Bissell returned to academia, then moved to the Ford Foundation. When life there grew dull, he gently dropped a hint to Allen Dulles that he might consider work at the agency. He was one of the new generation of logistics and technology experts, the technocrats, who came out of the war effort — for World War II had been a war of logistics. While Henry Stimson, Republican secretary of state, the epitome of WASP privilege, had shut down the famed Black Chamber in 1929, saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” the coming of World War II had made it necessary for gentlemen to spy, and to fight dirty. The OSS, a precursor of the CIA, had first brought college men into espionage, and, after its founding in 1947, an Ivy League — educated cadre ran the service. The plots to get rid of Castro that would shock a nation when they were revealed at the Church Hearings in 1973 were like others of the era. The OSS and CIA had come up with wacky schemes before, such as dropping pornographic literature on Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat, to drive him mad with lust.
After World War II, the Yale crew coach Skip Waltz was the chief recruiter. A few measured words at the boathouse to a team player, a suggestion in confidence, brought dozens of oarsmen into the CIA. But if many of the Ivy League recruits had been “well rounded,” promising men of action, Bissell was unusual — an academic, who came to the agency from a foundation. Bissell liked systems, flow charts, tables. He was the champion of the coming thing in intelligence — technology, photint, elint — and it would sometimes put him in conflict with the traditionalists — the humint people. He would take little interest in the actual content of the pictures the U-2 or SR-71 would take.
Bissell was most interested in the psychology of CIA operations, the manipulation of public opinion, the creation of illusory forces rather than the use of actual weapons.
He would argue in his memoirs that the U-2 served as a psychological weapon as well as a reconnaissance tool. It sowed the crucial idea that the United States could overfly the Soviet Union with impunity. Responding to the humiliation their military felt at having been so brazenly overflown, the Soviets insisted they had shot down the plane at 70,000 feet with a single antiaircraft missile. In fact, they likely fired a huge salvo of the missiles and may have even knocked one of their own fighters out of the sky.
Bissell’s first success came with the overthrow in 1954 of Guatemalan dictator Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. That, along with the replacement of Mosaddeq in Iran with the shah, were the CIA’s proudest achievements. Accomplished at the behest not just of the president but of the United Fruit Company, the Guatemala operation set the CIA on the course of exotic “covert,” “destabilizing” operations.
Significantly, to Bissell’s thinking, the operation turned not on military force but on illusion, such as bogus radio transmissions reporting gathering rebel forces — a twist on the old wartime deception of a few soldiers walking repeatedly back and forth along a wall to suggest to an enemy many more soldiers. The rebel air force was a couple of old P-51s that Bissell had arranged to have the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza buy and lease out for cover. When real bombs ran out, the planes dropped Coke bottles that emitted a sinister whistle. This was the perfect symbol of American intervention circa 1954: the Coca-Cola bottle as bomb, bringing with it American-style fear and intimidation.
Success in Guatemala lent the CIA a sense of false confidence that would ultimately lead to the Bay of Pigs disaster.
Barely a year later, in the fall of 1955, Allen Dulles called in Bissell, who had been with the agency only briefly, and out of the blue gave him the job of running Aquatone.
Dulles, catlike with his whiskery mustache, tweedy and academic, puffing on his pipe, looked his role. But he was a master bureaucrat. The director had already gotten the Air Force to cover his ass with a letter saying that, indeed, the absurdly optimistic schedule Kelly Johnson proposed for the U-2 was realistic.
While Johnson was building the airplane, the Harvard astronomer James Baker directed the development of special cameras. They would carry 10,000 feet of film on each flight and be able to photograph a swath of territory 125 miles wide and 3,000 miles long.
But they all knew it was only a matter of time before Soviet antiaircraft missiles could reach the maximum altitude of 70,000 feet or so and make the U-2 vulnerable. Even while the U-2 was being tested, Bissell planned the plane that became the Blackbird to fly higher and faster, and in 1958 he began to develop the first spy satellite, Corona.
Work on the new plane continued in Lockheed’s Building 82 at the Burbank Airport. The first flight was scheduled for August 1955. Kelly Johnson knew who he wanted to fly it first — Tony LeVier, his top test pilot. But first he had to find a place from which to fly it.
He knew they could not test the U-2 at Edwards. By 1954, that base had become too public, and this was a project so secret that its treasury was Johnson’s own home mailbox, in Encino, and its cover firm called C&J Inc. (from Clarence Johnson, his given name).
One day in the spring of 1955, Johnson and LeVier set out in the company’s Beech Bonanza to look for a test site. To disguise their purpose, they wore hunting clothes and took off in the direction of Mexico carrying a huge lunch LeVier’s wife had prepared. They crisscrossed dozens of little airstrips and disused bases. Then finally Osmond Ritland, the CIA’s military aide to the program, remembered a strip in the gunnery range where he had been stationed during the war in the desert north of Nellis Air Force Base. With the map spread over Johnson’s lap, they aimed for the little x, north of the vast Nevada Test Site. “We looked at that lake,” Ritland would later recall, “and we all looked at each other. It was another Edwards, so we wheeled around, landed on that lake, taxied up to one end of it, and Kelly Johnson said, ‘We’ll build it right there, that’s the hangar. We’ll put the runway there.’ ”
The lake was covered with sagebrush. Wild burros occasionally ventured across it. With an old Air Force compass in hand, kicking away the spent .50-caliber shell casings, Johnson laid out the strip. “This will be the tower, right here,” he said. Pebbles the size of peas blew around in the afternoon winds.
Soon, seventy-five people would be working here, paving the runway, building hangars, and setting up mobile homes bought from the Navy as barracks. By the time training started, the number of workers jumped to 250. The U-2s were flown in on cargo planes, their wings removed. An official CIA history rather prissily explains, “The site at first afforded few of the necessities and none of the amenities of life.”
They flew Bissell out to the site. “Sweet Jesus,” Mr. B. may have exclaimed, a favorite phrase of his.
“This will do nicely,” he commented. He even liked Johnson’s proposed name for the place: “Paradise Ranch.”
Johnson and Bissell worked it out such that the Nevada Test Site took official ownership of the strip. Construction on the runway began and a press release was issued, tying the work to the test site, when work began in August. It was done by REECO, Reynolds Electric, the subsidiary of EG&G that ran the nuclear test site. It was referred to now as “Watertown Strip”—perhaps a coy reference to the dryness of the place, or to Allen Dulles’s hometown in northern New York State — and not Groom Lake in the emerging cover story, which described the airplane as a weather craft.
Meanwhile, a continent away, the command post for the program was set up in the E-ring of the Pentagon. Bissell moved out of the CIA headquarters on the Mall and into a special program management office with a staff of 225 in an old office on L Street — one of the temporary wartime buildings that had never been removed, an apt metaphor for the survival of the wartime mentality into the uneasy peace. The place was named “Bissell Center,” and some in the agency began talking of the RBAF—“Richard Bissell Air Force.”