The Secret Genesis of Area 51 Read online

  The U-2 would have a speed of Mach 0.8 or 460 knots at altitude. Its initial maximum altitude would be 70,600 feet, and the ultimate maximum altitude would be 73,100 feet. The new plane would take off at 90 knots, land at 76 knots and glide 244 nautical miles from 70,000 feet. Johnson promised the first test flight would occur on or before August 2, 1955, and the completion of four aircraft by December 1, 1955.

  FUEL PROBLEMS

  As with any new aircraft design, the U-2 encountered problems for Lockheed and other relevant support vendors to resolve. One such problem was fuel control and the propensity of the engine dumping engine oil into the cockpit via the ventilation system. Another was restarting the aircraft, which required descending to thirty-five thousand feet or lower, making it vulnerable to Soviet interception. Finding this unsatisfactory, Pratt & Whitney developed a high-altitude version of the J57 engine to provide added payload and altitude capability.

  The pilots found the aircraft fuel control system very primitive. They referred to it as the “water spigot” because it was either on or off. It didn’t have a central control, a crucial consideration with the early U-2 that required to maintain trim as it consumed fuel.

  None of the first fifty U-2s had normal fuel gauges. The aircraft contained a complex system of fuel lines and valves draining to a central sump, making it impossible to provide the pilots with an Empty/Full type of fuel gauge. Instead, they used mechanical fuel totalizers/counters.

  Before each mission, the ground crew set the counters to indicate the total amount of fuel in the wings. A flow meter then subtracted the gallons of fuel consumed during a flight, which the pilots recorded on a log to compare with estimates made by mission planners for each leg of the flight.

  The pilots double-checked the log by keeping track of the fuel consumption by monitoring airspeed and flight time. The planes often ran out of fuel or experienced flame-outs (the flame in the combustion chamber of a jet engine extinguishing), with a resultant loss of power because of the poor fuel control system. During the early part of the program, the pilots averaged seven flame-outs per flight, each time requiring the U-2 operating at a seventy-thousand-foot altitude to descend into the thicker air at twenty to thirty thousand feet to get a restart. One U-2 pilot ran out of fuel and glided over nine hundred miles to an air force base.

  THE CAMERAS

  Lockheed faced a battle with the U.S. Air Force when it came to photography. The U.S. Air Force reconnaissance experts had all gained their practical experience during World War II in the multi-engine bombers. Aerial reconnaissance at that time required the multi-engine bombers to accommodate the long focal length the cumbersome 240-inch Boston camera needed. The camera’s size required partial disassembly of the YC-97 Boeing Stratocruiser carrying it.

  By December 1954, Lockheed was at work designing the U-2’s airframe, and Pratt & Whitney was already building the J57 jet engine, but no firm plans existed for the special cameras that weren’t too bulky and had sufficient resolution for high-altitude reconnaissance. A resolution of fewer than ten feet from altitudes above sixty-eight thousand feet required an aerial camera almost four times as good as any existing.

  In the mid-1940s, James G. Baker of Harvard and Richard S. Perkin of the Perkin-Elmer (P-E) Company of Norwalk, Connecticut, had collaborated on designing very-high-acuity lenses for an experimental camera for the army air force. Baker realized that size and weight were the major restraining factors for developing a camera for the U-2 and began working on a radically new system in October 1954, even before the CIA adopted the Lockheed proposal. Baker needed almost a year to produce a working model of such a complex camera. However, Kelly Johnson had promised to have a U-2 in the air within eight months. Baker consulted with his friend and colleague Richard Perkin and came up with the Hycon Manufacturing Company–built air force camera known as the K-38, a twenty-four-inch aerial framing camera that he adapted for the U-2.

  Perkin suggested modifying several standard K-38 cameras to reduce their weight to the U-2’s 450-pound payload limit. At the same time, Baker made critical adjustments to improve the acuity of existing K-38 lenses. Baker did this in a few weeks to several modified K-38s, now known as A-l cameras. The camera was ready when the first “angel” aircraft took to the air in mid-1955.

