The Secret Genesis of Area 51 Read online

  The CIA project personnel pioneered the development of the ready-to-eat foods in squeezable containers used today. They chose bacon- or cheeseflavored mixtures that the pilot squeezed into his mouth using the self-sealing hole in the face mask. Despite all these precautions, the U-2 pilots lost three to six pounds of body weight during an eight-hour mission.

  GREATEST LOSS OF LIFE AT AREA 51

  Each day during the week, USAF C-54 transport planes flown by the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) secretly transported the CIA officials, USAF personnel and contract support, along with supplies, from Norton AFB and Burbank, California, to Area 51 and back. Everyone working at Area 51 commuted from out of state, with most staying at Area 51 the entire week. James Cunningham dubbed this activity “Bissell’s Narrow-Gauge Airline” in November, less than seven weeks after it began.

  On November 17, 1955, a Douglas MC-54M Skymaster transport plane attached to the 1700th Air Transport Group of the Military Air Transport Service at Kelly AFB, Texas, departed Norton AFB with five military personnel on board. Following the daily routine, the plane landed at Burbank, a few miles away, to pick up nine civilians from the Lockheed Skunk Works. The civilians included five from the Central Intelligence Agency, two from Hycon and two from Lockheed.

  Due to the secrecy of the U-2 program, the commuter planes always maintained radio silence. At the early hour of departure, the passengers usually slept while en route to Watertown.

  A few miles west of Las Vegas, Nevada, the plane hit a severe blizzard as it approached Mount Charleston and the Spring Mountain range. The plane became lost in the clouds, and the blinding blizzard blew it off course. An error in plotting the plane’s position caused the plane to crash only 50 feet below the crest of an 11,300-foot ridge leading to the peak of Mount Charleston.

  The C-54 employee transport crash site on Mount Charleston, Nevada, in 1955, where fourteen were killed en route to Area 51. coldwarmonument.org/the-accident/accident-photos.

  When the plane failed to land at Area 51, the CIA and air force frantically initiated a search for the wreckage. Searching for a secret plane carrying secret documents and personnel to a secret facility proved delicate to the organizers. To maintain the secrecy of the U-2 project, no one could identify the type of plane, who was flying it, who and how many were on board, where the flight originated or its destination. Such flights never communicated with air traffic control or anyone else.

  During the afternoon of Thursday, November 17, 1955, Captain Meierdierck was flying search out of Watertown when he located the wreckage on Mount Charleston. The mountain was experiencing the worst weather conditions seen in years, bad enough for the Forest Service to predict the crash site remaining inaccessible until the middle of June. The CIA found this, a seven-month delay, unacceptable for the top-secret U-2 project.

  Two air force parachute rescue teams arrived from March Air Force Base in California with the intention of offering first aid to any surviving the impact, only to have to abort the paratrooper drop because of the intense wind conditions at the top of the mountain. The U.S. Air Force then deployed the Forty-Second Air Rescue Squadron, a trained mountaineer team from March Air Force Base under the command of Colonel Frank Schwikert.

  Las Vegas sheriff Butch Leypoldt also deployed the Sheriff’s Mounted Posse to assist in military rescue efforts, along with two paratroopers from the original March team. No one expected to find any survivors. Nonetheless, providing first aid to any survivors remained their priority. Recovery of classified documents and body recovery was a secondary priority for the U.S. Air Force and CIA. The Sheriff’s Mounted Posse had no idea of the top-secret documents scattered at the crash site or the identity of the crash victims, for that matter. It would stay that way for nearly half a century.

  The first rescue party, the paramedic group from March Field, California, left on Friday morning on foot wearing snowshoes. One of the posse members became severely ill during the climb and returned down the mountain, aided by the other three members of the posse. The two parachute rescuers continued their climb. They reached the crash site and radio base camp, confirming there were no survivors and their intent to remain near the site to wait for the arrival of a horse party headed up the mountain.

