by Phil Patton
But once you opened your mind to the possibility of active disinformation, all kinds of questions came up. Who, some UFO buffs could ask, would most likely have the resources to fake the celebrated Santilli film of the “alien autopsy” claimed to date from the Roswell crash? If such official duplicity was common, what, then, could be trusted? For years, youfers had been charging the government with a cover-up, but now, ironically, the opposite had to be considered: The government may be manipulating, even generating, UFO reports to conceal secret programs.
This possibility was made more intriguing by a report that appeared in the summer of 1997 suggesting the CIA and Air Force had been happy to have many sightings of the U-2 and the A-12 classified as UFO sightings simply to hide the existence of the planes. This was natural mutation at work. The report came in an article by Gerald Haines, the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office, which appeared in the CIA publication Studies in Intelligence. In “A Die Hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” Haines declared that “over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States.” This was especially true during the early days of its development, when the aircraft, not yet painted black, were silver.
Such confusion was apparently officially encouraged, but there was no evidence that it was actually suggested or directed. Later, things may have become different. Haines recorded that one branch of the CIA, the OSI’s Life Science Division, had “counterintelligence concerns” in the seventies and eighties “that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs such as the Stealth aircraft.” Such information mutations led to active disinformation. The Air Force, Haines reported, was forced “to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.”
To understand how this might have evolved, one has to understand the mind-set of the Reagan era, a period I came to think of as the Second Cold War, a renewal of hostility and fear after the détente of the seventies. Its beginnings can be traced to Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire”—the resemblance of the era’s language to that of the film Star Wars is significant. The ideology of this second war, however, can be traced to a group of advisers who believed that the Soviet threat was underestimated because it had been cleverly disguised.
I had met one of the men who believed this. He had been a deputy director of the CIA in the early seventies and was now in private business. He introduced me to the concepts of maskirovka and dezinformatsiia—disinformation. Disinformation was the buzzword of the resurgent youfer conspiracy theories of the eighties.
We met at a Denny’s restaurant near Washington. Somehow we got to talking about the Blackbirds. He shook his head in lingering wonder at the Skunk Works, and recounted the speed with which they had built the Blackbird. He seemed nostalgic for those days, the years of the Evil Empire and Star Wars, when “active counterintelligence”—Doty’s “legitimate lying”—was in vogue.
The man explained that he had debriefed a Warsaw Bloc defector, a Czech named Jan Sejna, who told him that practically the whole Czech air defense system was phony: wooden missiles, fake troops. The Soviets, he said, would run whole schemes of bogus radio traffic and move out dummy equipment during the periods when U.S. satellites passed overhead. It sounded all of a piece with the infamous Soviet Air Force Day fly-by—the Hollywood trick of running the same bombers past the reviewing stand again and again—that had inspired the bomber gap.
This, he explained, was a technique long beloved of the Russians: maskirovka—the use of disguises, tactical and strategic, of fake SAM sites, of airplanes that flew around in circles in May Day–type parades, “bluffing up” the bomber forces to suggest a bomber gap that the U-2 would have to seek out and debunk. There was a Russian tradition, apparently, of the military Potemkin village.
There was also dezinformatsiia, he told me, the creation of phony programs, documents, and informers. And who was to say the Soviets weren’t doing this on the strategic as well as the tactical scale? Such thoughts were freely accepted at hard-right institutions like the Hoover Institute. For men such as Sam Cohen, “the father of the neutron bomb,” this raised larger questions: Were the missiles the Soviets seemed to be placing in silos really there, or were they empty containers? Were the real missiles stashed away on railcars traveling the vast and trackless central expanse of the Soviet Union, in violation of all SALT treaties? This was a popular line of thinking in the Reagan years; later the proponents of the B-2 Stealth bomber suggested that the huge flying wing would roam the countryside searching out those missiles. In the traditional Cold War mode called “mirror-imaging”—if they’ve got a weapon, we also must have that same weapon—it could also be taken as justification for an American effort in maskirovka and disinformation. Thus the eighties became a period of “proactive” deception—American disinformation to cover secret programs.
I had doubts about the whole premise. What if the defector himself was disinformation, a plant? What if the fake missiles were real? If the goal had been to spread doubt and uncertainty, it had worked. We, the enemy, were frozen if we bought the story—either way. In this light it was worth considering whether MJ-12 or at least the Bennewitz disinformation effort had been a kind of counterintelligence maneuver.
The answer would likely never be known. John Pike, the Federation of American Scientists expert on secrecy, was convinced there had been many active counterintelligence programs surrounding Star Wars. He met a man who had presented himself as a journalist for an industry newsletter and who claimed to have a lot of useful information about Area 51. But, Pike would recall, “he seemed more interested in telling than in asking,” and he subsequently seemed to vanish into thin air. Active disinformation, he felt sure, had helped cover Star Wars programs. And Star Wars’ relation to Dreamland was another mystery.
