produced a map of the state, asking him to mark Watertown’s exact location. Whether the Soviets were playing a game with Powers or whether he was telling his readers the truth but “with definite limitation” remains unclear. Either way, trial transcripts from August of 1960, declassified by the CIA in 1985, revealed that the Soviets knew exactly where Watertown was and that it was located inside the Nevada Test Site. During Powers’s trial, Soviet procurator-general Rudenko asked his comrade judges if they were familiar with “the deposition of the accused Powers which he gave in the preliminary investigations and here in court on the preparations for flights in the U-2 aircraft at the Las Vegas firing range (poligon) in the Nevada desert,” and then he fingered the base as being used by the CIA for “the training in the use of special reconnaissance aircraft.” Not before the publication of this book has it been understood that the KGB clearly knew about Area 51 during the Powers trial.
Further, the trial revealed that the Soviets also had a much clearer picture of the inner workings of the American military-industrial complex and its defense-contracting system than the CIA had previously known. Rudenko was able to name “Lockheed company” as the manufacturer of the U-2. He argued that the existence of the “Las Vegas firing range,” aka Area 51, and the Lockheed spy plane exemplified what he called a “criminal conspiracy” between “a major American capitalist company, an espionage and reconnaissance center, and the military of America.” In his speech to the USSR International Affairs Committee, Rudenko had correctly identified the three players in the triangle of Area 51: defense contractors, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon.
After a three-day trial, the Soviets determined that Gary Powers, having been caught spying on Russia, exposed the United States for what it really was: “an enemy of the peace.” Powers was sentenced to ten years in prison. President Eisenhower was judged to be a “follower of Hitler,” the lowest insult in the Russian lexicon. Hitler had doublecrossed Khrushchev’s predecessor, Joseph Stalin, in 1941, and the result of that double cross was twenty million Russians dead. In comparing Eisenhower to Hitler, Khrushchev was sending a clear message: diplomacy was off the table. The upcoming east-west summit in Paris was canceled. How bad could things get?
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics issued a press release identifying Watertown as the U-2 training facility but stating falsely that it was no longer used as a training base. The Russians knew that statement was meant to mislead the American public and not Russia’s intelligence service, the KGB — and the CIA knew the Soviets had first-person information about Area 51 in the form of Gary Powers, not just photographic images of the facility from the satellites they’d been sending overhead.
With the White House absorbing the fallout from the Gary Powers affair, the CIA and the Air Force were deeply involved in the Mach 3 replacement for the U-2 out at the Ranch. The 8,500-foot-long runway, designated 14/32 and believed to be the longest in the world, had been finished, complete with a two-mile semicircular extension called the Hook, which would allow an A-12 pilot extra room for maneuvering were he to overshoot the runway. Four new aircraft hangars were built, designated 4, 5, 6, and 7. The former U-2 hangars whose metal doors had buckled in the atomic blast were converted into maintenance facilities and machine shops. Navy housing units, 140 in all, were transported to the base and laid out in neat rows. The commissary was expanded, as was the movie house and fire station. Richard Bissell had a tennis court put in, and plans for an Olympic-size swimming pool were drawn. The airspace over the entire region was given its own designation, R-4808N, separate from what had previously been designated Prohibited Area P-275; it included the Nevada Test Site, Area 13, and Area 51. All the CIA was waiting for was Lockheed’s delivery of the A-12 airplanes.
At Lockheed, each Mach 3 aircraft was literally being hand forged, part by part, one airplane at a time. The production of the aircraft, according to Richard Bissell, “spawned its own industrial base. Special tools had to be developed, along with new paints, chemicals, wires, oils, engines, fuel, even special titanium screws. By the time Lockheed finished building the A-12, they themselves had developed and manufactured thirteen million different parts.” It was the titanium that first held everything up. Titanium was the only metal strong enough to handle the kind of heat the Mach 3 aircraft would have to endure: 500- to 600-degree temperatures on the fuselage’s skin and nearly 1,000 degrees in places close to the engines. This meant the titanium alloy had to be pure; nearly 95 percent of what Lockheed initially received had to be rejected. Titanium was also critically sensitive to the chemical chlorine, a fact Lockheed engineers did not realize at first. During the summer, when chlorine levels in the Burbank water system were elevated to fight algae, inside the Skunk Works, airplane pieces started to mysteriously corrode. Eventually, the problem was discovered, and the entire Skunk Works crew had to switch over to distilled water. Next it was discovered that titanium was also sensitive to cadmium, which was what most of Lockheed’s tools were plated with. Hundreds of toolboxes had to be reconfigured, thousands of tools tossed out. The next problem was power related. Wind-tunnel testing in Burbank was draining too much electricity off the local grid. If a reporter found out about the electricity drain, it could lead to unwanted questions. NASA offered Kelly Johnson an alternative wind-tunnel test facility up in Northern California, near the Mojave, which was where Lockheed engineers ended up — performing their tests late at night under cover of darkness. The complicated nature of all things Oxcart pushed the new spy plane further and further behind the schedule.