  A forest ranger, a deputy sheriff and two members of the Second Air Rescue Unit headed out on foot early Saturday morning as a second rescue party. At 6:00 a.m., the sheriff headed out with another group of Sheriff’s Mounted Posse members, along with two air force colonels. After several days of struggling through the deep snow and subzero weather while using skis and snowshoes, the team aborted their attempts to climb the north side of the mountain in time to save any survivors. The team became bogged down in the deep snow as it returned to base camp.

  The top-secrecy of this accident posed many problems for the CIA and air force. The CIA was extremely concerned about the top-secret documents and equipment needing recovery before the civilian rescue party approached the wreckage. Securing the area now became the mission.

  To this end, Colonel Schwikert from March Air Force Base and Colonel Pittman from Norton Air Force Base met up with the sheriff, fifteen members of the Sheriff’s Mounted Posse and seventeen horses at the base camp set up at the bottom of the mountain. They briefed the sheriff on the situation to ensure the posse and he stood down while the U.S. Air Force attended to classified matters.

  The group departed the base camp, taking a horse-friendly but longer route to the south of the mountain. They traveled up a switchback trail toward the ridge with the snow drifts so deep the horses’ feet never touched the ground. The riders at times dragged their feet in the snow behind their saddles or dismounts to slide on their stomachs while hanging on to the horses’ tails. Conditions became much worse, with the rescue team realizing they had no water to drink and had only a few cans of SPAM for food.

  Sheriff Leypoldt led the rescue party up the mountain along an old hiking trail, where snow varied up to six feet deep. In temperatures below zero and drifts twenty feet deep, the rescue party worked its way up the mountain in increasing wind velocities that covered them with powdered snow. The horses often slipped off the narrow trail, at times pinning their riders beneath them in the snow.

  The rescue party, traveling on skis and snowshoes, overtook and joined the first army rescue team six miles from the plane. Finding them so cold and miserable, the leader of the party ordered them to return to the lodge. The rescuers traveled along the ridge near the summit to the crash site in the freezing wind, the shallow snow turning to ice that the horses’ hooves broke through.

  The rescue party arrived at 1:00 p.m. at the wreckage, where they stood down, shivering in the blizzard wind and snow, to allow the sheriff and Colonel Schwikert time to inspect the crash site before allowing them to proceed.

  The pilot appeared to have seen the mountain at the last moment and tried to climb over it. It was too late. The plane pancaked against the mountain and disintegrated, causing cargo and ten passengers to erupt through the top of the cabin and scatter forty or fifty feet in all directions. The plane’s motors lay twenty or thirty feet from the plane, and the plane’s nose and wings were downslope in front of the fuselage tail.

  The sheriff and his posse grouped a few yards away while the U.S. Air Force collected the classified documents and material. When finished with collecting the classified material, Colonel Schwikert turned the recovery of bodies over to the sheriff.

  The sheriff ’s posse had to break the frozen bodies to bend them before tying them onto the saddles of spooked horses for the trek back down the mountain. Otherwise, the frozen bodies would have extended to the sides of the narrow trail and caught in the brush. The first group of five rescuers departed on foot, leading the horses through a cold blizzard down slippery slopes. It became necessary for the rescuers to clear the trail with a shovel. Several times, the horses carrying the recovered bodies and lunging through the snow slipped and rolled down the slopes. In one incident, one of the
horses slipped, falling and rolling down the mountainside, leaving the body on the trail. The rescuer managed to return his horse to its feet but was too exhausted and weak to put the body back on the horse.

  The sun set with the blizzard howling around the rescue party with no flashlights. They groped in the darkness, hanging on to the saddles to prevent their staggering and falling off the steep mountainside. They finally met up with the half-frozen snowshoe troops from March Field now in their third day of the encampment in small pup tents on the side of the frozen mountain.

  The rescue and recovery effort ended with the Sheriff’s Mounted Posse volunteers taking an oath of secrecy concerning everything they had seen. Following this, the greatest single loss of life in the entire U-2 program, Lockheed assumed the responsibility of transporting personnel to Watertown using a Lockheed-owned C-47. Lost were the lives of key CIA, Lockheed and Hycon personnel so essential that their deaths almost ended the U-2 project entirely.

