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Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Page 14

by Annie M. Jacobsen


  Following Project 57, the first nuclear explosion in the series to form a mushroom cloud was called Boltzmann, detonated on May 28, 1957. At twelve kilotons, it was approximately the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and caused Area 51 personnel located eleven miles over the hill to be temporarily evacuated from the base. The bomb was described in a press release simply as a “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory device.” On June 9, 1957, the New York Times printed the Atomic Energy Commission’s “partial schedule” of the Operation Plumbbob atomic tests so that summer tourists wanting to see a mushroom cloud could plan their itineraries accordingly. “This is the best time in history for the non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching,” the New York Times said. According to Richard Mingus, it seemed that higher-ranking CIA officers at Area 51 did not agree with the Gray Lady’s assessment. “After one blast really shook the place, a group of them jumped in someone’s private aircraft and took off pretty fast.” One report, declassified in 1993, noted the damage: “The blast buckled aircraft hangar doors, shattered windows in the mess hall and broke a ventilator panel on a dormitory.” Area 51 employees were once again evacuated. Neither Richard Bissell nor his team was prepared for such drastic effects and certainly not as a matter of course. Whether the Agency protested or complied remains classified, but the U-2s were quickly flown to a remote area of the north base at Edwards Air Force Base in California and hidden in hangars there. Nothing was going to stop the Atomic Energy Commission and its tests. Operation Plumbbob was in full swing.

  Then came the Hood bomb.

  It was the middle of the night on July 5, 1957. Richard Mingus was getting ready to head to the test site for work. Gloria was finally pregnant again, and it had been a celebratory Fourth of July. Now Mingus prepared himself for what he knew was going to be an exceedingly long day. The shot was going to be big; so big, the commission had already evacuated every last person from Area 51.

  Only the caretakers were left. Richard Mingus kissed Gloria good-bye and climbed into his new 1957 DeSoto. How Mingus loved his car, with its four doors and long fins, a luxury made affordable by long overtime hours at the test site. The morning of the Hood bomb, Mingus drove the sixty-five miles to the main gate at Camp Mercury, located at the southernmost end of the test site, off Highway 95. It was somewhere around 1:30 a.m. Hood was scheduled for detonation early that morning, in Area 9. On the seat beside him, Mingus carried his lunch, always lovingly packed by Gloria in a small, wooden lunch box. Inside there was a sandwich, a can opener, and a can of Mingus’s favorite: Dinty Moore stew. Once inside the gates of the test site, Mingus parked his DeSoto and transferred his belongings into an Atomic Energy Commission truck. Then he drove the familiar route from Camp Mercury to the control point. First he made sure to stop by the ice house, where he could fill up a five-gallon can with water, making sure to put a big block of ice inside. “The size of the Hood bomb was classified but everyone knew it was going to be really big,” Mingus explains.

  Three miles to the north, at Area 9, the Army would be conducting hundreds of tests during and immediately after the explosion. Seventy Chester White pigs wearing military uniforms were enclosed in cages facing the bomb and placed a short distance from ground zero. The pigs had been anesthetized to counter the pain of the beta radiation burns they were certain to receive. Using the pigs, the Army wanted to determine which fabrics best withstood an atomic bomb blast. Farther back, lying in trenches, were one hundred soldiers, all of whom were participating in twenty-four scientific experiments. In classified papers obtained by the author, scientists called this the Indoctrination Project. A committee called the Committee on Human Resources was conducting these secret tests on soldiers to determine how they would react psychologically when nuclear bombs started going off. The Committee on Human Resources wanted to study the “psychology of panic” and thereby develop “emotional engineering programs” for soldiers for future use.

  A second battalion of 2,100 troops was stationed farther back, in Area 4 and Area 7, troops whose job was to simulate a “mythical attack by an aggressor force against Las Vegas, conducted over four days.” A mile to the south, twenty-five hundred Marines would be working on combined air-ground exercises during Hood, using an amphibian tractor called the LVTP5, the ship-to-shore vehicle that was used in the Pacific during World War II, an “armored monster capable of bringing Marines ashore with dry feet.” Dozens of helicopters performed maneuvers as well. Medical divisions were present, tasked with studying “blast biology,” to determine the primary and secondary effects of flying bricks, timber, and glass. Different types of wood houses had been built to see what could withstand a nuclear blast best: wood or wallboard; masonry or metal; asbestos-shingle or tarpaper roof. The Federal Civilian Defense Administration was testing different types of bomb shelters and underground domes. One structure was ninety feet by ninety feet across and had a reinforced door weighing a hundred tons that was mounted on a monorail. The Mosler Safe Company sponsored and paid for a $500,000 nuclearbombproof steel vault, ideal for insurance companies and banks seeking ways to mitigate loss after a nuclear attack.

