The Secret Genesis of Area 51 Read online

  The DD/S approved them establishing this policy and initiating a crash program to prepare dependent housing. They accomplished this at Adana by rental and renovation of local economy houses and using trailers shipped from the United States.

  In Atsugi, they remodeled existing agency billets and constructed more units through a local builder. This program cost total several hundred thousand dollars in each case. The CIA could not recoup this cost when the two detachments returned to the ZI.

  The CIA continued its U-2 flights while developing a replacement. With the failure of the CIA’s Project RAINBOW to reduce the radar cross-section of the U-2, preliminary work began at Lockheed in late 1957 to develop a follow-on aircraft to overfly the Soviet Union. Under Project GUSTO, the designs were nicknamed “Archangel,” after the U-2 program, which had been known as “Angel.”

  Virtually every mission flown by the U-2 produced invaluable intelligence on what the Soviet Union was up to with its bomber, missile and nuclear capabilities. Soviet Overflight Mission 4035 located and photographed the Soviet missile test facility at Tyuratam at a distance. Other flights examined the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and the Saryshagan missile test site. Because of Eisenhower’s increasing cautiousness, only five more occurred during the year before the May 1960 incident that stopped all manned overflights of the Soviet Union.

  The twelfth and thirteenth Soviet overflights discovered the nuclear weapons testing facility in Semipalatinsk and revealed many of the ground zeros from previous nuclear tests. The U-2 mapped the whole of Tibet, the Soviet missile test center at Kapustin Yar and the Soviet Far East naval aviation bases at Komsomolsk and Khabarovsk.

  Toward the end of March 1957, seven U-2s staged from Eielson and returned during an operation code named Congo Maiden, where they photographed the Soviet Northern Siberian coastline to determine the status of upgraded World War II Soviet airfields in this frozen region. They enabled the CIA to evaluate Soviet air defenses in case a preemptive U.S. strike on the Arctic airfields became necessary along the extreme eastern and northern coastlines of Siberia.

  Bissell suggested bringing the British into the program to increase the number of overflights. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan agreed with the plan and sent four Royal Air Force officers of Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas for training in May 1958. On July 8, the senior British pilot, Squadron Leader Christopher H. Walker, died when his U-2 malfunctioned and crashed near Wayside, Texas. The CIA did not disclose the circumstances of this first death involving the U-2 for over fifty years. The CIA selected and sent another pilot to replace Walker.

  After training, the group of Royal Air Force U-2 pilots arrived in Turkey in November 1958. The United States and the United Kingdom remained jointly involved following the CIA’s Detachment B from Adana, which provided valuable intelligence during the 1958 Lebanon crisis.

  The CIA and Eisenhower viewed using British pilots as a way of increasing plausible deniability for the flights. The CIA saw British participation as a way of obtaining additional Soviet overflights the president would not authorize. The United Kingdom gained the ability to target flights toward areas of the world of less interest to the United States and to avoid another Suez-like interruption of U-2 photographs.

  Although the Royal Air Force unit operated as part of Detachment B, the United Kingdom received title to the U-2s its pilots flew, and Eisenhower wrote about the nations conducting two complementary programs rather than a joint one because of the separate lines of authority.

  While most British flights occurred over the Middle East during the two years the United Kingdom program existed, the Brits flew two successful missions over Soviet missile test sites. One overflight occurred in December and another in February 1960. Neither proved nor disproved the missile gap. Nonetheless, the British flights’ success contributed to Eisenhower’s authorization of one overflight in April. Like Eisenhower, Macmillan approved the Soviet overflights. Direct British involvement in overflights ended after the May 1960 U-2 downing incident. Although four pilots remained stationed in California until 1974, the CIA’s official history of the program states no Royal Air Force pilots ever conducted another overflight in an agency U-2. Even though their U-2 experience remained secret, between 1960 and 1961, the first four pilots received the U.S. Air Force Cross.

