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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  In the following month, September, bad weather got in the way of good photographic intelligence. Day after day it rained over Cuba or the island was shrouded in heavy cloud cover. Finally, on September 29, a CIA U-2 mission over the Isle of Pines and the Bay of Pigs revealed yet another previously unknown missile site. President Kennedy’s top advisers were convened. The CIA warned the advisers of more unknown dangers in Cuba and pushed for additional overflights so as to gain better intelligence on military installations there. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were opposed to the idea. Not another Gary Powers incident, they said. But on October 5 and 7, the CIA got presidential approval to run two additional missions of its own. The resultant news was hard to ignore: there were now a total of nineteen surface-to-air missile sites on the island of Cuba, meaning there was something very important that the Soviets were intent on defending there. The Pentagon held firm. There was still no hard data revealing actual missiles, McNamara and Rusk said. Making matters even more complicated, JFK’s Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, was pushing for preemptive strikes against Cuba. It was a volatile and incredibly dangerous situation. If the CIA was correct and there already were nuclear missiles in Cuba, then LeMay’s so-called preemptive strikes would actually initiate a nuclear war, not prevent one.

  What the Agency needed desperately was a wizard of diplomacy, someone who could help the rival agencies see eye to eye so they could all work together to get the Soviets to back down. The Agency and the Air Force had decidedly different ideas on imminent missions; the CIA wanted to gather more intelligence with the U-2; the Air Force wanted to prepare for war. An individual who could wear both hats with relative objectivity was needed, someone who could see both sides of the debate. In a rare moment of accord, both sides agreed that the man for the job was Brigadier General Jack Ledford. Just a few weeks earlier, Ledford had been asked by McCone to serve as the director of the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, meaning he would be the Pentagon liaison to the CIA at Area 51. Ledford had just graduated from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and was looking forward to moving out west when his old World War II commander General LeMay encouraged him to take the new CIA liaison job.

  LeMay had known Ledford since the war in the Pacific when Ledford flew under his command. A former Olympic diver, Ledford was tall, charismatic, and handsome. According to Wheelon, “He was someone whose charisma was contagious. Ledford was impossible not to like to be around.” There was, of course, the legendary story of Ledford’s plane crash, involving heroics in the Pacific theater during World War II. As a captain in the Air Force, Ledford was making a bombing run over Kyushu Island, Japan, when he was attacked by Japanese fighter jets, his airplane and his own body hit with fire. Ledford’s flight engineer, Master Sergeant Harry C. Miller, was hit in the head. The medic on board treated Miller and tried to treat Ledford with opiates, who declined so he could keep his head clear. With the aircraft crashing, Ledford and the medic opened a parachute, cut the shroud lines, and attached the chute to the unconscious flight engineer. They dropped the man through the nose of the wheel well; Captain Ledford followed, delaying opening his own parachute so he could be next to Sergeant Miller when he landed. Miller would be unconscious when he hit the earth, and without Ledford’s help he would likely have broken his back. The medic, not far behind, later recounted how amazing it was that Ledford’s daring and dangerous plan had actually worked.

  Now, two decades later, at the Cuban missile crisis round table, Ledford showed the same foresight in preempting a potentially deadly situation. The first thing General Ledford did was present the CIA and the Air Force with a shoot-down analysis, detailing the odds for losing a U-2 on another overflight. The chances were one in six, Ledford said.

  He pushed for the U-2 mission, arguing that it was better to know now if there really were nuclear missiles in Cuba than to wish you knew later on, when it could be too late. Once these cold hard facts were on the table, the heart of the debate became clear. The point of contention was not whether or not to fly the mission. Rather, it was who would fly the mission — the Air Force or the CIA. As it turned out, each organization wanted the job. President Kennedy felt the mission needed to involve a pilot wearing a blue U.S. Air Force pilot suit. Kennedy felt that if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down over Cuba, there would be too much baggage attached to the event, that it would rekindle hostilities over the Gary Powers shoot-down. But General Ledford knew what the president did not: that the CIA had higherquality U-2 airplanes, ones far less likely to end up getting shot down. Agency U-2s flew five thousand feet higher than their heavier Air Force U-2 counterparts, which were weighed down by additional reconnaissance gear. The CIA airplanes also had better electronic countermeasure packages, meaning they had more sophisticated means of jamming SA-2 missiles coming at them. So Ledford performed diplomatic wizardry by convincing the CIA to actually loan the Air Force its prized U-2 airplanes. With the fate of the free world at stake, the CIA and the Air Force agreed to work together to solve the crisis.

