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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  One day, in the late summer of 1961, just two months after the Bay of Pigs became public, Jim Freedman was walking around the base with a checklist of tasks. His priority job that week struck him as a very odd, very low-tech request. In a world of cutting-edge science and technological gadgets relating to espionage, the supervisor wanted Freeman to help Area 51 carpenters locate more plywood. “The workers were transforming a set of steps into a ramp,” he explains. “This was happening all over the base. Lots of doorsills were becoming lots of ramps and I remember thinking, There’s a lot of money going into getting something low and on wheels to be able to move around this base.” Freedman knew not to ask questions. “But when a small airplane landed, and out came a man in the wheelchair, I watched my boss, Werner Weiss of the CIA, meet the man out on the tarmac. And I knew from watching their interaction just how important this man was to the CIA. He had white-silvery hair. A very memorable figure in a wheelchair. For years, I looked for him on TV.” Freedman never saw the man on TV, but the man was Lyman Kirkpatrick, inspector general for the CIA. Working on presidential orders to assess Area 51, Kirkpatrick is the only CIA inspector general known to have visited the base. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, Kirkpatrick managed to meticulously cover the rugged high-desert terrain. After Kirkpatrick examined the various buildings he asked to be driven around the outer edges of the base. There, he found what he considered to be a security flaw. “The high and rugged northeast perimeter of the immediate operating area, which I visited in order to see for myself, is not under government ownership,” Kirkpatrick wrote in his report, which was declassified in 2004 but has since been removed from the CIA library archives. “It is subject to a score or more of mineral claims, at least one of which is visited periodically by its owner,” Kirkpatrick wrote, referring to the Black Metal and Groom mines. “Several claims are sites of unoccupied buildings or cellars which together with the terrain in general afford excellent opportunity for successful penetration by a skilled and determined opposition,” Kirkpatrick warned. As inspector general for the CIA, Kirkpatrick was concerned that the base was not “rigorously protected against sabotage,” most notably by “air violations.” In the game of cat and mouse between the Soviet Union and the United States, tensions were at an all-time high. First there had been the Gary Powers incident, in May of 1960. Less than a year later came the CIA’s failed commando operation at the Bay of Pigs. The president had been advised that the Soviets could be preparing their own operation as payback for either of those events. Former president Eisenhower told Kennedy that “the failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would otherwise not do,” and Lyman Kirkpatrick warned that one type of sabotage operation the Soviets could be considering might involve hitting Area 51. It would be a strike between the eyes, meant to harm the office of the president in the view of the people. After Gary Powers, the White House had promised that the Watertown facility had been closed down. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the president promised to rein in covert activity by the CIA. Any public revelation that Area 51 existed would expose the fact that the CIA, the Air Force, and defense contractors were all working together on a black project to overfly Russia again — despite presidential assurances that they would do no such thing. If the nation were to discover the Mach 3 spy plane project moving forward at Area 51, what would they think about the president’s promises? Area 51 was a target in exposure alone, the inspector general said. Jim Freedman was one of the men assigned to photograph and assess the mines in the mountains — the terrain that Kirkpatrick had said would “afford excellent opportunity for successful penetration.”

  Freedman’s superior, Hank Meierdierck, decided to make a hunting trip out of the task. Meierdierck was a living legend at Area 51. In 1956 he had worked as the CIA’s instructor pilot on base, teaching the Project Aquatone pilots how to fly the U-2. Now, during Oxcart, Hank Meierdierck had an office at the Pentagon but most of his time was spent out at Area 51. “One day Hank asked me if I liked to hunt,” recalls Jim Freedman. “I said yes. Well, Hank smiled and said, ‘Good. Bring your rifle out next time.’”

  Weapons were not allowed on Lockheed transport planes flying in and out of Area 51 from McCarran Airport. But Freedman’s level of clearance was such that security did not examine the things he carried with him. “The next trip to Area 51, I put my rifle in a box with an oscilloscope,” Freedman explains, “and that’s how I got my hunting rifle out there.” found a helicopter pilot to fly the men into the mountains north of Area 51 to photograph the old mines there. Then he dropped the two men and their hunting rifles off at a favored spot on Groom Mountain where Area 51 officials liked to surreptitiously hunt deer. Meierdierck told the helicopter pilot to return the next day.

