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Before the two fighter pilots arrived at Area 51 to fly the U-2, Bevacqua and Francis Gary Powers were a couple of type A pilots with the 508th Strategic Fighter Wing at Turner Air Force Base in Georgia. They lived in a rented four-bedroom house situated two miles from the main gate. Both had been flying F-84 fighter jets for almost two years when one day Powers, whom everybody called Frank, just up and disappeared. “There were rumors that Frank had gone off on some kind of secret program,” Bevacqua says, “but this was just talk, not something you could really sink your teeth into.” A few months later Bevacqua was approached by a squadron leader and asked if he wanted to volunteer for “an interesting flight program.”

“About what?” Bevacqua asked. The recruiter said he could not say, only that it would involve flying and that Bevacqua would have to leave the Air Force but could later return. The program, he was told, needed “a volunteer.” It was important, the recruiter said, a mysterious edge to his voice. Bevacqua signed on.

He was flown to the Berger Brothers Company, located in a nondescript building in New Haven, Connecticut, not far from Yale University, that was filled with seamstresses making girdles and bras. What was he doing in there? he wondered. He was led through the workstations and into a back room. The unlikely supplier had a perfect cover for CIA-contract work: making ladies’ underwear. In reality, the company, later renamed the David Clark Company, had already proven itself thousands of times over. During World War II, it made parachutes for U.S. Army Air Forces and Navy pilots.

In a clandestine back room, behind the brassiere assembly lines, Tony Bevacqua was fitted for a high-altitude flight suit specifically tailored for his physique. For the duration of his contract, Bevacqua would be required to maintain his weight within ounces. An ill-fitting suit could mean death for a pilot and the inevitable loss of an airplane. Bevacqua understood the concept of need-to-know and was aware that it prohibited him from asking any questions about what the suit was for. But he knew enough about partial-pressure suits to realize that whatever aircraft he was going to be piloting was going to be flying very high indeed.

His next stop was Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for a battery of physical and psychological procedures. There, Bevacqua underwent a series of endurance tests. Some were familiar but others he found thought-provokingly strange. All U-2 pilots were put into the high-altitude chamber to simulate the experience of sitting in a cockpit in a flight suit that your life depended on. At 63,000 feet, blood boils because there is not enough pressure to sustain oxygen in the bloodstream. There was another test called the Furnace in which U-2 pilots were left in a room that was significantly hotter than a hot sauna. Bevacqua was spared that one but he did have liquids pumped into his every orifice, first water and then some kind of mineral oil. Many U-2 pilots were hooked up to odd machines and others were given electroshock. Bevacqua got what he called the dreaded corpse test instead. He recalled how he “was put in a small space, my arms crossed over my chest like I was in a casket at a morgue. It was absolutely impossible for me to move my extremities. I was told to hyperventilate for as long as I could.”

Bevacqua surmised that he would be chosen for the prestigious, top secret assignment only if he was able to pass every test. He wanted the job badly and was entirely willing to push himself physically to the edge. “I came within a breath of passing out during the corpse test,” he explains. “After they said I could breathe, the attendants then pulled at my arms and legs but there was no way they could move or bend my extremities. As I breathed oxygen back into my body my cheeks loosened and then the rest of my body gradually returned to normal.” After a few minutes Bevacqua’s vital signs stabilized. “Apparently, this test