The Secret Genesis of Area 51

by Td Barnes

  From Gardner’s enthusiasm for the CL-282, Strong at first thought the U.S. Air Force officials supported the Lockheed design. He soon learned of the U.S. Air Force choosing the modified version of the Martin B-57 and the new Bell X-16 to meet future reconnaissance needs.

  Despite Lockheed’s CL-282 having support by September 1954, the members of the Intelligence Systems Panel and high-ranking air force civilians such as Trevor Gardner still reported to the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Air Force’s commitment to the Martin R-57 and the Bell X-16 prevented it from offering funds to Lockheed to pursue the CL-282 concept. Therefore, Lockheed needed additional support from outside the U.S. Air Force if it wanted to give life to the CL-282 project. Moreover, this support could only come from scientists serving on the high-level advisory committees.

  In late December 1954, the Land Group spent more than an hour driving around in a committee member’s year-old Ford while discussing which of the high-altitude aircraft proposals to recommend to the president. Choosing between Bell, Martin, Fairchild or Lockheed, committee member Allen Donovan favored going with the Lockheed aircraft to fill the needs of the intelligence community.

  The CIA saw that the air force’s brute force methods were no match for the Soviet radar system. The air force’s failure to produce the needed intelligence on the Soviet Union’s intentions and capabilities came at a time when HUMINT-gathering activity by the CIA in the Soviet-denied territory remained virtually nil while international tensions increased around the world.

  With the air force’s aerial reconnaissance and the CIA’s HUMINT capabilities stifled, the CIA saw the solution as its having the ability to defeat radar detection. Rather than the air force’s traditional targeting and damage assessment, the agency’s new philosophy of reconnaissance became looking for warning indicators, force levels and an enemy’s capability to launch an attack. Thus, the CIA added technology to its covert means of gathering intelligence. The prime objective for the CIA became the acquisition of the Soviet Union’s technical capabilities.

  The CIA changed its intelligence-gathering methods, bringing in people knowledgeable in such things as pulse duration, pulse repetition and the frequencies used in the Soviet Union’s electronic warfare operations. To collect this intelligence, the CIA became the aggressor, devising methods of frightening or threatening the Soviets into turning on their radar systems for the CIA to evaluate and exploit.

  During the Korean War, President Truman had obtained the passage of the CIA Act, NSC 5412, the National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations, which stipulated the classification of the CIA’s activities and its budget. The act enabled any other government agency to transfer funds to the CIA “without regard to any provisions of law.” A part of this act stipulated the U.S. government would have to plausibly disclaim responsibility and deny any exposed CIA actions or activities.

  Also during the Truman presidency, the administration’s concern over Soviet “psychological warfare” prompted the new National Security Council to authorize the launching of peacetime covert action operations. The NSC made the director of Central Intelligence responsible for psychological warfare. He established at the same time the principle that covert action was an exclusive function of the executive branch. The CIA certainly was a natural choice for Truman to assign this function, at least in part because the agency operated with unvouchered funds under its control to provide minimal risk of exposure in Washington.

  During the Korean conflict, the agency’s covert operations had grown quickly. However, peacetime covert activities were new to the United States. Wartime commitments and other missions soon made covert engagements the most expensive and bureaucratically prominent of the CIA’s activities. The Departments of State and Defense feared the CIA alone having this power might cause the military to create a new rival covert action office in the Pentagon.

  These concerns were warranted. Now under the Eisenhower administration, the first civilian director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, had formerly served with the Office of Strategic Services. The CIA director’s brother, John Foster Dulles, was the secretary of state during the Eisenhower administration; his sister was a diplomat; his maternal grandfather was the secretary of state under Benjamin Harrison; and his uncle by marriage was the secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson. He, a diplomat and a corporate lawyer, did not keep the White House and the Pentagon informed of precisely what the CIA was doing in clandestine operations overseas to the point that Eisenhower concluded in 1960, at the end of his presidency, that American intelligence was in shambles.

