Al O’Donnell arranged for my temporary security clearance so that I could accompany him to the federally restricted land that is the Nevada Test Site. Looking into the Sedan nuclear crater — so vast it is visible from outer space — is not something I will ever forget. While Area 51, Area 25, and Area 13 were off-limits to us on that visit, that I was able even to get within a stone’s throw of these three hidden places is thanks to O’Donnell. And a special thanks to Ruth, Al’s very capable wife. From Jim Freedman I learned things that could be contained in their own book. Freedman has the unusual ability to share deeply personal experiences with stunning clarity, objectivity, and conviction. Once, he explained why: “I tell you all this, Annie, because you give a damn.”
Dr. Bud Wheelon, the CIA’s first deputy director of science and technology, has given only a few interviews in his life. I am grateful to have joined those ranks. During one of our interviews he stopped midstory to thoroughly explain missile technology to me. From that moment on I understood what was at stake during the Cuban missile crisis. How close we came to nuclear war.
Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Stockman and Colonel Richard Leghorn are legends among legendary men. Colonel Leghorn generously shared with me artifacts he had stored away in his attic, shipping original photographs, long-lost articles, and out-of-print books across the country for my review. Thanks to his assistant, Barbara Austin, for her help. Hervey Stockman was not so easy to locate at first, but when I finally did reach him, on the telephone, it was a magical moment. Thank you, Peter Stockman, for sending me a copy of Hervey’s oral history, which was an invaluable source of information.
For all the investigating that goes on in writing a book like this, sometimes the most sought-after information comes in the most whimsical of ways. In the summer of 2009, I went to the Nuclear Testing Archive library in Las Vegas to locate declassified documents on the Project 57 “dirty bomb” test, ones that were mysteriously missing from the Department of Energy’s online repository. Even in person, the staff was unable to fulfill my records request. Hindered and frustrated, I took a walk around the adjacent atomic-testing museum to cool down. Reporter’s notebook in hand, I was staring at a photograph of a mushroom cloud hanging on the wall when the museum’s security guard walked up and said hello. It was Richard Mingus. We’d met briefly before, on an earlier visit. I told Mingus that I felt records on Project 57 were being withheld from me over at the library. In his characteristic matter-of-fact style Mingus said, “Well, I worked on that test. What is it you’d like to know?” Mingus, I quickly learned, was also one of the CIA’s original Area 51 security guards. Thanks to Mingus, the “missing” Project 57 documents became easier to locate.
At the National Archives and Records Administration, thank you to Timothy Nenninger, chief of the Textual Records Reference Staff, Martha Murphy, chief of Special Access and FOIA Staff, and Tom Mills, who specializes in World War II records; thank you, Rita Cann, at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri; Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive in Las Vegas; Troy Wade of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation; Tech Sergeant Jennifer Lindsey of the U.S. Air Force; Staff Sergeant Alice Moore, Creech Air Force Base; Dr. David R. Williams, NASA; Dr. David Robarge, chief historian, Central Intelligence Agency; Tony Hiley, curator and director of the CIA Museum; Cheryl Moore, EEA CIA; Jim Long, Laughlin Heritage Foundation Museum; R. Cargill Hall, historian emeritus, National Reconnaissance Office; Dr. Craig Luther, chief historian, Edwards Air Force Base; S. Eugene Poteat, president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers; Melissa Dalton, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics; Dr. Jeffrey Richelson, National Security Archives; David Myhra, author and aviation historian; Fred Burton, former special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service; Sherre Lovick, former Lockheed Skunk Works engineer; Colonel Adelbert W. “Buz” Carpenter, former SR-71 pilot; Charles “Chuck” Wilson, former U-2 pilot; Arthur Beidler, 67th Reconnaissance Tactical Squadron, Japan; Dennis Nordquist, Pratt & Whitney mechanical engineer; Tony Landis, NASA photographer; Michael Schmitz, Roadrunners Internationale photographer; Joerg Arnu, Norio Hayakawa, and Peter Merlin of Dreamlandresort.com. A special thank you to Doris Barnes, Barbara Slater, Stacy Slater Bernhardt, Stella Murray, Mary Martin, and Mary Jane Murphy. Thank you, Jeff King, for making me such an excellent map, and Ploy Siripant, for a phenomenal job on the jacket. Thank you Tommy Harron, Jerry Maybrook, and Jeremy Wesley for the great work on the audio book.
