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hit a target anywhere in the world. So much for the Paperclips Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff being the most competent rocket scientists in the world. “As it beeped in the sky, Sputnik 1 created a crisis of confidence that swept the country like a windblown forest fire,” Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian later recalled. British reporters at the Guardian warned, “We must be prepared to be told [by Russia] what the other side of the moon looks like.” French journalists homed in on America’s “disillusion and bitter[ness]” at the crushing space-race defeat. The French underscored America’s scientific shame. “The Americans have little experience with humiliation in the technical domain,” read the article in Le Figaro. Because members of the public had no idea about the CIA’s U-2 spy plane program, they believed that with Sputnik, the Russians could now learn all of America’s secrets, while America remained in the dark about theirs. For twenty-one days, Sputnik circled the Earth at a speed of 18,000 mph until its radio signal finally faded and died.

In deciding the best course of action, the president turned back to his science advisers. In the month following Sputnik, a new position was created for James Killian—special assistant to the president for science and technology—and for the next two years Killian would meet with the president almost every day. This became a defining moment for Richard Bissell. For as depressing as his Area 51 prospects had seemed only a month before, the news of Sputnik was, ironically for the CIA, a harbinger of good news. James Killian adored Richard Bissell; they’d been friends for over a decade. Immediately after the Russians launched Sputnik, Killian and Bissell found themselves working closely together again. Only this time, they weren’t teaching economics to university students. The two men would work hand in glove to launch America’s most formidable top secret billion-dollar spy plane, to be built and test-flown at Area 51. Advancing science and technology for military purposes was now at the very top of the president’s list of priorities. With James Killian on his side, Bissell inadvertently found himself in the extraordinary position of getting almost whatever he wanted from the president of the United States. And as long as what Richard Bissell built at Area 51 could humiliate the Russians and show them who was boss, this included a bottomless budget, infinite manpower, total secrecy, and ultimate control.

CHAPTER SIX

Atomic Accidents

Richard Bissell once said that setting up Area 51 inside a nuclear testing facility kept the curiosity-seekers at bay. With Operation Plumbbob, a 1957 atomic test series that involved thirty consecutive nuclear explosions, he got more than he bargained for. With the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. In the twenty-first century, this kind of weapon would be referred to as a dirty bomb.

The dirty bomb menace posed a growing threat to the internal security of the country, one the Pentagon wanted to make less severe by testing the nightmare scenario first. The organization needed to do this in a controlled environment, away from the urban masses, in total secrecy. No one outside the project, absolutely no one, could know. Officials from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project decided that the perfect place to do this was Area 51, inside the Dreamland airspace, about four or five miles northwest of Groom Lake. If the dirty bomb was set off outside the legal perimeter of the Nevada Test Site, secrecy was all but guaranteed. As far as specifics were concerned, there was an apocalyptic prerequisite the likes of which no government had ever dealt with before. Weapons testers needed “a site that could be relinquished for 20,000 years.”

Code-named the 57 Project, and later Project 57, the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Air