into a ramp,” he explains. “This was happening all over the base. Lots of doorsills were becoming lots of ramps and I remember thinking, There’s a lot of money going into getting something low and on wheels to be able to move around this base.” Freedman knew not to ask questions. “But when a small airplane landed, and out came a man in the wheelchair, I watched my boss, Werner Weiss of the CIA, meet the man out on the tarmac. And I knew from watching their interaction just how important this man was to the CIA. He had white-silvery hair. A very memorable figure in a wheelchair. For years, I looked for him on TV.” Freedman never saw the man on TV, but the man was Lyman Kirkpatrick, inspector general for the CIA. Working on presidential orders to assess Area 51, Kirkpatrick is the only CIA inspector general known to have visited the base. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, Kirkpatrick managed to meticulously cover the rugged high-desert terrain. After Kirkpatrick examined the various buildings he asked to be driven around the outer edges of the base. There, he found what he considered to be a security flaw. “The high and rugged northeast perimeter of the immediate operating area, which I visited in order to see for myself, is not under government ownership,” Kirkpatrick wrote in his report, which was declassified in 2004 but has since been removed from the CIA library archives. “It is subject to a score or more of mineral claims, at least one of which is visited periodically by its owner,” Kirkpatrick wrote, referring to the Black Metal and Groom mines. “Several claims are sites of unoccupied buildings or cellars which together with the terrain in general afford excellent opportunity for successful penetration by a skilled and determined opposition,” Kirkpatrick warned. As inspector general for the CIA, Kirkpatrick was concerned that the base was not “rigorously protected against sabotage,” most notably by “air violations.” In the game of cat and mouse between the Soviet Union and the United States, tensions were at an all-time high. First there had been the Gary Powers incident, in May of 1960. Less than a year later came the CIA’s failed commando operation at the Bay of Pigs. The president had been advised that the Soviets could be preparing their own operation as payback for either of those events. Former president Eisenhower told Kennedy that “the failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would otherwise not do,” and Lyman Kirkpatrick warned that one type of sabotage operation the Soviets could be considering might involve hitting Area 51. It would be a strike between the eyes, meant to harm the office of the president in the view of the people. After Gary Powers, the White House had promised that the Watertown facility had been closed down. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the president promised to rein in covert activity by the CIA. Any public revelation that Area 51 existed would expose the fact that the CIA, the Air Force, and defense contractors were all working together on a black project to overfly Russia again — despite presidential assurances that they would do no such thing. If the nation were to discover the Mach 3 spy plane project moving forward at Area 51, what would they think about the president’s promises? Area 51 was a target in exposure alone, the inspector general said. Jim Freedman was one of the men assigned to photograph and assess the mines in the mountains — the terrain that Kirkpatrick had said would “afford excellent opportunity for successful penetration.”
Freedman’s superior, Hank Meierdierck, decided to make a hunting trip out of the task. Meierdierck was a living legend at Area 51. In 1956 he had worked as the CIA’s instructor pilot on base, teaching the Project Aquatone pilots how to fly the U-2. Now, during Oxcart, Hank Meierdierck had an office at the Pentagon but most of his time was spent out at Area 51. “One day Hank asked me if I liked to hunt,” recalls Jim Freedman. “I said yes. Well, Hank smiled and said, ‘Good. Bring your rifle out next time.’”
Weapons were not allowed on Lockheed transport planes flying in and out of Area 51 from McCarran Airport. But Freedman’s level of clearance was such that security did not examine the things he carried with him. “The next trip to Area 51, I put my rifle in a box with an oscilloscope,” Freedman explains, “and that’s how I got my hunting rifle out there.” found a helicopter pilot to fly the men into the mountains north of Area 51 to photograph the old mines there. Then he dropped the two men and their hunting rifles off at a favored spot on Groom Mountain where Area 51 officials liked to surreptitiously hunt deer. Meierdierck told the helicopter pilot to return the next day.
From on top of Groom Mountain, the view down over Area 51 was spectacular. It was, as Kirkpatrick had speculated, a perfect place for a Soviet spy to disguise himself as a deer hunter and take notes. During the day, you could see the buildings down at Area 51 spread out in an H formation to the west of the runways. Jeeps and vans could be seen ferrying workers around. If you had binoculars, you could get a clear look at what was going on. At night, the whole place went dark; most of the buildings that had windows kept the curtains drawn. If an aircraft needed to land at night, the lights would quickly flash on, illuminating the runway. The airplane would land and the lights would quickly go off, bathing the valley in darkness once again.
