Area 51 had a Washington, DC, complement for the U-2 program, an office on the fifth floor of an unmarked CIA facility at 1717 H Street. This served as the command center for Project Aquatone’s first, secret missions over the Soviet Union. It was from this clandestine facility that, shortly before midnight on July 3, 1956, Richard Bissell made a historic telephone call over a secure line. He reached the U-2’s secret base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, and gave the commander the authorization to proceed. There, in a nearby room, Hervey Stockman sat breathing pure oxygen from a ventilator as a flight surgeon monitored the levels of nitrogen in his blood. Outside the door, CIA men armed with machine guns stood guard. Given the time difference, where Stockman was sitting it was already the following morning, making it the anniversary of America’s independence. The nation was 180 years old. If all went well, Stockman was about to become the first pilot to penetrate the Iron Curtain’s airspace. He would fly all the way to Leningrad, around the coast, and back down, putting him forever in the record books as the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2.
Stockman and his U-2 took off from Wiesbaden a little after 6:00 a.m., the pilot and his airplane moving skyward in a dramatic incline. The U-2 rose at a remarkable fifteen thousand feet a minute, so steep a gradient that for airmen on the ground who were unfamiliar with the airplane, it must have looked like Stockman was about to pitch back and stall. Halfway to altitude, Stockman briefly let the fuselage even out, allowing his body fluids and the fluids in the fuel tanks to expand and adjust. Once, a U-2 pilot had ascended too quickly, and his fuel tanks exploded. The pilot was killed. After a few additional minutes of ascent, Stockman arrived at cruising altitude. The sky above him was black and he could see stars. Below him, the Earth curved. It would be an eight-and-a-half-hour journey without a sip of water or a bite of food. In the U-2’s camera bay, Stockman transported a five-hundred- pound Hycon camera fitted with the most advanced photo lenses ever devised in America. To prove how accurate the camera was, Bissell had sent a U-2 from Groom Lake on a flight over President Eisenhower’s Pennsylvania farm. From thirteen and a half miles up, the U-2’s cameras were able to take clear photographs of Eisenhower’s cows as they drank water from troughs.
After several hours, Stockman approached Russia’s submarine city. “I was supposed to turn the cameras on when I reached Leningrad,” Stockman recalls. “I was to fly along photographing the naval installations there as well as a couple of airfields that were all part of what we had been led to believe might hold long-range Soviet bombers.” But there were no long-range bombers to be found. The famous bomber gap, it turned out, was false. What Stockman filmed on the first overflight into Russia provided the CIA with critical facts on an issue that had previously been the subject of contentious debate. Russian weapons expert Herbert Miller wrote a triumphant memo to Eisenhower after the film in Stockman’s camera was interpreted, explaining just how many “new discoveries have come to light.” Stockman’s flight provided the Agency with four hundred thousand square miles of coverage. “Many new airfields previously unknown, industrial complexes of a size heretofore unsuspected were revealed… Fighter aircraft at the five most important bases covered were drawn up in orderly rows as if for formal inspection on parade.” What astonished Miller was just how current the information was. “We know that the guns in the anti-aircraft batteries sighted were in a horizontal position rather than pointed upwards and ‘on the ready.’ We know that some harvests were being brought in, and that the small truck gardens were being worked.” They denoted “real intentions, objectives and qualities of the Soviet Union.” Hervey Stockman explains it this way: “What it portrayed was that as a people they were not all geared up to go to war. They were leading a normal Russian life, so that behind this ‘Iron Curtain’ there wasn’t all this beating of drums and movement of tanks and everything that was envisioned. They were going about their way over there.”
Stockman’s photos made the CIA ecstatic and justified the entire U-2 program, as a flurry of top secret memos dated July 17, 1956, revealed. “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of what was going on in the Soviet Union, on July 4, 1956,” Miller wrote. But as beneficial as Stockman’s flight was for the CIA, the results proved disastrous for President Eisenhower’s relationship with Nikita Khrushchev. Despite Bissell’s assurances to the contrary, the U-2s were tracked by the Soviets’ air-defense warning systems from the moment they hit the radar screens. Once the film from Stockman’s flight was developed, CIA photo interpreters determined that the Soviets had attempted more than twenty interceptions of Stockman’s mission. “MiG-17 and MiG-19 fighters were photographed desperately trying to reach the U-2, only to have to fall back to an altitude where the air was dense enough for them to restart their flamed-out, oxygen-starved engines,” photo interpreter Dino Brugioni told Air and Space magazine after the U-2 program was declassified, in 1998.
