IN EARLY SPRING 1955, Dick Bissell, Kelly Johnson, and Colonel Osmund Ritland, the air force’s senior officer on the U-2 project, took a small Beechcraft airplane over the vast open spaces of Nevada, searching for the ideal place to test their new spy plane. As they flew close to the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s proving ground, they recognized an old airstrip next to a large salt flat at a place called Groom Lake. It was a desolate landscape, but for security purposes, the location was an absolute dream. Bald Mountain, with an elevation of 9,549 feet, to the north and the Papoose Mountain range to the south overshadowed the flat plain. As there wasn’t a living soul for miles in all directions, the CIA could test the aircraft in total secrecy. Bissell convinced the Atomic Energy Commission to acquire the parched, dusty rectangular piece of land—known only by its map designation, Area 51—for the project’s use.
For the next several months, workers labored building a 6,000-foot paved runway, secured the perimeter with fencing, and rolled in a few dozen trailers to serve as temporary housing for engineers, test pilots, and support staff, which included CIA officers doubling as security guards. With no roads or nearby towns, the secret base still looked bleak. Anyone working on the U-2 training facility had to be flown onto the base and back out again. The training would be dangerous, but the immediate threat to these top-secret workers was rattlesnakes. The CIA issued employees heavy-duty work boots to stomp on any rattlers that entered their quarters. As a joke, Kelly Johnson began calling the site “Paradise Ranch.” The name stuck and was later shortened to “the Ranch.”
Debate persisted over which department or military branch would oversee the U-2 project. By now, the US Navy had also become keenly interested in the spy plane. US Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining wanted the Strategic Air Command (SAC), located at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, to run the program. But CIA director Allen Dulles didn’t trust SAC head General Curtis LeMay, the youngest four-star general since Ulysses S. Grant, and fought the idea vigorously. The dispute went all the way to the White House where President Dwight Eisenhower would make the final decision. After much contemplation, the president sided with the CIA.
“I want this whole thing to be a civilian operation,” Eisenhower wrote. “If uniformed personnel of the armed services of the United States fly over Russia, it is an act of war—legally—and I don’t want any part of it.”1
In April 1955, Bissell signed a contract with the air force and the navy to assume primary oversight of all security for the overhead reconnaissance project. Now the CIA not only had control of the mission but would have to take full responsibility should something go wrong.
Under the auspices of the CIA, the program began to take on the unique characteristics of the agency. To veil the U-2 program in secrecy, the experimental aircraft were referred to not as planes but as “articles.” The brave men manning them were called “drivers,” not pilots. The idea was to give the enemy no written or verbal indication of the true nature of the U-2 program.
Still, the CIA needed the air force’s experience and expertise, so Director Dulles and air force chief of staff Twining came up with a compromise, code-named OILSTONE, whereby the air force would take responsibility for pilot selection and training, mission development, and operational support, while the agency handled cameras, film processing, and operational security.2 The air force, however, would keep the project at arm’s length. All technical personnel (photography, technology, and maintenance) would be specially trained civilians. In a top-secret document outlining the organizational concept for Operation Oilstone, the air force stressed the imperative that “OILSTONE appear to friendly governments as a project of the CIA rather than of the Air Force.”
The first U-2 spy plane, called Article 341, was disassembled and transported in a huge C-124 cargo plane to Groom Lake on July 25, 1955. Kelly Johnson had delivered the plane in eight months, not five as agreed on in the initial contract. Dick Bissell and his partners in the air force were thrilled with the result. It took six full days for engineers to reassemble the U-2’s wings and tail in preparation for its very first flight.
The man at the controls for the U-2’s maiden flight was Tony LeVier, Lockheed’s top test pilot. An adrenaline junkie with a cool demeanor and lightning-fast reflexes, LeVier was a champion air racer known for his acrobatic style and speed. Kelly Johnson had used him to test the Shooting Star, and LeVier responded by pushing the aircraft to the ungodly speed of 565 mph. Engineer and pilot made for a good team.
“I like LeVier to fly my aircraft first because he always brings back the answers,” Johnson once told reporters.3
But the partnership had nearly killed the gutsy pilot during a previous test flight, when the plane’s turbine crumbled in midair and cut the tail off. LeVier bailed out at the last second and suffered a hard fall. Although his parachute had deployed correctly, he landed badly, breaking his back. After his recuperation, the fearless airman returned to the skies with zero trepidation.
In 1954, he gained legendary status testing the XF-104 Starfighter—a single-engine aircraft designed by Kelly Johnson to reach supersonic speeds—for the air force. LeVier got a feel for the new plane with high-speed taxiing tests at Edwards Air Force Base in February of that year before going full throttle a month later, in a twenty-minute flight over the high desert of Southern California. LeVier pushed the Starfighter over the 1,000-mile-per-hour threshold, becoming the first pilot to achieve such a feat. Awed reporters called the aircraft “a missile with a man in it.”
Now that man was at Groom Lake and about to test another of Johnson’s space-age designs. During LeVier’s first taxi trial of the new U-2, he took the aircraft to fifty knots. He then pushed the speed to seventy knots in a second trial and suddenly found himself airborne—a surprise as LeVier had had no intention of flying that day. The pilot immediately started back toward the ground, but the dry lake bed had no markings by which to judge distance or altitude. LeVier was landing virtually blind. The U-2 made contact with the ground and bounced twice before he regained control. On the second landing, the spy plane skidded about one hundred yards before coming to a stop.
