professors because of their affiliation with Vannevar Bush, the former dean of engineering at MIT and later the man in charge of the Manhattan Project.
In addition to the firing systems on the nuclear bombs, which were based on a simple signal-switching relay system called the DN-11 relay, EG&G handled the defense contract to take millions of stopmotion photographs of nuclear bomb explosions in the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site. It was from these photographs, and from these photographs only, that EG&G scientists could determine for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense the exact yield, or power, of an exploded nuclear bomb. For decades a great majority of the most highly classified engineering jobs related to nuclear weapons testing went to EG&G. In the 1960s, when special engineering teams were needed to clean up deadly radioactive waste that was the result of these nuclear tests, the contracts went to EG&G as well. They were trusted implicitly, and EG&G’s operations were quintessential black. They also had other businesses, such as radar testing. In the early 1950s, EG&G ran a radar-testing facility approximately thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. Very little information is known about that period or about what EG&G was working on, as the data remains classified in EG&G’s unique Restricted Data files. At Bissell’s behest, in 1957 EG&G agreed to set up a radar range on the outskirts of Area 51 to measure radar returns for the dirty-bird project. In a CIA monograph about the U-2, declassified in 1998, the EG&G tracking station just outside Groom Lake is alleged to be “little more than a series of radar sets and a trailer containing instrumentation” where engineers could record data and analyze results. And yet the exact location of this “small testing facility” has been redacted from the otherwise declassified U-2 record. Why? The key term is EG&G. Giving away too much information about EG&G could inadvertently open a can of worms. No one but an elite has a need-to-know where any exterior EG&G facilities are located at Area 51—specifically, whether they are located outside the blueprint of the base.
And so, in April of 1957, with EG&G radar specialists tracking his aircraft’s radar returns, Lockheed test pilot Robert Sieker took one of the newly painted U-2s to the skies over Groom Lake. His orders were to see how high he could get the dirty bird to climb. Sieker took off from Area 51 and flew for almost ninety miles without incident when suddenly, in a valley near Pioche, the Boston Group’s paint caused the airplane to overheat, spin out of control, and crash. Sieker was able to eject but was killed when a piece of the spinning aircraft hit him in the head. Kelly Johnson was right. It was a bad idea to try to retrofit the U2. CIA search teams took four days to locate Sieker’s body and the wreckage of the plane. The crash had attracted the watchful eye of the press, and the U-2’s cover story, that it was a weather research plane, wore thin. Halfway across the country, a headline at the Chicago Daily Tribune read “Secrecy Veils High-Altitude Research Jet; Lockheed U2 Called Super Snooper.”
A pilot was dead, and the camouflage paint had made the U-2 more dangerous, not more stealthy. Bissell knew he needed to act fast. He was losing control of the U-2 spy plane program and everything he had created at Area 51. His next idea, part genius and part hubris, was to petition the president for an entirely new spy plane. The CIA needed a better, faster, more technologically advanced aircraft that would break scientific barriers and trick Soviet radars into thinking it wasn’t there. This new spy plane Bissell had in mind would fly higher than ninety thousand feet and have stealth features built in from pencil to plane. Bissell was taking a major gamble with his billiondollar request. Bringing an entirely new black budget spy plane program to the president’s attention at a time when the president was upset with the results of the previous work done at Area 51 was either madness or brilliance, depending on one’s point of view. But just as Richard Bissell began presenting plans for his radical and ambitious new project to the president, a national security crisis overwhelmed the country. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched the world’s first satellite, a 184-pound silver orb called Sputnik 1. This was the secret that Sergei Korolev had been working on at Area 51’s Communist doppelgдnger, NII-88.
At first, the White House tried to downplay the fact that the Soviets had beat the Americans into space. Eisenhower, at his country home in Pennsylvania for the weekend, didn’t immediately comment on the event. But the following morning, the New York Times ran a headline of half-inch-high capital letters across all six columns, a spot historically reserved for the declarations of war.
SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 MPH; SPHERE TRACKED IN 4 CROSSINGS OVER U.S.
A satellite launch meant the Russians now had a rocket with enough propulsion and guidance to hit a target anywhere in the world. So much for the Paperclips Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff being the most competent rocket scientists in the world. “As it beeped in the sky, Sputnik 1 created a crisis of confidence that swept the country like a windblown forest fire,” Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian later recalled. British reporters at the Guardian warned, “We must be prepared to be told [by Russia] what the other side of the moon looks like.” French journalists homed in on America’s “disillusion and bitter[ness]” at the crushing space-race defeat. The French underscored America’s scientific shame. “The Americans have little experience with humiliation in the technical domain,” read the article in Le Figaro. Because members of the public had no idea about the CIA’s U-2 spy plane program, they believed that with Sputnik, the Russians could now learn all of America’s secrets, while America remained in the dark about theirs. For twenty-one days, Sputnik circled the Earth at a speed of 18,000 mph until its radio signal finally faded and died.
In deciding the best course of action, the president turned back to his science advisers. In the month following Sputnik, a new position was created for James Killian — special assistant to the president for science and technology — and for the next two years Killian would meet with the president almost every day. This became a defining moment for Richard Bissell. For as depressing as his Area 51 prospects had seemed only a month before, the news of Sputnik was, ironically for the CIA, a harbinger of good news. James Killian adored Richard Bissell; they’d been friends for over a decade. Immediately after the Russians launched Sputnik, Killian and Bissell found themselves working closely together again. Only this time, they weren’t teaching economics to university students. The two men would work hand in glove to launch America’s most formidable top secret billion-dollar spy plane, to be built and test-flown at Area 51. Advancing science and technology for military purposes was now at the very top of the president’s list of priorities. With James Killian on his side, Bissell inadvertently found himself in the extraordinary position of getting almost whatever he wanted from the president of the United States. And as long as what Richard Bissell built at Area 51 could humiliate the Russians and show them who was boss, this included a bottomless budget, infinite manpower, total secrecy, and ultimate control.
Chapter Six: Atomic Accidents
Richard Bissell once said that setting up Area 51 inside a nuclear testing facility kept the curiosity-seekers at bay. With Operation Plumbbob, a 1957 atomic test series that involved thirty consecutive nuclear explosions, he got more than he bargained for. With the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. In the twenty-first century, this kind of weapon would be referred to as a dirty bomb.
The dirty bomb menace posed a growing threat to the internal security of the country, one the Pentagon wanted to make less severe by testing the nightmare scenario first. The organization needed to do this in a controlled environment, away from the urban masses, in total secrecy. No one outside the project, absolutely no one, could know. Officials from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project decided that the perfect place to do this was Area 51, inside the Dreamland airspace, about four or five miles northwest of Groom Lake. If the dirty bomb was set off outside the legal perimeter of the Nevada Test Site, secrecy was all but guaranteed. As far as specifics were concerned, there was an apocalyptic prerequisite the likes of which no government had ever dealt with before. Weapons testers needed “a site that could be relinquished for 20,000 years.”
Code-named the 57 Project, and later Project 57, the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Air Force, and EG&G would work together to simulate an Air Force airplane crash involving an XW-25 nuclear warhead — a crash in which radioactive particles would “accidentally” be dispersed on the ground. The land around the mock crash site would be contaminated by plutonium, which, according to scientists, would take 24,100 years to decay by half. At the time, scientists had no idea what accidental plutonium dispersal in open air would do to beings and things in the element’s path. The 57 Project was a test that would provide critical data to that end. There were