  In April 1958, the CIA source Pyotr Sehisonovich Popov told his handler, George Kisevalter, of a senior KGB official boasting of having “full technical details” of the U-2. Bissell concluded the project to have a leak. However, the CIA never identified the source of the leak. Many speculated it was a radar operator at a U-2 base in Japan, the same Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated President Kennedy.

  On May 15, 1959, Lyle Rudd flew the nineteenth Soviet overflight from NAS Cubi Point in the Philippines, flying nine hours and forty minutes in the air, the longest operational U-2 mission to date, covering 4,200 miles.

  Operation Hot Shop on June 9 and 18, 1959, obtained the first telemetry ever of a Soviet R-7 ICBM during the first stage burn—eighty seconds after launch. Three months later, Detachment B overflights of Israel discovered the Dimona nuclear reactor and processing facility under construction.

  On December 6, 1959, Squadron Leader Robbie Robinson flew the twenty-first Soviet overflight, Mission 8005, as the first mission flown by the Royal Air Force out of Peshawar. The following flight by the RAF discovered a new Soviet bomber at Kazan. Robinson captured eight Tu-22 BLINDER aircraft on film. From there, he headed south down the Volga over the missile factory at Dnepropetrovsk.

  On April 19, 1960, Bob Ericson flew the twenty-third Soviet overflight, Mission 4155, Operation Square Deal, which the Soviet Air Defense organization manually tracked the whole time. Several MiG-19s made unsuccessful attempts to shoot down the aircraft.

  Khrushchev claimed in his memoir that a new Soviet surface-to-air missile should have shot down the April flight had the missile crews not reacted too slowly. By this time, the CIA concluded that the Soviet SAMs had “a high probability of a successful intercept at seventy thousand feet, providing they detected the plane in sufficient time to alert the site.”

  Despite the now much greater risk, the CIA failed to stop the overflights because of overconfidence from the years of successful missions and because of the strong demand for more missile site photos. By this time, the U-2 was the major source of covert intelligence on the Soviet Union; the aircraft photographed 15 percent of the country, resulting in 5,500 separate intelligence reports. Eisenhower authorized one more overflight to occur no later than May 1, 1960, because of the important Paris Summit of the Big Four on May 16.

  On September 24, 1959, while conducting a test flight in Article 360 from Detachment C in Atsugi in Japan, Tom Crull encountered problems on a test flight and eventually ran out of fuel. With great skill, he managed to dead-stick the aircraft onto a small civilian airfield in Fujisawa, where curious Japanese civilians promptly surrounded and photographed it.

  The CIA shipped the damaged U-2C aircraft back to Lockheed in the United States for repairs. Article 360 returned to Detachment B at Adana in Turkey, where it gained a reputation as a “Hangar Queen” for a variety of reasons. As a matter of fate, Gary Powers drew Article 360 to fly on Mission 4154, Operation Grand Slam.

  When the U-2 became operational in June 1956, an official predicted a useful lifetime over the USSR of two years. Its first flight over Soviet territory revealed the Soviet defense warning system detecting and tracking it. The U-2 remained a unique and invaluable source of intelligence information for four years. Everything changed near Sverdlovsk on May Day, May 1, 1960, when Russian missiles shot down Francis Gary Powers in Article 360, the Hangar Queen. All eyes turned on Area 51 and the U-2’s proposed replacement, the Mach 3 A-12. The U-2 continued flying, but not over Russia.

  The CIA chose for the fateful mission—the twenty-fourth deeppenetration Soviet overflight, Operation Grand Slam—an ambitious flight plan for the first crossing of the Soviet Union from Peshawar
, Pakistan, to Bodø, Norway; previous flights always exited in the direction from which they entered. The route permitted visits to Tyuratam, Sverdlovsk, Kotlas, Severodvinsk and Murmansk.

  The CIA chose Francis Gary Powers, the most experienced pilot, for the flight. Powers had flown twenty-seven missions at this point. After several delays, the flight, Mission 4154, in a U-2C known as the Hangar Queen, finally occurred on May Day 1960.

