Across the world, the Russians were busy working on their own form of espionage. If Area 51 had a Communist doppelg?nger, it was a remote top secret facility forty miles northeast of Moscow called NII-88. There, a rocket scientist named Sergei Korolev—the Soviet Union’s own Wernher Von Braun—was working on a project that would soon shame American military science and propel the arms and space race into a sprint. Fearing the CIA would assassinate Russia’s key rocket scientist, Stalin declared Sergei Korolev’s name a state secret, which it remained until his death, in 1966. Sergei Korolev was only referred to as Chief Designer, not unlike the way Richard Bissell was known to employees outside the CIA only as Mr. B. Just as insiders called Area 51 the Ranch, NII-88 was known to its scientists as the Bureau. Like Area 51, NII-88 did not exist on the map. Before the Communist Revolution, NII-88 had been a small village called Podlipki, same as the Groom Lake area had once been a little mining enclave called Groom Mine. Both facilities began as outcroppings of tents and warehouses, accessible only to a short list of government elite. Both facilities would develop into multimillion-dollar establishments where multibillion-dollar espionage platforms would be built and tested, each having the singular purpose of outperforming what was being built on the other side.
In 1956, all the CIA knew of NII-88 was that it was the place where Russia kept dozens of its captured German scientists toiling away on secret science projects. These men were Russia’s version of America’s Paperclip scientists, and they included the four hundred German rocket scientists who’d been plied with alcohol and then seized in the middle of the night—just as former Messerschmitt pilot Fritz Wendel had said.
The CIA first learned about NII-88’s existence in late 1955, when the Soviets decided they had milked their former Third Reich scientists for all they were worth and began sending them back home. When the CIA learned of Russia’s repatriation program, the Agency leaped at the intelligence opportunity and initiated a program called Operation Dragon Return. CIA officers were dispatched to Germany to hunt down the scientists who had been working in Russia, and the information gleaned from the returnees was considerable. It included technical data on Russian advances in radio technology, electronics, and armaments design. But to the CIA’s great frustration, when it came to NII-88, the repatriated German scientists claimed to have no clear idea about what was really going on there. It seemed that NII-88, like Area 51, worked with strict need-to-know protocols, and the German scientists hadn’t been cleared with a need-to-know. All the Germans could tell the CIA agents debriefing them was that Moscow’s top scientists and engineers were developing something there that was highly classified. Unlike in America, where German rocket scientists were put in charge of America’s most classified missile program at White Sands Missile Range, German scientists in Russia had been relegated to the second tier. With no hard facts about the extraordinary technological enterprise that was under way at NII-88, the CIA was left guessing. The speculation was that the Russians were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, that could reach the United States by traveling over the top of the world.
The missile threat needed to be addressed, and fast. By 1956 Americans were constantly being reminded about this foreboding Red menace by the media. A January 1956 issue of Time magazine made Soviet missile technology its big story. The cover featured a drawing of an anthropomorphic rocket, complete with eyeballs and a brain, carrying a nuclear bomb and bearing down on a major U.S. city. The magazine’s analysts declared that in a little more than five years, Russians would be winning the arms race. The editors went so far as to prophesize a nuclear strike on the Pacific Ocean that would send a “cloud of radioactive death drift[ing] downwind” over America. Making the threat seem worse was the fact that there was no end to the confidence and bravado projected by the Soviet premier. “We’re making missiles like sausages,” Nikita Khrushchev declared on TV. If Russia succeeded in making these ICBMs, as was feared, then Russia really could place a nuclear warhead in the missile’s nose and strike anywhere in the United States. “I am quite sure that we shall have very soon a guided missile with a hydrogen-bomb warhead which would hit any point in the world,” Khrushchev boasted shortly after the Time magazine article appeared.