Once I completed a draft of this manuscript, my editor, John Parsley, helped me to refine it into the book that it is. What I learned from John about storytelling is immeasurable. Thank you also to Nicole Dewey, Geoff Shandler, and Michael Pietsch.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Hornfischer, the perfect agent for someone like me, and to my confidant Frank Morse. Thank you for the wise counsel, Steve Younger, David Willingham, Aron Ketchel, Eric Rayman, and Karen Andrews.
It takes a village to make a writer. I’m one of the lucky ones who has always known writing is what I was meant to do. I arrived at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, at the age of fifteen, typewriter in hand, and wrote for nearly twenty years straight without earning as much as one cent. Only at the age of thirty-four did things shift for me, and I’ve earned my living as a writer ever since. I say that for all of the writers following in my footsteps. Don’t give up. My village fire keepers — those to whom I am deeply indebted for their individually imperative roles — include Alice and Tom Soininen, Julie Elkins, John Soininen; my writing teacher at St. Paul’s School, Michael Burns, and at Princeton University, Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates, and P. Adams Sitney; my storytelling hero in Greece, John Zervos; those who supported me in Big Sur: Lisa Firestone, Thanis Iliadis, Alex Timken, Robert Jolliffe, Harriet and Jeremy Polturak, James Young, Nate Downey, Emmy Starr and Stephen Vehslage, Samantha Muldoon, Erin Gafill and Tom Birmingham; my mentors in Los Angeles: Rachel Resnick, Keith Rogers, Kathleen Silver, Rio Morse, and my friend and editor in chief at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nancie Clare, who commissioned my original two-part series on Area 51 for the magazine; my fellow writers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, Annette Murphy, Terry Rossio, Jolly Stamat, Moira McMahon, Lisa Gold; fellow storyteller Lucy Firestone; my mother-in-law, Marion Wroldsen, not only for her deep love of reading but for lending me her son.
Nothing in this world is so joyful as being the wife of Kevin Jacobsen and the mother of our two boys. While writing this book, it was Kevin who made endless sandwiches for me, brewed pots of coffee, and let me travel to wherever it was that I needed to go. Kevin hears out every first draft, usually standing in our kitchen or yard. Everything gets better after I listen to what he has to say.
Notes
Prologue: The Secret City
1. Nevada Test and Training Range: Map reference number NTTR01, NGA stock no. 84413.
2. Nevada Test Site: Map based on NTS Boundary Coordinates: FFACO, appendix 1, January 1998, revision 2, 6. On Aug 23, 2010, the Nevada Test Site changed its name to the Nevada National Security Site. Throughout the book, I refer to it as the Nevada Test Site, as that is the name it went by for nearly sixty years.
3. 105 nuclear weapons: Department of Energy, “United States Nuclear Tests,” xii-xv. Total atmospheric for Nevada Test Site (NTS) is officially listed as 100 and total Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR) is listed as 5. Underground is 804 by U.S. plus 24 by U.S./UK for a total of 933.
4. weapons-grade plutonium and uranium: Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, clarified: “The [Nevada Test Site] has never been a repository for weapons grade plutonium or uranium. Of course there is the ‘expended’ material from 828 underground nuclear weapons tests that is contained within the cavities where the tests were conducted.” E-mail, September 21, 2010.
5. two known exceptions: Memo, Top Secret Oxcart, Oxcart Reconnaissance Operation Plan, BYE 2369-67, 15; second example from int
erview with Peter Merlin.
6. bomb’s price tag: Brookings Institute, “50 Facts about U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” fact no. 1 (1996 dollars: $20,000,000,000; 2011 dollars: $28,000,000,000).
7. was relayed to him by two men: Wiesner, Vannevar Bush, 98. This fact is hardly known; credit is usually given to General Leslie R. Groves and War Secretary Henry L. Stimson. Wiesner, Vannevar Bush’s biographer at the National Academy of Sciences (he was also a science adviser to President Eisenhower), wrote: “Bush… had the duty, after the death of President Roosevelt, of giving President
Truman his first detailed account of the bomb.”
