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By Root 941 0

are countless opportunities for leaks. That first airplane crash, into Mount Charleston, set a precedent for the CIA in an unexpected way. The Agency did what it always does: secured the crash site immediately and produced a cover story for the press. But an interesting turn of events unfolded, ones that were entirely beyond the CIA’s control. Hungry for a story and lacking any facts, the press put together its own, inaccurate version of events. One of the city’s leading papers, the Las Vegas Review Journal, reported that the crash was being kept secret because the men on board were most likely nuclear scientists working on a top secret new weapons project at the Nevada Test Site. Reporters stopped asking questions and the speculative story quickly became accepted as fact. The CIA would learn from this experience: it could use the public’s preconceptions as well as the media’s desire to tell a story to its own benefit. Civilians could unwittingly propagate significant disinformation on the CIA’s behalf.

In Central Intelligence Agency parlance, there are two kinds of strategic deception: cover and disinformation. Cover induces the belief that something true is something false; disinformation aims to produce the belief that something false is in fact true. In other words, cover conceals the truth while disinformation conveys false information. When the CIA disseminates false information, it is always intended to mislead. When the press disseminates false information that helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles. The truth about the crash at Mount Charleston, the single biggest loss of life for the U-2 program, would remain hidden from the public until the CIA acknowledged the plane crash in 2002. Until then, even the families of the men in the airplane had no idea that their loved ones had been working on a top secret CIA program when they died.

As a result of the crash, the Air Force lost its job as the air carrier for Area 51. For the next seventeen years, commuter flights in and out of the base would be operated by Lockheed. Starting sometime around 1972, the CIA began turning control of Area 51 over to the Air Force, and the Department of Defense took charge of commuter flights. But rather than running military aircraft to and from the clandestine facility, the DOD hired the engineering company EG&G to do it. It made sense. By 1972, EG&G had gotten so powerful and so trusted in the uppermost echelons of the government, it was even in charge of some of the security systems for Air Force One.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Seeds of a Conspiracy

As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51, reports of UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA headquarters. Later painted black to blend in with the sky, the U-2s at that time were silver, which meant their long, shiny wings reflected light down from the upper atmosphere in a way that led citizens all over California, Nevada, and Utah to think the planes were UFOs. The altitude of the U-2 alone was enough to bewilder people. Commercial airplanes flew at between ten thousand and twenty thousand feet in the mid-1950s, whereas the U-2 flew at around seventy thousand feet. Then there was the radical shape of the airplane to consider. Its wings were nearly twice as long as the fuselage, which made the U-2 look like a fiery flying cross.

In 1955 the UFO phenomenon sweeping America was seven years old. The modern-day UFO craze officially began on June 24, 1947, when a search-and-rescue pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine flying discs speeding over Washington State while he was out searching for a downed airplane. Approximately two weeks later, the crash at Roswell occurred. By the end of the month, more than 850 UFO sightings had been reported in the news media. Rumors of flying saucers were sweeping the nation, and public anxiety was mounting; Americans demanded answers from the military.

According to a CIA study on UFOs, declassified in 1997, the Air Force had originally been running two programs.