The following winter, in 1955, Richard Bissell and his fellow CIA officer Herbert Miller, the Agency’s leading expert on Soviet nuclear weapons, flew across the American West in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza in search of a location where they could build a secret CIA test facility, the only one of its kind on American soil. Only a handful of CIA officers and an Air Force colonel named Osmond “Ozzie” Ritland had any idea what the men were up to, flying around out there. Bissell’s orders, which had come directly from President Eisenhower himself, were to find a secret location to build a test facility for the Agency’s bold, new spy plane—the aircraft that would keep watch over the Soviet Union’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program. Accompanying the CIA officers was the nation’s leading aerodynamicist, Lockheed Corporation’s Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the man tasked with designing and building this new plane.
Johnson sat in the back of the Beechcraft with geological survey maps spread out across his lap as the men flew from Burbank, California, across the Mojave Desert, and into Nevada. They were searching for a dry lake bed called Groom Lake just outside the Nevada Test Site, which had had its boundaries configured by Holmes and Narver in July of 1950 during the top secret Project Nutmeg that resulted in Nevada’s being chosen as America’s continental atomic bombing range. Legendary air racer and experimental test pilot Tony LeVier was flying the small airplane. LeVier had a vague idea of where he was going because his fellow Lockheed test pilot Ray Goudey had taken him to Groom Lake on a prescouting mission just a few weeks before. On occasion, Goudey had shuttled atomic scientists from California to the test site and once he had even set down his aircraft on Groom Lake to eat his bag lunch.
“Descending for a closer look, we saw evidence of a temporary landing strip,” Bissell later recalled, “the kind of runway that had been built in various locations across the United States during World War Two for the benefit of pilots in training who might have to make an emergency landing.” The large, hardened salt pan was a perfect natural runway, and LeVier effortlessly landed the plane. The men got out and walked around, discussing how level the terrain was and kicking the old shell casings lying about like stones. To the north, Bald Mountain towered over the valley, offering cover, and to the southwest, there was equal shelter from a mountain range called Papoose. According to Bissell, “Groom Lake would prove perfect for our needs.”
Bissell was acutely aware that Groom Lake was just over the hill from the government’s atomic bomb testing facility, which meant that as far as secrecy was concerned, there was no better place in the continental United States for the CIA to set up its new spy plane program and begin clandestine work. “I recommended to Eisenhower that he add a piece of adjacent land, including Groom Lake, to the Nevada Test Site of the Atomic Energy Commission,” Bissell related in his memoir, written in the last year of his life. Four months after Richard Bissell, Herbert Miller, Kelly Johnson, and Tony LeVier touched down on Groom Lake, Area 51 had its first residents. It was a small group of four Lockheed test pilots, two dozen Lockheed mechanics and engineers, a handful of CIA officers who doubled as security guards, and a small group of Lieutenant Colonel Ritland’s Air Force staff. There was a cowboy feel to the base that first summer, with temperatures so hot the mechanics used to crack eggs on metal surfaces just to see how long it would take for them to fry.
Originally the base consisted of one airplane hangar and a handful of tents, called hooches, constructed out of wooden platforms and covered in canvas tops. Sometimes when the winds got rough, the tents would blow away. Thunderstorms were frequent and would render the dry lake bed unusable, temporarily covered by an inch of rain. As soon as the sun returned, the water would quickly evaporate, and the test pilots could fly again. Power came from a diesel generator. There was one cook and a makeshift mess hall. It took another month for halfway-decent showers to be built on the base. The men could have been at an army outpost in Egypt or India as far as amenities were concerned.
Residents were issued work boots, to defend against rattlesnakes, and hats with lights, to wear at night. When the sun dropped behind the mountains in the evenings, the sky turned purple, then gray. In no time everything was pitch-black. The sounds at night were cricket song and coyote howl, and there was barely anything more than static on the radio and definitely no TV. The nearest town, Las Vegas, had only thirty-five thousand residents, and it was seventy-five miles away. At night, the skies at Area 51 glittered with stars.
But as rustic as the base was as far as appearance, behind the scenes Area 51 was as much Washington, DC, as it was Wild West. The U-2 was a top secret airplane built on the covert orders of the president of the United States. Its 1955 budget was $22 million, which would be $180 million in 2011.