Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base
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20. Walt Ray told Colonel Slater through his headset: Interview with Colonel Slater.
21. “I’m ejecting”: Interview with Colonel Slater. Immediately after the crash Air Force channels reported that an SR-71 flying on a routine flight out of Edwards Air Force Base had gone missing and was presumed down in Nevada.
22. unable to separate from his seat: Memorandum for Acting Deputy Director for Science and Technology, Subject Loss of Article 125 (Oxcart Aircraft), 25 January 1967, 2.
23. Roger Andersen flew in low, in a T-33: Interview with Roger Andersen.
24. Charlie Trapp found the aircraft first: Interview with Charlie Trapp.
25. “‘How’d you like to fly the plane?’”: Interview with Frank Murray.
26. eight-page letter to the president: Top Secret Idealist/Oxcart, Central Intelligence Agency Office of the Director, BYE-2915-66 Alternative A, 14 December 1966.
27. a scandalous waste of an asset: DRAFT, Director of Special Activities, Comments to W.R. Thomas III Memorandum to the Director, BOB, 27 July 1966, 11.
28. Gary Powers incident had actually strengthened: Ibid., 3.
29. the CIA “controls no nuclear weapons”: Top Secret Idealist/Oxcart, Central Intelligence Agency Office of the Director, BYE2915-66 Alternative A, 14 December 1966, 4.
30. But would the president see things his way: Memorandum for the President, Subject: Advanced Reconnaissance Aircraft, December 26, 1966, Top Secret. Participants included Cyrus Vance (deputy secretary of defense), Donald Hornig (the president’s science adviser), C.W. Fischer (bureau of the budget), and Helms. All except Helms recommended mothballing Oxcart. On December 28, the president approved this memo recommendation and ordered the phaseout of the A-12 fleet by January 1968.
31. Slater was instructed to return to Area 51: Interview with Colonel Slater.
32. ahead of a two-star general: Ibid. 33. Slater went to visit Werner Weiss: Ibid.
Chapter Sixteen: Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS Pueblo
Interviews: Colonel Slater, Ken Collins, Roger Andersen, Hervey Stockman, Peter Stockman, Frank Murray, Ronald L. “Jack” Layton, Eunice Layton, Charlie Trapp
1. “never found have much use for intelligence”: Hathaway and Smith, Richard Helms, 2. The most telling comment comes from Helms (ibid., 7): “With President Johnson… I finally came to the conclusion that what I had to say I should get into the first 60, or at least 120 seconds, that I had on my feet. Because after that he was pushing buttons for coffee or Fresca, or talking to Rusk, or talking to McNamara, or whispering here or whispering there. I had lost my principal audience.”
2. Target Tuesday lunch: Barrett, “Doing ‘Tuesday Lunch,’” 676-
77.
3. Helms told the president: John Parangosky, Deputy for Technology, OSA, wrote in summation, “Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, submitted to the 303 Committee another formal proposal to deploy the OXCART. In addition, he raised the matter at President Johnson’s ‘Tuesday Lunch’ on 16 May, and received the Presidents approval to ‘go.’ Walt Rostow later in the day formally conveyed the President’s decision, and the BLACK SHIELD deployment plan was forthwith put into effect.”
4. A million pounds of matйriel, 260 support crew: Johnson, History of the Oxcart Program, 1. The three A-12s that were deployed to Kadena flew nonstop from Groom Lake across the Pacific. They refueled twice en route and got to Kadena in a little less than six hours; interview with Colonel Slater, Ken Collins, Frank Murray, Roger Andersen.
5. “the bird should leave the nest”: CIA Director of Special Activities to CIA Director of Reconnaissance, “Operation readiness of the OXCART System,” 12 November 1965.
6. nearly 40 percent of all islanders’ income: CIA NLE MR Case No. 2000-69, Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) June 1960, 2. “The military economy employs 13 % of the working population and generates 36 % of the national income.”
7. to keep an extremely low profile: Interview with Ken Collins. 8. “no plausible cover story”: Interview with Colonel Slater.
9. the first Oxcart mission: Photographic Interpretation Report: Black Shield Mission X-001, 31 May 1967. NPIC/R-112/67, June 1967.
10. by the time the photographic intelligence got back: John Parangosky, Deputy for Technology, OSA, wrote: “Film from earlier missions was developed at the Eastman Kodak plant in Rochester, New York. By late summer an Air Force Center in Japan carried out the processing in order to place the photointelligence in the hands of American commanders in Vietnam within 24 hours of completion of a BLACK SHIELD mission.”
