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

Chapter Five: The Need-to-Know

Everything that happens at Area 51, when it is happening, is classified as TS/SCI, or top secret/sensitive compartmented information — an enigmatic security policy with protocols that are also top secret. “TS/SCI classification guides are also classified,” says Cargill Hall, historian emeritus for the National Reconnaissance Office; this government espionage agency is so secret that even its name was classified top secret from the time it was founded, in 1958, to its declassification, in 1992. In 2011, most Americans still don’t know what the NRO is or what it does, or that it is a partner organization routinely involved with Area 51, because that is classified information.

Information classified TS/SCI ensures that outsiders don’t know what they don’t know and insiders know only what they have a need-toknow. Winston Churchill famously said of Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same can be said about Area 51. In the lesser-known second part of Churchill’s phrase, he said, “But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Facing a totalitarian government like the Soviet Union’s, where secrets are easily kept, Area 51 had to mirror Soviet secrecy techniques in order to safeguard the U-2. It was in America’s national interest to do so because human intelligence was failing. “We obtain little significant information from classical covert operations inside Russia,” bemoaned the president’s science advisers in a secret 1954 national security report in which they gunned for “science and technology to improve our intelligence take.”

They got what they wanted at Area 51. By using Soviet-style secrecy protocols for its own operation, and putting these tactics in place out in the Nevada desert, the CIA felt it could give its archenemy a run for its money regarding the element of surprise. Even Air Force transport crews had no idea where they were going when they went to the base. A classified-missions pilot would fly to a set of coordinates over the Mojave Desert and contact a certain UHF frequency called Sage Control. There, a voice at the other end of the radio would deliver increasingly more specific coordinates, ending with a go-ahead to land at a spot nestled inside a circle of mountains where no airstrip was supposed to exist. Only when the aircraft was a few hundred feet off the ground would runway lights flash on.

CIA pilots were kept equally in the dark. Carefully culled from Strategic Air Command bases at Turner Air Force Base, in Georgia, and Bergstrom Air Force Base, in Texas, the men had no idea who they were going to be working for when they signed on. In retrospect it seems easy to recognize the hand of the CIA, but this was not the case in late 1955 when the Agency was just seven years old. “It was like something out of fiction,” Hervey Stockman recalls. “I was given a date and told to be at Room 215 at the Austin Hotel and knock on that door at exactly 3:15. So I went down there at the appointed time and knocked on the door. An extremely good-looking guy in a beautiful tweed opened it and said, ‘Come on in, Hervey…’ That was my first introduction to the Agency.”

Hervey Stockman was one of America’s most accomplished pilots. He was as fearless as he was gentle, a man who fell in love with airplanes the first time he flew one for the Army Air Corps, shortly after leaving the comforts of Princeton University to fight the Nazis in the Second World War. By the time he arrived at Area 51 for training, part of the first group of seven U-2 fliers called Detachment A, he had already flown 168 combat missions in two wars, World War II and Korea.

Area 51 “was the boonies,” Stockman says. “We lived in trailers, three to a trailer as I recall. We couldn’t write or call home from out there at Groom Lake.” When Stockman’s group arrived in January of 1956, there were “probably fifty or so people on the site.” The trailers were in walking distance from the hangars, and “there was a training building, which was also a trailer,” right next door, which was where Stockman spent most of his time. He remembers the mess hall as being one of the only permanent structures besides the hangars on base. “It was just all desert out there,” Stockman remembers. On occasion, wild horses roamed onto the lake bed looking for water or food. “To get to civilization you were pretty dependent on aircraft. There was some road traffic but it was very carefully watched. Security people everywhere.”

