But the point was made. Rich dedicated all his efforts to fixing the un-start problem. Like so many engineering challenges facing the scientists at Area 51, fixing it involved great ingenuity. In this case, Rich and his team didn’t exactly fix the problem. Instead, they created a go-around that made things not so life-threatening for the pilots. Rich invented an electronic control that made sure that when one engine experienced an un-start, the second engine dropped its power as well. The control switch would then restart both engines at the same time. After the new fix, pilots were notified of the un-start by a loud buzzing noise in the cockpit. And as far as nearly getting knocked unconscious at 2,000 miles per hour, Oxcart pilots could cross that off their lists of concerns.
In addition to the problems the pilots were having getting the airplane up to speed, there were problems with the electronic countermeasures, or ECMs. The reports being analyzed back at Langley said if Operation Skylark was to happen over Cuba, cruise speed would have to be at a minimum Mach 2.8, because there was a real chance that the Soviet radar systems in Cuba would be able to detect Oxcart flights and possibly even shoot them down. While Project Palladium officers continue to work on jamming methods, the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon decided that the solution lay in working to enhance stealth. The phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further. This meant that Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick and the radar cross-section team were summoned back to Area 51.
In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project Kempster-Lacroix, Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined, would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the ground.
Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with KempsterLacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Force changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.
It was ironic, to say the least. Not the flip-flopping by the Air Force but the concerns about radiation. By 1964, the government had exploded 286 nuclear bombs within shouting distance of Area 51. One year earlier, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty prohibiting nuclear testing in the air, space, or sea. The initiative had been in the works for years but negotiations had repeatedly failed. Now that it was finally signed, testing had moved underground. Neither superpower trusted the other to honor the commitment for very long, and the number of tests per month actually accelerated after the treaty; the idea was to stay weapons-ready in the event one side broke the treaty. Between September 1961 and December 1964, a record-breaking 162 bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site inside underground tunnels and shafts. Nearly half of these explosions resulted in the “accidental release of radioactivity” into the atmosphere.
In addition to weapons tests, the nuclear laboratories were racing to find ways to use nuclear bombs for “peaceful applications.” This included ideas like widening the Panama Canal or blowing up America’s natural geography to make room for future highways and homes. These proposed earthmoving projects fell under the rubric of Project Plowshares, a name chosen from a verse in the Old Testament, Micah 4:3: And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
But that was just semantics. Test ban treaty or not, the Department of Defense had no intention of putting down its swords. The men were fully committed to the long haul that was the Cold War.
Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than for its top secret work for the CIA. “The first jamming system was called Red Dog; later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an electronic pulse. The work was exciting when the airplanes were flying and there was actual data to collect, but if the Red Dog system failed and needed fixing, it meant a lot of waiting around.
These were the early days of electronic warfare, and there were not a lot of Red Dog spare parts lying around. As a result, Ken Swanson worked many long weekends at Area 51. Swanson says that sometimes he and his Sylvania colleague felt like they were the only ones on the base. One weekend the men took the Area 51 motor pool’s four-wheel-drive vehicle up to Bald Mountain, the tallest peak on the Groom Range, to have a look around. “We found a bunch of old Model Ts and had no idea what they were doing there,” Swanson recalls. Another time he went solo to investigate the old mines. “I was wearing tennis shoes and Bermuda shorts and I bumped into a bunch of rattlers sunning themselves. Next time I went back, I wore snake boots,” he says. During winter weekends, there were even fewer people at Area 51, and for entertainment, after a long day performing high-tech electronic-countermeasures work, Swanson would go joyriding around the dry lake bed. He’d borrow an Econoline van from the motor pool, take it out on the frozen tarmac, and do spins. “But I stopped after I had the van on two wheels once,” Swanson says.
With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG&G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surfaceto-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars. An equally important part of the radar testing system was the radar pole that had to be installed on the top of Bald Mountain. For that, the CIA recruited one of the best rescue helicopter pilots in the country, Charlie Trapp.
“I was minding my own business in South Carolina,” Trapp recalls, “when these guys from the Air Force called me up and asked if I want to come fly a two-airplane helo unit in Nevada, one hundred miles from the nearest town. They said it was important and that I’d have to be able to hover and land at nine thousand feet.” Trapp thought it sounded interesting as well as challenging and he signed on. “We flew in from Nellis in the H-43 [helicopter] and before we even landed at Area 51, they said, ‘Let’s go see how you land on top of the mountain first,’ that’s how important the mountain project was to the beginning of my Area 51 assignment.” For months, Trapp hauled cement in thousandpound buckets from the Area 51 operations center up to the top of Bald Mountain. “I’d hover over the top and lower the equipment down,” Trapp explains. “There were high winds and serious dust storms.” Finally, Trapp helicoptered in the one-hundred-foot-long radar pole, which a team of workers cemented into place. Mission accomplished. “We did such a good job, the CIA gave us air medals,” Trapp says. On his way back down to Area 51 in the helicopter, Trapp would fly around the different mountain peaks. “Once, I came across an old graveyard. In a helicopter you can hover and look. The graves were made of piles of rocks. I remember two of them were really small. They must have been kids’ graves.” The mou
ntain had a psychological pull with many of the men at Area 51 during the Oxcart years. It was also the only place the men were allowed to go that was technically “off base.”