  The CIA awarded Hycon a contract for the modified K-38 cameras. Hycon, in turn, subcontracted Perkin-Elmer to provide new lenses and to modify the cameras to make them less bulky. In turn, Perkin-Elmer subcontracted to Baker’s Spica, Incorporated to rework the existing K-38 lenses and later design an improved lens system known as the A-1 camera system.

  The A-1 used two 24-inch K-38 framing cameras, one mounted one vertically and the other resting in a rocking mount. The A1 photographed a 17.2-degree swath beneath the aircraft onto a roll of 9.5-inch film. The rocking mount allowed it to alternately photograph out to 36.5 degrees the left oblique and right oblique onto separate rolls of 9.5-inch film that unwound in opposite directions to minimize their effect on the balance of the aircraft.

  The U-2s equipped with the A-1 camera system also carried a Perkin-Elmer tracking camera to make continuous horizon-to-horizon photographs of the terrain passing beneath the plane. The U-2 also carried a backup camera system, a K-17 six-inch three-camera trimetrogon unit using nineinch film.

  Mounting the Type A camera system in the U-2’s Q-bay. CIA via TD Barnes Collection.

  Problems with the A-1 rocking system required Baker to come up with the new camera system known as the A-2, which returned to a trimetrogon arrangement. The A-2 consisted of three separate K-38 framing cameras and 9.5-inch film magazines. One K-38 filmed the right oblique, another the vertical and a third the left oblique. The A-2 system also included a 3-inch tracking camera and came equipped with the new 24-inch f/8.0 Baker-designed lenses with several aspheric surfaces. James Baker personally ground and made the final bench tests on each lens before releasing it to the agency. These lenses resolved sixty lines per millimeter, a 240-percent improvement over existing lenses.

  Once Baker and Scott had redesigned the twenty-four-inch lens for the K-38 devices, they continued to pioneer aerial photography for the U-2 with Baker’s new camera design, known as the B model. It incorporated an entirely new concept, a high-resolution panoramic-type framing camera with a much longer thirty-six-inch f/10.0 aspheric lens. The complex B camera engineered by Hycon’s chief designer, William McFadden, used a single lens to obtain photography from one horizon to the other, thereby reducing weight by having two fewer lenses and shutter assemblies than the standard trimetrogon configuration. Because its lens was longer than those used in the A cameras, the B camera achieved even higher resolution—one hundred lines per millimeter.

  The B camera used an 18- by 18-inch format achieved by focusing the image onto two counter-rotating but overlapping 9.5-inch-wide strips of film. Baker designed this camera so that one film supply was located forward, the other aft. Thus, as the film supplies unwound, they counterbalanced each other and did not disturb the aircraft’s center of gravity. The B camera’s two modes of operation increased the available number of exposures, almost doubled the camera’s operating time and provided stereo coverage from three of the seven B-camera frames.

  The C model with a 240-inch focal length was James Baker’s idea for the ultimate high-altitude camera. In December 1954, he designed a camera with a folding optical path using three mirrors, a prism and a f/20.0 lens system. Before working out the details of this design, however, Baker flew to California in early January 1955 to consult with Kelly Johnson about the weight and space limitations of the U-2’s payload compartment. Despite every effort to reduce the physical dimensions of the C camera, he needed an additional 6 inches of payload space to accommodate the bigger lens. When he broached this subject to Johnson, the latter replied, “Six more inches? I’d sell my grandmother for 6 more inches!”

  Baker continued his efforts to design a better camera for the CIA. He later decided to make the mirrors for t
he system out of a new, lightweight foamed silica material developed by Pittsburgh-Coming Glass Company that reduced the weight significantly. Hycon flight-tested the C camera on January 31, 1957, and discovered that its 180-inch focal length, five times longer than that of the B camera, made the camera very sensitive to aircraft vibration and led to great difficulty in aiming the C camera from altitudes above sixty-eight thousand feet. The engineers, therefore, decided to shelve the camera. More than five years later, a redesigned C camera employed during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 proved very satisfactory.

  The failure of the C camera design was not a serious setback to the high-altitude reconnaissance program because the B camera proved highly successful. Once initial difficulties with the film-transport system were overcome, the B camera became the workhorse of high-altitude photography. An improved version known as the B-2 was still in use. Both earlier A-model cameras were phased out after September 1958.

