The Agency’s concerted effort to conceal from Congress and the public its interest in UFOs would, in coming decades, open up a Pandora’s box and cause credibility issues for the CIA. “The concealment of CIA interest [in UFOs] contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and cover-up,” wrote Gerald K. Haines, the historian for the National Reconnaissance Office and someone who is often introduced as the CIA’s expert on the matter. But to get the UFO monkey off his back, Allen Dulles began a “psychological warfare” campaign of his own. When letters came in from concerned citizens about the sightings, the CIA’s policy was to ignore them. When letters came in from UFO groups, the CIA’s policy was to monitor the individuals in the group. When letters came in from congressmen or senators, such as the one from Ohio congressman Gordon Scherer in September of 1955, the CIA’s policy was to have Director Dulles write a polite note explaining that UFOs were a law enforcement problem and the CIA was specifically barred from enforcing the law. The notes certainly portray Allen Dulles as an arrogant public servant, but they are prized by UFO collectors, who say they prove the CIA’s sinister cover-up of extraterrestrial UFOs. Regardless of alleged CIA policy, the public’s fascination with UFOs proved more formidable than the CIA had ever bargained for; average citizens simply could not get enough information about mysterious objects streaking across the skies. And the more information they were given, the more they wanted to know and the more questions they asked. It didn’t take long for the public to become convinced that the CIA was covering something up, which, of course, it was.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Need-to-Know
Everything that happens at Area 51, when it is happening, is classified as TS/SCI, or top secret/sensitive compartmented information—an enigmatic security policy with protocols that are also top secret. “TS/SCI classification guides are also classified,” says Cargill Hall, historian emeritus for the National Reconnaissance Office; this government espionage agency is so secret that even its name was classified top secret from the time it was founded, in 1958, to its declassification, in 1992. In 2011, most Americans still don’t know what the NRO is or what it does, or that it is a partner organization routinely involved with Area 51, because that is classified information.
Information classified TS/SCI ensures that outsiders don’t know what they don’t know and insiders know only what they have a need-to-know. Winston Churchill famously said of Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The same can be said about Area 51. In the lesser-known second part of Churchill’s phrase, he said, “But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Facing a totalitarian government like the Soviet Union’s, where secrets are easily kept, Area 51 had to mirror Soviet secrecy techniques in order to safeguard the U-2. It was in America’s national interest to do so because human intelligence was failing. “We obtain little significant information from classical covert operations inside Russia,” bemoaned the president’s science advisers in a secret 1954 national security report in which they gunned for “science and technology to improve our intelligence take.”
They got what they wanted at Area 51. By using Soviet-style secrecy protocols for its own operation, and putting these tactics in place out in the Nevada desert, the CIA felt it could give its archenemy a run for its money regarding the element of surprise. Even Air Force transport crews had no idea where they were going when they went to the base. A classified-missions pilot would fly to a set of coordinates over the Mojave Desert and contact a certain UHF frequency called Sage Control. There, a voice at the other end of the radio would deliver increasingly more specific coordinates, ending with a go-ahead to land at a spot nestled inside a circle of mountains where no airstrip was supposed to exist. Only when the aircraft was a few hundred feet off the ground would runway lights flash on.