On March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered his famous “Star Wars,” or “Strategic Defense Initiative,” speech. Within a year a huge effort was under way to develop all sorts of high-tech antimissile weapons and energy beams. Black budgets for weapons increased from $892 million in 1981 to $8.6 billion for fiscal year 1987—and Dreamland would have been the natural place for testing the aircraft, UAVs, lasers, high-frequency radio weapons, and other technologies. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization that had grown from the Star Wars initiative was also the likely developer of the Tier III UAV, the legendary bat plane that had been spotted around Dreamland.
These years naturally saw increased efforts in security as well, especially in the area of disinformation, based on a reading of Soviet disinformation and maskirovka. And psychological investigations of various types—such as those developed at the R&D fringe of the CIA back in the days of blind LSD experiments and brainwashing—seem to have increased.
The Lore is full of references to mind control experiments, but holographic images are also a real possibility: The test of the ability of equipment to create illusions would have been just the sort of thing that could produce strangely moving lights above the Jumbled Hills.
Reagan believed in Wunderwaffe, wonder weapons. This belief was deeply rooted in his Hollywood past, as the historian Garry Wills showed in his book Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. The Star Wars–era ray guns were anticipated in Reagan’s Brass Bancroft films of the thirties and forties, which introduced similar themes. Murder in the Air, for instance, described an “inertia projector,” a kind of force beam. Reagan was idealistic about the lasers: They were defensive, just as the Lone Ranger uses his silver bullets not to kill people but to knock the guns out of the hands of the bad guys. It was a dream of peace without bloodshed.
With the military buildup, maneuvers and exercises increased. NATO was flying entire armored divisions across the At
lantic to show that it could respond to a Soviet invasion. Counterintelligence didn’t want to be left out. How do you “go on maneuvers” in counterintelligence? Well, you run an active disinformation campaign, targeted at producing a widespread belief in something. The target could have been the American public at large or simply the UFO community, just as the targets for SAC or for Stealth were, in practice runs, the cities and towns of America.
The counterintelligence professionals included the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. AFOSI, in charge of such matters as theft, drugs, procurement violations, and the personal security of officers, is also in charge of counterintelligence, which means preventing spying or other information leaks. Some counterintelligence is defensive but most is offensive or proactive—the creation of covers, such as the deceptive A-7 aircraft that were displayed as cover for the Stealth fighter.
Some active disinformation documents, including faked Air Force letters and reports, have been convincingly traced to AFOSI and to a Colonel Hennessey. He was part of the AFOSI’s PJ section—which handled counterintelligence for secret programs. When Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico wrote the General Accounting Office inquiring about any government records having to do with Majestic 12, the only interesting item the GAO came up with was a message dated November 17, 1980, from the operations division of AFOSI, containing the phrase “MJ Twelve.” AFOSI concluded that the message was a forgery.
Whether they were real, active disinformation, or amateur fakes, one of the strongest pieces of evidence against the MJ-12 papers is the reference in one of them to Area 51. By the best evidence, that designation had not been bestowed by the Atomic Energy Commission until 1958. (Peter Merlin tracked it to the test site bulletin, and mundane changes in phone numbers.) The area had not been used for anything to speak of until Tony LeVier flew over it in 1955.
However, there is incontrovertible proof of the existence of “alien” craft at Area 51—Soviet ones. The military tried to hide their existence, but it was secretly very proud of the captured Soviet airplanes, furtively brought into the area. And since they were there—denied, hidden—who was to say that yet other alien craft were not there also?
17. Red Square, Red Hats, and STUDs
Press button for pleasure, reads the neatly routed Formica sign on the chain-link at the Shamrock Lounge, near Lathrop Wells, west of Dreamland. The Shamrock is one of several legal cathouses in Nevada’s Amargosa Valley, most little more than a collection of trailers, linked together and fenced off.
If you had been inside the Shamrock, or in the café at Lathrop Wells, where old men linger, sipping coffee and sopping up their gravy with sourdough biscuits, late on the morning of March 26, 1984, you would have been distracted by the boom of an airplane hitting the ground.
It was the sound of Maj. Gen. Robert Bond plunging into the ground and to his death after losing control of his aircraft and smashing into a mountainside.
Secret planes become unsecret when they fall out of the sky. The news of a mysterious airplane crash near Dreamland and the fact that a general was in the cockpit meant the story could not be contained. There was immediate press speculation that Bond had been flying a “super-secret new stealth airplane.” Among UFO watchers, the speculation went further—had Bond been testing one of the recovered saucers? As recently as 1991, in his book Cosmic Top Secret, William Hamilton declared, “The Air Force refused to say what type of plane Bond was flying at Area 51, but it seems highly irregular for the Air Force to use a three-star general as a test pilot. Is it possible that the general was test flying a recovered alien spacecraft?” In fact, Bond had been flying a MiG-23.
Bobby Bond was known around the Skunk Works as a stickler and worrier. A hard-driving Tactical Air Command fighter type, he was also cleared on Stealth and other secret programs. Bond’s crash brought the foreign technology program to light. It was run by what was at one time called the Foreign Technology Division out of Wright Patterson—exactly the place where the saucers were supposed to be hidden. Foreign tech indeed.