For Freedman, the hunting trip dragged on a little long. “Hank was stubborn,” Freedman explains. “He said he wasn’t leaving until he got a deer. And he preferred to hunt on his own, so he suggested we split up and meet back at the campsite for dinner.” Which is what they did. “There was very little for us to talk about,” Freedman says. “We both knew we were on top secret projects. You couldn’t afford to talk. Everyone had a wife and a family. No one could afford to lose their job.” One subject the men could discuss was hunting. Only three years had passed since the last aboveground atomic tests had detonated across the valley down below. Freedman wondered if anyone who caught a deer up on Groom Mountain should even consider eating it because “the deer ate the foliage which was contaminated from alpha particles from all the tests.” As it turned out, the men did not catch any deer anyway.
Come Monday, the helicopter pilot returned, and by the end of the next day, Freedman was sitting in his dining room in Las Vegas, eating dinner with his wife and kids. He was able to get his hunting rifle out of Area 51 the same way he got it in: “Inside the oscilloscope case.”
Not long after Lyman Kirkpatrick filed his final inspector general’s report on Area 51, Richard Bissell resigned. This was not before he had been offered a lesser job at CIA, as the director of the Office of Science and Technology. But in that new capacity Bissell’s need-toknow would have been drastically reduced. In CIA parlance, having one’s access curbed was an insult. Instead, he chose to leave the Agency.
Without Richard Bissell in charge of the secret CIA facility, what would become of Area 51? And who would run the Oxcart reconnaissance program? The decision about Bissell’s replacement went up the chain of command to President Kennedy. He had been in office for less than a year and already he was up to his elbows in CIA backlash. President Kennedy’s new secretary of defense was a man named Robert McNamara, an intellectually minded Harvard Business School graduate who had won the Legion of Merit during World War II for performing firebomb analysis from behind a desk. Now, as secretary of defense, after the Bay of Pigs, McNamara called for the Pentagon to assume control of all spy plane programs. McNamara was at the top of the chain of command of all the armed services and believed his Air Force should be in charge of all U.S. assets with wings. The public had lost confidence in the CIA, McNamara told the president.
But James Killian and his colleague Edwin Land, now both part of Kennedy’s presidential foreign intelligence advisory board, told the president that the best move forward for national security was to keep the CIA in the spy plane business at Area 51. What happened with Bissell was unfortunate, they said, suggesting that Richard Bissell, and Richard Bissell alone, had gone rogue. They argued that the CIA was still the agency best equipped to deliver overhead intelligence to the president. If that wasn’t possible, Killian and Land said, then the idea of who controls overhead reconnaissance should be restructured. One plan was that the CIA might work in better partnership with the Air Force. President Kennedy liked that. On September 6, 1961, he created a protocol that required the CIA deputy director and the undersecretary of the Air Force to comanage all space reconnaissance and aerial espionage programs together as the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified agency within Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense. A central headquarters for NRO was established in Washington, a small office with a limited staff but with a number of empire-size egos vying for power and control. The organization maintained a public face, an overt identity at the Pentagon called the Office of Space Systems, but no one outside a select few knew of NRO’s existence until 1992.
Jim Freedman remembers the transition in the chain of command and how it affected his work at Area 51. “Because I was the person with a list of every employee at the area, it was my job to know not just who was who, but who was the boss of somebody’s boss. An individual person didn’t necessarily know much more about the person they worked for than their code name. And they almost certainly didn’t know who was working on the other side of the wall or in the next trailer over. Wayne Pendleton was the head of the radar group for a while. He was my go-to person for a lot of different groups. One day, Pendleton suddenly says, ‘I’m going to Washington, Jim.’ So I said, ‘What if I need you, what number should I call?’ And Pendleton laughed. He said, ‘You won’t need me because where I’m going doesn’t exist.’ Decades later I would learn that the place where Wayne was going when he left the Ranch was to a little office in Washington called NRO.”
After the Bay of Pigs and his resignation, Richard Bissell drifted away from Washington’s power center like a man scorned. Quickly, his longtime, biggest supporters became his greatest detractors. Most notable among them
