Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [29]
The job of the Lockheed test pilots was to get the U-2 ready as fast as possible so they could turn it over to the CIA’s instructor pilot Hank Meierdierck, who would then teach the CIA mission pilots, recruited from Air Force bases around the country, how to fly the airplane. Bissell’s ambitious plan was to overfly the Soviet Union inside of a year. The Communist advances in hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles had the CIA seriously concerned, as did the hastily hushed Soviet overflight of—and crash in—the West. Human intelligence, or HUMINT, behind the Iron Curtain was at an all-time low. The great news for the Agency was that there was no such thing as an Iron Ceiling. Overhead was what was going to keep America safe. The U-2 was the Agency’s best chance to get hard intelligence on the Soviet Union, considering that one photograph could provide the Agency with as much information as approximately ten thousand spies on the ground.
President Eisenhower put the CIA in charge of the overhead reconnaissance because, as he later wrote, the aerial reconnaissance program needed to be handled in an “unconventional way.” What that meant was that President Eisenhower wanted the program to be black, or hidden from Congress and from everyone but a select few who needed to know about it. He also wanted the U-2 to be piloted by a man who didn’t wear a uniform. Before the U-2, there was no precedent for one nation to regularly spy on another nation from overhead during peacetime. The president’s fear was that if a U-2 mission was exposed, it would be interpreted by the Soviets, and perhaps by the whole world, as an overtly hostile act. At least if the plane had a CIA pilot, the president could deny the U.S. military was involved.
Despite his apparent elusiveness, Mr. B. maintained absolute control of all things that were going on at Area 51. Remarkably, he had been able to set up the remote desert facility as a stand-alone organization; he did this by persuading President Eisenhower to remove the U-2 program from the CIA’s own organizational chart. “The entire project became the most compartmented and self-contained activity within the agency,” Bissell wrote of his sovereign territory at Groom Lake. “I worked behind a barrier of secrecy that protected my decision making from interference.” The Development Project Staff, which was the bland-sounding code name for the secret U-2 operation, was the only division of the CIA that had its own communications office. Bissell saw government overseers as unnecessary meddlers and told colleagues that Congress and its committees simply got in the way of getting done what needed to be done. In this way, Bissell was remarkably effective with his program at Area 51. Each month he summed up activities on the secret base in a five-page brief for the president. But Bissell’s long leash, and the extreme power he wielded over the nation’s first spy plane program, earned him enmity from a top general whose wrath was historically a dangerous thing to incur. That was General Curtis LeMay.
While the CIA was in charge of Project Aquatone as a whole, U-2 operations were to be a collaborative effort among the CIA, the Air Force, and Lockheed Corporation. Lockheed built the airplane and provided the first test pilots as well as the program mechanics. The Air Force was in charge of support operations. It was there to provide everything the CIA needed, from chase planes to tire changers. But Richard Bissell exercised his power early on, making Lockheed, not the Air Force, his original Project Aquatone partner. Bissell worked hand in hand with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson to get the U-2 aloft with as little Air Force involvement as possible. In fact, the Air Force was almost entirely left out of the early planning stages. The first U-2 was built by Lockheed and flight-tested at Groom Lake by Lockheed test pilots before the commander of the Air Force