  CHAPTER 8

  WATERTOWN GOES OPERATIONAL

  “WEATHER RESEARCH”

  While the CIA made its final preparations for U-2 overflights, the U.S. Air Force began a reconnaissance project causing considerable protest around the world and threatened the existence of the U-2 spying program before it even began.

  Project GENETRIX, a project originating from the 1951 RAND Corporation study, involved the use of camera-carrying balloons to obtain high-altitude photography of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China while claiming to be weather research connected with the International Geophysical Year.

  President Eisenhower gave his approval on December 27, 1955, two weeks before the CIA’s U-2 began flights from bases in Western Europe. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force had launched 516 balloons by the end of February 1956. Once launched, the balloons flew at the mercy of the prevailing winds, missing the prime target areas, which lay in the higher latitudes, and instead, many drifted toward southern Europe, across the Black Sea and the desert areas of China.

  Large numbers of balloons failed to cross the Soviet Union and China because of hostile aircraft shooting them down or because they prematurely expended their ballast supplies and descended too soon. Of the 516 balloons launched, the U.S. Air Force recovered only 46 payloads. Only 34 balloons succeeded in obtaining useful photographs while causing the United States problems from the balloon overflights provoking a storm of protest and unfavorable publicity.

  Photo taken from the shuttle plane of a U-2 preparing for flight. Note the NACA markings. The CIA attempted to reduce visual sightings of the U-2 by painting it. The weight of the paint cost the plane 1,500 feet of altitude. CIA via TD Barnes Collection.

  All this publicity and protest led President Eisenhower to conclude the balloons giving more legitimate grounds for irritation than matching the benefit obtained from them. He ordered the project halted.

  Although Project GENETRIX gained limited quality photo intelligence, it still rated as some of the best and most complete photography obtained of the Soviet Union since World War II. The U.S. Air Force and the CIA considered it as “pioneering” photography because it provided a baseline for all future overhead photography, including the U-2. Even innocuous photos of forests and streams proved valuable in later years when U-2 and satellite photography revealed construction activity.

  The data obtained by NATO and U.S. radars tracking the paths of the balloons at an average altitude of 45,800 feet over the Soviet Bloc proved of still greater importance to the U-2 program for the most accurate record to date of high-altitude wind currents. Knowledgeable meteorologists later used these for determining optimum flight paths for U-2 flights.

  One fortuitous development from Project GENETRIX involved a steel bar that secured the top rigging of the huge polyethylene gasbag with the camera payload and automatic-ballasting equipment. By sheer chance, the length of the bar corresponded to the wavelength of the radio frequency used by Soviet TOKEN S-band radar that the Soviet forces used for early warning and ground-control intercept.

  The bar on the GENETRIX balloons resonated when struck by TOKEN radar pulses, making it possible for radar operators at the U.S. and NATO installations on the periphery of the Soviet Union to locate several unknown TOKEN radars. These radar findings, coupled with other intercepts made during the balloon flights, provided extensive data on Warsaw Pact radar networks, radar sets and ground control interception techniques.

  Nonetheless, the ill will generated by the balloon overflights concerned the CIA officials and soured the Eisenhower administration on all overflights, including those flights by the U-2, near ready for deployment. The CIA feared President Eisenhower might curtail a balloon program of the Free Europe Committee, a covert agency operation base in West Germany used to release propaganda pamphlets over Eastern Europe.

  By January 1956, everyone working on Project AQUATONE saw the U-2 nearing operational deployment. During tests, the aircraft met all the criteria established in late 1954. Its range of 2,950 miles was sufficient to overfly continents, its altitude of seventy-two thousand feet was beyond the reach of all known antiaircraft weapons and interceptor aircraft and it carried the finest camera lenses available.

