by Phil Patton
Out of a sense of near national emergency—a desperate desire to see what was going on inside the Soviet Union—the U-2 spy plane was developed. In July 1954, Ike had created the Killian Committee, chaired by MIT president James Killian, and including leading lights of the scientific community as well as military figures, to decide what to do about the danger of atomic surprise attack. Relying heavily on work by the RAND corporation, its report came in the autumn. One of its key recommendations was the development of some sort of aerial reconnaissance to establish the state of Soviet weaponry.
Major Seaberg’s “Bald Eagle” proposal for a high-flying spy plane was brought out of the files; aviation contractors were quietly asked for ideas. Among their proposals was one for a Mach 4 plane launched from the back of a fast B-58 bomber. Another called for a ramjet aircraft to be carried to high altitude by a huge balloon, then released. Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunk Works proposed putting long wings on the fuselage of his F-104 Starfighter—and, he promised, he could do it quickly.
To Edwin Land of Polaroid, a key member of the Killian group, the Skunk Works proposal, called the CL-282, seemed the most practical and potentially the fastest way to put cameras over the Soviet Union. On November 5, 1954, Land wrote a memo to CIA director Allen Dulles called “A Unique Opportunity for Comprehensive Intelligence,” pushing the Lockheed idea.
No proposal or program that we have seen in intelligence planning can so quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and at so little cost.
We have been forced to imagine what [the Soviet] program is, and it could well be argued that peace is always in danger when one great power is essentially ignorant of the major economic, military, and political activities … of another great power … We cannot fulfill our responsibility for maintaining the peace if we are left in ignorance of Russian activities.
He made another key point: Such a program was also vital in order to avoid “over-estimation” of the enemy—as dangerous as its opposite.
Land was persuasive and obtained Eisenhower’s approval. By December 1954, Kelly Johnson had in his hand a contract to produce twenty of the planes for $22 million—all within nine months. The CIA would foot the bill from discretionary—and very much unaccounted for—funds. And it, not the Air Force, would take charge of the project, code-named Aquatone.
Soon a strange figure began to be seen in the shops and offices of the Skunk Works. A tall, stooped man, he inevitably reminded observers of a stork. No one introduced this odd Easterner—anyone at Lockheed could tell that he was from back East, so out of place was he inside the yellow hangars in Burbank—except occasionally he was referred to simply as “Mr. B.” He would look even more out of place later on the caliche runway at the base at Groom Lake.
Mr. B. was Richard Bissell, a former Yale economics professor who now headed up Aquatone.
Bissell had grown up in comparative privilege in Hartford, Connecticut, where his family owned Mark Twain’s old house. “It was a world unto itself,” he would recall, full of odd rooms, secret closets, and private balconies—a happy psychic conditioning, perhaps, for the hidden chambers of the intelligence establishment he was to join. As a child he once tossed his teddy bear off the fantail of the Queen Mary and ordered his nanny to retrieve it. As a teenager, he looked out on the Colosseum and the ruins of the Forum and meditated on the nature of empire.
After Groton and Yale, where he turned down admission to Skull and Bones and became an America Firster, dedicated to keeping the country out of the mounting European conflict, he went on to graduate school. He turned to government just in time to become a key figure in one of the unsung but vital logistics battles of World War II. While U-boats roamed in wolfpacks preying on Allied shipping, and the codebreakers back in England labored to defeat them without tipping their hands, Bissell almost single-handedly ran the Allied merchant shipping program. Using a complex system of file cards, he figured out how to turn ships around fast, and what to fill their limited holds with—bombs or oil or coal—and how to get fruit and tea to London. After the war, he drafted the initial proposal for the Marshall Plan.
In Washington after the war, Bissell’s imperial thoughts found congenial territory. Dean Acheson has compared the face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union to that between Rome and Carthage. Bissell quickly became part of the influential Georgetown cocktail party set, gathering over martinis to discuss affairs of state with the Rostows and the Alsops, the Grahams—Kate and Phil of The Washington Post—and the Dulleses—John Foster, Ike’s secretary of state, Eleanor, a State Department expert in Asian affairs, and Allen, the head of the CIA.
