Israelis had been telling the State Department that they were in great danger from their Middle East neighbors when really, Helms explained to the president, Israel had the tactical advantage. Israel was playing the weak card in the hope of winning American military support. Helms also said that he’d recently met with a senior Israeli official whose visit he saw as “a clear portent that war might come at any time.” Coupled with Angleton’s assessment, Helms said this meant most likely in a matter of days. When Israel launched an attack three days later, Helms’s status with President Johnson went through the roof. “The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in the Johnson White House,” wrote a CIA historian.
The story of Redfa’s defection made international headlines when it happened, in 1966. But what didn’t make the news was what happened once Israel finished with the MiG: the Soviet-made fighter was shipped to Area 51. Colonel Slater, who was commander of Area 51 at the time, remembers how “it arrived in the middle of the night, hidden inside a C-130 [cargo plane], hand-delivered by Israeli intelligence agents.” What had been a major coup for Israel was now an equally huge break for the United States. To the Israelis, the MiG was the most dangerous fighter in the Arab world. To the Americans, this was the deadly little aircraft that had been shooting down so many American fighter pilots over Vietnam. The Russians had been supplying the North Vietnamese with MiG-21 aircraft and MiG pilot training as well. Now, with an MiG at Area 51, Agency engineers once again had high-value foreign technology in their hands. “We could finally learn how to beat the MiG in air-to-air combat,” Colonel Slater explains.
The path to Area 51 is different for everyone. For T. D. Barnes it began in 1962 when the CIA wanted him to go to Vietnam to be an “adviser” there. Barnes was just back from Bamburg, Germany, where he’d been deployed during the Berlin Wall crisis, tasked with running Hawk missile sites along the border with Czechoslovakia. It had been two years since he’d worked on the CIA’s Project Palladium out of Fort Bliss.
“I said I’d go work for the Agency. But I had this dream of becoming an Army officer, which meant going through officer training school first. The Agency and the Army agreed and sent me to officer school.” There, during survival training Barnes ripped open his knees and got a rare blood disease. “It just about nearly killed me. I was never going to do combat. I’m lucky I didn’t die,” says Barnes. He recovered but because of the blood disability, he couldn’t go to Vietnam for the CIA. This also meant that after ten years of service, his military career was over. Barnes and his wife, Doris, moved home to Oklahoma and bought a house there with a yard for their two little girls, and one day when Doris was reading the classified section of the local newspaper, she found an advertisement of interest. “A contractor called Unitech was looking for telemetry and radar specialists that could work on a project involving space,” Barnes recalls.
Barnes figured Unitech was harvesting rйsumйs. “Getting a list of people who might be qualified to work on a highly specialized kind of a project if a contract were to materialize with, say, NASA down the road.” Barnes told Doris it wasn’t worth the phone call. Doris said to call anyway. “Within two days our house was on the market, we were packed up, and we were traveling to this little one-horse town in the Mojave Desert called Beatty.” Beatty, Nevada. Population somewhere around 426, depending on who wants to know.
In 1964, Beatty, Nevada, was one strange town. Situated 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it lay on a strip of land between Death Valley and Nevada’s atomic bomb range. Beatty had one sheriff — he was eighty years old, was a great shot with a rifle, and was missing most of his teeth. Beatty also had nine gas stations, eleven churches, an airstrip, and a whorehouse called the Vicky Star Ranch. Behind the facade, Beatty housed a collection of three- and four-letter federal agencies, many of which were working different angles on various overt and covert operations there. “Nobody knew what anybody else in Beatty was really doing there and since you didn’t have a need-toknow you didn’t ask,” recalls Barnes. Forty-five years later he still hadn’t “figured out what the service stations or the churches were a cover for.”
How Beatty worked and who was running whom left much to the imagination. “When Doris and I drove into town that first day,” Barnes recalls, “we pulled up to the service station to get some gas. One of the town characters, a semi-homeless person everyone called Panamint Annie, walked up to us and leaned against our car. She looked at me — it was summer — and she said, ‘Well, it’s hotter than Hell’s hubs, now isn’t it, Barnes?’ I thought, How the hell does she know my last name?” Technically, Barnes had been recruited by Unitech. It turned out they had a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, after all. “But there were lots of other agencies in Beatty who were working in the dark,” Barnes says. “Unitech was the sign on the door.”
