Richard Leghorn was undeterred. He went around Putt by going above him, to the commander of the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, his old antagonist from Operation Crossroads General Curtis LeMay. In the winter of 1954, LeMay was presented with the first actual drawings of Leghorn’s high-flying spy plane, conceptualized by the Lockheed Corporation. Whereas Putt was uninterested in Leghorn’s ideas, LeMay was offended by them. He walked out of the meeting declaring that the whole overhead thing was a waste of his time.
But there was another group of men who had President Eisenhower’s ear, and those men made up the select group of scientists who sat on the president’s scientific advisory board, friends and colleagues of Colonel Richard Leghorn from MIT. They included James R. Killian Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as Edwin H. Land, the eccentric millionaire who had just invented the Polaroid camera and its remarkable instant film. The president’s science advisers had an idea. Never mind the Air Force. Generals tended to be uncreative thinkers, bureaucrats who lived inside a mental box. Why not approach the Central Intelligence Agency? The Agency was made up of men whose sole purpose was to conduct espionage. Surely they would be interested in spying from the air. Unlike the Air Force, Killian and Land reasoned, the CIA had access to the president’s secret financial reserves. All the overhead espionage program really needed was a team captain or a patron saint. As it turned out, they had someone in mind. It was February of 1954. A brilliant economist who had formerly been running the financial office over at the Marshall Plan had just joined the CIA as Director Allen Dulles’s special assistant. His name was Richard Bissell. He was a perfect candidate for the overhead job.
At least one of Richard Bissell’s ancestors was a spy. Sergeant Daniel Bissell conducted espionage missions for General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Generations later, on September 18, 1910, Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. was born into a family of Connecticut aristocrats. Severely cross-eyed from birth, it was only after a risky surgery at the age of eight that Richard Bissell could see clearly enough to read anything. Before that, his mother had read to him. As a child, Bissell was obsessed with history and with war. His parents took him on a visit to the battlefields of northern France when he was ten years old, and it was there, staring out over barren fields ravaged by firebombs, that Bissell developed what he would later describe as an overwhelming “impression of World War I as a cataclysm.”
Despite great privilege, Bissell struggled through his formative years with intense feelings of inadequacy, first at Groton boarding school, then later at Yale University. But behind his low self-esteem was a great willfulness and burgeoning self-confidence that would emerge shortly after he turned twenty-one. On a weekend trip with family friends at a Connecticut beachhead called Pinnacle Rock, Bissell fell off a seventy-foot cliff. When he woke up in the hospital, he was suffering from a mild case of amnesia. But as soon as he was well enough to move around on his own, which took months, he secretly ventured back to the site of the fall. There he made the same climb again. “My hands were shaking,” Bissell explained in describing the second climb, but “I was glad to have done it and to know that I didn’t have to do it again.” He had gone from unsure to self-assured, thanks to a death-defying fall. Immediately after college, in 1932, Bissell headed to England, where he received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Then it was back to Yale for a PhD, where he wrote complex financial treatises at the astonishingly prolific rate of twenty pages a day. Bissell’s colleagues began to admire him, calling him a “human computer.” His mind, they said, functioned “like a machine.” Soon, the classes he taught were filled to capacity.
Eventually, his talents as an economist caught the eye of MIT president James Killian, who recruited Bissell to join the MIT staff. Now, in 1954, here was James Killian recruiting Richard Bissell again, which was how just a few short years after the fireside chat with Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell found himself in charge of one of the most ambitious, most secret programs in CIA history, the U-2 spy plane program. Its code name was Project Aquatone.