Collins and Sullivan returned to Area 51 to keep up on proficiency flying in preparation for their final transcontinental flights. When it was time to return to Kadena, they flew from Groom Lake to Burbank in a Lockheed propeller plane and then took a commercial flight from the West Coast all the way to Tokyo. “That night, we had dinner in the Tokyo Hilton,” Collins remembers. “We finished up dinner and were heading back up to the rooms when we heard on the radio that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles.” Stunned, Collins went downstairs to buy a newspaper, the English-language version of the Tokyo Times. “There, in the lower right-hand corner of the paper, a small article caught my eye. The headline read something like ‘HighAltitude Crash of a U.S. Air Force Airplane.’ Well, that was enough to get my attention. I had a terrible feeling I knew what ‘high-altitude’ meant.”
The following day, Collins and Sullivan flew to the island of Kadena. An Agency driver picked them up at the airport. As soon as the door shut and the men were alone, the driver turned around and said solemnly, “We lost an airplane.”
“We lost a pilot,” Collins said.
It was former U-2 pilot Tony Bevacqua who was assigned to fly the search mission for Jack Weeks and his missing airplane. After Bevacqua had left Groom Lake, in 1957, he’d spent the next eight years flying dangerous U-2 reconnaissance missions and atomic sampling missions all over the world, from Alaska to Argentina. During the Vietnam War, Bevacqua flew SR-71 reconnaissance missions over Hanoi. (On one mission, on July 26, 1968, the photographs taken from the camera on his Blackbird show two SA-2 missiles being fired up at him.) But no single mission would stay with him into old age like the mission he was asked to fly on June 5, 1968, looking for Jack Weeks.
Bevacqua had arrived on Kadena the month before, having been selected to fly the Air Force version of the Oxcart, the SR-71. “All I had been told that day was that someone was missing,” Bevacqua remembers. “I didn’t have a need to know more. But I think I knew that the pilot was CIA.” The downed pilot, he learned, might be floating somewhere in the South China Sea, approximately 520 miles east of the Philippines and 625 miles south of Okinawa. “As I set out, my heart was pumped up and I was thinking, Maybe I will find this guy. I remember anticipation. Hopeful anticipation of maybe seeing a little yellow life raft floating somewhere in that giant sea.” Instead, Bevacqua saw nothing but hundreds of miles of open water. “It was like looking for a drop of water in the ocean,” Bevacqua remembers. The day after the mission, Bevacqua went to the photo interpreters to ask if they’d found anything on the film. “They said, ‘No, sorry. Not a thing.’ And that was the end of that,” Bevacqua explains.
Jack Weeks was gone. Vanished into the sea. Neither his body nor any part of the airplane was ever recovered. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins muses, recalling the destiny of his friend Jack Weeks. “I was supposed to be flying that aircraft that day but Jack got sick and we switched in the rotation. Jack Weeks went down. I’m still here.”
The 1129th Special Activities Squadron had reached its end. The CIA held a special secret ceremony at Area 51 for the remaining Oxcart pilots and their wives. Some of the pilots had their pictures taken with the aircraft but did not receive copies for their scrapbooks or walls. “The pictures went into a vault,” says Colonel Slater. “We were told we could have copies of them when, or if, the project got declassified.” Roger Andersen recalls how quickly the operation rolled up. “By that time, in 1968, there were a lot of other operations going on at Area 51, none of which I had a need-to-know.” Andersen had the distinction of flying the last Project Oxcart support plane, a T-33, back to Edwards Air Force Base. “Flying out of Area 51, I knew I’d miss it up there,” Andersen says. “Even after all these years, and having lived all over the world, I can say that Area 51 is unlike anywhere else in the world.” For certain, there would be no more barrel rolls with Colonel Slater over Groom Lake.
The men moved on. If you are career Air Force or CIA, you go where you are assigned. Ken Collins was recruited by the Air Force into the SR-71 program. Because the A-12 program was classified, no one in the SR-71 program had any idea Collins had already put in hundreds of hours flying in the Mach 3 airplane. “It left many in the SR71 program confused. It surprised many people when it appeared I already knew how to fly the aircraft that was supposedly just built. They didn’t have a need-to-know what I had spent the last six years of my life doing. They didn’t learn for decades,” not until the Oxcart program was declassified, in 2007.
