Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [66]
At once charming and aloof, garrulous and yet secretive, Bissell was the sort of highborn gentleman scoundrel that the CIA, under Allen Dulles, loved to recruit. At the agency, he quickly proved his organizational mettle by helping to orchestrate the overthrow of the leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, which had threatened the interests of the politically connected United Fruit Company. (Allen Dulles was a significant shareholder in the company, which John Foster Dulles had once represented as legal counsel. The director of the National Security Council, Robert Cutler, had sat on United Fruit’s board, and Spruille Braden, the assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, and Walter Bedell Smith, the undersecretary of state, would both join United Fruit’s board after the coup.)
Bissell’s success in Guatemala, and a similarly staged restoration of the pro-Western shah in Iran (to preserve the holdings of the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company), had marked him as a rising star within the agency. Allen Dulles was said to be grooming Bissell as his successor, and the two shared a love of sailing and socializing, though Bissell was not blessed with his boss’s famous wit or his infamously roving eye. (Dulles’s marital indiscretions were perhaps the CIA’s worst-kept secret.)
To find the right airplane for the job, a craft that could fly unmolested deep into Soviet territory, Bissell turned to Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the legendary aeronautical engineer who headed Lockheed’s most classified “black” military programs. Johnson had a blueprint for such a super-high-altitude jet-glider, the CL-282 Aquatone. He had proposed it to the air force, but Secretary Quarles had opted to go with a rival design by Bell Labs, the company he once headed, to reconfigure British bombers for reconnaissance duty. The Aquatone had been deemed too frail and ungainly for regular air force service. Besides offending the air force’s aesthetic sense, the radical weight reductions that would allow it to fly so long and so high necessitated cutting too many standard safety and redundancy systems. But it suited Bissell’s needs. He had only two requests: it had to be built quickly and quietly.
The contract was shrouded in such secrecy that the Aquatone was listed innocuously as “utility plane number two,” hence its eventual designation as the U-2. Only eighty-one people at Lockheed had been permitted to work on the Aquatone/U-2, in contrast to the thousands who typically labored on such projects, and they finished the prototype in a record eighty-eight days. During that time, janitors were not even permitted in the hangar where it was assembled. To further minimize potential security leaks, Bissell demanded that subcontractors deliver component parts to front companies at fictitious addresses, and he bypassed regular accounting procedures by paying for the plane with a series of $1,256,000 checks made out personally to Johnson and hand-delivered to his Encino home address. As far as Lockheed and the U.S. government were concerned, the U-2 was entirely off the books. Even within the White House staff, only two people—Eisenhower’s personal assistants General Andrew Goodpaster and Gordon Gray—initially knew of the plane’s existence.
A similarly circuitous route had been used to recruit and train air force pilots, who were interviewed in dingy motels around the SAC bases in Georgia and Texas and sent for reconnaissance training to a nuclear testing ground near Groom Lake, Nevada, where Bissell reasoned that the fear of radiation poisoning ensured privacy. Formally engaged as civilian employees of the Second Provisional Weather Squadron, Bissell’s boys operated under the cover of high-altitude weather research. Like the unmarked planes they flew, Jones and his fellow aviators carried no identification papers or dog tags, and no regimental crests or badges adorned their flight suits. Before