  Richard Mingus was at the control point when the Hood bomb went off, all seventy-four kilotons of it. Almost immediately after the bomb detonated, a call came in from Mingus’s boss, a man by the name of Sergeant May. There was a major security problem, May was told. The Atomic Energy Commission had forgotten to secure Area 51. May needed to send Mingus over to the evacuated CIA facility immediately. “Once Sergeant May got off the phone he turned to me quick and said, ‘Go to rad safe, check out a Geiger counter and get over to Building 23 fast.’” Mingus followed orders. He jumped into his Atomic Energy Commission truck and raced toward Building 23.

  Not only the yield size of Hood was classified; so was the fact that despite the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurance that it was not testing thermonuclear bombs, Hood was a thermonuclear bomb test. At seventy-four kilotons, it was six times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and remains in 2011 the largest bomb ever exploded over the continental United States. The flash from the Hood bomb was visible from Canada to Mexico and from eight hundred miles out at sea. “So powerful was the blast that it was felt and seen over most of the Western United States as it lighted up the pre-dawn darkness,” reported the United Press International. It took twenty-five minutes for the nuclear blast wave to reach Los Angeles, 350 miles to the west. “LA Awakened. Flash Seen, Shock Felt Here. Calls Flood Police Switch Board,” headlined the Los Angeles Times. Right around the time the blast reached Los Angeles, Richard Mingus reached Building 23, a solid concrete bunker where radiation safety officers stayed during the explosions. In the distance, Mingus saw that a large swath of the desert was on fire.

  “You know about Delta?” the security officer inside Building 23 asked Mingus.

  “I’ve worked there many times,” Mingus said.

  “Grab another fella and get out there,” the man said. “Find a place with the least amount of radiation and set up a roadblock between the test site and Delta.” The Atomic Energy Commission may have moved Area 51 workers off the test site for the nuclear test, but entire buildings full of classified information remained behind. That the facility was not being physically secured by a guard had been an oversight. Now Richard Mingus was being asked to plug that security hole.

  Mingus drove quickly up through the test site, heading north toward Area 51. “The whole of Bandit Mountain was on fire,” Mingus explains, referring to the low hills between Papoose Lake and Yucca Flat. “You could see individual Joshua trees on fire.” Mingus kept on driving, moving as fast as he could while avoiding an accident. But to get to where he needed to go, Mingus had to drive straight through ground zero. “There were huge rocks and boulders in the road sent there by the blast,” Mingus explains. “I had my windows rolled up tight and I was driving like hell and my Geiger was screaming. I was worried if I drove too fast and had a wreck in that area, that wouldn’t have been goo
d. At guard post three eighty-five, my Geiger counter was chirping like hell. I remember distinctly it was reading eight point five Rs [never considered a safe amount]. We’d already deactivated that post because of the bomb and now it was way too hot to stay there so I drove on over the hill to Area 51.”