  From on top of Groom Mountain, the view down over Area 51 was spectacular. It was, as Kirkpatrick had speculated, a perfect place for a Soviet spy to disguise himself as a deer hunter and take notes. During the day, you could see the buildings down at Area 51 spread out in an H formation to the west of the runways. Jeeps and vans could be seen ferrying workers around. If you had binoculars, you could get a clear look at what was going on. At night, the whole place went dark; most of the buildings that had windows kept the curtains drawn. If an aircraft needed to land at night, the lights would quickly flash on, illuminating the runway. The airplane would land and the lights would quickly go off, bathing the valley in darkness once again.

  For Freedman, the hunting trip dragged on a little long. “Hank was stubborn,” Freedman explains. “He said he wasn’t leaving until he got a deer. And he preferred to hunt on his own, so he suggested we split up and meet back at the campsite for dinner.” Which is what they did. “There was very little for us to talk about,” Freedman says. “We both knew we were on top secret projects. You couldn’t afford to talk. Everyone had a wife and a family. No one could afford to lose their job.” One subject the men could discuss was hunting. Only three years had passed since the last aboveground atomic tests had detonated across the valley down below. Freedman wondered if anyone who caught a deer up on Groom Mountain should even consider eating it because “the deer ate the foliage which was contaminated from alpha particles from all the tests.” As it turned out, the men did not catch any deer anyway.

  Come Monday, the helicopter pilot returned, and by the end of the next day, Freedman was sitting in his dining room in Las Vegas, eating dinner with his wife and kids. He was able to get his hunting rifle out of Area 51 the same way he got it in: “Inside the oscilloscope case.”

  Not long after Lyman Kirkpatrick filed his final inspector general’s report on Area 51, Richard Bissell resigned. This was not before he had been offered a lesser job at CIA, as the director of the Office of Science and Technology. But in that new capacity Bissell’s need-toknow would have been drastically reduced. In CIA parlance, having one’s access curbed was an insult. Instead, he chose to leave the Agency.

  Without Richard Bissell in charge of the secret CIA facility, what would become of Area 51? And who would run the Oxcart reconnaissance program? The decision about Bissell’s replacement went up the chain of command to President Kennedy. He had been in office for less than a year and already he was up to his elbows in CIA backlash. President Kennedy’s new secretary of defense was a man named Robert McNamara, an intellectually minded Harvard Business School graduate who had won the Legion of Merit during World War II for performing firebomb analysis from behind a desk. Now, as secretary of defense, after the Bay of Pigs, McNamara called for the Pentagon to assume control of all spy plane programs. McNamara was at the top of the chain of command of all the armed services and believed his Air Force should be in charge of all U.S. assets with wings. The public had lost confidence in the CIA, McNamara told the president.

  But James Killian and his colleague Edwin Land, now both part of Kennedy’s presidential foreign intelligence advisory board, told the president that the best move forward for national security was to keep the CIA in
the spy plane business at Area 51. What happened with Bissell was unfortunate, they said, suggesting that Richard Bissell, and Richard Bissell alone, had gone rogue. They argued that the CIA was still the agency best equipped to deliver overhead intelligence to the president. If that wasn’t possible, Killian and Land said, then the idea of who controls overhead reconnaissance should be restructured. One plan was that the CIA might work in better partnership with the Air Force. President Kennedy liked that. On September 6, 1961, he created a protocol that required the CIA deputy director and the undersecretary of the Air Force to comanage all space reconnaissance and aerial espionage programs together as the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified agency within Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense. A central headquarters for NRO was established in Washington, a small office with a limited staff but with a number of empire-size egos vying for power and control. The organization maintained a public face, an overt identity at the Pentagon called the Office of Space Systems, but no one outside a select few knew of NRO’s existence until 1992.

