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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  When the New York Times’s senior science writer Walter Sullivan hand-delivered a letter to Killian letting him know the New York Times was in possession of leaked information about these secret tests, the White House went into denial mode. “Neither confirm nor deny such leaks,” the president’s special assistant Karl G. Harr Jr. wrote in a secret memo to Killian. “If the New York Times, or anyone else, breaks a substantial part of the story,” one possible response would be to say the White House had disclosed “all that we may safely say from a national security point of view.” In regards to brazenly violating the White House policy of announcing every nuclear test, Killian’s position was to be that “it was a scientific experiment utilizing a nuclear detonation to discharge electrons into the Earth’s magnetic field.” It was semantics that gave Killian the authority, or cover, to declare that a nuclear test was not a nuclear test. Adding one last ironic touch of deception, the president’s special assistant told Killian that were the New York Times to make the Argus test public, a panel of scientists “should meet with the press in the Great Hall of the National Academy of Science in order to emphasize the scientific aspects of this experiment.”

  Were the president’s top science advisers really making America safer? Or were they abusing their power with the president? Couple their power with the total lack of oversight they enjoyed, and it was the president’s scientists who paved the road for the U.S. militarization of space. “It was agreed that I would be protected from congressional inquisition,” Killian wrote in his memoirs, adding, “I think now this was the wrong decision. It would have been of help to Congress to have been more fully informed about the work of PSAC [President’s Science Advisory Committee], and help me to have a better feeling for congressional opinion.”

  Beginning with Argus, the president’s science advisers were using space as their laboratory, conducting tests that a Defense Nuclear Agency review board would later call “poorly instrumented and hastily executed.” They did so with total disregard for potentially catastrophic effects on the planet, not to mention the effect it would have decades later on the arms race in space. According to the same report, Killian was aware of the risk and took a gamble. There had been discussions regarding the possibility that the Teak and Orange shots really could burn holes in the ozone. But those “pre-event discussions were inconclusive,” the report said. And so the scientists went forward on the assumption that if a hole happened, it would later be closed.

  In reality, Killian and others had no idea what would or would not happen when the megaton bomb exploded in the upper atmosphere. “And they didn’t factor in to their equations what could have happened if they failed,” recalls Al O’Donnell. “We were lucky. When the Teak bomb exploded right over our heads on Johnston Island, we thought we might be goners. It was an enormous bright white-light blast.” The men did not have radio communications for eight hours. “All the birds on the island that had been pestering us during the setup, these big fearless birds we called Gooney birds, after the bomb went off, they just disappeared. Or maybe they died.” When Admiral Parker of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project finally reached O’Donnell and the rest of the EG&G crew by radio from his office in the Pentagon, his words were: “Are you still there?”

  If American citizens were in the dark about the megaton thermonuclear weapons tests being conducted by the American military in space, the Russians certainly were not. They forged ahead with an unprecedented weapons test of their own. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tsar Bomba, detonated over northern Russia, flattened entire villages in surrounding areas and broke windows a thousand miles away in Finland. Anyone within a fourhundred-mile radius who was staring at the blast would have gone blind. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told the United Nations Assembly that the purpose of the test was to “show somebody Kuzka’s mother”—to show somebody who’s boss. The world was racing toward catastrophe. Would the A-12 spy planes heading to Area 51 really help, or would overhead espionage prove to be nothing more than a drop in the bucket?

  Chapter Ten: Wizards of Science, Technology, and Diplomacy

  Harry Martin stood on the tarmac mesmerized by the beauty of the Oxcart. With its long, shiny fuselage, the airplane resembled a cobra with wings. As the master fuels sergeant, Martin had been at Area 51 since the very first days of the Oxcart program, back when the tarmac he was standing on was being poured as cement. Now, something big was happening at Area 51. The Oxcart had arrived and it was getting ready to fly. For more than a week, Martin had watched dignitaries come and go, touching down and taking off in Air Force jets. The generals would inevitably show up in the hangar where Martin worked because it was the place where the airplane stayed. Martin’s job was to prep the aircraft with fuel, which for weeks had been leaking as if through a sieve.

  Martin had caught glimpses of General LeMay, shorter than he’d expected but chomping on his signature cigar like he did on the cover of magazines. Martin had also seen General Doolittle, of the harrowing World War II Doolittle Raid. Harry Martin never shook hands with any of the generals; they were busy and way above his pay grade. Besides, Martin’s left hand was wrapped in a bandage, which made work slightly challenging, although he was most grateful to still have a thumb. Martin had been working with a saw and a pipe the week before when his tool slipped and nearly severed his most important finger. Fortunately, a flight surgeon was working with a project pilot in the hangar next door and Martin got his thumb sewn together fast.