When Khrushchev learned the Americans had betrayed him, he was furious. After the picnic at Gorky Park, Khrushchev had agreed to spend the Fourth of July at Spaso House, the official residence of Ambassador Charles Bohlen, located just down the street from the Kremlin. When Khrushchev learned that while he had been celebrating the American Independence Day with the country’s ambassador, a U-2 had been soaring over Russia, he was humiliated. “The Americans [are] chortling over our impotence,” Khrushchev told his son, Sergei, a twenty- one-year-old aspiring missile designer. But in addition to the personal affront they caused Khrushchev, the U-2 overflights greatly embarrassed the Soviet Union’s military machine. Soviet MiG fighter jets couldn’t get a shot anywhere near Hervey Stockman’s U-2, which flew miles above the MiG performance ceiling, just as Colonel Leghorn had predicted. In 1956, the land-based Soviet surface-to-air missiles could not get a shot up high enough to knock the airplane out of the sky. America’s spy plane had flown over Russia with impunity. And if that fact became known, the Soviet Union would look weak.
Weighing the options — embarrass his own military, embarrass the American president, or say nothing — Khrushchev chose to remain silent, at least as far as the international press was concerned. As a result, the first U-2 overflights were kept secret between the two governments. But they seriously strained already tenuous relations. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to stop all overflights inside the Soviet Union until further notice. Even worse, the president told Richard Bissell that he had “lost enthusiasm” for the CIA’s aerial espionage program.
Back at Area 51, Bissell had a lot to worry about. Concerned that his U-2 program was going to be canceled by the president, he hired a team to analyze the probability of a Soviet shoot-down of the U-2. The news was grim: the Soviets were advancing their surface-to-air missile technology so rapidly that in all likelihood, within eighteen months they would be able to get their SA-2 missile up to seventy thousand feet. Bissell decided that the only way to keep his program aloft was to hide the U-2 from Soviet radar by inventing some kind of radar-absorbing paint. Bissell shared his idea with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, who told him that painting the U-2 was a bad idea. Paint was heavy, and the U2 flew so high because of how light it was, Johnson explained. The weight that paint would add to the aircraft would result in a loss of fifteen hundred feet of altitude. Bissell didn’t want to hear that. So he went to the president’s scientific adviser James Killian and asked him to put together a group of scientists who could make the CIA some radar-absorbing paint. These scientists, who worked out of Harvard University and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and were called the Boston Group, told Bissell they could get him what he wanted. It was a radical idea that had never been tested before. The scientists and engineers at MIT prided themselves on meeting challenges that other scientists believed were impossible.
There was a second serious problem facing Richard Bissell in the summer of 1956 and that was General LeMay. Impressed with the spy plane’s performance, LeMay was now angling for control of the airplane. Under a program called Project Dragon Lady, LeMay ordered a fleet of thirty-one U-2s specifically for the Air Force. To keep the program secret from Congress, the Air Force transferred money over to the CIA, which meant that while working to head off LeMay’s usurpation, Bissell simultaneously had to act as the go-between between the Air Force and Lockheed for the slightly modified U-2s. With these new Air Force airplanes came a demand for more “drivers,” which meant the arrival of two new groups of pilots at Area 51—those picked for CIA missions and others chosen for Air Force ones. Among those selected for Air Force missions was Anthony “Tony” Bevacqua.
“I may have been the only U-2 pilot at Area 51 who never made a model airplane as a kid,” Bevacqua recalls. Instead, he had spent all his time devouring books. His obsessive reading of paperbacks, usually those by Zane Grey or Erle Gardner, helped offset his fear that he be unable to read English, like his father. The son of Sicilian immigrants, Bevacqua was the youngest pilot to fly the U-2 at Groom Lake, which he did in the winter of 1957 at the age of twenty-four. But before the handsome, vibrant Bevacqua wound up at the CIA’s secret base, he was the roommate of another dashing young pilot whose name would soon become known around the world.
Before the two fighter pilots arrived at Area 51 to fly the U-2, Bevacqua and Francis Gary Powers were a couple of type A pilots with the 508th Strategic Fighter Wing at Turner Air Force Base in Georgia. They lived in a rented four-bedroom house situated two miles from the main gate. Both had been flying F-84 fighter jets for almost two years when one day Powers, whom everybody called Frank, just up and disappeared. “There were rumors that Frank had gone off on some kind of secret program,” Bevacqua says, “but this was just talk, not something you could really sink your teeth into.” A few months later Bevacqua was approached by a squadron leader and asked if