  On October 14, an Air Force pilot flying a CIA U-2 brought home film footage of Cuba that the White House needed to see. Photographs showing nuclear missiles supplied by the Soviet Union and set up on missile stands in Cuba. Those eight canisters of film brought back by the CIA’s U-2 set in motion the Cuban missile crisis, bringing the world closer than it had ever come to all-out nuclear war. They would also give the work going on at Area 51 a shot in the arm. The Pentagon told the CIA they wanted the Oxcart operations ready immediately so the aircraft could be used to overfly Cuba. A CIA review of Oxcart, declassified in 2007, said it flatly: “The Oxcart program suddenly assumed greater significance than ever, and its achievement of operational status became one of the highest national priorities.”

  Chapter Eleven: What Airplane?

  Gardening helped CIA pilot Kenneth Collins relax. He had over a hundred rosebushes in his garden, which he and his wife, Jane, pruned together on weekends after Collins returned home from a long, mysterious week at the Ranch. At Area 51, where he worked as a project pilot, Collins went by the code name Ken Colmar. “Same first name because you will instantly respond to it when called,” Collins explains. “Colmar for the C, in case you had something monogrammed.” His call sign was Dutch 21 but most men on base called him the Iceman. The pressure-suit officers came up with the nickname. “I was known to show no emotion or irritation even after a particularly dangerous flight,” Collins recalls. The pressure-suit officers could gauge how tough a flight was by how sweaty a pilot’s underwear was when they helped pilots undress. Collins’s underwear was always remarkably dry.

  Flying Oxcart was, to an Air Force pilot, the single most elite job in the nation at the time. Ken Collins “commuted” to Area 51 each week, flying in from sunny Southern California, where he and other pilots who now worked for the CIA pretended to live normal lives with their pretty wives and, ideally, a few children. Having a stable marriage and family had become a CIA-pilot mandate during Oxcart, something that was not in place during the U-2. It was Gary Powers’s alcoholic wife who’d triggered the change. Some in the Agency believed she put the secrecy of the entire U-2 program at risk with behavior that even they could not control. Once, Barbara Powers got it into her head to visit her husband at his clandestine post in Turkey. She made it as far as Athens before the officer assigned to watch her notified Powers that he would be out of a job if he couldn’t keep his impetuous wife in line. Ken Collins was told this story during his first interview at the Pentagon. Loose lips didn’t just sink ships, he was reminded; loose lips could trigger nuclear war. Collins also learned that his wife, Jane, would be subject to psychological screening were he to be accepted into a top secret program rumored to involve “space travel.”

  Collins and his family were moved from their home in South Carolina to a Los Angeles suburb called Northridge and into a fourbedroom raised ranch with a two-car garage and an avoca
do tree out front. He was thirty-six years old. Jane attended church and collected antique china. All four of Jane and Ken Collins’s children, two boys and two girls, maintained good grades in school. The neighbors were told Mr. Collins worked for Hughes Aircraft Company. Collins was told to report nosy neighbors to the CIA, and if any foreign-borns tried to befriend the Collinses, they were to notify the Agency, who would look into the matter.

  Each Monday morning, Collins left his home and drove to Burbank Airport, nine miles to the southwest. There, he and the other Oxcart pilots climbed aboard Constellation propeller planes and headed to Area 51, never with more than two pilots per airplane — a guideline put into place after the Mount Charleston crash eight years earlier. The deaths of those top Agency and Air Force managers and scientists had set progress on the U-2 program back several months. Now, in 1963, Oxcart was already more than a year behind schedule. The Agency could not afford to lose any pilots. The vetting process alone took eighteen months and getting familiar with the aircraft took another year.