The Lore held that other alien technology was buried more deeply in the legendary Hangar 18, and alien bodies—some said dead, some said living—were kept in tanks of liquid and cryogenic coolers. Where but the Foreign Technology Division, the believers ask, would the Roswell bodies have been stored?
The only piece of alien flying technology ever photographed and positively identified at Dreamland was not from Zeta Reticuli or any other system. It was a MiG-21, captured in John Lear’s shot from the lake edge in September 1978. That image confirmed what had long been suspected: that a program existed for testing aircraft captured, stolen, bribed, or otherwise purloined from the Soviet bloc.
Like a real-world shadow of the UFO testing programs of the Lore, the “Red Hat” squadron program was highly secret, in order not to compromise the sources of the planes—and the spare parts, engines, and tires needed to keep them flying. The important secrets had to do not with enemies but with allies, as Frank Powers was given to understand: The U-2 flights to be protected at all costs were not those over the Soviet Union but those over Israel and Egypt, aimed at the waning power of Great Britain and France.
It began in 1953, when the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division (now Foreign Aerospace Technology Center) at Wright Patterson Air Force Base first flew a Yak-23, smuggling it out of Eastern Europe, testing it from the Dayton base as a U.S. “X-5” painted up in American insignia. When the testing was finished, the airplane was smuggled back inside the Iron Curtain.
The “Black Yak” was followed only years later by a series of tests of MiGs, called by the code names “Have Drill” and “Have Doughnut.” This was the work of the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron, the Red Hats, who wore red stars on their patches, and the Air Technology intelligence center.
When Kelly Johnson had pushed for the Blackbird as a high-altitude interceptor, he was thinking of war against the Soviet Union, of fleets of incoming bombers, to be dispatched by look-down shoot-down radar, and missiles. The Air Force envisioned fighter combat in largely the same terms: The fighter bosses believed combat would take place without the two opposing fighters ever seeing each other. They would lock on by radar at long distance. No guns were necessary.
But dogfighting returned in Vietnam, with U.S. fighters facing North Vietnamese MiGs. The F-4 Phantom was losing fights with MiGs at a disturbing rate—one Phantom downed for every two MiGs.
In the Six-Day War, the Israelis acquired a number of the Soviet planes from captured airfields, defectors, or—in one case—when Libyan pilots landed at a Sinai base they did not know had already been taken by the Israelis. They are the probable source of a MiG-17 obtained by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1967, the first one to fly in Dreamland. Later, the United States would acquire—just how remains a mystery—a MiG-21, Su-22s, and MiG-23s, and by the nineties even an Su-27 Flanker, the most advanced Russian aircraft.
After France cut off sales of Mirage fighters to Israel, to placate the Arab nations that provided its oil, the United States struck an agreement to sell the Israelis planes and made captured MiGs part of the price.
Soon men in the ranks at Nellis AFB began jokingly referring to the box of restricted airspace around the secret base as Red Square.
In the project called Have Drill, the Red Hats flew the MiG-17 from Groom Lake in simulated dogfights over the desert to figure out its strengths and weaknesses. The MiG performed better than the Phantom at low speeds—it could turn “inside” the F-4 every time—but if the F-4 pilot kept speeds up and stayed outside and behind, he could win. Using the tactics developed at Groom, the Navy produced a film called Throw a Nickel on the Grass (a line from an old Navy fliers’ song) and brought in classes of pilots for retraining. By the end of the war, the kill ratio had shifted to eight-to-one.
At the 1969 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, the talk among the pilots turned to MiGs. A number of admirals were flown up to Groom and put through the paces in the
captured aircraft.
In the eighties, with more aircraft acquired through Afghanistan, a new program called Constant Peg was set up at Tonopah. The Red Eagles, as they were called, were part of the same 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron. They trained Navy as well as Air Force pilots and, after carrier-based fighters shot down two Libyan MiGs in 1989, a Pentagon spokesman, in a moment of pride overcoming tact, bragged that the successful pilots had been trained in enemy aircraft.
With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, the foreign-technology boys set their sights even higher. It was the military yard sale of all time, and by 1993 the American taxpayer was spending half a billion dollars per year for “foreign material acquisitions.”
Trader (aka Paul McGinnis) tracked down the cost of running one evaluation program—he could rattle off the number by heart—the program with element number 207248F. The program behind the number was called STUDs, for “special tactical unit detachments.” It is hard to believe that any connotations with regard to this acronym are other than intentional. From fiscal 1993 to 1994 STUDs went from $885,000 to $20 million, and to $118 million for 1995.
Many of the foreign aircraft have probably come into the country by surreptitious sale or bribe. They may even include advanced prototypes purchased from a renegade general or engineer. But there was a limit to the process—a classic catch-22. All military systems are supposed to involve fair competition among different contractors or suppliers, with a request for proposals and evaluation. But since the “source” of the MiGs was not only “sole” but secret and clandestine, the Pentagon could hardly hold competitions among the corrupt Warsaw bloc colonels or Third World defectors who could provide the hardware.