Operation Overflight (4 page)

Not only did the music stop. But as if he were plugged into the set also, Collins' voice stopped too. Silently he glared at me.

Red-faced, I turned the radio on again. The moment the music resumed, Collins resumed speaking.

Slowly, bit by bit, I was losing my naïveté. You learn as you grow up, I suppose. And I was growing up.

The other agency man called one of the pilots into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. When he returned, with an odd look, another pilot was summoned. Later he too returned, looking strange.

“Palmer,” he said. “Your turn.”

Entering the room, I saw, on top of the bureau, what looked like an elaborate tape recorder. Only I knew, suddenly, it wasn't.

“Ever see one of these before?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, “but I think I can make a pretty good guess as to what it is.”

“Any objection to taking a lie-detector test?”

Though I had a great many, I didn't voice them, shaking my head. If this was a condition of the job, I'd do it. But I didn't like it.

“Sit down. While I'm strapping you in, you can look over this list of questions.”

Knowing what he's going to ask in advance should make it easier, I thought. Except that the opposite psychology was used. Awareness that a disturbing question was upcoming served only to increase the tension.

I had never felt so completely exposed, as if there was no privacy whatsoever. If at that moment someone had handed me a petition banning polygraphs forever from the face of the earth, I would
gladly have signed it. When I was asked the last question and the straps were taken off, I vowed that never again, no matter what the circumstances, would I undergo such an insult to my integrity.

Apparently we all passed the test, for the same men attended the rest of the meetings. These took place in various Washington hotels—the Mayfair, Roger Smith, etc.—at irregular intervals over the next three months. At no time did we meet in a government building. “Covert,” as opposed to “overt,” employees, we never saw inside headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Turning up the radio and careful inspection of the room were only two of the precautions against “bugging,” I soon learned. By changing hotels and randomly selecting different pilots' rooms, we avoided establishing a pattern.

Our travel arrangements were also carefully planned so that no routine could be detected. Sometimes we traveled singly, sometimes in groups of two, three, or four, sometimes with an agency representative along, sometimes not. Usually, when accompanied, it was by Collins, who was becoming as omnipresent as the radio in each of our hotel rooms.

When I got to know him better, he confirmed what I had long suspected, that “Collins” was just as native to him as “Palmer” to me. I learned his real name, but, the pseudonym having become habit, never used it.

With one exception, aliases presented no problem, since, being a generally friendly lot, pilots aren't given to much use of last names. The exception was a pilot whose surname began with Mac, which, of course, was also his nickname. The agency, however, had given him the cover name of Murphy. Fortunately no one ever asked Murphy why he was called Mac.

More troublesome were the phony addresses we had been instructed to use on hotel registers. I suspect more than a few men have encountered the same dilemma, although under different circumstances. Trying to make up an address on the spot, the mind suddenly blanks. We learned, after a few curious looks from desk clerks, to manufacture our cover addresses in advance.

As covert agents, we probably left a great deal to be desired. Although we all had Top Secret clearances, and our time in the Air Force had made us security-conscious, we considered ourselves pilots, not spies, and at times the cloak-and-dagger precautions tickled our funny bones.

Orders directed us to report to Omaha, Nebraska. Inasmuch as
this was the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, to which we were all assigned, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Arriving in Omaha, however, we were given a number to call. To no one's surprise, Collins answered. Greeting us at the airport, he asked us to resume our covers, whereupon he gave us tickets for the next flight to St. Louis.

We managed, though with some effort, to suppress our laughter. St. Louis had been one of the stops en route to Omaha.

From St. Louis we caught a flight to Albuquerque, which we now learned was our actual destination, checking into the Lovelace Clinic for a week-long physical examination.

It was incredibly thorough. I had been unaware that many of the tests given us even existed, and commented on this to one of the doctors. They hadn't existed before, he laughed; many had been especially designed just for us. Many of the tests which we pioneered were later made a part of the astronauts' physicals. All of the Mercury personnel went through Lovelace Clinic.

Occasionally, if we asked, we were told the purpose of a set of tests. For example, a number were designed to determine any tendency toward claustrophobia. I couldn't understand, at the time, why these were so important.

Other tests defied guessing, until we discovered that they had nothing to do with our physical. For some time doctors had been aware that pilots as a group apparently age more slowly than other people. Lovelace was working on a government grant to determine why. We just happened to be handy guinea pigs.

At Lovelace we had our first washout. One pilot, though perfectly capable of flying for the Air Force, did not meet the rigid specifications required for this particular project.

He was the only washout in our group. As far as we knew, no one was eliminated because of a security check. To be more accurate, we were not even sure such an investigation had been made.

When a serviceman or potential government employee is given a background check for security clearance, the FBI usually questions former employers, neighbors, associates. Often some word of the investigation gets back to the individual. If the agency conducted a separate security check on us, we were unaware of it; this meant either that we were accepted on the basis of our Air Force clearances or that the investigation was more discreet than usual. Considering the extreme sensitivity of the project, I strongly suspect the latter to be the case. It is also possible the investigation occurred before we were ever approached.

As we later learned, our initial selection was less random than it first appeared.

Only reserve officers had been interviewed, no regular officers. This was because there were apt to be fewer questions asked when a reserve officer resigned.

Also, the choice of a number of pilots from the same unit was not accidental. Our wing was being dissolved, its personnel assigned elsewhere. In such a transition, with everyone moving, there was less chance the disappearance of a few pilots would evoke comment.

In April, on instruction from Collins, I submitted my letter of resignation to the Secretary of the Air Force.

Under ordinary circumstances several months would have been required for the request to be approved. It was back in less than one. On the thirteenth of May, 1956, I became a civilian again.