11. four were “detected and tracked”: CHESS RUFF TRINE OXCART, BYE-44232/67, Black Shield Reconnaissance Missions 31 May-15 August 1967, 22 Sept. 1967, Central Intelligence Agency, 1. Declassified in August 2007.
12. first attempted shoot-down: Robarge, Archangel, 36.
13. when he was involved in a midair crash: interview with Hervey Stockman; also from Conversations with Hervey Stockman (not numbered) in a section called “Mid-air collision.”
14. to find U.S. airmen who’d gone down: Interview with Frank Murray.
15. “I hope they try something because we are looking for a fight”: Karnow, Vietnam, 514.
16. it was on an espionage mission: CIA Top Secret [Redacted], 24 January 1968, Memorandum: Chronology of Events Concerning the
Seizure of the USS Pueblo, 8 pages.
17. two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene: Ibid., 3.
18. The captain considered sinking his ship: Bamford, Body of Secrets, 259.
19. 90 percent of the documents survived: Ibid., 305.
20. Pentagon began secretly preparing for war: Department of Defense, Top Secret Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, January 25, 1968.
21. pinpointed the Pueblo’s exact location: TOP SECRET TRINE OXCART, BYE-1330/68 Figure 9; a map of Weeks’s flight is noted as Mission BX-6847, 26 January 1968, figure 5.
22. he told his fellow pilots about the problems: Interviews with Frank Murray, Ken Collins.
23. very few individuals had any idea: In fact, for forty years, Frank Murray believed he had located the USS Pueblo because, in a bizarre twist, the CIA told him he did. Only in 2007, when the CIA declassified the official documents on the Oxcart program, was Jack Weeks’s true role in the crisis finally revealed. Murray’s other mission remains classified.
24. “So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower”: Rich, Skunk Works, 44. This is in a section of Rich’s book written by Walt W. Rostow, President Johnson’s national security adviser from 1966 to 1968.
25. Murray was assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea: TOP SECRET TRINE OXCART, BYE-1330/68 figure 7. Mission BX-6853, 19 February 1968.
26. a U.S. federal judge determined: Wilber, “Hell Hath a Jury.” 27. There were beautiful sunsets to watch: Interview with Ken
Collins.
28. collectively flown twenty-nine missions: Robarge, Archangel, 35. The pilots were put on alert to fly a total of fifty-eight. Of the twentynine, twenty-four were over North Vietnam, two were over Cambodia, Laos, and the DMZ, and three were over North Korea.
29. “using our jamming systems on the bird”: Interview with Frank Murray. The Pentagon was also using Oxcart photographs to identify potential targets for U.S. Air Force air strikes. TOP SECRET CHESS RUFF TRINE Oxcart BYE-44232/67.
30. The Blackbirds were arriving on Kadena to take Oxcart’s place: Interviews with Ken Collins and Tony Bevacqua. The SR-71 began arriving in March of 1968.
31. “reaffirmed the original decision to end the A-12 program”: Helms Memorandum to Paul Nitze (DOD) and Horning, “Considerations Affecting OXCART Program Phase Out,” 18 April 1968.
32. Jack Weeks became ill: Interview with Ken Collins. 33. After Bevacqua had left Groom Lake: Interview with Tony
Bevacqua.
34. mission on July 26, 1968: This was the first time an SR-71 was fired upon by an SA-2. With Bevacqua, in the backseat, was reconna
issance systems officer Jerry Crew.
www.blackbirds.net/sr71/sr-crew-photos/ (accessed December 29, 2010).
35. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron had reached its end: The Oxcart program lasted just over ten years, from its inception as a drawing on a piece of paper called A-1, in 1957, to termination in June of 1968. Lockheed produced fifteen A-12 Oxcarts, three YF-12As, and thirty-one SR-71 Blackbirds. The CIA’s John Parangosky wrote in summation, “The 49 supersonic aircraft had completed more than 7,300 flights, with 17,000 hours in the air. Over 2,400 hours had been above Mach 3. Five OXCART were lost in accidents; two pilots were killed, and two had narrow escapes. In addition, two F-101 chase
planes were lost with their Air Force pilots during OXCART testing phase.”
36. The CIA held a special secret ceremony at Area 51: Interviews with Ken Collins, Frank Murray, Colonel Slater, and Jack Layton. Vice Admiral Rufus L. Taylor, deputy director of Central Intelligence, presented the CIA Intelligence Star for Valor to Kenneth S. Collins, Ronald L. Layton, Francis J. Murray, Dennis B. Sullivan, and Mele Vojvodich. Jack W. Weeks’s award was accepted by his widow, Sharlene Weeks. The United States Air Force Legion of Merit was presented to Colonel Hugh Slater and his deputy, Colonel Maynard N. Amundson.
