I quit high school to join the Navy . Back then you signed up you went to boot camp, then at your first assignment you went to school. The school was called USAFI, the United Stated Armed Forces Institute. That's where I got my GED. I was assigned to the Seabee's in 1960 at the Naval Air Station in Adak, Alaska, a base in the Aleutian Islands. The base was used as a refueling base for US spy planes flying over Russia. I was trained to run heavy equipment (excavating), but it was also where I first became involved in intelligence gathering. While I was at the base, my duty was to keep track of the traffic, in and out of the planes . When the planes came in, the pilots would sleep while it was being refueled. They would put 20 or more marines, circling the plane to guard it. There was one pilot named Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Russia and became a POW. Well, the government wanted to know how they (Russians) knew when he would be in a certain place, so they began gathering information about the traffic patterns, and when the announcement about the planes was received by the ground . You see, we should have only had about 20 minutes advance notice on their arrival, but sometimes we knew an hour or more ahead of time. The government wanted to know just how loose the information was on the comings and goings of the planes.
As early as 1956 the Central Intelligence Agency was directed to gather information on the Soviet Union's military and defense exploits . Flights out of Alaska, Norway, West Germany, Turkey, Pakistan and Japan cruised above Soviet bases and installations. Hundreds of U.S. airplanes had been flying into Soviet airspace but could only penetrate a few hundred miles. A Lockheed vice-president, Clarence (Kelly) Johnson was the designer of the U-2 and presented the idea to the Air Force . Johnson wanted to improve the performance of the F-104 but soon realized it would be easier to build a new plane.
