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.
Chapter Four: The Seeds of a Conspiracy
As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51, reports of UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA headquarters. Later painted black to blend in with the sky, the U-2s at that time were silver, which meant their long, shiny wings reflected light down from the upper atmosphere in a way that led citizens all over California, Nevada, and Utah to think the planes were UFOs. The altitude of the U-2 alone was enough to bewilder people. Commercial airplanes flew at between ten thousand and twenty thousand feet in the mid-1950s, whereas the U-2 flew at around seventy thousand feet. Then there was the radical shape of the airplane to consider. Its wings were nearly twice as long as the fuselage, which made the U-2 look like a fiery flying cross.
In 1955 the UFO phenomenon sweeping America was seven years old. The modern-day UFO craze officially began on June 24, 1947, when a search-and-rescue pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine flying discs speeding over Washington State while he was out searching for a downed airplane. Approximately two weeks later, the crash at Roswell occurred. By the end of the month, more than 850 UFO sightings had been reported in the news media. Rumors of flying saucers were sweeping the nation, and public anxiety was mounting; Americans demanded answers from the military.
According to a CIA study on UFOs, declassified in 1997, the Air Force had originally been running two programs. One was covert, initially called Project Saucer and later called Project Sign; another was an overt Air Force public relations campaign called Project Grudge. The point of Project Grudge was to “persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary,” and to do this, Air Force officials went on TV and radio dismissing UFO reports.
Sightings were attributed to planets, meteors, even “large hailstones,” Air Force officials said, categorically denying that UFOs were anything nefarious or out of this world. But their efforts did very little to appease the public. With the nuclear arms race in full swing, the idea that the world could come to an end in nuclear holocaust had tipped the psychological scales for many Americans, giving way to public discussion about Armageddon and the End of Times. In 1951, Hollywood released the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about aliens preparing to destroy Earth. Two years later, The War of the Worlds was made into a movie and won an Academy Award. Even the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung got into the act, publishing a book that said UFOs were individual mirrors of a collective anxiety the world was having about nuclear annihilation. Sightings continued and so did intense interest by both the Air Force and the CIA.
At Area 51, the reality that the U-2 was repeatedly being mistaken for a UFO was not something analysts welcomed, but it was something they were forced to address. The general feeling at the Agency was that CIA officers had more important things to do than handle the public hysteria about strange objects in the sky. Dealing with UFO reports, the CIA felt, was more appropriately suited for pencil pushers over at the Air Force. According to declassified documents, the CIA did open up a clandestine UFO data-collecting department, albeit begrudgingly. Seeing as the CIA could easily clear its own analysts to handle information on the U-2, this made sense. This attitude, that CIA officers were above plebeian affairs such as UFO sightings, was endemic at the Agency and trickled down from the top. CIA director Allen Dulles was an elitist at heart, an old-school spy brought up in the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II espionage division of the Army. Dulles preferred gentlemen spy craft and disliked technology in general, which was why he’d delegated control of the U-2 spy plane to Richard Bissell in the first place. As for the UFO problems, Dulles assigned that job to a former OSS colleague named Todos M. Odarenko. The UFO division was placed inside the physics office, which Odarenko ran. Almost immediately Odarenko “sought to have his division relieved of the responsibility for monitoring UFO reports,” according to a CIA monograph declassified in 1997. And yet the significance of UFOs to the CIA could not have had a higher national security concern.
The case file regarding unidentified flying objects that Allen Dulles had inherited from the Agency’s previous director, General Walter Bedell Smith, was, and remains, one of the most top secret files in CIA history. Because it has yet to be declassified, there is no way of knowing how much information Bedell Smith shared with his successor. But Bedell Smith himself would more likely than not have had a need-to-know about the Army intelligence’s blackest programs, and that would have included the flying disc retrieved at Roswell. When the crash occurred, in July of 1947, Bedell Smith was the ambassador to the Soviet Union. During the search for the Horten brothers under the program known as Operation Harass, Bedell Smith was serving as commander of the First Army at Governors Island, New York — a locale from which Project Paperclip scientists were monitored, evaluated, and assigned research and engineeering jobs. And when the crash remains left Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to be shipped out to the desert in Nevada, Bedell Smith was the director of the CIA. The degree of need-to-know access he had regarding secret parallel programs set up there remains one of the great riddles of Area 51.
Walter Bedell Smith served as director of Central Intelligence from 1950 to 1953, and there were few men more trusted by President Harry Truman and five-star general of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. Years earlier, when General Eisenhower had been serving as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe during World War II, Bedell Smith was his chief of staff. A handful of Smith’s closest colleagues affectionately called him Beetle, but most men were intimidated by the person privately referred to as Eisenhower’s “hatchet man.” So forceful was Bedell Smith that when George S. Patton needed discipline, the task fell on Bedell Smith’s shoulders. When the Nazis surrendered to the Allied Forces, it was Bedell Smith who was in charge of writing up acceptable terms.
From the earliest days of the Cold War, General Walter Bedell Smith fought the Russians from America’s innermost circle of power. He had served as President Truman’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1948, a position that uniquely qualified him to be the second director of the CIA. Intelligence on the Soviet Union was the CIA’s primary concern in the early days of the Cold War, and there was nothing the U.S. government knew regarding what the Russians were up to that Bedell Smith did not have access to. The conundrum for Smith when he took over the role of director of Central Intelligence on August 21, 1950, was that very few people at the CIA had a need-toknow what the general now knew regarding unidentified flying objects. The record that has been declassified thus far suggests that Bedell Smith demanded that all his employees accept what his personal experiences with the Russians and “UFOs” had taught him: the Communists were evil, and this idea that UFOs were coming from other planets was nothing but the fantasy of panicked, paranoid minds. General Smith summarily rejected the idea that UFOs were anything out of this world and he spearheaded CIA policy accordingly. “Preposterous,” he wrote in a memo in 1952. Unlike Dulles, Bedell Smith personally oversaw the national security
