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Information classified TS/SCI ensures that outsiders don’t know what they don’t know and insiders know only what they have a need-to-know. Winston Churchill famously said of Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same can be said about Area 51. In the lesser-known second part of Churchill’s phrase, he said, “But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Facing a totalitarian government like the Soviet Union’s, where secrets are easily kept, Area 51 had to mirror Soviet secrecy techniques in order to safeguard the U-2. It was in America’s national interest to do so because human intelligence was failing. “We obtain little significant information from classical covert operations inside Russia,” bemoaned the president’s science advisers in a secret 1954 national security report in which they gunned for “science and technology to improve our intelligence take.”

They got what they wanted at Area 51. By using Soviet-style secrecy protocols for its own operation, and putting these tactics in place out in the Nevada desert, the CIA felt it could give its archenemy a run for its money regarding the element of surprise. Even Air Force transport crews had no idea where they were going when they went to the base. A classified-missions pilot would fly to a set of coordinates over the Mojave Desert and contact a certain UHF frequency called Sage Control. There, a voice at the other end of the radio would deliver increasingly more specific coordinates, ending with a go-ahead to land at a spot nestled inside a circle of mountains where no airstrip was supposed to exist. Only when the aircraft was a few hundred feet off the ground would runway lights flash on.

CIA pilots were kept equally in the dark. Carefully culled from Strategic Air Command bases at Turner Air Force Base, in Georgia, and Bergstrom Air Force Base, in Texas, the men had no idea who they were going to be working for when they signed on. In retrospect it seems easy to recognize the hand of the CIA, but this was not the case in late 1955 when the Agency was just seven years old. “It was like something out of fiction,” Hervey Stockman recalls. “I was given a date and told to be at Room 215 at the Austin Hotel and knock on that door at exactly 3:15. So I went down there at the appointed time and knocked on the door. An extremely good-looking guy in a beautiful tweed opened it and said, ‘Come on in, Hervey…’ That was my first introduction to the Agency.”

Hervey Stockman was one of America’s most accomplished pilots. He was as fearless as he was gentle, a man who fell in love with airplanes the first time he flew one for the Army Air Corps, shortly after leaving the comforts of Princeton University to fight the Nazis in the Second World War. By the time he arrived at Area 51 for training, part of the first group of seven U-2 fliers called Detachment A, he had already flown 168 combat missions in two wars, World War II and Korea.

Area 51 “was the boonies,” Stockman says. “We lived in trailers, three to a trailer as I recall. We couldn’t write or call home from out there at Groom Lake.” When Stockman’s group arrived in January of 1956, there were “probably fifty or so people on the site.” The trailers were in walking distance from the hangars, and “there was a training building, which was also a trailer,” right next door, which was where Stockman spent most of his time. He remembers the mess hall as being one of the only permanent structures besides the hangars on base. “It was just all desert out there,” Stockman remembers. On occasion, wild horses roamed onto the lake bed looking for water or food. “To get to civilization you were pretty dependent on aircraft. There was some road traffic but it was very carefully watched. Security people everywhere.”

The identities of the pilots were equally concealed. “We all had pseudonyms. Mine was Sampson… I hated the name Sampson so I asked, Can I use the name Sterritt? I said, ‘Sterritt fits me better. I’m a little guy and Sterritt is more my speed.’ They said, ‘Feel free. If you