  When Mingus arrived at Groom Lake, his Geiger counter finally settled down. It had been approximately fifty minutes since the bomb had gone off. Having reached forty-eight thousand feet, the mushroom cloud would have already floated over Area 13 and Area 51 by that time. Most likely, it was somewhere over Utah now. “When I pulled into Area 51, it was like a ghost town,” Mingus recalls. “I set up a westfacing post. I could see far. Pretty soon, the other guard arrived. He took up the post at the control tower and I stayed in the truck, parked there on the road facing west.” Mingus was fewer than ten miles from ground zero, where the Hood bomb had exploded just an hour before. The blast wave had hit Area 51 with such force, it buckled the metal doors on several of the west-facing buildings, including a maintenance hangar and the supply warehouse. Radioactive ash floated down from the sky. And yet, despite the near-constant rain of nuclear fallout, the requirement for security took precedent. Mingus drank water from his five-gallon jug and waited for the smoke from the nuclear bomb to clear. He ate the sandwich that Gloria had made for him and watched the hills burn. After several hours, he took the can of Dinty Moore stew from his lunchbox and opened it with the can opener that Gloria always made sure to pack. Mingus got out of the AEC truck and opened the hood. He set the soup can on the control block and stirred it with a spoon. It didn’t take long for the liquid to heat up. Mingus got back in the car and checked to see if his radio was working. “Delta is secure,” Mingus said before kicking back to enjoy his stew. For the rest of the day and well into the night, every half hour a voice came over the radio from the control point asking if everything was “okay.” Each time, Mingus let his boss know that Groom Lake was secure. He didn’t see another soul out there in the desert for the rest of the day. By nightfall, all that was left of the fire were the Joshua trees smoldering on the hills. The land at the test site had been appropriately chosen; mostly it was just creosote bush and sand. The bushes had burned, and the sand, after being subjected to 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, had fused into little pieces of glass. Between the fallout and the structural damage, Area 51 had become uninhabitable. After Hood, the once-bustling classified facility transformed into a ghost town overnight — not unlike the mining towns that had preceded it a century before. The future of the secret base was, almost literally, up in the air.

  Chapter Seven: From Ghost Town to Boomtown

  After the Plumbbob atomic tests rocked Area 51, the CIA base sat like a ghost town. Very little is known about what happened there from the summer of 1957 through the summer of 1959. According to Richard Mingus, a pair of caretakers lived at the Groom Lake facility, a man and his wife. No record of their names has been found. What is known is that after the Plumbbob series effectively shut down operations at Area 51, workers from the Atomic Energy Commission roamed the hills and valleys measuring fallout with Geiger counters in hand. As impossible as it is to imagine in the twenty-first century, in the early days of atomic testing there was no such thing as HAZMAT suits for workers performing tasks in environments laden with WMD. Instead, workers combed the desert floor dressed in white lab coats and work boots, looking for particles of nuclear fallout. According to Atomic Energy Commission documents made public in 1993, this radioactive debris varied in size, from pinhead particles to pencil-size pieces of steel.

  Much to the surprise of the nuclear scientists, the atomic weapons tests revealed that sometimes, in the first milliseconds of destruction, the atomic energy actually jettisoned splintered pieces of the bomb tower away from the intense heat, intact, before vaporization could occur. These highly radioactive pieces were then carried aloft in the clouds and deposited down on places like Groom Lake, and Atomic Energy Commission workers could then locate them with magnets. But while workers measured fallout patterns, weapons planners moved ahead with preparations for the next atomic test series, which would take place the following fall. The Operation Hardtack II nuclear test series would prove even bigger than Plumbbob, in terms of the number of tests. From September 12 to October 30, 1958, an astonishing thirty-seven nuclear bombs were exploded — from tops of tall towers, in tunnels and shafts, on the surface of the earth, and hanging from balloons. Areas 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15 served as ground zero for the detonations, all within eighteen miles of Area 51.

  All but abandoned by the CIA and left to the elements, the oncebustling Area 51 facility took on a spooky, postapocalyptic feel. Guards from the test site did occasional spot tests, but the classified material had all been moved. While the barren landscape weathered the fallout, the animals observed around Groom Lake suffered terribly. Wild horses, deer, and rabbits roamed around the abandoned hangars and vacant airfields covered with beta radiation burns — the skin lesions caused by radiation poisoning that had plagued so many people and animals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war. It was also during this period that a rare breach of security over Area 51 airspace occurred. On July 28, 1957, a Douglas Aircraft Company employee named Edward K. Current made what he said was an emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip at Groom Lake. Mr. Current told Atomic Energy Commission security officers who questioned him that he had been on a cross-country training flight when he became lost and ran low on fuel. He was held overnight and released. The following day, the Nevada Test Organization uncharacteristically issued a press release stating that a private pilot had mistakenly landed on the “Watertown landing strip.” Mr. Current never made a public statement about his curious visit and remains the only civilian who ever landed at Area 51 uninvited in a private airplane, got out, and roamed around.

  Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Richard Bissell waited for presidential approval to plan more overflights using U-2s stationed at secret CIA facilities overseas. And on the West Coast, in Burbank, California, Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson was busy drawing up plans for the secret new spy plane. If Johnson was able to secure the new CIA contract he was working on with Bissell, it would likely mean Lockheed would spend the next decade fulfilling contract work out at Area 51. But what Kelly Johnson needed at this point was a radar cross-section wizard.