America’s space agency set up shop in Beatty in the mid-1960s in order to develop programs that would help get man to the moon. But before NASA landed on Earth’s nearest celestial body, they had to conquer space, and to do so, they needed help from the U.S. Air Force. And before NASA conquered space, they had to get to the edge of space, which was why Barnes was in Beatty. He was hired to work on NASA’s X-15 rocket plane, a prototype research vehicle that looked and acted more like a missile with wings than an airplane. Each day, Barnes got picked up for work by a NASA employee named Bill Houck, who drove a federal van around town and made a total of ten stops to retrieve all the members of the secret team. They would drive out to the edge of town and begin the short trek to the top of a chaparral-covered mountain where one hangar that was roughly the size of a tennis court, three trailers, and a number of radar dishes made up the NASA high-range tracking station at Beatty. Day after day, the ten-man crew of electronics and radar wizards manned stateof-the-art electronic systems, tracking the X-15 as it raced across the skies above the Mojave, from the Dryden Flight Research Center in California up toward the edge of space. Once, the airplane was forced to make an emergency landing on a dry lake bed not far from Beatty. There was a rule prohibiting transport trucks to haul cargo through Death Valley after dark on weekends, which meant the X-15 rocket had to spend the night in Barnes’s driveway. His daughters, ages five and eight, spent the weekend running circles around the James Bondlooking rocket ship parked out front cheering “Daddy’s spaceship!” No one else in Beatty said a thing.
To get into the air, the X-15 was jettisoned off a B-52 mother ship, after which its rocket engine would launch it into the atmosphere like a missile until it reached the edge of space. Touching the tip of space, the X-15 would then turn around and “fly” home, getting up to speeds of Mach 6. That kind of speed made for an incredibly bumpy ride. In a matter of months, Barnes became a hypersonic-flight-support expert. He monitored many things, including telemetry, and was always amazed watching how each of the pilots responded differently to physical stress. “We knew more about what was going on with the pilots’ bodies than the pilots knew themselves. From Beatty, we monitored everything. Their heart rates, their pulse, and also everything going on with the pilot and the plane.” In case of an accident, NASA had emergency crews set up across California, Nevada, and Utah on various dry lake beds where the X-15 could land if need be. One of those lake beds was Groom Lake. Barnes says, “From watching my radars, I knew something was going on over there at Groom. I could see things on my radar I wasn’t supposed to see. One of those ‘things’ went really, really fast. Later, when I was briefed on Oxcart, I figured out what I had been watching. But at the time, I didn’t have a need-to-know so I didn’t say anything about what I saw at Groom Lake and nobody asked.”
The X-15 was an exciting and fast-paced project to work on, with groundbreaking missions happening twice a week. As it was with so many of the early projects involving high-speed and high-altitude flight, many different agencies were involved in the program, not just NASA. The Air Force funded a large part of the program. The CIA didn’t care about space travel but they were very interested in the ram-jet technology on the X-15, something they had wanted to use on their own D-21 drone. “Everyone monitored each other, technology-wise,” Barnes says. To keep the various parties in the loop, there was a designated radio network set up for everyone involved in the project. “There were people from Vandenberg Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range, Dryden, and CIA monitoring what was going on all day long.”
Even though he was only twenty-seven years old, Barnes was the most senior radar specialist in Beatty. And almost immediately he noticed there seemed to be a major problem with the radar. “We tracked the X-15 with radar stations at Edwards, in California, and at Ely, in Nevada. My radar in Beatty was fine but I noticed there was a problem at Edwards and Ely. When the X-15 was parked on the tarmac at either place, the radars there read that it was at an altitude of two thousand feet instead of being on the ground.”
Barnes got on the radio channel and told mission control at the Dryden Flight Research Center about the problem. Dryden blamed it on the radar at Beatty, even though Barnes’s radar agreed with the airplane’s. Over the radio network, Barnes argued his point. The site manager in Beatty was horrified that Barnes dared to challenge his superiors and shot Barnes a dirty look. Back down, he mouthed silently. Barnes complied. But just a few weeks later, when he learned that the X-15 was going through a fitting and there weren’t going to be any flights for three weeks, Barnes seized the moment. “Now would be a good time to fix your radar problem,” Barnes said into the