Down on the tarmac, every time an A-12 Oxcart took off, it was Trapp’s job to hang out airborne, two hundred feet above the runway and off to one side, “in case the aircraft crashed,” Trapp explains. “My helicopter contained firefighting equipment, and I always had two PJs with me, para-rescue jumpers, [who perform] like a Navy SEAL. It was a lot of work having us airborne and I told the boss, Colonel Holbury, that I could be airborne in less than two minutes’ time. So the policy changed.” Instead, Trapp was on standby in the event of an accident, “which meant I got to drive the only golf cart around the Area 51 base.” The golf cart came in handy at night. “We played a lot of poker in the House-Six bar,” Trapp explains. “The loser had to do the late-night cheeseburger run over to the mess hall. With the golf cart, you could get there and back in five minutes.”
For all the technology that was around at Area 51, entertainment was decidedly old-school. “We did a lot of arm wrestling,” Trapp says. “Some guys played racquetball and other guys played three-hole golf.” When Trapp gained ten pounds eating so many late-night cheeseburgers, he was ordered to lose the weight or risk losing his job. To assist in the effort, Colonel Holbury challenged Trapp to weekly rounds of squash. Once, someone brought a sailboard out to Area 51, and the pilots pulled rank and got the men in the machine shop to affix wheels to the bottom of the board. “We took the thing out to Groom Lake when the wind was blowing really hard,” Trapp recalls. “It didn’t go that fast but we didn’t care.”
Of all the pastimes, the unanimous favorite was flying model airplanes using remote control. “We had two areas for flying model planes,” Trapp recalls. “Out on the grass by the golf course, and on the tarmac out on the dry lake. Sometimes the airplanes would go so far and so high they’d get lost. A guy would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, when you’re out in the helicopter, can you keep your eye out for my model plane? It’s got a five-foot wing span and yellow wings.’ We found ways to entertain ourselves at Area 51. We had to; there weren’t any girls.”
The man who took the model airplane flying most seriously was Frank Murray. He was also the chase pilot with the most flying time during Project Oxcart. “You could always find Frank sitting in his room gluing model airplanes together,” Colonel Slater recalls. “That was his idea of fun. Or maybe he was the only guy at 51 who wasn’t half-drunk at eleven o’clock at night.” Which is how Murray accumulated the most flying time. “If somebody’s kid got hurt in the middle of the night, which happened more than you think, and I need a pilot to get someone off base fast, I’d round up Frank,” Colonel Slater explains. When master fuels sergeant Harry Martin’s grandfather died, it was Frank Murray who flew him back east so he could get to the funeral in time. “Frank was always willing to do the job,” Colonel Slater explains. “Most people require time off from flying. Not Frank.”
Murray flew model airplanes to keep his head clear for flying real airplanes. “Everyone had their different thing,” Colonel Slater says. “Bud Wheelon from CIA used to want to play tennis at midnight when he was on base. Some liked to go hunting up in the mountains by the old Sheehan mine. Holbury used to like to make the guard dogs run. Some guys threw rocks at rattlesnakes. I liked to drive around in the jeep and find petrified wood.”
As an Oxcart chase pilot, Murray spent his days and nights chasing the Mach 3 airplane in the F-101. The Voodoo was a two-seat, supersonic jet fighter the Air Force used to accompany the Oxcart on takeoffs and landings. “We flew it with Oxcart up through the special operating area, or Yuletide, which was the airspace just north of the base,” Murray explains. “The Agency had us fly alongside the Oxcart in the Voodoo until we couldn’t keep up with the Oxcart anymore.” Flying chase meant Murray got assigned most of the grunt work and enjoyed little of the glamour. “I was a little jealous of the Oxcart pilots,” he admits. “How can a pilot not be? But I was happy as a pig in the Voodoo. For a farm boy from San Diego, flying chase for the 1129th was a good time.”
Murray flew the F-101 doing just about everything that needed to be done in support of Oxcart operations. This included flying against the Red Dog simulators, observing tanker refuels, overseeing takeoffs and landings, and flying Lockheed photographers around on CIA photo shoots. But Murray’s path in life took a significant redirection when General Ledford, the head of the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, decided he wanted to learn how to fly the F-101 while he was overseeing activities at Area 51. Murray recalls: “The general had been a bomber pilot in World War Two but he hadn’t ever flown anything as fast as the Voodoo could go, which was around twelve hundred or thirteen hundred miles per hour. So he decided that he wanted to learn how to fly it and when it came to choosing an IP, an instructor pilot, the general chose me.”
