the CIA since it was nothing but a desert floor. Richard Bissell would never be invited back again.
And Area 51 would soon have a new mayor. It was late at night in the summer of 1962 and Bud Wheelon sat in the library in the Washington, DC, home of Howard and Jane Roman, two clandestine officers with CIA. It was only Wheelon’s second month employed by the Agency, and because he was not a career spy, he had had a lot of catching up to do. Almost every night, he worked until ten, having just accepted the job that made him the Agency’s first head of the Directorate of Science and Technology, or DS&T. Only thirtythree years old, Wheelon was a brilliant ballistic-missile scientist and signals intelligence analyst. He was also a graduate of MIT and had played rugby with James Killian when Killian was the president there. Now he had been hand-picked by President Kennedy’s science advisers, including James Killian, to replace Richard Bissell on all overhead reconnaissance projects for the CIA. This included satellites, U-2 operations, and the Oxcart spy plane. It was the job Bissell had declined, but “in this way, I became the new ‘Mayor of Area 51,’” Wheelon explains.
“I did not have much to do at night so I started reading clandestine reports, which I’d never seen before,” Wheelon says. Although he found many uninteresting, one in particular caught his eye. “It made me concerned. At the time, there was a very serious National Intelligence Estimate under way for President Kennedy, one that would address the question: Will the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba? I had been briefed that the estimate was coming down on the side that the Russians would not do such a thing. The Pentagon had decided that putting missiles in Cuba was too reckless a move for the Russians and that they would not do such a reckless thing.”
The Pentagon was dead wrong. As Wheelon read dozens of intelligence reports, one rose up like a red flag. “One thing you have to worry about with anyone informing against a person or a state is fabrication,” Wheelon explains. “There were a lot of Cubans in Miami [at the time] whose sugar plantations had been taken away from them by Castro and they wanted action taken. But there was one report that caught my eye. The informant said that he’d seen very long trailers, big trucks, led by jeeps with Soviet security people inside. As these trucks made their way through certain villages, Cubans were directing traffic so the long trailers could get by. In South America, often on the street corners, you will find post-office boxes. They are not squat boxes with a level opening like you find in the States. Instead, they are more of a traditional letterbox attached at the top of a long pole. The informant witnessed one of these very long trailer trucks coming up to an intersection and not being able to make the curb. There was a letterbox blocking the way. Some of the Soviet security people got out of the truck. They grabbed an acetylene torch from the back and cut the letterbox right down. They didn’t waste any time or give it a second thought. When I read that, I thought, Whoever reported this is no fabricator. This is not a detail you could make up. Whatever was in those trailers was too important to let a letterbox stand in the way.”
Wheelon believed there were missiles inside the trailers. Missiles with nuclear warheads. Unknown to Wheelon at the time, his new boss, CIA director John McCone, also believed this was true. Except McCone wasn’t around Washington, DC; he was in Paris, on his honeymoon. This left Wheelon in charge of more than was usual for a newcomer to the CIA. Concerned by the intelligence report, Wheelon asked to meet with the head of the board of the National Intelligence Council, Sherman Kent. “I went to him and I said, ‘Sherm, I am new around here so you should discount a lot of what I say. I am not a professional intelligence person, but it looks to me like the evidence is overwhelming that they have missiles down there.’” Sherman Kent thanked Wheelon for his advice but explained that the board was going to present President Kennedy with the opposite conclusion— that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Cuban missile crisis is a story of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the drama that culminated in a tenday standoff between two superpowers on the brink of thermonuclear war. But it is also the story of two powerful rivals within the American services, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force, and how they set aside historical differences to work together to save the world from near nuclear annihilation. Like so many international crises of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis had its link to Area 51—through the U-2.
During the crisis, the CIA and the Air Force worked together to conduct the U-2 spy mission that caused the Soviet Union to back down. How this was accomplished not only involved two key Area 51 players but also set a precedent for the power-sharing arrangement at Area 51 that worked well for a while, until it didn’t work anymore. The diplomatic efforts of one Army Air Force old-timer and one CIA newcomer helped set the stage for success. The old-timer was General Jack Ledford, and the newcomer was Bud Wheelon.