At Area 51, the concern continued to be stealth. The radar results from the pole tests were promising, but as the Oxcart advanced, so did Soviet countermeasures to shoot it down. Russia was spending billions of rubles on surface-to-air missile technology and the CIA soon learned that the Oxcart’s new nemesis was a system called Tall King. Getting hard data on Tall King’s exact capabilities before the Oxcart went anywhere near it was now a top priority for the CIA.
To understand countermeasures, the CIA initiated an esoteric research-and-development program called Project Palladium. The program would get its legs over Cuba and eventually move to Area 51. It would involve ELINT. In 1960, “there were many CIA officers who thought ELINT was a dirty word,” recalls Gene Poteat, the engineer in charge of Project Palladium, which originated with the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. Poteat was one of the early pioneers who helped change that perception inside the CIA. “We needed to know the sensitivity of Soviet radar receivers and the proficiency of its operators,” Poteat explains. With Khrushchev using Cuba as a military base in the Western Hemisphere, the CIA saw an opportunity. “When the Soviets moved into Cuba with their missiles and associated radar, we were presented with a golden opportunity to measure the system sensitivity of the SA-2 aircraft missile radar,” says Poteat. To do this, the CIA needed a brigade of missile wizards. This included men like T. D. Barnes. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes was a CIA asset at an age when most men hadn’t graduated from college yet. Married at seventeen to his highschool sweetheart, Doris, Barnes became a self-taught electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up, and reselling them for five times the amount. In doing so, he went from bitter poverty — raised on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity or running water — to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. Barnes credited his mother for his becoming one of the CIA’s most important radar countermeasure experts. “My mom saw an article on radar in Life magazine when I was no more than nine or ten. She said I should write a school report on the subject and so I did. That’s when I got bit with the radar bug.”
At age seventeen, Barnes lied about his age to join the National Guard so he could go fight in Korea. He dreamed of one day being an Army officer. Two years later he was deployed to the 38th Parallel to defend the region alongside a British and a Turkish infantry company. It was in Korea that Barnes began his intelligence career at the bottom of the chain of command. “I was the guy who sat on the top of the hill and looked for enemy soldiers. If I saw ’em coming, it was my job to radio the information back to base,” Barnes recalls. He loved the Army. The things he learned there stayed with him all his life: “Never waste a moment. Shine your boots when you’re sitting on the pot. Always go to funerals. Look out for your men.” Once, in Korea, a wounded soldier was rushed onto the base. Barnes overheard that the man needed to be driven to the hospital, but because gas was scarce, all vehicles had to be signed out by a superior. With no superior around, Barnes worried the man might die if he didn’t get help fast, so he signed his superior’s name on the order. “I was willing to take the demerit,” Barnes explains. His actions caught the attention of the highest-ranking officer on the base, Major General Carl Jark, and later earned him a meritorious award. When the war was over General Jark pointed Barnes in the direction of radar and electronics. “He suggested I go to Fort Bliss and get myself an education there,” Barnes explains. So T.D. and Doris Barnes headed to Texas. There, Barnes’s whole world would change. And it didn’t take long for his exceptional talents to come to the attention of the CIA.
Barnes loved learning. At Fort Bliss, he attended classes for Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules missile school by day and classes at Texas Western University by night for the next fifty-four months. These were the missiles that had been developed a decade earlier by the Paperclip scientists, born originally of the German V-2 rocket. At Fort Bliss, Barnes read technical papers authored by former Nazi scientists. Sometimes the Paperclip scientists taught class. “No one really thought of them as former Nazis,” says Barnes. “They were the experts. They worked for us