  Jim Freedman remembers the transition in the chain of command and how it affected his work at Area 51. “Because I was the person with a list of every employee at the area, it was my job to know not just who was who, but who was the boss of somebody’s boss. An individual person didn’t necessarily know much more about the person they worked for than their code name. And they almost certainly didn’t know who was working on the other side of the wall or in the next trailer over. Wayne Pendleton was the head of the radar group for a while. He was my go-to person for a lot of different groups. One day, Pendleton suddenly says, ‘I’m going to Washington, Jim.’ So I said, ‘What if I need you, what number should I call?’ And Pendleton laughed. He said, ‘You won’t need me because where I’m going doesn’t exist.’ Decades later I would learn that the place where Wayne was going when he left the Ranch was to a little office in Washington called NRO.”

  After the Bay of Pigs and his resignation, Richard Bissell drifted away from Washington’s power center like a man scorned. Quickly, his longtime, biggest supporters became his greatest detractors. Most notable among them was James Killian. The president’s powerful science adviser, Killian had headhunted Bissell twice before, the first time in 1946 to work in the economics department at MIT, and then again in 1954 to manage the U-2 aerial espionage program for the CIA. For nearly twenty years, Killian had considered Richard Bissell not just a colleague but a friend. After the Bay of Pigs, Killian turned his back on his friend. In a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, Killian told the CIA’s historian Donald E. Welzenbach that he was terribly upset when he learned of Bissell’s role in covert CIA operations. In a Studies in Intelligence report for the CIA, Welzenbach wrote, “Killian looked upon science and technology almost as a religion, something sacred to be kept from contamination by those who would misuse it for unwholesome ends. Into this category fit the covert operations and ‘dirty tricks’ of Dick Bissell’s Directorate of Plans.”

  It was hypocrisy of the highest order. James Killian had been up to his own dirty tricks, the true, perilous facts of which have remained buried until now. Unlike Richard Bissell, because of Killian’s powerful role as President Eisenhower’s chief science adviser, Killian did not get caught. But what Killian spearheaded in the name of so-called sacred science in retrospect hardly seems like science at all. In late 1958, Killian organized, oversaw, and then tried to cover up the facts regarding two of the most dangerous weapons tests in the history of the nuclear bomb. Two thermonuclear devices, called Teak and Orange, each an astonishingly powerful 3.8 megatons, were exploded in the Earth’s upper atmosphere at Johnston Atoll, 750 miles west of Hawaii. Teak went off at 252,000 feet, or 50 miles, and Orange went off at 141,000 feet, 28 miles, which is exactly where the ozone layer lies. In hindsight, it was a ludicrous idea. “The impetus for these tests was derived from the uncertainty in U.S. capability to discern Soviet high-altitude nuclear detonation,” read one classified report. Killian was in charge of the tests, and his rationale for authorizing them was that if sometime in the future the Soviets were to detonate a highaltitude nuclear bomb, our scientists would need to know what to look for.

  Instead of being difficult to detect, a nuclear bomb exploding in the ozone layer was instantly obvious in horrific and catastrophic ways. The fireballs produced by both Teak and Orange burned the retinas of any living thing that had been looking up at the sky without goggles within a 225-mile radius of the blast, including hundreds of monkeys and rabbits that Killian authorized to be flown in airplanes nearby. The animals’ heads had been locked in gadgets that forced them to witness the megaton blast. From Guam to Wake Island to Maui, the natural blue sky changed to a red, white, and gray, creating an aurora 2,100 miles along the geomagnetic meridian. Radio communication throughout a swath of the Pacific region went dead.

