Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 2
56
In addition to the camera systems, the U-2 carried one other important item of optical equipment, a periscope. Designed by James Baker and built by Walter Baird of Baird Associates, the optical periscope helped pilots recognize targets beneath the aircraft and also proved to be a valuable navigational aid.²²
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PREPARATIONS FOR TESTING THE U-2
As work progressed in California on the airframe, in Connecticut on the engines, and in Boston on the camera system, the top officials of the Development Projects Staff flew to California and Nevada to search for a site where the aircraft could be tested safely and secretly. On 12 April 1955 Richard Bissell and Col. Osmund Ritland (the senior Air Force officer on the project staff) flew over Nevada with Kelly Johnson in a small Beechcraft plane piloted by Lockheed’s chief test pilot, Tony LeVier. They spotted what appeared to be an airstrip by a salt flat known as Groom Lake, near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) Nevada Proving Ground. After debating about landing on the old airstrip, LeVier set the plane down on the lakebed, and all four walked over to examine the strip. The facility had been used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range for Army Air Corps pilots. From the air the strip appeared to be paved, but on closer inspection it turned out to have originally been fashioned from compacted earth that had turned into ankle-deep dust after more than a decade of disuse. If LeVier had attempted to land on the airstrip, the plane would probably have nosed over when the wheels sank into the loose soil, killing or injuring all of the key figures in the U-2 project.²³
Bissell and his colleagues all agreed that Groom Lake would make an ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots. Upon returning to Washington, Bissell discovered that Groom Lake was not part of the AEC proving ground. After consulting with Dulles, Bissell and Miller asked the Atomic Energy Commission to add the Groom Lake area to its real estate holdings in Nevada. AEC Chairman Adm. Lewis Strauss readily agreed, and President Eisenhower also approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada Test Site. The outlines of Area 51
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²² Information supplied by James Baker to Donald E. Welzenbach, 12 May 1986 (U).
²³ *OSA History*, chap. 8, pp. 1-2 (TS Codeword); Miller, *Lockheed U-2*, pp. 19-20.
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Secret
Approved for Release: 2013/06/25