37. The men moved on: Interviews with Ken Collins, Colonel Slater, Frank Murray, Charlie Trapp, Roger Andersen.
Chapter Seventeen: The MiGs of Area 51
Interviews: T. D. Barnes, Doris Barnes, Tony Landis, Peter Merlin, Colonel Slater, Frank Murray, Roger Andersen, Grace Weismann (Joe Walker’s widow)
1. Iraqi air force colonel named Munir Redfa: Uzi Mahnaimi, “Stolen Iraqi Jet Helped Israel Win Six-Day War,” Sunday Times of London, June 3, 2007.
2. “Turn back immediately”: Geller, Inside the Israeli Secret Service. I use information from chapter 3, “Stealing a Soviet MiG.”
3. Redfa flew over Turkey: Obituary, “Major-General Meir Amit,” Telegraph, July 22, 2009.
4. Amit sat down with the Israeli air force: Ibid.
5. James Jesus Angleton: Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder, 275. “Jim’s interest in Israel was of exceptional value… To my knowledge, only Israel has ever dedicated a monument to a foreign intelligence officer.” Angleton worked as “the Agency’s liaison with the FBI… The best of Angleton’s operational work is still classified and in my view should remain so.”
6. Agency’s most enigmatic and bellicose spies: Author visit to CIA spy museum, CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia.
7. “wilderness of mirrors”: Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder, 277. The phrase has become synonymous with Angleton’s thinking and most notably included Angleton’s belief that the split between the Soviet Union and China was not real. According to Helms, Angleton’s “conviction that the Sino-Soviet split was mirage created by Soviet deception experts [was] interesting but simply not true.”
8. when they worked in the OSS counterintelligence unit, X-2: Ibid., chapter 28, “Beyond X-2.”
9. Helms’s status with President Johnson: Weiner, Legacy of
Ashes, 319.
10. But what didn’t make the news: Interviews with Colonel Slater, Frank Murray, T. D. Barnes.
11. Doris was reading the classified: Interview with Doris Barnes. 12. Beatty, Nevada, was one strange town: Details about Beatty in the 1960s come from interviews with Doris Barnes and T. D. Barnes.
13. “Daddy’s spaceship!”: Interviews with the Barnes’s two daughters, who wish to remain anonymous.
14. where the X-15 could land if need be: Interview with Peter Merlin; Barnes, “NASA X-15 Program,” 1.
15. Barnes got on the radio channel: The dates and data regarding X-15 mission flights can be found in Jenkins, Hypersonics Before the Shuttle. This story of the missing audiotape comes from Barnes.
16. a catastrophic midair collision occurred: I tell the story as Barnes related it to me. Another account appears in Donald Mallick’s The Smell of Kerosene, 132-35. Mallick was assigned the helicopter mission to locate Walker’s crash site.
17. reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG: Interview with Barnes.
18. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions: Barnes, “Exploitation of MiGs at Area 51, Project Have Doughnut,” http://area51specialprojects.com/migs_area51.html; Tolip, “Black Ops: American Pilots Flying Russian Aircraft During the Cold War,” MilitaryHeat.com, October 4, 2007.
19. gave birth to the Top Gun fighter-pilot school: Interview with Barnes.
20. The scales had tipped: Wilcox, Scream of Eagles, 76–77.
Chapter Eighteen: Meltdown
Interviews: Richard Mingus, T. D. Barnes, Troy Wade, Darwin Morgan, Milton M. Klein, Harold B. Finger
1. to see what would happen: Atomic Energy Commission, Summary of Project 57, the first safety test of Operation Plumbbob, report to the General Manager by the Director, Division of Military Application, Objective, 24.
2. bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs: “Palomares Summary Report,” Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico: Field Command Defense Nuclear Agency Technology and Analysis Directorate, January 15, 1975.
3. SAC bombers would already be airborne: When LeMay left SAC in 1957 to become the Air Force vice chief of staff, he left behind a fighting force of 1,665 bomber aircraft, 68 bases around the world, and 224,014 men. The man who took over was Thomas S. Powers.
4. “all of a sudden, all hell”: Ron Hayes, “H-bomb Incident Crippled Pilot’s Career,” Palm Beach Post, January 17, 2007.
5. aerosolized plutonium: Gordon Dunning, “Protective and Remedial Measures Taken Following Three Incidents of Fallout,” United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1968. This was originally given as a speech called “Radiation Protection of the Public in Large Scale Nuclear Disaster,” for an international agency symposium in Interlaken, Switzerland, in May 1968.
