policy was to have Director Dulles write a polite note explaining that UFOs were a law enforcement problem and the CIA was specifically barred from enforcing the law. The notes certainly portray Allen Dulles as an arrogant public servant, but they are prized by UFO collectors, who say they prove the CIA’s sinister coverup of extraterrestrial UFOs. Regardless of alleged CIA policy, the public’s fascination with UFOs proved more formidable than the CIA had ever bargained for; average citizens simply could not get enough information about mysterious objects streaking across the skies. And the more information they were given, the more they wanted to know and the more questions they asked. It didn’t take long for the public to become convinced that the CIA was covering something up, which, of course, it was.
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
