CIA pilots were kept equally in the dark. Carefully culled from Strategic Air Command bases at Turner Air Force Base, in Georgia, and Bergstrom Air Force Base, in Texas, the men had no idea who they were going to be working for when they signed on. In retrospect it seems easy to recognize the hand of the CIA, but this was not the case in late 1955 when the Agency was just seven years old. “It was like something out of fiction,” Hervey Stockman recalls. “I was given a date and told to be at Room 215 at the Austin Hotel and knock on that door at exactly 3:15. So I went down there at the appointed time and knocked on the door. An extremely good-looking guy in a beautiful tweed opened it and said, ‘Come on in, Hervey…’ That was my first introduction to the Agency.”
Hervey Stockman was one of America’s most accomplished pilots. He was as fearless as he was gentle, a man who fell in love with airplanes the first time he flew one for the Army Air Corps, shortly after leaving the comforts of Princeton University to fight the Nazis in the Second World War. By the time he arrived at Area 51 for training, part of the first group of seven U-2 fliers called Detachment A, he had already flown 168 combat missions in two wars, World War II and Korea.
Area 51 “was the boonies,” Stockman says. “We lived in trailers, three to a trailer as I recall. We couldn’t write or call home from out there at Groom Lake.” When Stockman’s group arrived in January of 1956, there were “probably fifty or so people on the site.” The trailers were in walking distance from the hangars, and “there was a training building, which was also a trailer,” right next door, which was where Stockman spent most of his time. He remembers the mess hall as being one of the only permanent structures besides the hangars on base. “It was just all desert out there,” Stockman remembers. On occasion, wild horses roamed onto the lake bed looking for water or food. “To get to civilization you were pretty dependent on aircraft. There was some road traffic but it was very carefully watched. Security people everywhere.”
The identities of the pilots were equally concealed. “We all had pseudonyms. Mine was Sampson… I hated the name Sampson so I asked, Can I use the name Sterritt? I said, ‘Sterritt fits me better. I’m a little guy and Sterritt is more my speed.’ They said, ‘Feel free. If you want to be Sterritt, you’re Sterritt.’ But for their record keeping I was Sampson. The records are still there… in the basement. And they’re under the name Sampson. The Agency was very smart about all of that.” The pilots were watched during their time off, not so much to see what the men might be up to as to make sure KGB agents were not watching them. Detachment A pilots were given apartments in Hollywood, California, where they officially lived. During weekends they socialized at the Brown Derby Restaurant. “It was a gathering spot and the security people could keep an eye on us there,” Stockman explains. Come Monday morning, when it was time to return to Area 51, the Derby was the rendezvous spot because “it was one of the few places that was always open at five a.m.” The majority of the Derby clientele had been up all night; the six very physically fit, clear-eyed pilots with their Air Force haircuts, accompanied by two CIA handlers in sport jackets and bow ties, must have been a sight to behold. From there, the group drove the Cahuenga Pass through the Hollywood Hills to the Burbank airport, where they boarded a Lockheed airplane headed for the secret base. “At the time, we did not know of Lockheed’s involvement in the program,” Stockman explains. “Even that was concealed from us. We were called ‘drivers.’ There were a lot of reasons for it. At the time, I don’t think any of us really understood why, but that’s essentially what we were. We were just, by God, drivers. We were not glory boys.” The drivers did not have a need-to-know about anything except how to fly the airplane. Stockman once asked his superiors what the policy would be if he were shot down and captured. “Effectively, we were told that if we were captured and we were pressed by our captors, we could tell them anything and everything. Because of our lowly position as ‘drivers’ we didn’t know very much.” He said that during training even the name “Groom Lake was not part of our lexicon.”