Despite his apparent elusiveness, Mr. B. maintained absolute control of all things that were going on at Area 51. Remarkably, he had been able to set up the remote desert facility as a stand-alone organization; he did this by persuading President Eisenhower to remove the U-2 program from the CIA’s own organizational chart. “The entire project became the most compartmented and self-contained activity within the agency,” Bissell wrote of his sovereign territory at Groom Lake. “I worked behind a barrier of secrecy that protected my decision making from interference.” The Development Project Staff, which was the bland-sounding code name for the secret U-2 operation, was the only division of the CIA that had its own communications office. Bissell saw government overseers as unnecessary meddlers and told colleagues that Congress and its committees simply got in the way of getting done what needed to be done. In this way, Bissell was remarkably effective with his program at Area 51. Each month he summed up activities on the secret base in a five-page brief for the president. But Bissell’s long leash, and the extreme power he wielded over the nation’s first spy plane program, earned him enmity from a top general whose wrath was historically a dangerous thing to incur. That was General Curtis LeMay.
While the CIA was in charge of Project Aquatone as a whole, U-2 operations were to be a collaborative effort among the CIA, the Air Force, and Lockheed Corporation. Lockheed built the airplane and provided the first test pilots as well as the program mechanics. The Air Force was in charge of support operations. It was there to provide everything the CIA needed, from chase planes to tire changers. But Richard Bissell exercised his power early on, making Lockheed, not the Air Force, his original Project Aquatone partner. Bissell worked hand in hand with Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson to get the U-2 aloft with as little Air Force involvement as possible. In fact, the Air Force was almost entirely left out of the early planning stages. The first U-2 was built by Lockheed and flight-tested at Groom Lake by Lockheed test pilots before the commander of the Air Force research and development office had ever heard of an airplane called the U-2 or a test-flight facility called Area 51. This overt slight ticked off many top generals, a number of whom developed grudges against the CIA. And yet, by the end of 1955, dozens of active-duty Air Force personnel had been assigned to the U-2 operation. Air Force air expertise was absolutely necessary now that pilot training had begun and multiple U-2s were flying multiple practice missions every day, as the CIA readied Project Aquatone for assignments overseas. Richard Bissell, not Curtis LeMay, was now the de facto base commander of a whole lot of Air Force officers and enlisted men. LeMay was, understandably, enraged.
In early autumn of 1955, a conflict erupted between the two men, and President Eisenhower was forced to intervene. LeMay had been raising questions about why he wasn’t in charge of the program. It was now up to the president to decide who was officially in charge of Area 51 and the U-2. Bissell desperately wanted to reign over the prestigious program. “It was a glamorous and high-priority endeavor endorsed not only by the president but by a lot of very important scientific people,” Bissell wrote in his memoirs decades later. LeMay argued that the Air Force should be in charge of all programs involving airplanes, which was ironic, given the fact that LeMay had disliked the U-2 program from the get-go. In hindsight it seems as if LeMay wanted the U-2 program simply because he wanted the control.
Ultimately, the president’s decision came to rest on one significant quality that the CIA possessed and the Air Force did not: plausible deniability. With the CIA in charge, if a U-2 were to get shot down, the government could claim the spy plane program didn’t exist. Air Force fliers flew in uniform, but U-2 pilots working for the CIA would wear civilian garb. The cover story for such a mission would be weather-related research; at least, that was the plan. And so, in late October of 1955, the dispute was settled by President Eisenhower. He directed Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining to give the CIA control over the spy plane program and Area 51. The job of the Air Force, Eisenhower said, was to offer all necessary operational support to keep the program aloft.
One of the Air Force’s designated jobs was to handle flights to and from Area 51. Because the project was so secret, Bissell did not want personnel driving in and out of the base or living in Las Vegas. As far as Bissell was concerned, men cleared on the project were far more likely to draw attention to themselves driving to and from Sin City than they would be if they lived out of town and came in and out by airplane. Locals had friends in the area, whereas out-of-towners did not. This meant that each day, a C-54 transport plane shuttled workers from Lockheed’s airport facility in Burbank, California, to Area 51 and back. Ray Goudey and Bob Murphy had enjoyed four months of Goudey’s flying the pair back and forth between Burbank and the Ranch. Now they would have to commute on the Air Force’s C-54 like everyone else.