regarding the terrain just up the beach from the Bay of Pigs beach. Photo interpreters determined that the swampland in the area would be hard to run in unless the commandos familiarized themselves with preexisting trails. As for the water landing itself, from seventy thousand feet in the air, the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs looked flat and lovely. But because cameras could not photograph what lay underwater, Bissell had no idea that just beneath the surface of the sea there was a deadly coral reef that would later greatly impede the water landing by commandos.
Hundreds of pages, declassified after thirty years, reveal the hand of economics wizard Richard Bissell in the design of the paramilitary operation. Bissell painstakingly outlined: “Contingency Plans… Probabilities… Likelihood, chance of success… Plans for Operation ‘T,’… Operation ‘Z,’… Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3… Pre-Day Day plans… D-Day plans… Post D-Day plans… Unattributable actions by the Navy… Post-Recognition Plans… Arguments for maximum sabotage… Arguments for simultaneous defection… Feasibility of declaration of war by certain Central American states… Disclosures… Non-Disclosures… Continuation of Psychological Warfare Plans… How to deal, and how not to deal with the press.” For all the organization and preplanning, the operation might have been successful. But there are many reasons why it failed so tragically. When the Bay of Pigs operation was over, hundreds of CIA- trained, anti-Castro Cuban exiles were killed on approach or left to die on the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs. Those that lived to surrender were imprisoned and later ransomed back to the United States. When the story became public, so did brigade commander Pepe San Roman’s last words before his capture: “Must have air support in the next few hours or we will be wiped out. Under heavy attacks by MiG jets and heavy tanks.” Pepe San Roman begged Richard Bissell for help. “All groups demoralized… They consider themselves deceived.” By the end of the day, Richard Bissell’s world had begun to fall irreparably apart. The Bay of Pigs would be his downfall.
There was plenty of blame to go around but almost all of it fell at the feet of the CIA. In the years since, it has become clear that equal blame should be imputed to the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and President Kennedy. Shortly before he died, Richard Bissell blamed the mission’s failure on his old rival General Curtis LeMay. Bissell lamented that if LeMay had provided adequate air cover as he had promised, the mission would most likely have been a success. The Pentagon has historically attributed LeMay’s failure to send B-26 bombers to the Bay of Pigs to a “time zone confusion.” Bissell saw the mix-up as personal, believing that LeMay had been motivated by revenge. That he’d harbored a grudge against Bissell for the U-2 and Area 51. Whatever the reason, more than three hundred people were dead and 1,189 anti-Castro guerrillas, left high and dry, had been imprisoned. The rivalry between Bissell and LeMay was over, and the Bay of Pigs would force Richard Bissell to leave government service in February of 1962. There were many government backlashes as a result of the fiasco. One has been kept secret until now, namely that President Kennedy sent the CIA’s inspector general at the time, Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr., out to Area 51 to write up a report on the base. More specifically, the president wanted to assess what other Richard Bissell disasters in the making might be coming down the pipeline at Area 51.
Adding friction to an already charged situation was the fact that by some accounts, Kirkpatrick held a grudge. Before the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell was in line to succeed Allen Dulles as director of the CIA, and eight years earlier, Lyman Kirkpatrick had worn those coveted shoes. But like Bissell, Kirkpatrick was cut down in his prime. Kirkpatrick’s loss came not by his own actions but by a tragic blow beyond his control. On an Agency mission to Asia in 1952, Lyman Kirkpatrick contracted polio and became paralyzed from the waist down. Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Kirkpatrick was relegated to the role of second-tier bureaucrat.
In a world of gentlemen spy craft and high-technology espionage, bureaucracy was considered glorified janitorial work. But when Kirkpatrick was dispatched to Area 51 by JFK, the fate and future of the secret base Richard Bissell had built in the Nevada desert lay in Lyman Kirkpatrick’s hands.