  It was April 25, 1962. Just a few buildings down from where Martin worked, Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk sat in a recliner inside a Quonset hut taking a nap when a man from the Agency put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Lou, wake up!” The Oxcart was ready and it was time for Lou Schalk to fly. Two physiological support division officers helped Schalk into a flight suit, which looked like a coverall. There was no need for a pressure suit because today Schalk was only going to make a taxi test. Out on the tarmac, an engineer rolled up a metal set of stairs and Schalk climbed up into the strange-looking aircraft. There were no observers other than the crew. John Parangosky, who authored a secret interagency monograph called “The Oxcart History,” declassified in 2007, noted that if anyone had been watching he would have been unable to process what he was looking at. “A casual observer would have been startled by the appearance of this vehicle; he would have perhaps noticed especially its extremely long, slim shape, its two enormous jet engines, its long, sharp projecting nose, and its swept-back wings which appeared far too short to support the fuselage in flight.” It was a revolutionary airplane, Parangosky wrote, able to fly at three times the speed of sound for more than three thousand miles without refueling — all the way from Nevada to DC in less than an hour. “Toward the end of its flight, when fuel began to run low, it could cruise at over 90,000 feet.”

  But of course there were no casual observers present at Area 51. On that sunny day at Area 51 in April of 1962, this was the only A-12 Oxcart that Lockheed had completed for the CIA so far.

  As for all the remarkable things the aircraft had been meticulously designed to do, it wasn’t able to do any of them yet. Sitting on the tarmac, the aircraft was 160,000 pounds of titanium outfitted with millions of dollars’ worth of expensive equipment that no one yet knew how to work, certainly not above seventy thousand feet. Like its predecessor the U-2, the Oxcart was an aircraft without a manual. Unlike the U-2, this aircraft was technologically forty years ahead of its time. Some of the records the Oxcart would soon set would hold all the way into the new millennium.

  Lou Schalk fired up the engines and began rolling down the runway for the taxi test. To everyone’s surprise, including Lou Schalk’s, the aircraft
unexpectedly got lift. Given the enormous engine power, the aircraft suddenly started flying — lifting up just twenty feet off the ground. Stunned and horrified, Kelly Johnson watched from the control tower. “The aircraft began wobbling,” Johnson wrote in his notes, which “set up lateral oscillations which were horrible to see.” Johnson feared the airplane might crash before its first official flight. Schalk was equally surprised and decided not to try to circle around. Instead he set the plane down as quickly as he could. This meant landing in the dry lake bed, nearly two miles beyond where the runway ended. When it hit the earth, the aircraft sent up a huge cloud of dust, obscuring it from view. Schalk turned the plane around and drove back toward the control towers, still engulfed in a cloud of dust and dirt. When he got back, the Lockheed engineers ran up to the airplane on the metal rack of stairs. Kelly Johnson had only four words for Schalk: “What in Hell, Lou?” For about fifteen very tense minutes, Johnson had thought Lou Schalk had wrecked the CIA’s only Oxcart spy plane.

  The following day, Schalk flew again, this time with Kelly Johnson’s blessings but still not as an official first flight. Harry Martin was standing on the tarmac when the aircraft took off. “It was beautiful. Remarkable. Just watching it took your breath away,” Martin recalls. “I remember thinking, This is cool. And then, all of a sudden, as Schalk rose up in the air, pieces of the airplane started to fall off!” The engineers standing next to Martin panicked. Harry Martin thought for sure the airplane was going to crash. But Lou Schalk kept flying. The pieces of the airplane were thin slices of the titanium fuselage, called fillets. Their sudden absence did not affect low-altitude flight. Schalk flew for forty minutes and returned to Area 51. It was mission accomplished for Schalk but not for the engineers. They spent the next four days roaming around Groom Lake attempting to locate and reattach the pieces of the plane. Still, it was a milestone for the CIA. Three years, ten months, and seven days had passed since Kelly Johnson first presented his plans for a Mach 3 spy plane to Richard Bissell, and here was the Oxcart, finally ready for its first official flight.

  Agency officials were flown in from Washington to watch and to celebrate. Jim Freedman coordinated pickups and deliveries between McCarran Airport and the Ranch. It was a grand, congratulatory affair with lots of drinking in the newly constructed bar, called House-Six. Rare film footage of the historic event, shot by the CIA, shows men in suits milling around the tarmac slapping one another on the back over this incredible flying machine. They watch the aircraft take off and disappear from view. Schalk traveled up to thirty thousand feet, flew around in the restricted airspace for fifty-nine minutes, and came back down. His top speed was four hundred miles per hour. Watching from the tarmac was Richard Bissell, tall and gangly, wearing a dark suit and a porkpie hat. Bissell had been invited to attend the groundbreaking event as a guest of Kelly Johnson. It was a significant gesture; the two men had become friends, and Kelly Johnson was notably making a point. “Part of what made Kelly Johnson such a good man was that he was extremely loyal to the people he considered his friends,” Ed Lovick explains. For Bissell, the visit to Area 51 had to have been bittersweet. It would be the last time he would ever set foot at the facility he had overseen for the CIA since it was nothing but a desert floor. Richard Bissell would never be invited back again.

