radio network. There were dozens of senior officials listening in. “There was silence on the channel,” Barnes remembers. “My site manager whirled around on his chair and glared at me. ‘You’re on your own, Barnes,’ he said. Another one of the other guys, Bill Houck, leaned over to my station, gave me a big old grin and a thumbs-up. But Dryden still wouldn’t listen to me. They said the problem was inherent to the radar. That it couldn’t be fixed.”
By now, Barnes had gotten friendly with the X-15 pilots. Even though they had never met in person, a great rapport had developed between them; understandable, given how much time they spent communicating on headset during flights. Barnes cared about the pilots’ safety more than he cared about what his site manager perceived to be insubordination on his part. So Barnes told Dryden exactly what he believed was true. “I’ve been in radar long enough to know there’s no such thing as an inherent problem in radar,” Barnes said. “I agree with the airplane. If you don’t fix your radar, you’re gonna kill one of the pilots one of these days.”
There was a deathly silence on the network. Back at Dryden, the communication had been overheard by the pilots who were in the pilots’ lounge. X-15 pilot “Joe Walker got on a headset and said, ‘Effective immediately, there will be no X-15 flights until the radar problem is fixed.’” Now Dryden had no choice but to get on it. First, they flew up to the Beatty tracking station in a T-33, where they flew calibration flights to compare radar data with the airplane’s altimeter. At Ely, they did the same thing. Barnes was right. The radar at Beatty was correct. Though both agreed with their data, the Dryden Flight Research Center and the Ely tracking station were off by two thousand feet. The radars were torn down and reassembled, to no avail. It was finally discovered that they were vintage radars, left over from World War II, and they had never been retrofitted with the field modification the way the radar at Beatty had. Unitech got a huge Christmas bonus, and no one got killed.
Of major significance for Barnes was that somewhere off in the black operations ether a man named John Grace had been listening as the whole scenario went down. John Grace worked for the CIA, and Barnes’s name rang a bell. Grace asked his staff to look into this Barnes character, the man whose unique confidence in radar had wound up saving the day. Grace wanted to get Barnes hired for a project that would be coming to Groom Lake — something that even Barnes had been in the dark on back then.
Working at Beatty meant running multiple jobs, and there was a second aircraft Barnes was in charge of tracking — the XB-70. This experimental program was all that remained of General LeMay’s oncebeloved B-70 bomber now that it had been canceled by Congress, despite four billion dollars invested. The X in front of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying sixengined aircraft in the world. On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station. “General Electrics had built the engines on all six airplanes flying that day,” Barnes says. “They wanted a photograph of all their aircraft flying in a tight formation for the cover of their shareholders’ meeting manual that year.”
It was a clear day, with very little natural turbulence in the air. The six aircraft took off from Dryden and headed west. About thirty minutes later, the pilots began getting into formation over the Mojave Desert. Barnes was monitoring data and listening on headphones. Using his personal Fischer recording system, Barnes was also taping the pilot transmissions. For this particular photo op, the X-15 pilot, Joe Walker, whom Barnes had gotten to know well, was flying in the F-104. Walker was on the right wing of the aircraft and was trying to hold his position when turbulence by the XB-70’s six engines made him uncomfortable. “Walker came on the radio and spoke very clearly,” Barnes recalls. “He said, ‘I’m opposing this mission. It is too turbulent and it has no scientific value.’”
Only a few seconds later, a catastrophic midair collision occurred. “We heard the pilots screaming, ‘Midair! Midair! And I realized at first the XB-70 didn’t know it had been hit,” Barnes remembers. Joe Walker’s F-104 had slammed into the much larger airplane, caught fire, and exploded. On the XB-70, both vertical stabilizers had been shorn off, and the airplane began to crash. Continuing to pick up speed, the XB-70 whirled uncontrollably into a flat spin. As it headed toward the ground, parts of the aircraft tore loose. One of the XB-70 pilots, Al White, ejected. The other, Major Carl Cross, was trapped inside the airplane as it slammed into the desert floor. There, just a few miles from Barstow, California, it exploded into flames.