  During the period when he was designing lenses for the CIA’s overhead reconnaissance program, James Baker was also working on a classified lens designed by the air force for the Smithsonian Institution. To protect the security of Baker’s work for the agency, Herbert Miller of the Development Projects Staff told Baker to work on lenses for the U-2 in the open and did not make any effort to classify the documents connected with the project. Miller believed that by not calling attention to the effort using special security measures, the project could be completed faster without compromising it. This “hiding in the open” strategy proved very successful.

  In addition to the camera systems, the U-2 carried one other important item of optical equipment: a periscope designed by James Baker and built by Walter Baird of Baird Associates to enable pilots to recognize the targets beneath the aircraft and to provide a valuable navigational aid.

  SELECTING AREA 51 FOR THE U-2

  The work continued in California on the airframe, in Connecticut on the engines and in Boston on the camera system. The construction of the first few U-2 aircraft was nearing completion, and it was ready for flight tests. However, the top officials of the Development Projects Staff had not found a venue offering safety and secrecy to flight test the U-2.

  On April 12, 1955, U-2 designer Kelly Johnson sent project pilot Tony LeVier and Lockheed Skunk Works chief foreman Dorsey Kammerer in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza on a two-week survey mission to scout for a new flight test location for the CIA.

  A few days later, Bissell, with his air force liaison, Colonel Osmond J. “Ozzie” Ritland, departed on a two-day survey where they reviewed fifty potential sites in a small Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza plane piloted by Lockheed’s chief test pilot, Tony LeVier.

  They used the cover story of them going on a hunting trip in Mexico. They made it realistic by dressing and packing appropriately to keep their hunting trip cover realistic. During their two-week mission, they photographed and explored desert areas that had potential as a test site in Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.

  None of the sites met the stringent security requirements of the program. Bissell rejected Johnson’s proposed Site 1 (Mud Lake, Nevada) because of its closeness to the populated area of the Tonopah mining district and the Tonopah U.S. Army Air Force Bombing Range. Ritland, however, recalled a little X-shaped field located at the eastern side of dry Groom Lake that was once the Nellis Auxiliary Field No. 1. It was one hundred miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada, outside the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) Nevada Atomic Proving Ground at Yucca Flat.

  On a later flight, LeVier, Johnson, Bissell and Ritland flew out to Nevada on a two-day survey of Groom Lake, the most promising of all the lakebeds. They found the abandoned airfield that Ritland remembered as sandy, overgrown and unusable.

  They debated landing on the airstrip but feared to attempt landing on the airstrip at the risk of nosing the plane when the wheels sank into the loose soil. They ran the risk of killing or injuring all the key figures in the U-2 project, so instead, LeVier chose to set the plane down on the lakebed. They walked to examine the strip and found it covered ankle-deep with dust after more than a decade of disuse and littered with shell casings from gunnery practice during World War II.

  Unmarred by either hummock or furrow, no tree or bush grew on this dry pluvial lakebed, its parched clay and alkaline surface smoothed through the centuries to glass-like flatness from desert winds sweeping water from winter rains across the lakebed in a timeless cycle. Receiving an average annual precipitation of only five inches of rain and snow, only occasionally did water stand on the lake more noted for hosting dusty whirlwinds. Bissell later described the playa as “a perfect natural landing field as smooth as a billiard table without doing anything to it.” It was an area of flat, dried-up land, a desert basin from which water evaporated quickly, except on the lakebed. The lakebed was a clay-like, impermeable sediment with particles smaller than silt.

  Kelly Johnson initially opposed the choice of Groom Lake because it was farther from Burbank than he liked and because of its proximity to the Nevada Proving Ground (later renamed Nevada Test Site). Conducting a flight test program adjacent to an active nuclear test site and directly in the primary downwind path of radioactive fallout from atomic blasts concerned Johnson.

  The ancient dry lakebed’s surface provided sufficient hardness for aircraft operations and marked airstrips. However, for all practical purposes, the CIA treated the entire surface as an active runway under the jurisdiction of the Area 51 air traffic control tower.

