Without Richard Bissell in charge of the secret CIA facility, what would become of Area 51? And who would run the Oxcart reconnaissance program? The decision about Bissell’s replacement went up the chain of command to President Kennedy. He had been in office for less than a year and already he was up to his elbows in CIA backlash. President Kennedy’s new secretary of defense was a man named Robert McNamara, an intellectually minded Harvard Business School graduate who had won the Legion of Merit during World War II for performing firebomb analysis from behind a desk. Now, as secretary of defense, after the Bay of Pigs, McNamara called for the Pentagon to assume control of all spy plane programs. McNamara was at the top of the chain of command of all the armed services and believed his Air Force should be in charge of all U.S. assets with wings. The public had lost confidence in the CIA, McNamara told the president.
But James Killian and his colleague Edwin Land, now both part of Kennedy’s presidential foreign intelligence advisory board, told the president that the best move forward for national security was to keep the CIA in the spy plane business at Area 51. What happened with Bissell was unfortunate, they said, suggesting that Richard Bissell, and Richard Bissell alone, had gone rogue. They argued that the CIA was still the agency best equipped to deliver overhead intelligence to the president. If that wasn’t possible, Killian and Land said, then the idea of who controls overhead reconnaissance should be restructured. One plan was that the CIA might work in better partnership with the Air Force. President Kennedy liked that. On September 6, 1961, he created a protocol that required the CIA deputy director and the undersecretary of the Air Force to comanage all space reconnaissance and aerial espionage programs together as the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified agency within Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense. A central headquarters for NRO was established in Washington, a small office with a limited staff but with a number of empire-size egos vying for power and control. The organization maintained a public face, an overt identity at the Pentagon called the Office of Space Systems, but no one outside a select few knew of NRO’s existence until 1992.
Jim Freedman remembers the transition in the chain of command and how it affected his work at Area 51. “Because I was the person with a list of every employee at the area, it was my job to know not just who was who, but who was the boss of somebody’s boss. An individual person didn’t necessarily know much more about the person they worked for than their code name. And they almost certainly didn’t know who was working on the other side of the wall or in the next trailer over. Wayne Pendleton was the head of the radar group for a while. He was my go-to person for a lot of different groups. One day, Pendleton suddenly says, ‘I’m going to Washington, Jim.’ So I said, ‘What if I need you, what number should I call?’ And Pendleton laughed. He said, ‘You won’t need me because where I’m going doesn’t exist.’ Decades later I would learn that the place where Wayne was going when he left the Ranch was to a little office in Washington called NRO.”
After the Bay of Pigs and his resignation, Richard Bissell drifted away from Washington’s power center like a man scorned. Quickly, his longtime, biggest supporters became his greatest detractors. Most notable among them was James Killian. The president’s powerful science adviser, Killian had headhunted Bissell twice before, the first time in 1946 to work in the economics department at MIT, and then again in 1954 to manage the U-2 aerial espionage program for the CIA. For nearly twenty years, Killian had considered Richard Bissell not just a colleague but a friend. After the Bay of Pigs, Killian turned his back on his friend. In a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, Killian told the CIA’s historian Donald E. Welzenbach that he was terribly upset when he learned of Bissell’s role in covert CIA operations. In a Studies in Intelligence report for the CIA, Welzenbach wrote, “Killian looked upon science and technology almost as a religion, something sacred to be kept from contamination by those who would misuse it for unwholesome ends. Into this category fit the covert operations and ‘dirty tricks’ of Dick Bissell’s Directorate of Plans.”