  “We almost blew a hole in the ozone layer,” explains Al O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who in the twelve years since Crossroads had wired over one hundred nuclear bombs, including Teak and Orange. O’Donnell was standing on Johnston Island, 720 miles southwest of Honolulu, on August 1, 1958, when the Teak bomb went off. Due to a “program failure” on the Redstone missile system (which carried the warhead to its target), the rocket went straight up and detonated directly above where O’Donnell and the rest of the arming and firing party were working. The bomb was supposed to have detonated twenty-six miles to the south. In a sanitized film record of the event, men in flip-flops and shorts can be seen ducking for cover as a phenomenal fireball consumes the sky overhead. “It was scary,” O’Donnell sighs, remembering the catastrophic event as an old man, half a century later. There is a hint of resignation in his voice when he says, “But we were all used to it by then. The bombs had become too big.” In Teak’s first ten milliseconds, its fireball grew ten miles wide— enough yield to obliterate Manhattan. At H + 1 second, the fireball was more than forty miles wide, which could have taken out all five boroughs of New York City. It was not as if Killian, who was in charge of the project, hadn’t realized the potential for part of the ozone layer to be destroyed. “In late 1957 and early 1958, the question was raised as to whether or not the ultraviolet emissions from the Teak and Orange events would ‘burn a hole’ into the natural ozone layer,” states a 1976 review of the event authored by Los Alamos National Laboratory. But “the pre-event discussions were inconclusive” and the tests barreled ahead anyway. Why? “It was argued that even in case of complete destruction of the ozone layer over an area with radius 50 km, the ozone loss would amount to only 2 x 10−5 of the global inventory. The ‘hole’ would be closed promptly by bomb-produced turbulence and ambient motions in the atmosphere.” As astonishing and reckless as this was, the follow-up becomes even more unbelievable. “After the events, little attention was paid to this particular problem, evidently because no spectacular or unusual observations were made (because of lack of evidence one way or the other).” Apparently, no one thought to ask the dignitary on hand that day on Johnston Island, Wernher Von Braun.

  In government archival film footage, Von Braun can be seen observing the Redstone rocket he had designed to get the nuclear weapon up to the ozone where it would explode. Wearing aviator sunglasses and a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt and sporting an island tan, Von Braun appears more playboy than rocket scientist. But Von Braun was so spooked by the Teak blast that he left the island before the second test took place. Von Braun was not one to scare easily. When he worked for Adolf Hitler, he and his colleague Ernst Steinhoff were known to dash up to Hitler’s lair, Wolfsschanze, in Steinhoff’s personal airplane to brief the dictator on how the V-2 was coming along. But the power of the Teak bomb sent Von Braun running. Immediately after the deadened communications systems were restored, Von Braun fled. He never publicly said why.

  Killian’s high-altitude nuclear tests did not stop there. Two weeks later, another ultrasecret nuclear weapons project called Operation Argus commenced. Killian’s nu
clear bomb tests had now expanded to include outer space. “Argus was an unusual operation,” a Defense Nuclear Agency summary from 1993 recalls. “It was completed in less than six months after Presidential approval, and it was completed in complete secrecy. Nuclear-tipped missiles were fired from ships for the first time.” Oblique words used to conceal another one of the most

  radical, covert science experiments conducted by man. On August 27, August 30, and September 6, 1958, three nuclear warheads were launched from X-17 rockets from the deck of the USS Norton Sound as the warship floated off the coast of South Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean. Up went the missiles and the warheads until they exploded approximately three hundred miles into space. This “scientific experiment” was the brainchild of a Greek elevator operator turned physicist, Nicholas Christofilos. Christofilos convinced Killian that a nuclear explosion occurring above the Earth’s atmosphere — but within the Earth’s magnetic field — might produce an electronic pulse that could hypothetically damage the arming devices on Soviet ICBM warheads trying to make their way into the United States. While the phenomenon did occur in minutiae, meaning the arming devices registered “feeling” the pulse from the nuclear blast, Christofilos was wrong about the possibility that this would actually stop incoming enemy nuclear missiles in their tracks. In other words, the tests failed.

  To cover his tracks as to the sheer waste and recklessness of the experiment, in the month following the nuclear detonation in space, Killian wrote a memo to President Eisenhower attempting to put a congratulatory spin on how quickly the project occurred and how terrific it was that secrecy was maintained. Dated November 3, 1958, Killian’s letter began by describing Argus as “probably the most spectacular event ever conducted.” More egregious self-congratulation came next: “The experiment was in itself an extraordinary accomplishment. Especially notable was the successful launching of a large, solid-fuel rocket carrying a nuclear payload from the heaving deck of a ship in the squally South Atlantic. Scarcely less so is the fact that the whole experiment was planned and carried out in less than five months… Impressive, too, is the fact that no leaks have occurred.”