Bissell returned to academia, then moved to the Ford Foundation. When life there grew dull, he gently dropped a hint to Allen Dulles that he might consider work at the agency. He was one of the new generation of logistics and technology experts, the technocrats, who came out of the war effort—for World War II had been a war of logistics. While Henry Stimson, Republican secretary of state, the epitome of WASP privilege, had shut down the famed Black Chamber in 1929, saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” the coming of World War II had made it necessary for gentlemen to spy, and to fight dirty. The OSS, a precursor of the CIA, had first brought college men into espionage, and, after its founding in 1947, an Ivy League–educated cadre ran the service. The plots to get rid of Castro that would shock a nation when they were revealed at the Church Hearings in 1973 were like others of the era. The OSS and CIA had come up with wacky schemes before, such as dropping pornographic literature on Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat, to drive him mad with lust.
After World War II, the Yale crew coach Skip Waltz was the chief recruiter. A few measured words at the boathouse to a team player, a suggestion in confidence, brought dozens of oarsmen into the CIA. But if many of the Ivy League recruits had been “well rounded,” promising men of action, Bissell was unusual—an academic, who came to the agency from a foundation. Bissell liked systems, flow charts, tables. He was the champion of the coming thing in intelligence—technology, photint, elint—and it would sometimes put him in conflict with the traditionalists—the humint people. He would take little interest in the actual content of the pictures the U-2 or SR-71 would take.
Bissell was most interested in the psychology of CIA operations, the manipulation of public opinion, the creation of illusory forces rather than the use of actual weapons.
He would argue in his memoirs that the U-2 served as a psychological weapon as well as a reconnaissance tool. It sowed the crucial idea that the United States could overfly the Soviet Union with impunity. Responding to the humiliation their military felt at having been so brazenly overflown, the Soviets insisted they had shot down the plane at 70,000 feet with a single antiaircraft missile. In fact, they likely fired a huge salvo of the missiles and may have even knocked one of their own fighters out of the sky.
Bissell’s first success came with the overthrow in 1954 of Guatemalan dictator Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. That, along with the replacement of Mosaddeq in Iran with the shah, were the CIA’s proudest achievements. Accomplished at the behest not just of the president but of the United Fruit Company, the Guatemala operation set the CIA on the course of exotic “covert,” “destabilizing” operations.
Significantly, to Bissell’s thinking, the operation turned not on military force but on illusion, such as bogus radio transmissions reporting gathering rebel forces—a twist on the old wartime deception of a few soldiers walking repeatedly back and forth along a wall to suggest to an enemy many more soldiers. The rebel air force was a couple of old P-51s that Bissell had arranged to have the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza buy and lease out for cover. When real bombs ran out, the planes dropped Coke bottles that emitted a sinister whistle. This was the perfect symbol of American intervention circa 1954: the Coca-Cola bottle as bomb, bringing with it American-style fear and intimidation.
Success in Guatemala lent the CIA a sense of false confidence tha
t would ultimately lead to the Bay of Pigs disaster.
Barely a year later, in the fall of 1955, Allen Dulles called in Bissell, who had been with the agency only briefly, and out of the blue gave him the job of running Aquatone.
Dulles, catlike with his whiskery mustache, tweedy and academic, puffing on his pipe, looked his role. But he was a master bureaucrat. The director had already gotten the Air Force to cover his ass with a letter saying that, indeed, the absurdly optimistic schedule Kelly Johnson proposed for the U-2 was realistic.
While Johnson was building the airplane, the Harvard astronomer James Baker directed the development of special cameras. They would carry 10,000 feet of film on each flight and be able to photograph a swath of territory 125 miles wide and 3,000 miles long.
But they all knew it was only a matter of time before Soviet antiaircraft missiles could reach the maximum altitude of 70,000 feet or so and make the U-2 vulnerable. Even while the U-2 was being tested, Bissell planned the plane that became the Blackbird to fly higher and faster, and in 1958 he began to develop the first spy satellite, Corona.