Frank Murray volunteered to fight on the ground, or at least low to the ground, in Vietnam. “During Black Shield, no one had any idea where I’d been. Quite a few people thought maybe I’d dodged the war. I decided to go back in and fly airplanes in combat in Vietnam.” In November of 1970, Murray was sent to the Nakhon Phanom Air Base on the Mekong River across from Laos, where he volunteered to fly the A-1 Skyraider — a propeller-driven, single-seat airplane that was an anachronism in the jet age. “It flew about a hundred and sixty-five miles per hour at cruise,” says Murray. “I went from flying the fastest airplane in the world to the slowest one. The Oxcart taxied faster than the A-1 flew.” Because the Skyraider flew so slow, it was one of the easiest targets for the Vietcong. One in four Skyraiders sent on rescue missions was shot down. “We got shot at often but the Skyraider had armaments and I shot back.” In his one-year tour of duty, Murray, the squadron commander, flew sixty-four combat missions. The Skyraider’s most famous role was as the escort for the helicopters sent in to rescue wounded soldiers from the battlefield. “Our mission was to support the Jolly Green Giants. We pulled quite a few wounded Green Berets out of the battlefield that year.”
Colonel Slater was assigned to the position of vice commander of the Twentieth Tactical Fighter Wing at the Wethersfield Air Force Base in England. By all accounts, he was well on the way to becoming a general in the U.S. Air Force. Then tragedy struck. Colonel Slater’s eldest daughter, Stacy, was in Sun Valley, Idaho, on her honeymoon when the private plane she was flying in with her husband struck a mountain peak and crashed. Stranded on the side of a frozen mountain for twenty-four hours, Stacy Slater Bernhardt was paralyzed from the waist down. The recovery process was going to be long and painful, and the outcome was entirely unknown. “My wife, Barbara, and I needed to be with our daughter, with our family, so I requested to be transferred back to the United States,” Colonel Slater says. For Slater, a career military man, the decision was simple. “Love of country, love of family.”
Back in America, and after many months, his daughter recovered with near-miraculous results (she learned to walk with crutches). Colonel Slater was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base, where he began flying the Air Force’s attack version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, which comes equipped to carry two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. “I loved it,” Slater says, always the optimist. “I enjoyed working for the CIA, but no matter how old I get, I will always be a fighter pilot at heart.”
Chapter Seventeen: The MiGs of Area 51
To engineer something is to apply scientific and technical know-how to create an entity from parts. To reverse engineer something is to take another manufacturer’s or scientist’s product apart with the specific purpose of learning how it was constructed or composed. The concept of reverse engineering is uniquely woven into Area 51 legend and lore, with conspiracy theorists claiming Area 51 engineers are reverse engineering alien spacecraft inside the secret base. Historically, reverse engineering has played an important role at Area 51, as exemplified in formerly classified programs, including one from the late 1960s and 1970s, to reverse engineer Russian MiGs.
It began one scorching-hot morning in August of 1966 when an Iraqi Air Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad. Redfa then made a sudden turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified Redfa that he was off course.
“Turn back immediately,” he was told. Instead, Red
fa began flying in a zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey, then toward the Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There, one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.
Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.
The plan had been years in the making. Four years, to be exact, dating back to 1963, when Meir Amit first became head of the Mossad. Amit sat down with the Israeli air force and asked them what they would consider the single greatest foreign-intelligence contribution to national security. The answer was short, simple, and unanimous: bring us an MiG. The enemy air forces of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq all flew Russian MiGs. Before Redfa’s defection, the Mossad had tried twice, unsuccessfully, to acquire the airplane. In one case, an Egyptian-born Armenian intelligence agent known as John Thomas was caught in the act of espionage. His punishment was death; he and several coconspirators were hanged in an Egyptian public square.