“It was so damn senseless,” Barnes says. “A damn photograph.” The worst was yet to come. “A lot of people blamed Joe Walker. Easy, because he was dead. There was, of course, the tape of him saying he was opposing the mission. That the vortex on the damn XB-70 was sucking him in. Bill Houck, the NASA monitor at our station, asked me to give him the tape recording to send to Dryden. Once NASA got a hold of it,” Barnes says, “someone there quietly disposed of it.”
The XB-70 tragedy more or less closed down the program, and the X-15 rocket plane program was finishing up as well. For Barnes, life in Beatty was nearing an end, but one afternoon, Barnes received a phone call. A man identifying himself as John Grace wanted to know if he’d like to come work on an “interesting project” not far away. “Grace said it would be a commute from Las Vegas,” Barnes says. Grace told Barnes he would have to get a top secret clearance first. Whatever it was, it sounded exciting. Barnes told Grace, “Sign me up.” T. D. Barnes was officially on his way to Groom Lake.
In March of 1968, his top secret clearance finally in place, Barnes learned his new employer was going to be EG&G. He was instructed by a “handler” to arrive at a remote, unmarked hangar at McCarran Airport for his first day at work. There, Barnes was met by a man who shook his hand and escorted him into a small Constellation airplane. “They didn’t say anything to me about where we were going and I knew enough about black operations not to ask. It was a nice, quiet ride in the airplane. Just before we landed at Area 51, I heard the pilot say to the copilot, ‘They’ve got the doughnut out.’ Then the pilots quickly closed all the curtains on the airplane so when we landed I couldn’t see a thing. I wondered what the doughnut was. I didn’t ask. I was taken to the EG&G Special Projects building and introduced to our group. The boss said, ‘What’s your first name?’ I said, ‘T.D.’ He said, ‘Not anymore. You’re Thunder out here.’” Later that first day, Barnes was taken inside one of the hangars at Area 51. “They opened the door. There sat a Russian MiG. They said, ‘This here’s the doughnut.’ I got a chuckle about that. The pilots who’d brought me to the area had no idea that the whole reason I’d been brought in was because of the doughnut.”
Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil. Colonel Slater, overseeing Black Shield in Kadena at the time, remembers getting a call in the middle of the night from one of his staff, Jim Simon. “Simon called me up all excited and said, ‘Slater, you are not going to believe this!’ He told me about the MiG. How it landed at [Area] 51 in the middle of the night, hidden inside a cargo plane. How it was accompanied by someone from a foreign government. Simon couldn’t get over it and I couldn’t wait to see it,” Slater remembers. Oxcart pilot Frank Murray remembers the excitement of seeing it as well. During Operation Black Shield Murray was on rotation between Area 51 and Kadena when he was taken into the secret hangar to have a look at the MiG. “It was a tiny little sucker, considering how deadly it was,” Murray says. “We couldn’t believe we had a captured one up there at the Ranch.”
T. D. Barnes and the EG&G Special Projects Group at Area 51 got to work reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG — taking it apart and putting it back together again. All the engineers knew that this was the best way to really understand how something had been built. The EG&G Special Projects Group appeared to have advance expertise in this technical process of reverse engineering aircraft. At the time, no one knew why, and Barnes, new to the EG&G engineering team, knew better than to ask. He was excited to get to work. “We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio… everything. Then we put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation equipment.” Still, Barnes and his crew were stumped. How was it that this Soviet plane was beating the supposedly more capable U.S. fighters in air-to-air engagements? No one could explain why. So a second program was conceived, the MiG’s Have Doughnut tactical phase. During the Have Doughnut, the MiG would begin flying tactical missions against U.S. airplanes in the skies over Groom Lake. The Air Force said it wasn’t interested but the Navy leaped at the chance.
“Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn fast,” Barnes says. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions over Groom Lake. Mock air battles between the MiG and American fighter jets were a daily event for a period of six weeks during the spring of 1968. The program (not including its Area 51 locale) was declassified by the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division in October of 1997 and by the Defense Intelligence Agency in March of 2000. “We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains. Constant
