In 1980, journalist Linda Hunt published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealing publicly for the first time that several of the nation’s leading German American aerospace doctors had previously worked at Nazi concentration camps. There, they had obtained aviation medicine data by conducting barbaric experiments on thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and other people considered disposable. Many newspaper articles and medical papers followed, documenting how Project Paperclip came to be and raising important questions about how much the government had known about the scientists’ sordid pasts. The issues were well reported but often ignored by the public because of the heinous subject matter involved. The idea that the American military and its intelligence agents would overlook war crimes and crimes against humanity in the name of advancing American science was, and continues to be, an odious one. It is likely that this is the reason why the federal government has never fully declassified the Operation Paperclip files. In 1999, a government panel released 126,000 pages of previously classified documents on former German Paperclips, but the panel also revealed that there were over six hundred million still-classified pages waiting “for review.” No significant release has occured since.
In March of 1957, Bevacqua finally passed his tests and arrived at Area 51, where the living conditions had improved. The canvas tents had been upgraded to Quonset huts. There were working showers. The mess hall had been expanded, and someone had built a makeshift bar. But the protocols for flying were as undeveloped as they’d been when Ray Goudey and others were first figuring out how to get the U-2 to fly high. The training that Tony Bevacqua experienced at Area 51 was unlike anything he had ever seen on an Air Force base. The CIA method to train pilots on the U-2 was as radical and as unorthodox as an Air Force pilot could imagine. At Turner Air Force Base, Bevacqua had learned to fly F-84s the Air Force way. That meant first diligently studying the aircraft manuals, then practicing in a flight simulator, then practicing in a trainer, and finally going up in the airplane with an instructor. At Area 51, there was no manual for the U-2, no flight simulator, no trainer, and no instructor. “The original U-2s had only one seat and one engine, which meant the CIA instructor pilot gave you a lesson with your feet on the ground,” Bevacqua explains. Flying this strange and secret spy plane came without a morsel of bureaucracy, never mind basic rules, making the overall experience profound. “You were basically given a talk by an instructor pilot. Then you were given a piece of cardboard with a checklist on the front side, and fuel and oxygen graphs on the back. Then it was time to fly. And that was that.”
Coupled with the secrecy protocols, the experience for pilots at Area 51 verged on sublime. No one but his old roommate from Turner AFB, Francis Gary Powers, knew who Tony Bevacqua really was. At Area 51 he went by only a pilot number and his first name. His family members had no idea where he was, nor would they find out about his secret missions for decades to come. As for future assignments, very few people were told where Air Force pilots were headed in the U-2—including the pilots themselves. What everyone knew was that pilots who got shot down over enemy territory were almost always tortured for information. This meant that the less you knew as a pilot, the better it was for everyone involved.
Bevacqua couldn’t wait for an assignment. For this small group of pilots—only 25 percent of candidates passed the physical tests—a U-2 mission carried with it a sacred sense of national pride. Tony Bevacqua was living the American dream and protecting it at the same time. He was not someone who ever forgot for a moment how lucky he was. “Always make the most of your opportunities,” Bevacqua’s Italian-speaking father had told him as a child. Tony Bevacqua had done just that. He couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity. He was one of America’s most important spy plane pilots. He was helping to save the free world.
By the winter of 1957, the Boston Group had completed what Richard Bissell wanted in radar-absorbing paint. Bissell received the paint and gave it to Lockheed engineers at Area 51. He asked them to coat the fuselage of several U-2s with it, which they did. Bissell understood that Kelly Johnson disapproved of the radar-absorbing-paint program, which he said made his U-2s “dirty birds.” But Bissell was under too much presidential pressure to deal with the watchful eye of Kelly Johnson at this point. To measure how the dirty birds performed against radar, Bissell hired a different company to measure the radar returns, the defense contractor EG&G.