  Out of 365 days in a year, the CIA could not have picked a worse day to fly over Russia. On May Day each year, the United States and its allies went on military alert because this was an important Soviet holiday. Each May Day, the Soviet Union held massive parades to show off its war equipment. Also, this being a Soviet holiday meant much less air traffic than usual.

  Frank Powers’s mission that day was to fly over Russia and land at Bodø, Norway, where Marty Knutson was waiting to take the aircraft on its return flight. Knutson was sitting in Norway breathing oxygen and preparing to don his pressurized space suit to take over the aircraft that Powers was flying. At Bodø, they knew something was amiss when the aircraft failed to arrive within the required timeframe.

  The Soviet’s radar systems detected the Hangar Queen flying fifteen miles outside the Soviet border and tracked it over Sverdlovsk. Four and a half hours into the flight, one of three SA-2 missiles detonated behind the aircraft at 70,500 feet. Another missile hit a Soviet interceptor attempting to reach the American aircraft. Powers survived the near miss.

  The CIA did not know the Russians had captured Powers. Nor did the CIA know that the crash had failed to destroy the U-2 and it was in Soviet hands. The conspired cover story went into effect with NASA issuing a press release using the CIA’s cover story about a U-2 conducting weather research that may have strayed off course after the pilot “reported difficulties with his oxygen equipment.”

  The CIA rushed a U-2 from North Base at Edwards AFB to the NASA Dryden hangars to bolster the cover-up. NASA quickly painted NASA markings on it with a fictitious NASA serial number. NASA put the plane on display for the news media photo op at the NASA Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB.

  Bissell and other project officials believed it impossible to survive a U-2 accident from above seventy thousand feet. Consequently, they used the preexisting cover story.

  On May 3, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the successor to NACA, announced one of its aircraft missing while making a high-altitude research flight in Turkey. The government planned to say, if necessary, that the NASA aircraft had drifted with an incapacitated pilot across the Soviet border. NACA director Dr. Hugh L. Dryden’s press release stated the U-2 aircraft was conducting weather research for NACA with air force support and had gone missing and was presumed lost while operating overseas.

  Khrushchev learned of America’s NASA cover story and developed a political trap for Eisenhower. By remaining silent, Khrushchev lured the Americans into reinforcing the cover story. As the saying goes, the Russians gave the Americans enough slack rope to hang themselves. Politically, the United States did exactly that. At this point, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev exposed the cover-up by revealing on May 7 that Powers was alive and had confessed to spying on the Soviet Union.

  Eisenhower turned down Dulles’s offer to resign and publicly took full responsibility for the incident on May 11. By then, the CIA had canceled all overflights. The Paris Summit collapsed after Khrushchev, as the first speaker, demanded an apology from the United States, which Eisenhower refused.

  Powers had received little instruction on what to do during an interrogation. Although he said that he could reveal everything since the Soviets could learn what they wanted from the aircraft, Powers did his best to conceal classified information while appearing to cooperate. His trial began on August 17, 1960. Powers, who apologized on the advice of his Soviet defense counsel, received a three-year sentence in prison. However, on February 10, 1962, the USSR exchanged him and American student Frederic Pryor for Rudolf Abel at the Glienicke Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam, Germany.

  Two CIA investigations found that Powers performed well during the interrogation and “complied with his obligations as an American citizen during this period.” Nonetheless, the government was reluctant to reinstate him to the USAF because of its statements that the U-2 program was civilian. The CIA promised to do so after his CIA employment ended. Powers resolved the dilemma by choosing to work for Lockheed as a U-2 pilot.

  NASA, concerned about the damage to its reputation in the wake of the Powers U-2 affair, disengaged from the CIA and no longer provided it the cover story support needed for its covert U-2 operations.

  Four months later, the May Day incident resulted in a cessation of overflight operations. The CIA reduced the number of pilots in Detachments B and C and then returned them to the United States. Other air activities, however, increased, including the U-2 successor program. Satellite activity and clandestine air operations in various areas of the world and the Far East increased as well. So did the staffing of cadres for the detachments at Eglin, Kadena and the new detachment in Taiwan.