Work on the new plane continued in Lockheed’s Building 82 at the Burbank Airport. The first flight was scheduled for August 1955. Kelly Johnson knew who he wanted to fly it first—Tony LeVier, his top test pilot. But first he had to find a place from which to fly it.
He knew they could not test the U-2 at Edwards. By 1954, that base had become too public, and this was a project so secret that its treasury was Johnson’s own home mailbox, in Encino, and its cover firm called C&J Inc. (from Clarence Johnson, his given name).
One day in the spring of 1955, Johnson and LeVier set out in the company’s Beech Bonanza to look for a test site. To disguise their purpose, they wore hunting clothes and took off in the direction of Mexico carrying a huge lunch LeVier’s wife had prepared. They crisscrossed dozens of little airstrips and disused bases. Then finally Osmond Ritland, the CIA’s military aide to the program, remembered a strip in the gunnery range where he had been stationed during the war in the desert north of Nellis Air Force Base. With the map spread over Johnson’s lap, they aimed for the little x, north of the vast Nevada Test Site. “We looked at that lake,” Ritland would later recall, “and we all looked at each other. It was another Edwards, so we wheeled around, landed on that lake, taxied up to one end of it, and Kelly Johnson said, ‘We’ll build it right there, that’s the hangar. We’ll put the runway there.’ ”
The lake was covered with sagebrush. Wild burros occasionally ventured across it. With an old Air Force compass in hand, kicking away the spent .50-caliber shell casings, Johnson laid out the strip. “This will be the tower, right here,” he said. Pebbles the size of peas blew around in the afternoon winds.
Soon, seventy-five people would be working here, paving the runway, building hangars, and setting up mobile homes bought from the Navy as barracks. By the time training started, the number of workers jumped to 250. The U-2s were flown in on cargo planes, their wings removed. An official CIA history rather prissily explains, “The site at first afforded few of the necessities and none of the amenities of life.”
They flew Bissell out to the site. “Sweet Jesus,” Mr. B. may have exclaimed, a favorite phrase of his.
“This will do nicely,” he commented. He even liked Johnson’s proposed name for the place: “Paradise Ranch.”
Johnson and Bissell worked it out such that the Nevada Test Site took official ownership of the strip. Construction on the runway began and a press release was issued, tying the work to the test site, when work began in August. It was done by REECO, Reynolds Electric, the subsidiary of EG&G that ran the nuclear test site. It was referred to now as “Watertown Strip”—perhaps a coy reference to the dryness of the place, or to Allen Dulles’s hometown in northern New York State—and not Groom Lake in the emerging cover story, which described the airplane as a weather craft.
Meanwhile, a continent away, the command post for the program was set up in the E-ring of the Pentagon. Bissell moved out of the CIA headquarters on the Mall and into a special program management office with a staff of 225 in an old office on L Street—one of the temporary wartime buildings that had never been removed, an apt metaphor for the survival of the wartime mentality into the uneasy peace. The place was named “Bissell Center,” and some in the agency began talking of the RBAF—“Richard Bissell Air Force.”
The photo-processing center was set up in a seedy part of town at K and Fifth streets, NW, on four floors above offices of the Stuart Motor Car Company, an auto repair shop. It was code-named Automat.
Aircraft ferried workers and materials between the Skunk Works in Burbank and another factory, set up in the little town of Oildale near Bakersfield, a scruffy cotton and oil town where the country singer Merle Haggard had grown up in an old boxcar. The pilots flying to the new secret base were not told where it was. They were simply ordered to fly to a set of coordinates in the middle of the desert and then to await instructions from an unknown air control center, called Sage Control, for further instructions from “Delta.” At the point when the radar picked them up, the crews were ordered to descend into the dark desert and lower their gears and flaps. Only then did the runway lights flicker on beneath them.
Between flights, those working at the base lived four to a trailer and could contact families only if absolutely necessary. The phone for this purpose was called the “hello” phone, because that was the only way it was to be answered. It became a fixture of black projects. The number was given out for use only in emergencies. A message was left and the worker or engineer would call back.
There was much drinking and poker. With lots of idle time on their hands, one group of workers fired off homemade rockets made of sawdust, gunpowder, and cigar tubes. Once they nearly hit a cargo plane.
