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