  With the selection made, the key people went to work, with Bissell and his colleagues all agreeing that Groom Lake provided the ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots. Bissell returned to Washington, where he discovered that Groom Lake lay outside the AEC proving ground. He undertook to secure a presidential action adding the Groom Lake area to the AEC proving ground. Bissell and Miller consulted with Dulles before asking the Atomic Energy Commission to add the Groom Lake area to its real estate holding in Nevada. He wrote three memos to the U.S. Air Force, the AEC and the Training Command in charge of administering the gunnery range. AEC chairman Admiral Lewis Strauss readily agreed, so Dulles approached President Eisenhower, who approved the addition to the AEC holdings of this strip of wasteland, known by its AEC map designation as Area 51. Signed by Assistant Air Secretary for Research and Development Trevor Gardner, this ensured other range activities not involving the new test site and thus ensured the security needs for Project AQUATONE.

  Note the damaged TV antenna from a sandstorm and the guard climbing the water tower to his guard shack. CIA via TD Barnes Collection.

  The Groom Lake site in Lincoln County, Nevada, with its excellent flying weather and unparalleled remoteness, was perfect for providing the secrecy and security needed for the CIA’s U-2 Project AQUATONE. The entire county had less than two thousand population, with none residing near the dry Groom Lake except for a few miners sporadically working the lead and silver Groom Lake Mine owned by the Sheahan family since 1889. The federal government owned virtually all the land in the region, rendering it dormant, unpopulated and downwind of the radioactive fallout from the atomic tests at the Atomic Proving Grounds.

  The mountains around the valley contained large sagebrush and semiarid pinion juniper. In the blistering heat and desolate valley surrounded by mountains, nothing moved during the day—and at night, predators, spiny reptiles, poisonous rattlesnakes and stinging insects came out of hiding from the blazing sun amid sparse cactus or otherwise thorny plant life. The average temperature ranged from 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer to minus 21 degrees in the winter. Everything at Groom Lake either chapped, punctured or bit those working there.

  In 1955, the AEC’s Federal Protection Services operated the check stations on the Nevada Proving Grounds through the Yucca Flat region of Area 51, the location of 739 of the 928 nuclear tests. The road split a few miles past Camp 12 on the atomic test site. The road to the right branched off the AEC property where it passed a CIA secur
ity check station into Area 51. The rectangular, six- by ten-mile (9.7- by 16.1-kilometer) facility lay in a silty valley of a sparsely populated desert, vegetated with scrub plants on the desert floor underlying the soon-to-be restricted air space called the “Groom Box.”

  The following month, in May 1955, Tony LeVier, Dorsey Kammerer and Johnson returned to Groom Lake in Lockheed’s Bonanza. They used a compass and surveying equipment to lay out a place for a 5,000-foot, north–south runway on the southwest corner of the lakebed. While there, they staked out the facility’s general layout along the salt flat, an ancient dry pluvial lakebed of parched clay and alkaline. Located in the Emigrant Valley at a 4,462-foot elevation, Groom Lake provided a perfect landing strip for any size or type of plane anywhere on the lakebed except when it rained.

  LeVier and fellow Lockheed test pilot Bob Matye spent nearly a month at Groom Lake removing surface debris from the gunnery practice during World War II. LeVier drew up a proposal for marking four three-mile-long runways on the hard-pack clay. Johnson, however, refused to approve the $450 expense, citing a lack of funds.

  While Groom Lake was Johnson’s second choice for the test location, it was the top choice of hundreds of possible sites. At that time, there was no Highway 375 or the town of Rachel. Groom Lake lay on the Nevada Nuclear Test Grounds divided into numbered area grids during atomic bomb testing. It was on the grid number 51. The grid number Area 51 existed long before it became widely known as the infamous Area 51.

  NEVADA: FROM BATTLE-BORN TO THE BATTLEFIELD STATE

  The state of Nevada, 85 percent of its land owned by the federal government, and having a population of only 237,000, was perfect for the CIA wanting to test a top-secret reconnaissance plane. Nevada was born into battle during the Civil War and has remained a battle state to this day. Though the Nevada Territory barely even qualified as a territory, three years after it became a territory, Union sympathizers in the Civil War ensured Nevada’s entry into statehood as the thirty-sixth state to provide the vote needed to elect Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president and first ever Republican president of the United States.