Force One.