  And Area 51 would soon have a new mayor. It was late at night in the summer of 1962 and Bud Wheelon sat in the library in the Washington, DC, home of Howard and Jane Roman, two clandestine officers with CIA. It was only Wheelon’s second month employed by the Agency, and because he was not a career spy, he had had a lot of catching up to do. Almost every night, he worked until ten, having just accepted the job that made him the Agency’s first head of the Directorate of Science and Technology, or DS&T. Only thirtythree years old, Wheelon was a brilliant ballistic-missile scientist and signals intelligence analyst. He was also a graduate of MIT and had played rugby with James Killian when Killian was the president there. Now he had been hand-picked by President Kennedy’s science advisers, including James Killian, to replace Richard Bissell on all overhead reconnaissance projects for the CIA. This included satellites, U-2 operations, and the Oxcart spy plane. It was the job Bissell had declined, but “in this way, I became the new ‘Mayor of Area 51,’” Wheelon explains.

  “I did not have much to do at night so I started reading clandestine reports, which I’d never seen before,” Wheelon says. Although he found many uninteresting, one in particular caught his eye. “It made me concerned. At the time, there was a very serious National Intelligence Estimate under way for President Kennedy, one that would address the question: Will the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba? I had been briefed that the estimate was coming down on the side that the Russians would not do such a thing. The Pentagon had decided that putting missiles in Cuba was too reckless a move for the Russians and that they would not do such a reckless thing.”

  The Pentagon was dead wrong. As Wheelon read dozens of intelligence reports, one rose up like a red flag. “One thing you have to worry about with anyone informing against a person or a state is fabrication,” Wheelon explains. “There were a lot of Cubans in Miami [at the time] whose sugar plantations had been taken away from them by Castro and they wanted action taken. But there was one report that caught my eye. The informant said that he’d seen very long trailers, big trucks, led by jeeps with Soviet security people inside. As these trucks made their way through certain villages, Cubans were directing traffic so the long trailers could get by. In South America, often on the street corners, you will find post-office boxes. They are not squat boxes with a level opening like you find in the States. Instead, they are more of a traditional letterbox attached at the top of a long pole. The informant witnessed one of these very long trailer trucks coming up to an intersection and not being able to make the curb. There was a letterbox blocking the way. Some of the Soviet security people got out of the truck. They grabbed an acetylene torch from the back and cut the letterbox right down. They didn’t waste any time or give it a second thought. When I read that, I thought, Whoever reported this is no fabricator. This is not a detail you could make up. Whatever was in those trailers was too important to let a letterbox stand in the way.”

  Wheelon believed there were missiles inside the trailers. Missiles with nuclear warheads. Unknown to Wheelon at the time, his new boss, CIA director John McCone, also believed this was true. Except McCone wasn’t around Washington, DC; he was in Paris, on his honeymoon. This left Wheelon in charge of more than was usual for a newcomer to the CIA. Concerned by the intelligence report, Wheelon asked to meet with the head of the board of the National Intelligence Council, Sherman Kent. “I went to him and I said, ‘Sherm, I am new around here so you should discount a lot of what I say. I am not a professional intelligence person, but it looks to me like the evidence is overwhelming that they have missiles down there.’” Sherman Kent thanked Wheelon for his advice but explained that the board was going to present President Kennedy with the opposite conclusion— that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba.

  Cuban missile crisis is a story of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the drama that culminated in a tenday standoff between two superpowers on the brink of thermonuclear war. But it is also the story of two powerful rivals within the American services, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force, and how they set aside historical differences to work together to save the world from near nuclear annihilation. Like so many international crises of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis had its link to Area 51—through the U-2.

  During the crisis, the CIA and the Air Force worked together to conduct the U-2 spy mission that caused the Soviet Union to back down. How this was accomplished not only involved two key Area 51 players but also set a precedent for the power-sharing arrangement at Area 51 that worked well for a while, until it didn’t work anymore. The diplomatic efforts of one Army Air Force old-timer and one CIA newcomer helped set the stage for success. The old-timer was General Jack
Ledford, and the newcomer was Bud Wheelon.

  On the afternoon of August 29, 1962, a U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba spotted eight surface-to-air missile sites in the western part of Cuba, the same SA-2 missile systems that had shot down Gary Powers two years before. The following week, three more missile sites were discovered on the island, as well as a Soviet MiG-21 parked on the Santa Clara airfield nearby. For two months, the Agency had been analyzing reports that said between 4,000 and 6,000 individuals from the Soviet bloc had arrived in Cuba, including 1,700 Soviet military technicians. Cuban citizens were being kept from entering port areas where the Soviet-bloc ships were unloading unusually large crates, ones big enough to “contain airplane fuselage or missile components.” The implications were threefold: that Russia was building up the Cuban armed forces, that they were establishing multiple missile sites, and that they were establishing electronic jamming facilities against Cape Canaveral in Florida as well as other important U.S. installations. The director of the CIA, John McCone, had already told the president’s military advisers that he believed the Soviets were laying a deadly trap involving nuclear missiles. But there was no hard evidence of the missiles themselves, the military argued, and their position on that fact was firm. (The Pentagon did not doubt that the Soviets wanted to put nuclear missiles on Cuba; officials just didn’t think they’d accomplished that yet.) McCone left for his honeymoon in Paris.