did not receive copies for their scrapbooks or walls. “The pictures went into a vault,” says Colonel Slater. “We were told we could have copies of them when, or if, the project got declassified.” Roger Andersen recalls how quickly the operation rolled up. “By that time, in 1968, there were a lot of other operations going on at Area 51, none of which I had a need-to-know.” Andersen had the distinction of flying the last Project Oxcart support plane, a T-33, back to Edwards Air Force Base. “Flying out of Area 51, I knew I’d miss it up there,” Andersen says. “Even after all these years, and having lived all over the world, I can say that Area 51 is unlike anywhere else in the world.” For certain, there would be no more barrel rolls with Colonel Slater over Groom Lake.
The men moved on. If you are career Air Force or CIA, you go where you are assigned. Ken Collins was recruited by the Air Force into the SR-71 program. Because the A-12 program was classified, no one in the SR-71 program had any idea Collins had already put in hundreds of hours flying in the Mach 3 airplane. “It left many in the SR71 program confused. It surprised many people when it appeared I already knew how to fly the aircraft that was supposedly just built. They didn’t have a need-to-know what I had spent the last six years of my life doing. They didn’t learn for decades,” not until the Oxcart program was declassified, in 2007.
Frank Murray volunteered to fight on the ground, or at least low to the ground, in Vietnam. “During Black Shield, no one had any idea where I’d been. Quite a few people thought maybe I’d dodged the war. I decided to go back in and fly airplanes in combat in Vietnam.” In November of 1970, Murray was sent to the Nakhon Phanom Air Base on the Mekong River across from Laos, where he volunteered to fly the A-1 Skyraider — a propeller-driven, single-seat airplane that was an anachronism in the jet age. “It flew about a hundred and sixty-five miles per hour at cruise,” says Murray. “I went from flying the fastest airplane in the world to the slowest one. The Oxcart taxied faster than the A-1 flew.” Because the Skyraider flew so slow, it was one of the easiest targets for the Vietcong. One in four Skyraiders sent on rescue missions was shot down. “We got shot at often but the Skyraider had armaments and I shot back.” In his one-year tour of duty, Murray, the squadron commander, flew sixty-four combat missions. The Skyraider’s most famous role was as the escort for the helicopters sent in to rescue wounded soldiers from the battlefield. “Our mission was to support the Jolly Green Giants. We pulled quite a few wounded Green Berets out of the battlefield that year.”
Colonel Slater was assigned to the position of vice commander of the Twentieth Tactical Fighter Wing at the Wethersfield Air Force Base in England. By all accounts, he was well on the way to becoming a general in the U.S. Air Force. Then tragedy struck. Colonel Slater’s eldest daughter, Stacy, was in Sun Valley, Idaho, on her honeymoon when the private plane she was flying in with her husband struck a mountain peak and crashed. Stranded on the side of a frozen mountain for twenty-four hours, Stacy Slater Bernhardt was paralyzed from the waist down. The recovery process was going to be long and painful, and the outcome was entirely unknown. “My wife, Barbara, and I needed to be with our daughter, with our family, so I requested to be transferred back to the United States,” Colonel Slater says. For Slater, a career military man, the decision was simple. “Love of country, love of family.”
Back in America, and after many months, his daughter recovered with near-miraculous results (she learned to walk with crutches). Colonel Slater was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base, where he began flying the Air Force’s attack version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, which comes equipped to carry two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. “I loved it,” Slater says, always the optimist. “I enjoyed working for the CIA, but no matter how old I get, I will always be a fighter pilot at heart.”
Chapter Seventeen: The MiGs of Area 51
To engineer something is to apply scientific and technical know-how to create an entity from parts. To reverse engineer something is to take another manufacturer’s or scientist’s product apart with the specific purpose of learning how it was constructed or composed. The concept of reverse engineering is uniquely woven into Area 51 legend and lore, with conspiracy theorists claiming Area 51 engineers are reverse engineering alien spacecraft inside the secret base. Historically, reverse engineering has played an important role at Area 51, as exemplified in formerly classified programs, including one from the late 1960s and 1970s, to reverse engineer Russian MiGs.
It began one scorching-hot morning in August of 1966 when an Iraqi Air Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad. Redfa then made a sudden turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified Redfa that he was off course.
“Turn back immediately,” he was told. Instead, Redfa began flying in a zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey, then toward the Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There, one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.
Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.
The plan had been years in the making. Four years, to be exact, dating back to 1963, when Meir Amit first became head of the Mossad. Amit sat down with the Israeli air force and asked them what they would consider the single greatest foreign-intelligence contribution to national security. The answer was short, simple, and unanimous: bring us an MiG. The enemy air forces of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq all flew Russian MiGs. Before Redfa’s defection, the Mossad had tried twice, unsuccessfully, to acquire the airplane. In one case, an Egyptian-born Armenian intelligence agent known as John Thomas was caught in the act of espionage. His punishment was death; he and several coconspirators were hanged in an Egyptian public square.
For years, Mossad searched for a possible candidate for defection. Finally, in early 1966, they found a man who fit the profile in Munir Redfa, a Syrian Christian who had previously expressed feelings of persecution as a religious minority in a squadron of Muslims. Mossad dispatched a beautiful female intelligence agent to Baghdad on a mission. The agent worked the romance angle first, luring Redfa to Paris with the promise of sex. There, she told Redfa the truth about what she was after. In return for an Iraqi air force MiG, Redfa would be paid a million dollars and given a new identity and a safe haven for himself and his family. Redfa agreed.
With an MiG now in their possession, the Israelis set to work understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the aircraft in flight. If it ever came to war, the Israelis would be uniquely prepared for air combat. Which is exactly what happened in June of 1967. What Israel learned from Munir Redfa’s MiG ultimately allowed them to overpower the combined air forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan during the Six-Day War.
Back in Washington, CIA chief Richard Helms was briefed on Redfa’s story by James Jesus Angleton, the man running the CIA station in Tel Aviv. Angleton was a Harvard- and Yale-educated intelligence officer who had been in the espionage business for twentyfive years. Angleton, who died in 1987, remains one of the Agency’s most enigmatic and bellicose spies. He is famous within the Agency for many things, among them his idea that the Soviet propaganda machine worked 24-7 to create an ever-widening “wilderness of mirrors.” This wilderness, Angleton said, was the product of a myriad of KGB deceptions and stratagems that would one day ensnare, confuse, and overpower the West. Angleton believed that the Soviets could manipulate the CIA into believing false information was true and true information was false. The CIA’s inability to discern the truth inside a forest of Soviet disinformation would be America’s downfall, Angleton said.
James Jesus Angleton allegedly had as many enemies inside the Agency as inside the KGB, but Richard Helms trusted him. Helms and Angleton had known each other since World War II, when they worked in the OSS counterintelligence unit, X-2. In the 1960s, in addition to acting as the liaison between the CIA and the FBI, Angleton controlled the Israeli “account,” which meant he provided Helms with almost everything Helms knew about Israel.
During the course of negotiating the deal to get the MiG, the details of which remain classified, Angleton acquired additional information regarding Israel that he provided to Helms, and that Helms provided to the president. This included seemingly prophetic information about the Six-Day War before the Six-Day War began. The