Murray now had to teach a legendary war hero, someone who also happened to be the highest-ranking military officer on the Oxcart program, how to fly supersonic. It might have been a daunting task. Except that it was not in Frank Murray’s character to be apprehensive. To Murray, it sounded like fun. “Out at the Ranch we had eight 101s that ran chase and one of them was a two-holer, with two cockpits and two sticks. ‘Come on, Frankie,’ the general said. He got in the back and up we went.”
General Ledford began to spend more and more time at the Ranch, where, in addition to the serious work being done, operations had taken on a boys’ club atmosphere. After a day of intense flying, nights were spent eating, socializing, and having drinks. “Sometimes, on the late side of things after dinner, Ledford would get a hair in his hat that he wanted to get back to Washington to see his wife, Polly,” Murray says. “He’d slap me on the back. That was my cue to take him home.” Home, in Washington, DC, was 2,500 miles away, and with supersonic aircraft at one’s disposal, this could actually happen this late at night. “Ledford was my student but he was also the general so on these trips home, I started letting him sit in the front of the plane; I’d sit in back. Well, all those hours flying back and forth from Area 51 to Washington, that cemented it. He was my boss but he also became my friend.” Ledford had other friends as well, several in high places at the Air Force, which made getting back to the East Coast from Nevada in the middle of the night a relatively easier trip. “Ledford had a buddy who was still in SAC, an air division commander at Blytheville Air Force Base in northeast Arkansas, just about halfway between 51 and Washington. Ledford would radio him when we were up in the air approaching the next state over and he’d say, ‘Have you got a tanker in the area?’ If he did or didn’t you could bet your fifty there’d be a tanker lining up next to you somewhere over Arkansas,” Murray says. What this meant was that when Murray and the general were traveling from Area 51 to the East Coast late at night, they never even had to stop for gas.
After a little more than two hours in the air, the men would land at Andrews Air Force Base and taxi up to the generals’ quarters — similar to a luxury hotel suite on the base — and enjoy a postflight scotch. “Ledford had a fancy setup on base quarters that had a fully equipped bar,” Murray explains. “We’d have a pop and chat a little before his wife, Polly, arrived to pick him up and take him home. I’d spend the night in the generals’ quarters. Get some sleep and in the morning head home to 51.”
It was an exciting time for Frank Murray. He couldn’t have imagined living this life. Only a few years earlier, he’d been flying Voodoos at Otis Air Force Base as part of the Air Defense Command when he had seen an interesting sign tacked on a bulletin board that read NASA is looking for F-101 chase pilots. He thought working for NASA sounded like fun. He had no idea that was just a cover story and that the Air Force, not NASA, was really looking for chase pilots for the Oxcart program at Area 51. Murray applied and got in. He moved the family to Nevada and swore an oath not to tell anyone what he did, not even Stella, his wife. But he knew his family w
ould be super proud of him. For a farm boy from San Diego, he was at the top of his game.
While Project Oxcart worked to get mission-ready, back in Washington the widening of the conflict in Vietnam by the Communists in the north was becoming a nightmare for President Johnson. He had won the favor of the people back in 1957 by declaring Communism to be the world’s greatest threat. In comparison to the thermonuclear-armed Soviet Union, Vietnam was to Johnson a sideshow. But it was also a piece in the widely held domino theory: if Vietnam fell to Communism, the whole region would ultimately fall. President Johnson had inherited Vietnam from President Kennedy when it was a political crisis and not yet a war. That changed in the second summer Johnson held office, in August of 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon declared that the U.S. Navy had suffered an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam against the USS Maddox, and the National Security Agency had evidence, McNamara said. This event allowed Johnson to push the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress, which authorized war. (In 2005 NSA released a detailed confession admitting that its intelligence had been “deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack.”) To avenge the USS Maddox attack, Johnson ordered air attacks against the North Vietnamese, sending Navy pilots on bombing missions over North Vietnam. When a number of U.S. pilots were shot down, the North Vietnamese took them as prisoners of war.
The war’s escalation led Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to perform an about-face regarding Oxcart. The Agency’s spy plane could be vitally useful after all, McNamara now said, certainly when it came to gathering intelligence in North Vietnam. The Agency knew the Russians had begun supplying surface-to-air missile systems to the Communists in North Vietnam, and now they were shooting down American boys. Both the Air Force and the Agency sent U-2s on reconnaissance missions, and these overflights revealed that missile sites were being set up around Hanoi. But the Pentagon needed far more specific target information. In June, McNamara sat down with the CIA and began drawing up plans to get the Oxcart ready for its first mission at last.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 27