  The main targets for the U-2 lay behind the Iron Curtain. Bissell and his staff considered this and looked for operational bases in Europe. The CIA felt America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom, was the logical choice for U-2 bases.

  On January 10, 1956, Bissell flew to London to discuss the matter with the Royal Air Force (RAF) and MI-6 officials. Initially, they responded favorably. Nonetheless, they referred Bissell to a higher level for approval of the proposal. Bissell reported his findings to Director Dulles, who arranged to meet with Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd in London to explore the possibility of winning the British government’s approval for the project. Dulles presented his case to Lloyd on February 2, and by early March, Lloyd had approved the basing of U-2s in the United Kingdom, suggesting the U-2s use Lakenheath Air Force Base, which was already in use by the USAF Strategic Air Command.

  In March 1956, Colonel Ritland returned to the U.S. Air Force as the deputy project director, followed by Colonel Jack A. Gibbs. In March 1956, Colonel Landon McConnell took command of Watertown at Area 51, and CIA director Allen Dulles visited Area 51 to meet the first training class.

  Colonel Gibbs, who retired a brigadier general, received an assignment to the CIA as the deputy project director of the U-2 under Richard Bissell. In this role until July 1958, he became responsible for operational control of the three overseas detachments and the one at Area 51. Also, he was the CIA’s engineering manager for research and development efforts under Project RAINBOW to reduce the radar detectability of the U-2 and assess the feasibility of developing a new aircraft with lower RCS (radar cross-section) characteristics under Project GUSTO. He received the Legion of Merit in 1958 for his performance in this assignment.

  CONGRESS BRIEFED ON AQUATONE

  Although a guarded secret within both the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, DCI Dulles decided to tell a few key members of Congress about the U-2 project. On February 24, 1956, Dulles met with Senators Leverett Saltonstall and Richard B. Russell, the ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and its subcommittee on the CIA. He shared with them the details of Project AQUATONE and asked their opinion on informing some members of the House of Representatives.

  Because of the senators’ recommendation to brief the senior members of the House Appropriations Committee, Dulles met later with the ranking members, Representatives John Taber and Clarence Cannon. Official congressional acknowledgment of the U-2 project remained confined to this small group for the next four years. The House Armed Services Committee and its CIA subcommittees did not receive a CIA briefing on the U-2 Project until after the loss of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 over the Soviet Union in May 1960.

  COORDINATING INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION

  From the U-2 program, the CIA saw the apparent need for
an interagency task force or office to develop and coordinate collection requirement for the covert overhead reconnaissance effort.

  Scientist Edwin Land, who developed the Polaroid Company and was a member of the Beacon Hill Group. Wikipedia.

  Early on, on November 3, 1954, Edwin Land had written to DCI Dulles setting forth the idea of a permanent task force to consolidate requirements and for planning missions given priority and feasibility. Land’s recommendation went into effect when the U-2’s development and testing approach completion. On December 1, 1955, following a meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles and Trevor Gardner, Richard Bissell established an Ad Hoc Requirements Committee (ARC). He named James Q. Reber as the intelligence requirements officer for the U-2 project and chair of the ARC.

  Reber, already experienced in coordination with other intelligence agencies, headed the Directorate of Intelligence DI Office of Intelligence Coordination for four years. The first fullscale ARC meeting took place on February 1, 1956, with representatives from the army, navy and air force present. The CIA membership later expanded to include the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI). The Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and a representative of the Directorate of Plans attended for the CIA.

  In 1957, the National Security Agency (NSA) began sending a representative, and the State Department followed suit in 1960. After that, the committee issued its list of targets for the entire intelligence community using all available means of collection and not for the CIA with the U-2. ARC gave the top priority target list to the project director and the project staff’s operations section using the list to plan the flight paths for U-2 missions.

  Although not responsible for developing flight plans, the requirements committee assisted the planners with detailed target information as required. When ready to submit a flight plan to the president for approval, the committee drew up a detailed justification for the selection of the targets. This paper accompanied the flight plan.