The identities of the pilots were equally concealed. “We all had pseudonyms. Mine was Sampson… I hated the name Sampson so I asked, Can I use the name Sterritt? I said, ‘Sterritt fits me better. I’m a little guy and Sterritt is more my speed.’ They said, ‘Feel free. If you want to be Sterritt, you’re Sterritt.’ But for their record keeping I was Sampson. The records are still there… in the basement. And they’re under the name Sampson. The Agency was very smart about all of that.” The pilots were watched during their time off, not so much to see what the men might be up to as to make sure KGB agents were not watching them. Detachment A pilots were given apartments in Hollywood, California, where they officially lived. During weekends they socialized at the Brown Derby Restaurant. “It was a gathering spot and the security people could keep an eye on us there,” Stockman explains. Come Monday morning, when it was time to return to Area 51, the Derby was the rendezvous spot because “it was one of the few places that was always open at five a.m.” The majority of the Derby clientele had been up all night; the six very physically fit, clear-eyed pilots with their Air Force haircuts, accompanied by two CIA handlers in sport jackets and bow ties, must have been a sight to behold. From there, the group drove the Cahuenga Pass through the Hollywood Hills to the Burbank airport, where they boarded a Lockheed airplane headed for the secret base. “At the time, we did not know of Lockheed’s involvement in the program,” Stockman explains. “Even that was concealed from us. We were called ‘drivers.’ There were a lot of reasons for it. At the time, I don’t think any of us really understood why, but that’s essentially what we were. We were just, by God, drivers. We were not glory boys.” The drivers did not have a need-to-know about anything except how to fly the airplane. Stockman once asked his superiors what the policy would be if he were shot down and captured. “Effectively, we were told that if we were captured and we were pressed by our captors, we could tell them anything and everything. Because of our lowly position as ‘drivers’ we didn’t know very much.” He said that during training even the name “Groom Lake was not part of our lexicon.”

Across the world, the Russians were busy working on their own form of espionage. If Area 51 had a Communist doppelgдnger, it was a remote top secret facility forty miles northeast of Moscow called NII-88. There, a rocket scientist named Sergei Korolev — the Soviet Union’s own Wernher Von Braun — was working on a project that would soon shame American military science and propel the arms and space race into a sprint. Fearing the CIA would assassinate Russia’s key rocket scientist, Stalin declared Sergei Korolev’s name a state secret, which it remained until his death, in 1966. Sergei Korolev was only referred to as Chief Designer, not unlike the way Richard Bissell was known to employees outside the CIA only as Mr. B. Just as insiders called Area 51 the Ranch, NII-88 was known to its scientists as the Bureau. Like Area 51, NII-88 did not exist on the map. Before the Communist Revolution, NII-88 had been a small village called Podlipki, same as the Groom Lake area had once been a little mining enclave called Groom Mine. Both facilities began as outcroppings of tents and warehouses, accessible only to a short list of government elite. Both facilities would develop into multimillion-dollar establishments where multibillion-dollar espionage platforms would be built and tested, each having the singular purpose of outperforming what was being built on the other side.

In 1956, all the CIA knew of NII-88 was that it was the place where Russia kept dozens of its captured German scientists toiling away on secret science projects. These men were Russia’s version of America’s Paperclip scientists, and they included the four hundred German rocket scientists who’d been plied with alcohol and then seized in the middle of the night — just as former Messerschmitt pilot Fritz Wendel had said.

The CIA first learned about NII-88’s existence in late 1955, when the Soviets decided they had milked their former Third Reich scientists for all they were worth and began sending them back home. When the CIA learned of Russia’s repatriation program, the Agency leaped at the intelligence opportunity and initiated a program called Operation Dragon Return. CIA officers were dispatched to Germany to hunt down the scientists who had been working in Russia, and the information gleaned from the returnees was considerable. It included technical data on Russian advances in radio technology, electronics, and armaments design. But to the CIA’s great frustration, when it came to NII-88, the repatriated German scientists claimed to have no clear idea about what was really going on there. It seemed that NII-88, like Area 51, worked with strict need-to-know protocols, and the German scientists hadn’t been cleared with a need-to-know. All the Germans could tell the CIA agents debriefing them was that Moscow’s top scientists and engineers were developing something there that was highly classified. Unlike in America, where German rocket scientists were put in charge of America’s most classified missile program at White Sands Missile Range, German scientists in Russia had been relegated to the second tier. With no hard facts about the extraordinary technological enterprise that was under way at NII-88, the CIA was left guessing. The speculation was that the Russians were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, that could reach the United States by traveling over the top of the world.

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 and 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.

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.

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 science 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.