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