8. no one knew the Manhattan Project was there: Wills, Bomb Power, 10–13. Wills elaborated on how Truman had some suspicions when he was vice president and approached War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, who told him to back off, which Truman did.
9. who would control its “unimaginable destructive power”: Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 13.7. Also known as The Smyth Report, it was released by the government six days after Hiroshima, on August 12, 1945. Here, Smyth chronicled the administrative and technical history of the Manhattan Project, also called the Manhattan Engineering District (MED). The purpose of the report was allegedly to give citizens enough information about nuclear energy for them to participate in a public debate about what to do next. The report also encouraged the idea that handing the bomb over to civilian control, as opposed to military control, would be a more democratic scenario. Instead, the controls imposed by the Atomic Energy Commission would ultimately prove to be even more impenetrable than military controls; Hewlett and Anderson, New World.
10. the concept “born classified” came to be: Quist, Security Classification, 1. Here Quist writes: “The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was the first and, other than its successor, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, to date the only U.S. statute to establish a program to restrict the dissemination of information. This Act transferred control of all aspects of atomic (nuclear) energy from the Army, which had managed the government’s World War II Manhattan Project to produce atomic bombs, to a five-member civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). These new types of bombs, of awesome power, had been developed under stringent secrecy and security conditions. Congress, in enacting the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, continued the Manhattan Project’s comprehensive, rigid controls on U.S. information about atomic bombs and other aspects of atomic energy. The Atomic Energy Act designated the atomic energy information to be protected as ‘Restricted Data’ and defined that data.”
11. seventy thousand nuclear bombs: Brookings Institute, “50
Facts about U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” fact no. 6.
12. Atomic Energy was the first entity to control Area 51: This is one of the central organizing premises of my book and will no doubt be contested by the Atomic Energy Commission until they are forced to declassify the project to which I refer.
13. when President Clinton: The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) was created by President Clinton on January 15, 1994, to investigate and make public the use of human beings as subjects of federally funded research. Created by executive order and subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), the advisory committee was obligated to provide public access to its activities, processes, and papers, some of which can be viewed at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/.
14. he did not have a need-to-know: Author interview with EG&G engineer.
15. “give[s] the professional classificationist unanswerable authority”: Quist, Security Classification, 24; Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 442-51.
16. largest facility is, and always has been, the Nevada Test Site: Written correspondence with Darwin Morgan, September 21, 2010, U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Office, Office of Public Affairs and Information.
17. not controlled by the Department of Defense: It cannot yet be determined for certain if the Department of Defense (DOD) was involved in running the very first program at Area 51. Research at NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) reveals that DOD had a lot more to do with Paperclips than previously known publicly. For example, documents obtained by me through a FOIA request reveal “in the early 1950s the Defense Department [Office of Defense Research and Engineering (ORE)] and the JIOA took up overall direction of PAPERCLIP, which ran under the acronym of DEFSIP, or Defense Scientist Immigration Program.” JIOA stands for
Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency and was run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These multiple agencies and multiple chains of command serve to hide information.
Chapter One: The Riddle of Area 51
Interviews: Joerg Arnu, George Knapp, Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, Colonel Hugh Slater, Richard Mingus, Ernest “Ernie” Williams, Dr. Albert “Bud” Wheelon, Colonel Kenneth Collins, Colonel Sam Pizzo, Norio Hayakawa, Stanton Friedman
1. Nighttime is the best time: Interview with Joerg Arnu.
2. Robert Scott Lazar appeared on Eyewitness News: Interview with George Knapp; George Knapp, “Bob Lazar: The Man Behind Area 51,” Eyewitness News Investigates,
http://area51.eyewitnessnews8.com/.
3. veiled threats of incarceration: A common note among most Area 51 employees interviewed, certainly among the Air Force enlisted men, was the “threat of Leavenworth,” meaning incarceration at the largest federal security prison in the United States at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
4. Dr. Edward Teller: Teller, who died in 2003 at the age of ninetyfive, never confirmed or denied that he referred Lazar to EG&G for work at Area 51.