6. President Johnson learned: Moran, Day We Lost the H-Bomb,
36.
7. official nuclear disaster response team: Memo, Secret, United States Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505, “Responsibility for Search and Rescue Operations,” to M. E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations, November 19, 1974.
8. to assist in the cleanup efforts: Nuclear Weapon Accident Response Procedures (NARP) Manual, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), September 1990, xii.
9. “will never be known”: Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 408.
10. “I don’t know of any missing bomb”: Anthony Lake, “Lying Around Washington,” Foreign Policy, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 93. Thirtyeight U.S. Navy ships participated in the search for the bomb, which was eventually located five miles offshore in 2,850 feet of water by a submersible called Alvin.
11. during a secret mission over Greenland: SAC History Staff, Project Crested Ice, SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA, SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED, AFR 127-4: FOIA 89-107 OAS-) 1793. This source document provided many facts for this section.
12. A second fire started at the crash site: The cloud formed by the explosion measured “850 m high, 800 m in length, and 800 m in depth, and undoubtedly carried some plutonium downwind,” according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
13. One of the bombs fell into the bay: Gordon Corea, “Mystery of Lost US Nuclear Bomb,” BBC News, November 10, 2008.
14. “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures”: SAC History Staff, Project Crested Ice, 28.
15. “abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium”: Rollins, “Nevada Test Site — Site Description,” Table 2–4.
16. Called remote sensing: Department of Energy Fact Sheet DOE/NV #1140. The Remote Sensing Laboratory was established in the 1950s, an offshoot of atomic cloud sampling projects. Today, it is a secret industry about which very little is known publicly; http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV_1140.pdf.
17. initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory: EG&G Energy Measurements Division (EG&G/EM) of EG&G, Inc., managed and operated the research facility under DOE Contract DE-ACO3
93NV11265. On January 1, 1996, Be
chtel Nevada Corporation operated the research and production facilities under DOE M&O Contract DE-ACO8-96NV11718.
18. to secure the government contracts to clean things up: And what a massive market it would become. In addition to future nuclear accidents, there would be a colossal amount of radiation detection work to be done in, on, and around the Pacific Proving Ground. Between 1946 and 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission had exploded forty nuclear bombs, including the largest thermonuclear bomb ever exploded by the United States, the fifteen-megaton Castle Bravo bomb — a thousand times as powerful as the weapon dropped on Hiroshima. In June of 1971, an EG&G crew was dispatched to Eniwetok Atoll by the Atomic Energy Commission “for the purposes of pre-cleanup surveying.” EG&G had armed, wired, and fired all the bombs in the Pacific. Now, using radiation detection equipment, the company determined that the island was still uninhabitable by all life forms in the water and the air — even after thirteen years. But clean-up efforts could begin. These efforts would take decades, cost untold dollars, and involve several different contractors. EG&G would lead the way.
19. EG&G had been taking radiation measurements: Interviews with Al O’Donnell, Jim Freedman; Eniwetok Precleanup Survey Soil and Terrestrial, Radiation Survey (Lynch, Gudiksen and Jones) No. 44878; draft revised 5/14/73.
20. corporate headquarters won’t say: Interview with Meagan Stafford, EG&G/URS public relations, Sard Verbinnen & Co., July 16, 2010.
21. President Clinton was in 1994: Interview with EG&G engineer. DOE Openness Initiative, Human Radiation Experiments, EG&G Energy Measurements, Las Vegas, Nevada, Finding Aids, Radioactive Fallout: “EG&G/EM played an important role in monitoring airborne radiation from weapons testing, and it retained many records relating to monitoring air-borne radiation including reports on the Nevada Aerial Tracking Systems for the 1960s. The company has
developed a computerized inventory of the collection which includes some 24,000 classified documents, films, view-graphs, and other materials. Currently the company is attempting to reorganize its archives into a usable collection designed to accommodate future research efforts. The dismantling process that was begun in 1986 has been halted. The CIC will retain fallout records from the aboveground testing program. All other original research documentation, film, notebooks, and other records relating to EG&G/EM’s important role in monitoring airborne radiation and weapons testing, including reports and maps of cloud tracking still housed at EM, will be retained by EM. Classified Material Control (CMC) contains numerous reports on later testing programs and Aerial Tracking Systems reports for the 1960s. The company also holds original survey data for the period before 1971, but this has not been inventoried. There is an effort under way to obtain the funding to inventory and create a computerized database for these records.”