  After leaving Burbank, Collins and his fellow pilots were flown, two by two, up over the Mojave Desert to the northeast, past China Lake, and into the Tikaboo Valley. Flying into the restricted airspace above the Nevada Test Site, Collins would look out the window and make a mental note of the ever-growing landscape of giant craters. The appearance of a new, moonlike subsidence crater was often a weekly occurrence now that nuclear testing had moved underground. When seen from above, the landscape at the Nevada Test Site looked like a battlefield after the apocalypse. For Collins, the destruction was a solid visual reminder of what scorched earth would look like after a nuclear war.

  The Agency couldn’t have chosen a more dedicated pilot. Collecting intelligence on dangerous reconnaissance flights was Ken Collins’s life mission; it was what he did best. He seemed to be propelled by a natural talent and kept alive by an unknown force Collins called fate. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins believes. “When it comes for you, it comes,” and for whatever reason it was not time for death to come to him yet. This was a notion Collins formulated during the Korean War while flying reconnaissance missions and watching so many talented and brave fellow pilots die. How else but by fate did he survive all 113 combat missions he had flown? On those classified missions, the young Collins was armed with only a camera in the nose of his airplane as he flew deep into North Korea, sometimes all the way over the Yalu River, being fired at by MiG fighter jets. During the war, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and also the coveted Silver Star for valor, the third-highest military decoration a member of the armed services can receive. Both medals were pinned on Collins’s chest before he turned twenty-four.

  But now, as an Oxcart pilot, Collins kept his medals tucked away in a drawer, never mentioning that he had received them. As with many servicemen, glory was a difficult distinction to contemplate when so many of your fellows had died. Accepting fate as the hunter made things easier for Collins, which is how he dealt with the memory of his closest friend and former wingman from the Fifteenth Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Charles R. “Chuck” Parkerson. The two men had flown on many missions together, but there was one from which Parkerson never came home. “We had flown into North Korea and back out side by side,” Collins recalls. “We were almost home when Parkerson radioed me. He said the engine on his RF-80 had flamed out and he was unable to restart it. I saw he was losing altitude quickly and he knew that soon he would crash.” Parachuting into enemy territory meant certain death. “Over the radio, Parkerson asked me, ‘What should I do?’” Collins explains. “I said, ‘Fly out over the Yellow Sea and I’ll fly with you.’ I told him to bail out in the water and I’d send his coordinates back to base for a rescue team.” It seemed like a good idea, and Collins flew alongside his wingman as they headed toward the Yellow Sea. Parkerson prepared for a bailout. “But there was a problem,” Collins recalls. “The canopy on Parkerson’s RF-80 was stuck. Jammed. It wouldn’t open, which meant he was trapped inside the airplane. There was nothing I could do for my friend except to fly alongside him all the way until the end.” Collins watched Parkerson land his airplane on the sea. With Parkerson unable to get out of the sinking aircraft, Collins waited, watching from the air as his friend drowned. “When your time is up, it is up,” Collins recalls.

  Ten years later, it was 1963, the Korean War was history, and there was an airplane to get ready at Area 51. After the twin-prop passed over the last set of hills on the Nevada Test Site’s eastern edge, the airstrip at Groom Lake came into view, and Collins thought about how no one but his fellow CIA pilots had any idea who he really was. During training missions, the papers in Collins’s flight pouch identified him only as a NASA weather pilot. His space-age-looking aircraft was registered to an airfield called Watertown Strip, Nevada. He was never to carry any personal effects with him in the airplane. When the Lockheed Constellation landed on the tarmac at Area 51, security guards took his ID and papers and locked them away in a metal box. Each Friday, before the afternoon flight home, Collins’s identity was returned to him.