*contaminated with plutonium: Interviews with Richard Mingus; see notes for chapter 6.
5. for a lecture Teller was giving: The subject of Teller’s lecture was the nuclear freeze movement under way in a post-Three Mile Island world.
6. a page-1 story featuring Bob Lazar: Los Alamos Monitor, June 27, 1982, identifies Lazar as “a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.”
7. Lazar’s life had reached an unexpected low: The most comprehensive information on Lazar is available at the Area 51 research Web site Dreamlandresort.com, created by Joerg H. Arnu in
1999. In “The Bob Lazar Corner” one can find a time line of Lazar’s story as well as a compilation of public records, letters, and commentary about Lazar by his critics and his friends, as researched by Tom Mahood, whom I interviewed.
8. Tracy Murk: According to the wedding certificate researched by Tom Mahood. Also according to Mahood’s research, Tracy Ann Murk and Lazar married for a second time, on October 12, 1986 (the first wedding was April 19, 1986), with Murk inexplicably using the name Jackie Diane Evans.
9. committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide: Ibid. Death certificate #001423-86, Clark County Health District, Las Vegas, NV; cause of death: “inhalation of motor vehicle exhaust.” Sourced by Tom Mahood.
10. Fly to Area 51: Descriptions based on multiple eyewitness interviews; see Primary Interviews.
11. designed by Raytheon to detect incoming missile signals: Interview with T. D. Barnes.
12. The miner kept the secrecy oath: Interview with Colonel Slater. 13. access point Gate 385: Interview with Richard Mingus.
14. trucks from the Atomic Energy Commission motor pool: Interview with Ernie Williams. A farm boy from Nebraska, Williams’s father was a “water witch,” and Williams inherited some water-locating charm. In this manner, he is the man credited by many Roadrunners as having officially found Area 51’s first water well.
15. men dressed in HAZMAT suits: R. Kinnison and R. Gilbert, “Estimates of Soil Removal for Cleanup of Transuranics at NAEG Offsite Safety Shot Sites,” FY 1981, 1984, 1986-91.
16. would have gone through security there: Interview with anonymous EG&G employee who worked for the airline. 17. tennis matches: Interview with Dr. Wheelon.
18. jumping into the pool: Interview with Ken Collins. 19. Area 51 bar, called Sam’s Place: Interview with Colonel Pizzo.
20. According to Lazar: Lazar’s original interviews with George Knapp ar
e available on YouTube in six parts.
21. He glanced sideways, through a small nine-by-nine-inch window: Lazar’s interview with George Knapp, part two of six, minutes 4:10-5:05. Knapp: “In an earlier interview, you had mentioned you saw what you thought may be an alien. Was it an alien? What did you see?” Lazar: “What I had said and all that occurred was that I was walking by a door, ah, a door that had a small, nine-by-nine window in it, little wires running through it. And glanced in there, and there were two… ah, either technicians, scientists, or whoever they were, looking down at something. And what that something was caught my eye and I never really did see what it was. A lot of people have asserted, well, there was an alien, they’re aliens working around there and so on and so forth, I mean, I don’t think that was the case. But, ah, who knows. I was. You know. You’re seeing all these fantastic things and your mind gets going and you know you catch something out of the corner of your eye, who knows what your mind is going to come up with so I certainly wouldn’t stand on that as fact by any means.” See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfVZcAsTxk.
22. what was maybe an alien: Lazar’s interview with George Knapp, part two of six, minutes 2:33-3:30. Lazar says he was told the UFO he was assigned to work on originated from another planet. He says he was shown autopsy photographs of the craft’s alien pilots, which he described to Knapp in their interview: “One or two autopsy photographs I saw ah, dealt with just a small photograph, a bust shot essentially, just head, shoulders, and chest of an alien where the ah, ah, chest was cut open in a ‘T’ fashion and one single organ was removed. The organ itself in the other picture was cut and vivisectioned essentially the, ah, showing the different chambers in there. This was totally unrelated to anything I was doing but from that photograph it looked like what you see in UFO lore as the typical ‘gray’ [slang for alien] so how tall it was from what I could see, I couldn’t tell,
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