The Angels, Book One of the CIA Area 51 Chronicles, President Truman, the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marine Corps all fear the Central Intelligence Agency. Yet, the president tasks the CIA with doing something that the Air Force would not do. That was in eight months to develop the U-2 plane, create Area 51 to test-fly it, and develop a staffed overhead reconnaissance program to spy on Russia.
Despite many technological and bureaucratic hurdles, the CIA, in eight months from contract to flying and under budget, produces the revolutionary U-2 spy plane. A few months later, the CIA is overflying the Communist Soviet Union to disprove the feared bomber and missile gap between the two superpowers. The struggle between the CIA and the US Air Force to control the U-2 Angels and the persistent tension between the CIA and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower extends to the A-12 Archangels intended to replace the U-2. The CIA loses many lives of pilots flying out of the agency's remote site in Nevada, known today as Area 51.