  His mission flight that day, May 24, 1963, should have been like any other flight. By now, there were a total of five Oxcarts being flighttested at Area 51, and Collins breezed through his prebriefing with the Lockheed engineers, making mental notes about the different tasks he was to perform during the flight. The engineers wanted to know how certain engine controls worked during acceleration and slow cruise. Today’s test would be subsonic with the high-performance aircraft traveling somewhere around 450 miles per hour, like a racehorse out for a trot. It was to be a short mission up over Utah, into Wyoming, and back to Area 51. Air Force chase pilot Captain Donald Donohue would start out following Collins in an F-101 Voodoo. Later, Jack Weeks, also an Oxcart project pilot, would pick up the task.

  For a little over an hour, everything appeared to be normal. Heading into Wendover, Utah, Collins made note of a large cumulus cloud that lay ahead. As Collins slowed down, Jack Weeks signaled that he was going to head back to Area 51. The F-101 could not handle flying as slow as Collins needed to fly that day. Besides, from Weeks’s perspective, everything on the Oxcart looked fine. Collins gave Weeks the okay signal with one hand in the cockpit window and headed into the cloud.

  “Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding, indicating a rapid loss of speed,” Collins recalls. In heavy clouds, Collins had no visual references to determine where he was. “I advanced the throttles to counter the loss of airspeed. But instead of responding, and without any warning, the aircraft pitched up and flipped over with me trapped underneath. Then it went into an inverted flat spin.” The Agency’s million-dollar A-12 Oxcart was unrecoverable and crashing. Collins needed to bail out.

  Collins had no idea how close he was to the Earth’s surface because he was in the middle of a cloud and couldn’t see out of it. He also did not know if he was over a mountain range, which would mean he had even less time to eject. Collins closed his visor and grabbed the ejection ring that was positioned between his legs. He pushed his head firmly against the headrest and pulled. This kind of radical ejection from a prized top secret aircraft is not easy to forget, and Collins recalls dramatic details. “The canopy of the aircraft flew off and disappeared but I was still upside down, with the aircraft on top of me,” he explains. “Having pulled the D-ring, my boot stirrups snapped back. The explosive system in the seat rocket engaged, shooting me downward and away from the aircraft.” First Collins separated from the Oxcart. Next he separated from his seat. After that, he was a body falling through the air until a small parachute called a drogue snapped open, slowing his body down. In his long history of flying airplanes, this was the first time Collins had ever had to bail out. Falling to Earth, he tried to get a sense of what state he might be over. Was he in Nevada or Utah? The ground below him appeared to be high-desert terrain, low hills but no mountains that he could see. He was still too high up to discern if there were roads. As he floated down, in the distance he s
potted the heavy black aircraft tumbling through the air until it disappeared from sight. “I remember seeing a large, black column of smoke rise up from the desert floor and thinking, That’s my airplane.” Only now there was nothing left of it but an incinerated hunk of titanium smoldering on the ground. Fate was a hunter, all right.

  Suddenly, Collins felt his parachute break away and he began to free-fall once again. Had his luck run out? he wondered. Was today the day he was going to die? But then, as suddenly as the one parachute had broken away, he felt another tug at his shoulders, and a second parachute blossomed above him. This one was more than twice the size of the drogue. He began to float gently toward Earth. Collins hadn’t been told that the A-12 Oxcart ejection system had two separate parachutes. The first parachute, or drogue, was small enough to slow the pilot down and get him to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Then the drogue chute would jettison away in advance of the main parachute deploying. This large, thirty-five-foot-diameter landing aid was the one most pilots were familiar with.

  With the ground below him quickly getting closer, Collins could see roads and sagebrush. He wondered how long it might take for anyone to locate him. When fellow pilot Jack Weeks had left him, just minutes before the crash, everything on Collins’s aircraft had seemed fine, but because of secrecy protocols, Collins had not made radio contact with the command post before he bailed out. He could see that he was most likely somewhere north of the Salt Lake salt flats. Collins tucked his legs up and assumed the landing position. When he hit the ground, he rolled. His mind went through the checklist of what to do next.

  Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the back of their pickup.”