Two hundred and fifty miles to the east, on top of Mount Charleston, the wreckage of the airplane still burned. Smoke from the crash was visible as far away as Henderson, ten miles south of Las Vegas. That afternoon, a CBS news team was halfway up Highway 158, headed to the crash site, when the newsmen met a military blockade. Armed officers told the news crew that a military plane had crashed on a routine mission heading to the base at Indian Springs. The road into Kyle Canyon was closed. Meanwhile, Bissell had U-2s dispatched from Area 51 to help pinpoint the exact location of the Air Force airplane—an impromptu and unorthodox first “mission” for the spy plane, triggered by tragic circumstances. But there were briefcases full of secret papers that needed to be retrieved, and the U-2’s search-and-locate capabilities from high above were accurate and available. It was Hank Meierdierck, the man in charge of training CIA pilots to fly the U-2, who ultimately located the remains of the airplane.
The crash was the first of a series of Area 51–related airplane tragedies that would occur over the next decade. Airplane crashes, sensational by nature, risk operational exposure, and between crash investigators and local media, there are countless opportunities for leaks. That first airplane crash, into Mount Charleston, set a precedent for the CIA in an unexpected way. The Agency did what it always does: secured the crash site immediately and produced a cover story for the press. But an interesting turn of events unfolded, ones that were entirely beyond the CIA’s control. Hungry for a story and lacking any facts, the press put together its own, inaccurate version of events. One of the city’s leading papers, the Las Vegas Review Journal, reported that the crash was being kept secret because the men on board were most likely nuclear scientists working on a top secret new weapons project at the Nevada Test Site. Reporters stopped asking questions and the speculative story quickly became accepted as fact. The CIA would learn from this experience: it could use the public’s preconceptions as well as the media’s desire to tell a story to its own benefit. Civilians could unwittingly propagate significant disinformation on the CIA’s behalf.
In Central Intelligence Agency parlance, there are two kinds of strategic deception: cover and disinformation. Cover induces the belief that something true is something false; disinformation aims to produce the belief that something false is in fact true. In other words, cover conceals the truth while disinformation conveys false information. When the CIA disseminates false information, it is always intended to mislead. When the press disseminates false information that helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles. The truth about the crash at Mount Charleston, the single biggest loss of life for the U-2 program, would remain hidden from the public until the CIA acknowledged the plane crash in 2002. Until then, even the families of the men in the airplane had no idea that their loved ones had been working on a top secret CIA program when they died.
As a result of the crash, the Air Force lost its job as the air carrier for Area 51. For the next seventeen years, commuter flights in and out of the base would be operated by Lockheed. Starting sometime around 1972, the CIA began turning control of Area 51 over to the Air Force, and the Department of Defense took charge of commuter flights. But rather than running military aircraft to and from the clandestine facility, the DOD hired the engineering company EG&G to do it. It made sense. By 1972, EG&G had gotten so powerful and so trusted in the uppermost echelons of the government, it was even in charge of some of the security systems for Air Force One.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Seeds of a Conspiracy
As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51, reports of UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA headquarters. Later painted black to blend in with the sky, the U-2s at that time were silver, which meant their long, shiny wings reflected light down from the upper atmosphere in a way that led citizens all over California, Nevada, and Utah to think the planes were UFOs. The altitude of the U-2 alone was enough to bewilder people. Commercial airplanes flew at between ten thousand and twenty thousand feet in the mid-1950s, whereas the U-2 flew at around seventy thousand feet. Then there was the radical shape of the airplane to consider. Its wings were nearly twice as long as the fuselage, which made the U-2 look like a fiery flying cross.