Ray Goudey was also the world’s first test pilot to experience engine failure at sixty-four thousand feet, a potentially catastrophic event because the delicate U-2 is a single-engine airplane: if a U-2 loses one engine, it has lost all of them. In Goudey’s case, he glided down four thousand feet and got the engine to restart by using a tactic called windmilling. “Then it quit again,” Goudey explains. He let the plane fall another thirty thousand feet, more than five miles. Down in lower air, Goudey was able to get the engine to restart—and to stay started. Once Goudey was on the ground, it was Bob Murphy’s job to troubleshoot what had happened on the engine. Of course, in 1955, no mechanic in the world had any experience solving a combustion problem on an engine that had quit unexpectedly at sixty-four thousand feet.
Bob Murphy was a twenty-five-year-old flight-test mechanic whose can-do attitude and ability to troubleshoot just about any problem on an aircraft engine meant he was promoted to engine mechanic supervisor the following winter, in 1956. “The romance of the job was the hands-on element of things,” Murphy recalls of those early days at Groom Lake. “There was absolutely no government meddling, which enabled us to get the job done.” There was only one man with any kind of serious oversight at Area 51 and that was Richard Bissell, or Mr. B., as he was known to the men. Most of Bissell’s work involved getting Area 51 to run like an organization or, as he put it, “dealing with the policy matters involved in producing this radically new aircraft.” Shuttling back and forth between Washington and Area 51, Bissell seemed to enjoy the base he ruled over. “He moved around the facility somewhat mysteriously,” Bob Murphy recalls. “He would appear briefly out on the dry lake bed to say hi to the pilots and mechanics and watch the U-2 fly,” Murphy remembers. “Mr. B. always expressed enthusiasm for what we were doing and then he’d disappear again in some unmarked airplane.” But for Murphy, the concern was rarely the Customer, which was Lockheed’s code name for the CIA. Murphy was too busy working with test pilots, often finding himself in charge of overseeing two or three U-2 flights in a single day. “My job was to help the pilots to get the aircraft instruments checked out, get the plane to fly to seventy thousand feet, get it to fly for nine and ten hours straight, and then get it to start taking pictures. There was no shortage of work. We loved it and it’s what we did day after day.”
The job of the Lockheed test pilots was to get the U-2 ready as fast as possible so they could turn it over to the CIA’s instructor pilot Hank Meierdierck, who would then teach the CIA mission pilots, recruited from Air Force bases around the country, how to fly the airplane. Bissell’s ambitious plan was to overfly the Soviet Union inside of a year. The Communist advances in hydrogen bombs and long-range missiles had the CIA seriously concerned, as did the hastily hushed Soviet overflight of—and crash in—the West. Human intelligence, or HUMINT, behind the Iron Curtain was at an all-time low. The great news for the Agency was that there was no such thing as an Iron Ceiling. Overhead was what was going to keep America safe. The U-2 was the Agency’s best chance to get hard intelligence on the Soviet Union, considering that one photograph could provide the Agency with as much information as approximately ten thousand spies on the ground.
President Eisenhower put the CIA in charge of the overhead reconnaissance because, as he later wrote, the aerial reconnaissance program needed to be handled in an “unconventional way.” What that meant was that President Eisenhower wanted the program to be black, or hidden from Congress and from everyone but a select few who needed to know about it. He also wanted the U-2 to be piloted by a man who didn’t wear a uniform. Before the U-2, there was no precedent for one nation to regularly spy on another nation from overhead during peacetime. The president’s fear was that if a U-2 mission was exposed, it would be interpreted by the Soviets, and perhaps by the whole world, as an overtly hostile act. At least if the plane had a CIA pilot, the president could deny the U.S. military was involved.