  The Russians used the debris of Powers’s aircraft to design a copy under the name Berijev S-13. They discarded the Berijev S-13 for the MiG-25R and reconnaissance satellites.

  From 1956 to 1960, U-2 aircraft flew twenty-four missions over the USSR. Detachment A flew six missions, Detachment C flew four and Detachment B flew fourteen, including Powers’s flight.

  Unknown to Bissell at the time, the clouds of war were gathering much closer to home with Cuban president Fulgencio Batista fleeing Cuba for the Dominican Republic ahead of the Cuban revolution, making Fidel Castro the leader of Cuba. Although he refrained from declaring that the country was going communist, Cuba inspired guerrilla movements to spring up across Latin America.

  Meanwhile, the troops that President Truman had committed to fighting France’s war in Vietnam were still there and still engaged in a proxy fight with Russia and the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, which was threatening to overthrow the government of South Vietnam.

  The CIA’s U-2 program conducted eight overflights over communist territory and had not found any Myasishchev M-4 Bison bombers at the nine bases they had visited. The U-2 proved the feared bomber gap did not exist.

  CHANGES TO THE CIA PROGRAM

  Immediately after the Soviets announced that Powers was alive, the CIA evacuated the British pilots from Detachment B, as Turkey did not know of their presence in the country. The end of Soviet overflights meant that Detachment B would soon leave Turkey, and in July, Detachment C would leave Japan following a Japanese governmental request.

  Both detachments merged into Detachment G at Edwards Air Force Base, California, where the CIA had relocated the U-2 program after nuclear testing forced it to move from Area 51 in 1957.

  By the next U-2 flight, in October 1960 over Cuba, the National Security Council Special Group had replaced the previous informal procedure in which the president personally approved or disapproved each flight after discussion with advisors. The expansion of satellite intelligence partly compensated for the overflights’ end, but because U-2 photographs remained superior to satellite imagery, future administrations considered resumption at times, such as during the Berlin crisis of 1961.

  In November 1960, the deputy director of plans, Dick Bissell, contacted Colonel William Burke, the chief of the development project division. He notified Burke of his intent to take advantage of the reduction of Detachment B. He hoped to achieve a reduction in the authorized strength of the division, thus reflecting the gradual shift of resources away from the U-2 into new programs.

  The staff remained static until February 1962. Bissell left the CIA, and a six-month period of reorganization ensued. In May 1965, the CIA separated its satellite operations from the other activities within OSA under the Special Projects Staff (SPS). Effective September 15, 1965, the CIA established the Office of Special Projects within the CIA’s Directorate for Science
and Technology (DS&T) to carry on these operations.

  In March–April 1963, CIA satellites noted the Russians were building a massive launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The size of the assembly building had all the earmarks for a very large launch vehicle. With the CIA, it was, “Hello. What is going on here?”

  A very large causeway led up to two launch pads side by side. In the analysis, back in Washington, the launch pads were firsthand evidence of the preparations of a huge rocket. The activity could mean only one thing: the United States was in a space race to the moon.

  EPILOGUE

  Area 51 wasn’t meant to be a permanent base. The CIA acquired Area 51 and built the Groom Lake facility in 1955 for test flying the CIA’s U-2 reconnaissance plane and abandoned the facility when the U-2s moved out to become operational.

  At the time, neither Dick Bissell with the CIA nor Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson expected the U-2 reconnaissance plane to be perpetually invulnerable to Soviet counter-countermeasures. Thus, shortly after the operational commitment of the U-2 in June 1956, research had already begun to improve its survivability and extend the program’s lifetime. The outgrowth of the early studies became a subproject of AQUATONE called Project RAINBOW. Early estimates showed a high probability of success in U-2 overflights based on the U-2’s operating altitude. Its high penetration and operating altitude were expected to diminish the possibility of detection and accurate tracking by hostile defense systems. Unfortunately, the Soviet air defense warning system proved up to the challenge.