Chapter Nine: The Base Builds Back Up
As the man in charge of property control at Area 51, Jim Freedman was a taskmaster. “It was my job to provide services for all the different groups at the area,” Freedman explains. “This included the CIA, the Air Force, EG&G, REECo [Reynolds Electric and Engineering], and even Howard Hughes — an individual who very few people had any idea had his own hangar out at the Ranch.” What exactly Hughes was doing at Area 51 remains classified as of 2011, but Freedman explains the dynamic that was at play. “The CIA liked to foster competition between groups. It was why we had Kodak and Polaroid, Lockheed and North American, EG&G and Hughes. They were all no-bid contracts for security reasons. But competition keeps people on their toes.” Jim Freedman acted as the gofer among the groups from 1960 until 1974. If a scientist needed a widget, if an engineer needed an oscilloscope, or if a radar expert needed a piece of magnetic tape, it was Freedman’s job to get it, fast. As a prerequisite for the job, Freedman knew how to keep secrets. He carried a top secret and a Q clearance and had worked for EG&G since 1953. “We worked under a code that said, ‘What you learn here, leave here.’ That was pretty simple to follow,” says Freedman. “You couldn’t afford to talk. You’d lose your job and you’d be blackballed. So instead, my wife and family thought I fixed TVs. ‘How was your day, Dad?’ my kids would ask when I got home. ‘Great!’ I’d say. ‘I fixed twenty-four TVs.’”
As they had been with the Manhattan Project, the various jobs going on at Area 51 were compartmentalized for Oxcart, so that every person worked within very strict need-to-know protocols. The radar people had no idea about the ELINT people, who had no idea what any of the search-and-rescue teams were up to. Each group worked on its part of the puzzle. Each man was familiar with his single piece. Only a few individuals, officers working in managerial capacities, understood a corner of the puzzle — at most. But someone had to act as a go-between among these disparate groups, and in this way, Freedman became an individual who knew a lot more than most about the inner workings of Area 51.
He also knew the layout of the base. Most Area 51 workers were confined to the building, or buildings, they worked in, the building they slept in, and the mess hall, where everybody dined together. As the Area 51 runner, Freedman “went to places out there that I don’t think other people even knew were out there.” For example, Freedman says, there was “the faraway runway where people who were not supposed to be seen by others were brought into the base.” Freedman tells a story of one such group, the exact date of which he can’t recall but that was during the Vietnam War. “One day I was out there delivering something to someone, it was three in the morning, and I watched an airplane land. Then I watched forty-one Vietnamese men get off the plane. I never saw the men again, but a few days later I was sent on an errand. My supervisor said, ‘Jim, can you go to Las Vegas and get me x number of pounds of a special kind of rice?’ I’d say it was fairly obvious who that rice was being requested for.” Freedman elaborates: “These [foreign nationals] were being trained to use stateof-the-art Agency equipment out at the Area, which they probably took with them when they left and went and put behind enemy lines.”
Freedman’s first job at the test site had been installing radios in EG&G vehicles used during weapons tests. Next, he was trained as an engineer in the art of wiring nuclear bombs. In the 1950s, Freedman participated in dozens of nuclear tests on the arming and firing party alongside Al O’Donnell at the test site and also at the Pacific Proving Ground. “I even managed to survive a helicopter crash in the Marshall Islands,” Freedman adds. In 1957, EG&G learned that Freedman had studied photography after high school and assigned him to a team photographing nuclear explosions. But by 1960, the nuclear-test-ban treaty was in effect, testing had moved underground, and Freedman’s life had taken what he called “a dull turn.”
One afternoon, he was sitting inside an EG&G warehouse in Las Vegas, cleaning camera equipment. “I was thinking about how fast office work gets boring when my boss walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, Jim, do you want to go work on a secret project?’” Freedman didn’t hesitate. “I said yes, because it sounded interesting, and I wound up at Area 51. I’d never heard of the place before I went there. I never knew it existed just over the hill from the Nevada Test Site where I’d worked for so many years. Neither did anyone else who didn’t have a need-toknow.” When Freedman arrived at Area 51, it felt to him “like I was arriving on the far side of the moon. You know about the bright side of the moon; well, in relative terms, that was what the test site was like. Area 51 was the dark side.” What began as a short-term contract in December of 1960 would last for Jim Freedman for the next fourteen years.
One day, in the late summer of 1961, just two months after the Bay of Pigs became public, Jim Freedman was walking around the base with a checklist of tasks. His priority job that week struck him as a very odd, very low-tech request. In a world of cutting-edge science and technological gadgets relating to espionage, the supervisor wanted Freeman to help Area 51 carpenters locate more plywood. “The workers were transforming a set of steps