On the afternoon of August 29, 1962, a U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba spotted eight surface-to-air missile sites in the western part of Cuba, the same SA-2 missile systems that had shot down Gary Powers two years before. The following week, three more missile sites were discovered on the island, as well as a Soviet MiG-21 parked on the Santa Clara airfield nearby. For two months, the Agency had been analyzing reports that said between 4,000 and 6,000 individuals from the Soviet bloc had arrived in Cuba, including 1,700 Soviet military technicians. Cuban citizens were being kept from entering port areas where the Soviet-bloc ships were unloading unusually large crates, ones big enough to “contain airplane fuselage or missile components.” The implications were threefold: that Russia was building up the Cuban armed forces, that they were establishing multiple missile sites, and that they were establishing electronic jamming facilities against Cape Canaveral in Florida as well as other important U.S. installations. The director of the CIA, John McCone, had already told the president’s military advisers that he believed the Soviets were laying a deadly trap involving nuclear missiles. But there was no hard evidence of the missiles themselves, the military argued, and their position on that fact was firm. (The Pentagon did not doubt that the Soviets wanted to put nuclear missiles on Cuba; officials just didn’t think they’d accomplished that yet.) McCone left for his honeymoon in Paris.
In the following month, September, bad weather got in the way of good photographic intelligence. Day after day it rained over Cuba or the island was shrouded in heavy cloud cover. Finally, on September 29, a CIA U-2 mission over the Isle of Pines and the Bay of Pigs revealed yet another previously unknown missile site. President Kennedy’s top advisers were convened. The CIA warned the advisers of more unknown dangers in Cuba and pushed for additional overflights so as to gain better intelligence on military installations there. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were opposed to the idea. Not another Gary Powers incident, they said. But on October 5 and 7, the CIA got presidential approval to run two additional missions of its own. The resultant news was hard to ignore: there were now a total of nineteen surface-to-air missile sites on the island of Cuba, meaning there was something very important that the Soviets were intent on defending there. The Pentagon held firm. There was still no hard data revealing actual missiles, McNamara and Rusk said. Making matters even more complicated, JFK’s Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, was pushing for preemptive strikes against Cuba. It was a volatile and incredibly dangerous situation. If the CIA was correct and there already were nuclear missiles in Cuba, then LeMay’s so-called preemptive strikes would actually initiate a nuclear war, not prevent one.
What the Agency needed desperately was a wizard of diplomacy, someone who could help the rival agencies see eye to eye so they could all work together to get the Soviets to back down. The Agency and the Air Force had decidedly different ideas on imminent missions; the CIA wanted to gather more intelligence with the U-2; the Air Force wanted to prepare for war. An individual who could wear both hats with relative objectivity was needed, someone who could see both sides of the debate. In a rare moment of accord, both sides agreed that the man for the job was Brigadier General Jack Ledford. Just a few weeks earlier, Ledford had been asked by McCone to serve as the director of the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, meaning he would be the Pentagon liaison to the CIA at Area 51. Ledford had just graduated from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and was looking forward to moving out west when his old World War II commander General LeMay encouraged him to take the new CIA liaison job.
LeMay had known Ledford since the war in the Pacific when Ledford flew under his command. A former Olympic diver, Ledford was tall, charismatic, and handsome. According to Wheelon, “He was someone whose charisma was contagious. Ledford was impossible not to like to be around.” There was, of course, the legendary story of Ledford’s plane crash, involving heroics in the Pacific theater during World War II. As a captain in the Air Force, Ledford was making a bombing run over Kyushu Island, Japan, when he was attacked by Japanese fighter jets, his airplane and his own body hit with fire. Ledford’s flight engineer, Master Sergeant Harry C. Miller, was hit in the head. The medic on board treated Miller and tried to treat Ledford with opiates, who declined so he could keep his head clear. With the aircraft crashing, Ledford and the medic opened a parachute, cut the shroud lines, and attached the chute to the unconscious flight engineer. They dropped the man through the nose of the wheel well; Captain Ledford followed, delaying opening his own parachute so he could be next to Sergeant Miller when he landed. Miller would be unconscious when he hit the earth, and without Ledford’s help he would likely have broken his back. The medic, not far behind, later recounted how amazing it was that Ledford’s daring and dangerous plan