For years, Mossad searched for a possible candidate for defection. Finally, in early 1966, they found a man who fit the profile in Munir Redfa, a Syrian Christian who had previously expressed feelings of persecution as a religious minority in a squadron of Muslims. Mossad dispatched a beautiful female intelligence agent to Baghdad on a mission. The agent worked the romance angle first, luring Redfa to Paris with the promise of sex. There, she told Redfa the truth about what she was after. In return for an Iraqi air force MiG, Redfa would be paid a million dollars and given a new identity and a safe haven for himself and his family. Redfa agreed.
With an MiG now in their possession, the Israelis set to work understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the aircraft in flight. If it ever came to war, the Israelis would be uniquely prepared for air combat. Which is exactly what happened in June of 1967. What Israel learned from Munir Redfa’s MiG ultimately allowed them to overpower the combined air forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan during the Six-Day War.
Back in Washington, CIA chief Richard Helms was briefed on Redfa’s story by James Jesus Angleton, the man running the CIA station in Tel Aviv. Angleton was a Harvard- and Yale-educated intelligence officer who had been in the espionage business for twentyfive years. Angleton, who died in 1987, remains one of the Agency’s most enigmatic and bellicose spies. He is famous within the Agency for many things, among them his idea that the Soviet propaganda machine worked 24-7 to create an ever-widening “wilderness of mirrors.” This wilderness, Angleton said, was the product of a myriad of KGB deceptions and stratagems that would one day ensnare, confuse, and overpower the West. Angleton believed that the Soviets could manipulate the CIA into believing false information was true and true information was false. The CIA’s inability to discern the truth inside a forest of Soviet disinformation would be America’s downfall, Angleton said.
James Jesus Angleton allegedly had as many enemies inside the Agency as inside the KGB, but Richard Helms trusted him. Helms and Angleton had known each other since World War II, when they worked in the OSS counterintelligence unit, X-2. In the 1960s, in addition to acting as the liaison between the CIA and the FBI, Angleton controlled the Israeli “account,” which meant he provided Helms with almost everything Helms knew about Israel.
During the course of negotiating the deal to get the MiG, the details of which remain classified, Angleton acquired additional information regarding Israel that he provided to Helms, and that Helms provided to the president. This included seemingly prophetic information about the Six-Day War before the Six-Day War began. The Israelis had been telling the State Department that they were in great danger from their Middle East neighbors when really, Helms explained to the president, Israel had the tactical advantage. Israel was playing the weak card in the hope of winning American military support. Helms also said that he’d recently met with a senior Israeli official whose visit he saw as “a clear portent that war might come at any time.” Coupled with Angleton’s assessment, Helms said this meant most likely in a matter of days. When Israel launched an attack three days later, Helms’s status with President Johnson went through the roof. “The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in the Johnson White House,” wrote a CIA historian.
The story of Redfa’s defection made international headlines when it happened, in 1966. But what didn’t make the news was what happened once Israel finished with the MiG: the Soviet-made fighter was shipped to Area 51. Colonel Slater, who was commander of Area 51 at the time, remembers how “it arrived in the middle of the night, hidden inside a C-130 [cargo plane], hand-delivered by Israeli intelligence agents.” What had been a major coup for Israel was now an equally huge break for the United States. To the Israelis, the MiG was the most dangerous fighter in the Arab world. To the Americans, this was the deadly little aircraft that had been shooting down so many American fighter pilots over Vietnam. The Russians had been supplying the North Vietnamese with MiG-21 aircraft and MiG pilot training as well. Now, with an MiG at Area 51, Agency engineers once again had high-value foreign technology in their hands. “We could finally learn how to beat the MiG in air-to-air combat,” Colonel Slater explains.
The path to Area 51 is different for everyone. For T. D. Barnes it began in 1962 when the CIA wanted him to go to Vietnam to be an “adviser” there. Barnes was just back from Bamburg, Germany, where he’d been deployed during the Berlin Wall crisis, tasked with running Hawk missile sites along the border with Czechoslovakia. It had been two years since he’d worked on the CIA’s Project Palladium out of Fort Bliss.
