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The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/seabritain on 2024-08-20 15:03:40+00:00.

This is a follow-up to my previous post here:

In 1952, Herbert Miller replaced Colonel Benson as Chief of the Office of Scientific Intelligences Nuclear Energy Division and Chairman of the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee.

_{https://www.governmentattic.org/44docs/CIA_SandTofcSciIntel1949-68_1972_All.pdf}

Because of the tight security and sensitivity of many of the programs initiated under Mr. Miller’s guidance, strict compartmentation developed within OSI and the agency. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954, under which clearance for AE information came under tighter administrative control throughout the Government, compounded the compartmentation. Since Miller was responsible for Restricted Data information within the Agency, he was able to isolate the NED, its people and information from the rest of the Agency. Since RD clearances required his personal approval, he was able to limit the flow of information and gain personal control over all AE intelligence. The result was that Miller at times operated his Division outside the purview of his immediate supervisors and maintained a direct channel with the DCI.

Miller was part of the Special Engineer Detachment at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

_{https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/herbert-i-miller/}

He served in various leadership positions in the D and J Divisions at Los Alamos from 1946-1950.

_{https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1673353}

Some context on the aforementioned divisions.

_{https://lasg.org/archive/pre-1995/LA-UR-17-22764-MeadeRoger-LosAlamos-in-1953.pdf}

In 1948, Miller was aboard the USS Albemarle, the laboratory ship used during Operation Sandstone, a series of atmospheric nuclear tests.

_{https://rminucleardocs.icaad.ngo/api/files/1610681488349l115kt8nzb9.pdf}

Miller was on the Marshall Islands in 1949, working for AEC contractor Holmes & Narver.

_{https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7208/chicago_9780226783574-008/html?lang=en}

During his reign as Chief, the NED became responsible for the production of part of Section 63, Chapter VI of the National Intelligence Survey. These subsections related specifically to intelligence regarding radioactive elements, particularly uranium and thorium.

In 1955, Miller left this role to participate in the development of the U-2 spy plane. 

_{https://www.governmentattic.org/44docs/CIA_SandTofcSciIntel1949-68_1972_All.pdf}

Along with Richard Bissell, Special Assistant to Allen Dulles, he was tasked with picking the location of what would become known as Area 51. Selected quotes from Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base below.

_{https://archive.org/details/area51uncensored0000anni/page/n2/mode/1up?q=Miller}

According to most members of the black world who are familiar with the history of Area 51, the base opened its doors in 1955 after two CIA officers, Richard Bissell and Herbert Miller, chose the place to be the test facility for the Agency’s first spy plane, the U-2. Part of Area 51’s secret history is that the so-called Area 51 zone had been in existence for four years by the time the CIA identified it as a perfect clandestine test facility. Never before disclosed is the fact that Area 51’s first customer was not the CIA but the Atomic Energy Commission. Beginning in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission used its parallel system of secret-keeping to conduct radical and controversial research, development, and engineering not just on aircraft but also on pilot-related projects—entirely without oversight or ethical controls.

More from Jacobsen:

The following winter, in 1955, Richard Bissell and his fellow CIA officer Herbert Miller, the Agency’s leading expert on Soviet nuclear weapons, flew across the American West in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza in search of a location where they could build a secret CIA test facility, the only one of its kind on American soil. Only a handful of CIA officers and an Air Force colonel named Osmond “Ozzie” Ritland had any idea what the men were up to, flying around out there. Bissell’s orders, which had come directly from President Eisenhower himself, were to find a secret location to build a test facility for the Agency’s bold, new spy plane—the aircraft that would keep watch over the Soviet Union’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program. Accompanying the CIA officers was the nation’s leading aerodynamicist, Lockheed Corporation’s Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the man tasked with designing and building this new plane.Johnson sat in the back of the Beechcraft with geological survey maps spread out across his lap as the men flew from Burbank, California, across the Mojave Desert, and into Nevada. They were searching for a dry lake bed called Groom Lake just outside the Nevada Test Site, which had had its boundaries configured by Holmes and Narver in July of 1950 during the top secret Project Nutmeg that resulted in Nevada’s being chosen as America’s continental atomic bombing range. Legendary air racer and experimental test pilot Tony LeVier was flying the small airplane. LeVier had a vague idea of where he was going because his fellow Lockheed test pilot Ray Goudey had taken him to Groom Lake on a prescouting mission just a few weeks before. On occasion, Goudey had shuttled atomic scientists from California to the test site and once he had even set down his aircraft on Groom Lake to eat his bag lunch.

“Descending for a closer look, we saw evidence of a temporary landing strip,” Bissell later recalled, “the kind of runway that had been built in various locations across the United States during World War Two for the benefit of pilots in training who might have to make an emergency landing.” The large, hardened salt pan was a perfect natural runway, and LeVier effortlessly landed the plane. The men got out and walked around, discussing how level the terrain was and kicking the old shell casings lying about like stones. To the north, Bald Mountain towered over the valley, offering cover, and to the southwest, there was equal shelter from a mountain range called Papoose. According to Bissell, “Groom Lake would prove perfect for our needs.”

Bissell was acutely aware that Groom Lake was just over the hill from the government’s atomic bomb testing facility, which meant that as far as secrecy was concerned, there was no better place in the continental United States for the CIA to set up its new spy plane program and begin clandestine work. “I recommended to Eisenhower that he add a piece of adjacent land, including Groom Lake, to the Nevada Test Site of the Atomic Energy Commission,” Bissell related in his memoir, written in the last year of his life. Four months after Richard Bissell, Herbert Miller, Kelly Johnson, and Tony LeVier touched down on Groom Lake, Area 51 had its first residents. It was a small group of four Lockheed test pilots, two dozen Lockheed mechanics and engineers, a handful of CIA officers who doubled as security guards, and a small group of Lieutenant Colonel Ritland’s Air Force staff. There was a cowboy feel to the base that first summer, with temperatures so hot the mechanics used to crack eggs on metal surfaces just to see how long it would take for them to fry.

In a 1965 speech, Bissell recounted how Miller was initially under the impression that he would be running the entire U-2 project.

_{https://www.governmentattic.org/11docs/CIA-1965Bissellspeech_2014.pdf}