  The Eisenhower administration on March 15, 1954, reaffirmed the Central Intelligence Agency’s responsibility for conducting covert actions abroad. However, the CIA had to advise in advance the representatives of the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the president before initiating any major covert action programs. President Eisenhower designated a Planning Coordination Group as the body responsible for coordinating covert operations. This “Special Group” emerged as the executive body to review and approve covert action programs initiated by the CIA.

  The covert actions oversight group changed its name to the 303 Committee, the name coming from the National Security Action Memorandum No. 303, dated June 2, 1964. McGeorge Bundy, National Security advisor, became the chairman of the committee.

  The National Security Council directed the CIA to conduct “covert” rather than merely “psychological” operations. The NSC defined these operations as “all activities planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them was not evident to unauthorized persons. If uncovered, the U.S. Government could plausibly deny any responsibility for them. Such operations shall not include armed conflict by recognizing military forces, espionage, and counter-espionage, nor cover and deception for military operations.” Under Dulles’s direction, the CIA created MK-Ultra, a top-secret mind control research project managed by Sidney Gottlieb, and Dulles, who had in 1950 led the agency’s covert operations as deputy director for plans, also personally oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a program that influenced foreign and domestic media companies.

  At the time, Senator Joseph McCarthy was issuing subpoenas against the CIA in a series of investigations into potential communist subversion of the agency. Although none of the investigations revealed any wrongdoing, the hearings were potentially damaging, not only to the CIA’s reputation but also to the security of sensitive information. To discredit him and stop his investigation of communist infiltration of the CIA, the CIA, under Dulles’s orders, broke into McCarthy’s Senate office and fed disinformation to him.

  Johnson could not have timed it better to get Lockheed into the equation on coming up with a high-flying reconnaissance plane. The CIA had become more enamored of the idea of using Lockheed’s proposal for national security needs after noting the air force’s dismal results of obtaining the desperately needed intelligence to verify what the Soviet Union was up to. The CIA liked Kelly Johnson’s motto: “Be quick, be quiet, be on time.” The CIA remembered this when it started receiving intel from numerous sources that the Soviet Union was moving ahead quickly with a family of liquid-fueled, nuclear warhead–equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  THE U–2 PROGRAM: TOO SECRET TO EXPLAIN

  On November 26, 1954, the day after Thanksgiving, Richard M. “Dick” Bissell Jr., an economist who had taught at both Yale and MIT and was currently a special assistant to Allen Dulles, first learned about President Eisenhower approving a secret program that Dulles wanted him to take charge of. Dulles described the project as too secret for him to explain and gave Bissell a packet of documents to acquaint himself.

  Richard M. Bissell Jr., an economist who had taught at both Yale and MIT and was special assistant to Allen Dulles, was the Central Intelligence Agency officer responsible for the U-2 spy plane and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Wikipedia.

  Bissell, a former economics professor at MIT and a high official of the Marshall Plan, had b
ecome Allen W. Dulles’s special assistant for planning and coordination in January 1954. He received responsibility for the new U-2 project at the end of that year and would head all CIA overhead reconnaissance programs from 1954 until 1962.

  Bissell had long known in general terms of the proposal to build a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. Now, he was learning the details concerning the proposed project of sending aircraft over the Soviet Union.

  The following day, late on the morning of December 2, 1954, Dulles sent Bissell to the Pentagon to represent the CIA at an organizational meeting for the U-2 project. Herbert I. Miller, chief of the Office of Scientific Intelligence’s Nuclear Energy Division, and soon to become the executive officer of the overflight project, accompanied Bissell to the meeting.

  Bissell and Miller arrived at the Pentagon the following afternoon to meet with a group of key air force officials that included Trevor Gardner and Lieutenant General Donald L. Putt. Bissell attended the meeting with neither Dulles nor him knowing of the president having tasked the agency with running a project that the director of Central Intelligence (DCI), following the meeting, instructed Bissell to “work it out.” This project, too secret to explain, became more highly classified than the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb.