“I said I’d go work for the Agency. But I had this dream of becoming an Army officer, which meant going through officer training school first. The Agency and the Army agreed and sent me to officer school.” There, during survival training Barnes ripped open his knees and got a rare blood disease. “It just about nearly killed me. I was never going to do combat. I’m lucky I didn’t die,” says Barnes. He recovered but because of the blood disability, he couldn’t go to Vietnam for the CIA. This also meant that after ten years of service, his military career was over. Barnes and his wife, Doris, moved home to Oklahoma and bought a house there with a yard for their two little girls, and one day when Doris was reading the classified section of the local newspaper, she found an advertisement of interest. “A contractor called Unitech was looking for telemetry and radar specialists that could work on a project involving space,” Barnes recalls.
Barnes figured Unitech was harvesting rйsumйs. “Getting a list of people who might be qualified to work on a highly specialized kind of a project if a contract were to materialize with, say, NASA down the road.” Barnes told Doris it wasn’t worth the phone call. Doris said to call anyway. “Within two days our house was on the market, we were packed up, and we were traveling to this little one-horse town in the Mojave Desert called Beatty.” Beatty, Nevada. Population somewhere around 426, depending on who wants to know.
In 1964, Beatty, Nevada, was one strange town. Situated 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it lay on a strip of land between Death Valley and Nevada’s atomic bomb range. Beatty had one sheriff — he was eighty years old, was a great shot with a rifle, and was missing most of his teeth. Beatty also had nine gas stations, eleven churches, an airstrip, and a whorehouse called the Vicky Star Ranch. Behind the faca
de, Beatty housed a collection of three- and four-letter federal agencies, many of which were working different angles on various overt and covert operations there. “Nobody knew what anybody else in Beatty was really doing there and since you didn’t have a need-toknow you didn’t ask,” recalls Barnes. Forty-five years later he still hadn’t “figured out what the service stations or the churches were a cover for.”
How Beatty worked and who was running whom left much to the imagination. “When Doris and I drove into town that first day,” Barnes recalls, “we pulled up to the service station to get some gas. One of the town characters, a semi-homeless person everyone called Panamint Annie, walked up to us and leaned against our car. She looked at me — it was summer — and she said, ‘Well, it’s hotter than Hell’s hubs, now isn’t it, Barnes?’ I thought, How the hell does she know my last name?” Technically, Barnes had been recruited by Unitech. It turned out they had a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, after all. “But there were lots of other agencies in Beatty who were working in the dark,” Barnes says. “Unitech was the sign on the door.”
America’s space agency set up shop in Beatty in the mid-1960s in order to develop programs that would help get man to the moon. But before NASA landed on Earth’s nearest celestial body, they had to conquer space, and to do so, they needed help from the U.S. Air Force. And before NASA conquered space, they had to get to the edge of space, which was why Barnes was in Beatty. He was hired to work on NASA’s X-15 rocket plane, a prototype research vehicle that looked and acted more like a missile with wings than an airplane. Each day, Barnes got picked up for work by a NASA employee named Bill Houck, who drove a federal van around town and made a total of ten stops to retrieve all the members of the secret team. They would drive out to the edge of town and begin the short trek to the top of a chaparral-covered mountain where one hangar that was roughly the size of a tennis court, three trailers, and a number of radar dishes made up the NASA high-range tracking station at Beatty. Day after day, the ten-man crew of electronics and radar wizards manned stateof-the-art electronic systems, tracking the X-15 as it raced across the skies above the Mojave, from the Dryden Flight Research Center in California up toward the edge of space. Once, the airplane was forced to make an emergency landing on a dry lake bed not far from Beatty. There was a rule prohibiting transport trucks to haul cargo through Death Valley after dark on weekends, which meant the X-15 rocket had to spend the night in Barnes’s driveway. His daughters, ages five and eight, spent the weekend running circles around the James Bondlooking rocket ship parked out front cheering “Daddy’s spaceship!” No one else in Beatty said a thing.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 31