On November 17, 1955, a C-54 making the run from Burbank mistook its altitude and struck Mount Charleston, northwest of Las Vegas, just thirty feet short of its peak. It took three days for a rescue party to reach the crash; an Air Force colonel picked through the wreckage removing briefcases with classified documents. The Skunk Works was lucky; some of its key people had missed the flight because of overindulgence at a beer bash the night before.
Curtis LeMay didn’t like the idea of a bunch of civilians running an airplane program. But Eisenhower felt with equal certainty that he needed a less biased source of intelligence than the Air Force, which had a record of exaggerating the threat to keep its bomber budgets generous. Protecting himself and the American taxpayer from the military was as important a function of the U-2 program as was protecting us from the Soviet Union. LeMay’s deputy, Tom Powers, was flown to the Watertown camp in 1955 and briefed. In the deal that was worked out, SAC would “sheep-dip” the pilots—moving them from military to civilian status and training them. The base now had Air Force and CIA co-commanders.
LeMay carefully planned on letting the agency build the U-2 but then to take it away on behalf of SAC. The Skunk Works and the agency, however, worked to build their own credibility and went over LeMay’s head. In December 1955, Secretary of Defense Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson was flown to the site to bolster his enthusiasm for the program. He talked from the tower to a U-2 pilot high above. Later, Allen Dulles, pipe and all, dropped in to chat with the pilots-in-training.
The Atomic Energy Commission covered the construction work with a brief statement about the building of the airstrip, suggesting it was for nuclear testing activities, and later the familiar weather research cover story was put to work again. On May 7, 1956, a press release was issued over the name of NACA director Hugh Dryden announcing that the new weather research plane had been developed and flown. “The first data, covering conditions in the Rocky Mountain area, are being obtained from flights from Watertown Strip, Nevada.” This fooled few people; the Soviets had a copy of it when they shot down U-2 pilot Gary Powers.
At the same time, a long-planned press visit to the X-15 rocket plane at Edwards was hastily expa
nded to include a look at a “NACA” U-2, which had to be moved from the secretive North Base section of the flight test complex and painted up; it was given a bogus tail number. The paint wasn’t even dry when the reporters entered the hangar, and the ground crew was terrified one of the reporters would get close enough to touch the plane. Photos of the weather U-2 look retouched, with the NACA initials in a band on the tail.
At four-thirty on the morning of July 14, 1955, the U-2 was loaded on a C-124 and flown to Nevada. By August 4, it had been assembled and was ready to fly.
Test pilot Tony LeVier, who had chosen as his code name for the project “Anthony Evans,” was forty-two, at the top of a career wringing out the P-38 for Lockheed and then flying the first Skunk Works airplane, the XP-80 jet. He was fourteen when Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, and he’d immediately begun earning money collecting old tires and other junk in his Whittier, California, neighborhood, paying five dollars for his first airplane ride. Beginning with the Waco 10, in which he soloed three years later, LeVier would fly more than 250 different aircraft. By the time he came to Lockheed in 1941, he was already well known as a stunt and aerobatics pilot. He flew such exotic craft as the Mendenhall Special from Muroc Dry Lake in 1936 and won major trophy races in 1938 in a craft called the Schoenfeldt Firecracker.
At Lockheed, he immediately helped to figure out the odd high-speed compression problem of the P-38—a precursor of the shock waves at the sound barrier—and would put in more hours in its cockpit than any other test pilot. In June 1944 he made the first flight in the XP-80, and then flew its successor, the XP-80A “Gray Ghost”—of all the planes he flew, the one that he said came closest to killing him.
In March 1945, LeVier pushed the jet past 550 miles per hour when a turbine blade let go and he found himself embarrassed by the sudden lack of a tail. The plane began to tumble, and with the G’s he could barely reach the canopy release handle. When he did, it came off in his hand. Reaching behind the seat he grabbed the raw cable. Finally, the plane turned over and dumped him out and he pulled himself up into a little ball, waiting for what was left of the airplane to strike him. At just 3,000 feet he managed to get his parachute open.