  Allen Dulles, who favored the classical agent form of espionage rather than technology, lacked enthusiasm concerning the CIA’s taking a military role. The participants spent little time delineating air force and agency responsibilities in the project, taking for granted the CIA’s handling the security matters. It concerned them that the air force had a separate contract for Pratt & Whitney J57 engines that might jeopardize the project’s security. Much of the discussion centered on methods to divert air force materiel to the program.

  The U.S. Air Force promised to turn over several J57 engines in production for B-52s, KC-135s, F-100s and RB-57s. When Bissell asked who was paying for the airframes built by Lockheed, the others greeted his query with silence. Everyone present expected the CIA to come up with the funds. The meeting adjourned with Bissell volunteering to consider it, advising Dulles afterward that the money for the project would have to originate from the Contingency Reserve Fund.

  This fund, according to the director of Central Intelligence, with the president and the director of the budget’s approval, was supposed to be for paying the costs of the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert activities. Nonetheless, Dulles told Bissell to draft a memorandum for the president for funding the overflight program and for putting together a staff for Project AQUATONE, the project’s new code name. The CIA assigned the cryptonym “AQUATONE” to the project, with the USAF using the name “OILSTONE” for its support to the CIA.

  The project staff grew slowly, with many of the individuals working on overhead reconnaissance also remaining on the rolls of other agency components. To achieve maximum security, Bissell made the project staff self-sufficient, with Project AQUATONE having contract management, administrative, financial, logistics, communications and security personnel. He, thus, avoided having to turn to the CIA directorates for assistance. Bissell funded the developing Project AQUATONE separate from other agency components, paying its personnel and operating costs outside of regular agency accounts.

  Meanwhile, at Lockheed, Kelly Johnson and twenty-five engineers redesigned the airplane to provide for a new landing gear, different engine, different camera bay and a means of further improving performance. Eighty-one people, including shop personnel, worked on the plane now known as the U-2.

  In December 1954, the CIA ordered twenty aircraft. Kelly promised delivery of the first one in eight months and froze the design on December 10, 1954. He presented the first status of the plane along with a cost letter for $20 million to Washington in mid-December 1954. The government made the first check out to Kelly Johnson personally and sent it to his home to maintain the secrecy of the program.

  Lockheed completed the initial wind tunnel tests before Christmas and began tooling on December 27, 1954, producing a production aircraft that differed considerably from the original CL-282.

  FORGING A CIA–AIR FORCE PARTNERSHIP

  The CIA’s U-2 project headquarters concurrently moved forward with procuring the aircraft and equipment. It recruited personnel and planned for the testing and operational phases. Dick Bissell began what he later described as “a rather civilized and amicable battle” with the U.S. Air Force to hammer out a charter for joint USAF/CIA project participation.

  At the initial interagency meetings to establish the U-2 program in December 1954, the participants failed to work out a clear delineation of responsibilities between the CIA and the U.S. Air Force. They agreed only with the U.S. Air Force supplying the engines and the CIA paying for the airframes and cameras.

  Myriad details remained unsettled. The CIA and air force representatives worked on an interagency agreement to assign specific responsibilities for the program. These negotiations proved difficult.

  Dick Bissell experienced his first significant encounter with General Twining on March 7, 1955. In preparation for this meeting, Bissell, on February 25, created a briefing paper. He summarized project developments to date and recommended giving urgent attention to advance preparations for acquiring air force support in the operational phase. The project needed to complete research and planning in the fields of aeromedicine, intelligence requirements, flight planning, meteorology and logistics. The project required selecting and completing an organizational structure to recruit and train Lockheed test pilots and air force personnel holding important positions.

  The briefing paper passed to General Twining in advance of the meeting recommended designating a single officer responsible for all the activities of the U.S. Air Force in support of and as a participant in the project. His having this authority and responsibility positioned him to arrange for secret access to the variant resources of the U.S. Air Force on which he hoped to draw. The plan was for him to join with the CIA project officer in developing organizational plans for approval by appropriate authorities in the CIA and the U.S. Air Force. The program positioned him to secure other air force personnel as needed for the project at an early date.

