Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [27]
Residents were issued work boots, to defend against rattlesnakes, and hats with lights, to wear at night. When the sun dropped behind the mountains in the evenings, the sky turned purple, then gray. In no time everything was pitch-black. The sounds at night were cricket song and coyote howl, and there was barely anything more than static on the radio and definitely no TV. The nearest town, Las Vegas, had only thirty-five thousand residents, and it was seventy-five miles away. At night, the skies at Area 51 glittered with stars.
But as rustic as the base was as far as appearance, behind the scenes Area 51 was as much Washington, DC, as it was Wild West. The U-2 was a top secret airplane built on the covert orders of the president of the United States. Its 1955 budget was $22 million, which would be $180 million in 2011.
Each U-2 aircraft arrived at Area 51 from Lockheed’s facility in Burbank in pieces, hidden inside the belly of a C-124 transport plane. The pointy fuselage and long, thin wings were draped in white sheets so no one could get even a glimpse. “In the very beginning, we put Ship One and Ship Two together inside the hangar so nobody saw it before it flew,” recalls Bob Murphy, one of the first Lockheed mechanics on the base. From the moment the CIA began operating their Groom Lake facility, they did so with very strict protocols regarding who had a need-to-know and about what. All elements of the program were divided into sensitive compartmented information, or SCI. “I had no clue what the airplane looked like until it flew directly over my head,” recalls security guard Richard Mingus.
Getting the U-2 operations ready was a dream job for the daring experimental test pilot Ray Goudey. “I learned to fly an airplane before I could drive a car,” Goudey explains. As a teenager, Goudey joined the flying circus and flew with Sammy Mason’s famed Flying Brigade. After the war, he became part of a daredevil flying team called the Hollywood Hawks, where his centrifugal-force-defying outside snap made him a legend. In 1955 he was thirty-three years old and ready to settle down, in relative terms.
Getting Lockheed’s tricky new spy plane ready for the CIA was not a terribly daunting task for a flier like Goudey. Still, the U-2 was an unusual airplane, with wings so long their ends sagged when it sat parked on the tarmac at Groom. To keep its fuel-filled wings from tipping side to side on takeoff, mechanics had to run alongside the airplane as it taxied, sending huge dust clouds up from the lake bed and covering everything in fine sand. The aircraft’s aluminum skin was paper-thin, just 0.02 inches thick, which meant the aircraft was both fragile on the ground and extremely delicate to fly. If a pilot flew the U-2 too slow, the airplane could stall. If he flew too fast, the wings could literally come off. Complicating matters was the fact that what was too slow at one altitude was too fast at another height. The same variable occurred when the weight of the plane changed as it burned up hours of fuel. For these reasons, the original flights made by the test pilots were restricted to a two-hundred-mile radius from the center of Groom Lake. The likelihood of a crash was high, and the CIA needed to be able to keep secure any U-2 wreckage.
“In the beginning, all we did was fly all day long,” Goudey recalls. At Area 51 “we’d sleep, wake up, eat, and fly.” Soon, the base expanded and one hundred more people arrived. Navy Quonset huts were brought in and two additional water wells were dug. Commander Bob Yancey located a pool table and a 16-millimeter film projector in Las Vegas; now the men had entertainment other than stargazing. By September, there were two hundred men on base from