Within a few days I signed my contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. The document was brief and covered my terms of employment—eighteen months from the date of signing, fifteen hundred dollars per month while in the United States, twenty-five hundred per month overseas, with five hundred taken out each month and held in escrow, to be paid upon satisfactory completion of contract. This last provision, it was explained to us, had been added to make the tax bite easier.

There was also a security clause, containing the regular national security agreement that everyone in the service and most government employees must sign, prohibiting the revelation of any information adversely affecting national security, the penalty for so doing being a ten-thousand-dollar fine and/or ten years in jail.

There was only one copy of the contract, which the agency kept. Nor was I given a copy of any of the several other documents I signed. One, already cosigned by the Secretary of the Air Force, Donald A. Quarles, promised that upon completion of my contract I would be permitted to return to the Air Force at a rank corresponding to that of my contemporaries and with no time lost toward retirement. This was especially important to me, because already I had nearly six years in, and, on finishing the assignment, planned to return to the Air Force.

Following the signing of the contracts, we flew to a secret base on the West Coast to begin training.

Three

W
atertown Strip was one of those “you can't get there from here” places. Located in a desolate portion of southern Nevada desert, it was almost completely isolated: there were no towns in the vicinity, not even a ghost town, only miles of flat, uninhabited land. The only convenient way to reach it was by air, as we had, flying in from Lockheed's Burbank, California, terminal.

As a place to live, it left much to be desired. As a secret training base for a revolutionary new plane, it was an excellent site, its remoteness effectively masking its activity, such as the U-2 crash the week before we arrived, the first fatality on that aircraft.

Pilots are always quick to deny they are a superstitious lot. Be that as it may, I'm certain each of us was hoping and praying the same thing—that this was in no way a portent of things to come.

It was silver. But the altitude at which it would fly was so high as to render it invisible from the air and ground below.

Its wings, as the photographs had indicated, were its most startling feature. Except that the photograph hadn't prepared us for the actuality. In proportion to the length of the fuselage, which was some forty feet, they stretched out to more than eighty. Like the wings of a giant bird, they drooped slightly when on the ground; in turbulent air they flapped noticeably.

This was the U-2, basically a powered glider, jet engine inside a glider frame, only it was capable of things no glider or jet had ever accomplished before: it could reach, and maintain for hours at a time, altitudes never before touched.

But at a cost.

To achieve this height, carry a pilot, as well as a variety of electronic and photographic gear, plus enough fuel to keep it aloft for periods in excess of nine hours, it had to be extremely light. In aerodynamics there are certain balances. To achieve lightness, something else must be sacrificed. With the U-2 it was strength.

Each piece of structure was a little thinner than a pilot would have liked. Where there was usually extra support, such as joints and junctures, in the U-2 there was none. It was not a plane for heavy or drastic maneuvers.

In short, it had not been built to last. The intention was to go in, get the job done, get out. Even the eighteen months called for
in our contracts seemed a highly optimistic measure of the plane's probable life span. It was even rumored that the original concept of Operation Overflight had been a one-shot, single flight over the Soviet Union for each plane: the plane to take off without wheels, make the flight, return to its base, and belly-land.

Since both Lockheed and agency personnel were extremely tigh-tlipped when it came to matters of planning, this remained an unconfirmed rumor among the pilots.

We badly underrated the U-2 and its maker, “Kelly” Johnson.

One place where Johnson had eliminated weight was the ejection seat. There was none. To bail out, a pilot had to climb out.

Another economy was the landing gear. Rather than the tricycle type, with a gear under the nose and another under each wing, the U-2 had one under the nose and one under the tail, a bicycle arrangement. To support the wings while on the ground, a “pogo,” or extension with a small wheel on the end, was set in a socket underneath each wing. These kept the wings level while taxiing, but dropped off on takeoff.

Or were supposed to. On the fatal flight the week before our arrival, one of the pogos had failed to release. Coming back over the field, the pilot had flown in low, attempting to shake it off. Heavy with fuel, he had miscalculated, stalled, and crashed at the end of the runway.

Except for a rare accident of this sort, it was obvious just from looking at the arrangement that takeoff should present no special problems, but landing—without the pogos—would be tricky. Like riding a bicycle; only, with the ground roll finished, the plane would tilt over onto the heavy wing, the wing tip acting as part of the landing gear.

As for what it would be like in the air, it was a safe guess it would be extremely difficult to handle.

My hands itched to get onto the controls.

But that had to wait until we learned something very basic. How to breathe.

It now became apparent why we had been given some of the tests at Lovelace Clinic.

One of the risks of high-altitude flight is danger of sudden loss of pressurization in the cockpit. For safeguard, a special partial-pressure suit had been designed. Airtight, of rubberized fabric with
almost no give or elasticity, it fit snugly around the body, so snugly that the slightest movement—bending a knee or arm, turning the head—would rub the skin, leaving bruises. Wearing long johns helped, but not much; even when worn inside out, the seams pressed into the skin.

A hermetic seal at the neck fastened the helmet into place. Once on, it felt exactly like a too-tight tie over a badly shrunk collar. On long flights, counting preparatory time, we would have to remain in the suit for up to twelve hours. Anyone with the slightest touch of claustrophia would have gone mad.

Nor were these the only discomforts.

Since there was no way to unfasten the suit without losing oxygen, we had to learn to curb our appetite.

Early in the program some of the pilots would occasionally loosen the face plate to take liquids. In April, 1957, Lockheed test pilot Robert L. Sieker was killed in a U-2 crash near Edwards AFB, California. It was later determined that Sieker had done this, lost pressurization, and was unable to resecure the face plate. After this the pilots kept their face plates fastened when flying.