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