  In further preparation for a meeting on March 7, 1955, with the air force chief of staff Nathan Twining, Dick Bissell prepared a background paper for the director and General Cabell. He first warned them of General Twining wanting the operational commands and the Strategic Air Command responsibility for air force supporting AQUATONE. Dick Bissell recommended the director take a general line with the chiefs of staff.

  DCI Allen Dulles took up discussions with Twining on this subject following Bissell’s meeting earlier that month. Nathan wanted SAC, headed by General Curtis E. LeMay, to run the project once the planes and pilots became ready to fly. Dulles opposed such an arrangement and dragged the CIA-USAF talks on for several months, with Twining remaining determined to have the Strategic Air Command in full control once the aircraft deployed.

  Even with General LeMay wanting nothing to do with the U-2, he sent Colonel Douglas T. “Doug” Nelson TDY (temporary duty) from Strategic Air Command Headquarters to monitor the program and report to him.

  Nelson, who later retired as a major general, had earned his student pilot’s license before he was old enough to get a permit to drive a car. He flew his first plane in 1930 at the age of nine. For five dollars, Nelson flew an old Waco, taking off on the beach in Seaside, Oregon. He soloed on his sixteenth birthday in an E-2 Taylor Cub on a rainy day over a grass strip, also in Oregon. His early military service took him to the Middle East desert, Alaska and the China-Burma Theater of Operations. During the war, he flew 590 combat hours, primarily in C-46s.

  In 1946, after a tour of duty as a fighter aircraft instructor pilot, Nelson separated from the U.S. Army Air Force to become a commercial airline pilot, flying DC-3s with West Coast Airlines until November 1947, when he received a regular commission and returned to active duty. He received an assignment to S
trategic Air Command, where he served in the Thirty-Third Fighter Group before attending Air Tactical School in Florida.

  Lockheed’s Bob Murphy, Colonel Doug Nelson and Lieutenant Colonel Peterson at Area 51. Murphy and Nelson were with both the U-2 program and the A-12 successor. Bob Murphy.

  Nelson had spent October 1948 to March 1949 in Palestine as part of the United Nations Truce Force. While there, he sometimes relied on camels as his mode of transportation with the Syrian Camel Corps. He then returned to the States and became a B-29 lead crew aircraft commander at Walker Air Force Base in New Mexico.

  Nelson was serving at Strategic Air Command headquarters, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, with the Tactics Branch and Recon Division, Directorate of Operations, when, in 1956, General LeMay appointed him the Strategic Air Command project officer to support the CIA U-2 program.

  General LeMay’s sending Colonel Nelson to watch what the CIA was doing didn’t bother Bissell. Bissell felt it was none of the CIA’s business how the U.S. Air Force organized its activities. However, LeMay’s sending a senior officer challenged the character of the project. It forced Bissell to impose certain requirements that had a bearing on the organization.

  General LeMay could not accept the thought of his air force stepping aside while the CIA flew planes against the nation’s enemies. At the same time, the attitude of General Curtis LeMay raised some concern. He had made it clear at a meeting with Dick Bissell that as soon as the CIA paid for the U-2 (the U.S. Air Force designation for the Lockheed CL-282), he planned to take it over. He further stated that he did not expect that date to be too far in the future.

  Having LeMay’s air force colonel present caused many to perceive the CIA’s U-2 project as a clandestine, intelligence-gathering operation based on military pilots flying the missions. Clandestine intelligence gathering was not the case. Bissell wanted the project to have the least amount of military aura possible. It had to be rigorously secure. It had to be a CIA operating facility and not an air force base. It had also to be subject to close and continuous policy control by the senior policymakers of this government. Bissell felt such control much easier to maintain with the CIA’s project headquarters in Washington.