The brakes caught fire, and Bissell and Johnson doused the flames with an extinguisher as LeVier climbed out of the cockpit. Later, when debriefed by Johnson about the U-2’s performance, the pilot said the brakes performed poorly and also noted that the absence of markings on the runway made it nearly impossible to determine just how high the aircraft was off the ground. Other than damaged brakes and a few blown tires, however, the U-2 was in decent shape. Engineers focused on the brakes problem, while the ground crew put down proper distance markers on and near the runway—all in preparation for the spy plane’s first planned flight on August 4, 1955, with LeVier once again at the controls.
The pilot climbed back into the tiny cockpit of the U-2 and took off, reaching an altitude of 8,000 feet before leveling off. LeVier tested the control systems, flaps, and overall stability before attempting his first landing approach. Johnson had instructed LeVier to make initial contact with the forward landing gear and then let the aircraft settle on its back wheel. When he attempted this maneuver, the plane skidded and bounced back into the air. LeVier tried the landing technique several more times with the same result. Finally, he decided to land the plane with its rear wheel making contact first. That technique worked perfectly.
The pilot tested the U-2 nineteen more times while exploring its maximum speed of Mach 0.85 and stress limit of 2.5 gs. He also pushed the plane higher than any other aircraft had soared in sustained flight—52,000 feet. On September 8, 1955, LeVier climbed to 65,600 feet in the U-2, the secret aircraft’s initial design altitude.
Dick Bissell had confidence in the performance and durability of the U-2. Now he had to find and train men willing to fly it over enemy territory. President Eisenhower opposed using US military personnel to man the aircraft. He preferred “non-American” pilots to give the United States cover in case a U-2 crashed or was shot down over the Soviet Union or China. Discreet feelers went out to skilled pilots around the world to gauge their interest in the covert project. The CIA offered high pay for qualified candidates. Air force lieutenant colonel Leo P. Geary was in charge of training the foreign pilots selected. A Boston native with a degree in chemistry from Tufts University and a knack for languages, Geary had flown B-24 bombers during World War II. The first pilots trained for the mission came from Taiwan. Colonel Geary brought them to the United States for preliminary training at Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix, Arizona. The training session was a disaster as only a handful of recruits graduated from the program. The pilots could barely speak English and simply were not as skilled as American airmen. Those who failed the program were released from duty under strict orders never to reveal what they had learned and seen.
Once again, Bissell faced a serious problem. How could the CIA use American pilots on unlawful missions while maintaining deniability for the White House? The agency would have to employ the deadly tactics perfected by the Nazis in World War II. Bissell consulted with Dr. Alexander Batlin in the Technical Services Division of the agency’s Directorate of Plans. Bissell feared that a U-2 pilot captured in hostile territory might give up operational secrets under torture. According to Dr. Batlin, liquid potassium cyanide was the only solution. He reminded Bissell that Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering committed suicide by ingesting cyanide on the eve of his execution for war crimes in 1946. Goering bit down on a thin glass capsule filled with poison and was dead within fifteen seconds, taking with him any remaining secrets of Adolf Hitler’s fallen empire. Bissell knew that he could not order a pilot to commit suicide for his country. Still, if a captured airman had the option of a quick death over slow and painful torture, the odds were fair that he would bite the capsule and keep his secrets. Bissell went ahead and ordered the capsules, called L-pills, which would be offered to each pilot before his mission. Of course, the pilots were not briefed about this possibility during training. Foreknowledge of such a choice would no doubt have dissuaded many from participating in the program. These men were not kamikaze pilots, after all. They were highly skilled airmen who, despite the inherent danger of flying, had every intention of surviving their missions. Another potential drawback for some was the requirement that they resign their air force rank and seniority and fly the spy plane as civilians employed by the CIA. The agency tried to compensate for this by paying the U-2 pilots four times what they earned in the air force and promising them future reinstatement when they had completed their overflight missions for the CIA.
Only six pilots made the cut to fly in the first wave of the U-2 spy program. The attrition rate was high among candidates because the mental and physical exams conducted by the CIA were more rigorous than those of the air force. Colonel Richard Leghorn assisted in vetting candidates for the program. He knew better than anyone what it felt like to fly over enemy territory “unafraid, unarmed, and alone.”
Once Leghorn and others successfully screened candidates for the top-secret program, they handed pilots the flight manual for the Shooting Star and ordered them to memorize it. The training would use that plane to simulate the U-2’s floating tendencies during takeoff.
The original group of six flew from Burbank to Groom Lake to begin their training in January 1956. Since Area 51 did not officially exist, the pilots got post office boxes in North Hollywood, California, for their mail. The had all flown with the strategic Air Command and were tasked with learning to fly the U-2 to become trainers on the aircraft and teach the next wave of pilots for future missions behind the Iron Curtain.
The spy planes had only one seat, so the pilots took their direction from the ground by radio. The “drivers” were fighter pilots by training, and their aggressive nature made for a difficult transition to flying the defenseless U-2, a fragile aircraft with long, narrow wings that operated more like a glider than an interceptor or bomber. Speed was also an issue as the U-2 would break apart if pushed beyond Mach 0.8, or 453 mph. The aircraft was less “angel” than “dragon lady,” as far as the pilots were concerned. No matter how experienced, a pilot never knew what to expect when he entered the cockpit. Like the Dragon Lady of comic book lore, the U-2 was both mysterious and beyond control.