  It was September of 1957, and Edward Lovick was standing on Lockheed’s antenna pattern range tinkering with echo returns when Kelly Johnson approached him for a chat. Lovick, then a thirty-eightyear-old physicist, was known among colleagues as Lockheed’s radar man. Radar was still a relatively new science but Lovick knew more about the subject than anyone else at Lockheed at the time.

  “Would you like to come work on an interesting project?” the boss asked Lovick. In his eight-and-a-half-year tenure at the company, Lovick had never seen Kelly Johnson before. But standing beside Johnson were William Martin and L. D. MacDonald, two scientists Lovick considered to be brilliant. Martin was Lovick’s former boss, and the three men used to work together in the antenna lab. Martin and MacDonald had since disappeared to work on projects inside Building 82, a large, nondescript hangar at the north end of the facility where Lockheed’s black operations went on. As for the project that Kelly Johnson was asking Lovick to join, Johnson said it might finish in six weeks. Instead, it lasted thirty-two years. Although Lovick had no idea at the time, he was being invited into Lockheed’s classified group, officially called Advanced Development Projects but nicknamed the Skunk Works. In 1957, its primary customer was the CIA.

  Lovick was granted his top secret security clearance and briefed on the U-2 aircraft. He learned about the death of test pilot Robert Sieker at Area 51, just four months before. “My first assignment at Lockheed came as a direct result of this tragedy,” Lovick recalls. Sieker’s death had inadvertently played a role in the invention of the most significant military application of the twentieth century, and it led Ed Lovick to become known as the grandfather of stealt
h. What the Boston Group at MIT had attempted to do — add stealth features via paint to an existing airplane — had proved futile. But what Lovick and his team would soon discover was that stealth could be achieved if it was designed as a feature in the early drawing boards.

  “The purpose of stealth, or antiradar technology,” Lovick explains, “is to keep the enemy from sensing or detecting an aircraft, from tracking it, and therefore from shooting it down. The goal is to trick the enemy’s air defenses though camouflage or concealment.” Camouflage has been one of the most basic foundations of military strength since man first made spears. In ancient warfare, soldiers concealed themselves from the enemy using tree branches as disguise. Millennia later, American independence was gained partly because the British ignored this fundamental; their bright red coats made them easy targets for a band of revolutionaries in drab, ragtag dress. In the animal kingdom, all species depend on antipredator adaptation for survival, from the chameleon, which defines the idea, to the arctic fox, which turns from brown in summer months to white in winter. Lockheed’s U-2s were being tracked over the Soviet Union because they had no camouflage or antiradar technologies, so the Soviets could not only detect the U-2s but also accurately track the spy planes’ precise flight paths.

  To stay ahead of the Russians, Richard Bissell envisioned a new spy plane that would outfox Soviet radar. The CIA wanted an airplane with a radar cross section so low it would be close to invisible, the theory being that the Russians couldn’t object to what they didn’t know was there.

  The aircraft would be radically different, unlike anything the world had ever seen, or rather, not seen, before. It would beat Soviet advances in radar technology in three fields: height, speed, and stealth. The airplane needed to fly at ninety thousand feet and at a remarkably unprecedented speed of twenty-three hundred miles per hour, or Mach 3. In the late 1950s, for an aircraft to leave the tarmac on its own power and sustain even Mach 2 flight was unheard-of. Speed offered cover. In the event that a Mach 3 aircraft was tracked by radar, that kind of speed would make it extremely difficult to shoot down. By comparison, a U-2, which flew around five hundred miles per hour, would be seen by a Soviet SA-2 missile system approximately ten minutes before it was in shoot-down range, where it would remain for a full five minutes. An aircraft traveling at Mach 3 would be seen by Soviet radar for fewer than a hundred and twenty seconds before it could be fired upon, and it would remain in target range for fewer than twenty seconds. After that twenty-second window closed, the airplane would be too close for a Soviet missile to fire on it. The missile couldn’t chase the airplane because, even though the top speed for a missile at the time was Mach 3.5, once a missile gets that far into the upper atmosphere, it loses precision and speed. Shooting down an airplane flying at three times the speed of sound at ninety thousand feet was equivalent to hitting a bullet whizzing by seventeen miles away with another bullet.

 

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