flying takes a toll on any aircraft, but with a captured enemy airplane this proved especially challenging. “Since no spare parts were available, ground crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”
There were repercussions from the Soviets. “The fact that we had a MiG at Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five minutes.” Up to this point, the Soviets had gotten used to monitoring the routine activity at the base, which consisted primarily of takeoffs and landings of the Oxcart and a few drones. But once the MiG showed up, the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division appeared on the scene too, and with them came various models of Soviet-built radar systems captured in the Middle East. And once the Soviets discovered engineers at Groom Lake were testing these foreign radar systems, they again decided to monitor the situation more closely from overhead.
The newly acquired Soviet radar systems started cropping up around the western edges of the Groom dry lake bed and also around Slater Lake, which was about a mile northwest of the main hangars. Technical evaluation of the radar was quickly assigned to Barnes. He requested a Nike missile system and was surprised at just how quickly his request was filled. “I think the CIA went and got a Nike missile system at my old stomping ground, Fort Bliss, just about the very next day,” Barnes says. With radars scattered all over the range, including acquisition radar that rotated and searched for incoming targets, a geek like Barnes had a field day. “We used the Nike to track the MiGs and other airplanes to evaluate their ECM against X-band radar.” What Barnes did not know was that these radar systems were being acquired for the upcoming radar cross-section analysis of an Air Force plane in the works. The Russians had no idea what the Air Force was dreaming up either, but they were duly angry about the captured radars that were now sitting in the hills overlooking Groom Lake.
“We were pinned down,” says Barnes. For weeks on end, the Special Projects Group couldn’t turn on a single radar system; the Russians were monitoring the area that intensely. Barnes and his group passed the time by playing mind games with the Soviets. They painted strange shapes on the tarmac, “funny-looking impossible aircraft,” which they then heated up with portable heaters to confuse the Soviets who were shooting infrared satellite pictures of the work going on there. “We got a kick out of imagining what the Russians thought of our new airplanes,” Barnes says. With all the time on their hands, Barnes and his group of twenty-three electronics specialists began dreaming up other ways to entertain themselves. They made up riddles. They placed bets. They played with mixed chemicals that made their tennis sneakers glow in the dark. They rewired the Special Projects motor pool car so it would give the first guy to drive it a series of low-voltage shocks. They rigged up a tall TV antenna on top of their living quarters, hoping to draw reception from Las Vegas. Instead, they tapped into an international channel broadcast out of Spain. “For many months, all we watched were bullfights in Madrid,” Barnes recalls.
This was a group of highly trained specialists gathered to pioneer radar technology, so when they finally ran out of practical jokes and bullfights, their attention turned back to problem solving. They started to occupy themselves by examining minutiae on printouts from radar returns. In a serendipitous way, this led to a technological breakthrough at Groom Lake. The EG&G Special Projects Group figured out they could identify specific types of aircraft by the tiniest nuances in the patterns their radar signatures left on various radar systems. This was made possible by the group’s unusual advantage of having two things at their disposal: several bands of radar, which allowed them to compare results, and an entire fleet of military aircraft, which were to be used in the tactical phase of the exploitation of the MiG.
What would normally have been a technical endeavor to determine electronic countermeasures against enemy aircraft became a major breakthrough in the further development of stealth technology. From studying the minutiae, Barnes and his fellow radar experts identified what the enemy could and could not see on their radars back home. This information would eventually be shared with Lockheed during radar testing at Area 51, as Lockheed further developed stealth. Technology was doing for humans what humans had forever been trying to do for themselves; to spy on the enemy means to learn as much about him as he knows about himself. That was the technical breakthrough. There was a tactical breakthrough as well. The ultrasecret MiG program at Area 51 gave birth to the Top Gun fighterpilot school, a fact that would remain secret for decades. Officially called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, the program was established a year after the first MiG arrived, in March of 1969, and based out of Miramar, California. Instructor pilots who had fought mock air battles over Groom Lake against Munir Redfa’s MiG began training Navy pilots for sorties against Russian MiGs over Vietnam. When these Top Gun-trained Navy pilots resumed flying in Southeast Asia, the results were radically different than the deadly nine-to-one ratio from before. The scales had tipped. Now, American pilots would begin shooting down North Vietnamese pilots at a ratio of thirteen to one. The captured Soviet-made MiG-21 Fishbed proved to be an aerial warfare coup for the United States. And what followed was a quid pro quo. To thank the Israelis for supplying the United States with the most prized and unknowable aircraft in the arsenal of its archnemesis, America began to supply Israel with jet fighters to assist Israel in keeping its rivals at bay.
Chapter Eighteen: Meltdown
The idea behind a facility like Area 51 is that dangerous top secret tests can be conducted there without much scrutiny or oversight. To this end, there is no shortage of death woven into the uncensored history of Area 51. One of the most dangerous tests ever performed there was Project 57, the dirty bomb test that took place five miles northwest of Groom Lake, in a subparcel called Area 13. And yet what might have been the one defensible, positive outcome in this otherwise shockingly outrageous test — namely, lessons gleaned from its cleanup — was ignored until it was too late.
Unlike the spy plane projects at Groom Lake, where operations tend to have clear-cut beginnings and ceremonious endings, Project 57 was abandoned midstream. If the point of setting off a dirty bomb in secret was to see what would happen if an airplane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into the earth near where people lived, it follows that serious efforts would then be undertaken by the Atomic Energy Commission to learn how to clean up such a nightmare scenario after the catastrophe occurs. No such efforts were initially made.
Instead, about a year after setting off the dirty bomb, the Atomic Energy Commission put a barbed-wire fence around the Area 51 subparcel, marked it with HAZARD/DO NOT ENTER/NUCLEAR MATERIAL signs, and moved on to the next weapons test. The bustling CIA facility five miles downwind would be relatively safe, the nuclear scientists and the weapons planners surmised. Alpha particles are heavy and would rest on the topsoil after the original dust cloud settled down. Furthermore, almost no one knew about the supersecret project, certainly not the public, so who would protest? The closest inhabitants were the rank and file at the CIA’s Groom Lake facility next door, and they also knew nothing of Project 57. The men there followed strict need-to-know protocols, and as far as the commission was concerned, all anyone at Area 51 needed to know was to not venture near the barbed- wire fence marking off Area 13.
And yet the information gleaned from a cleanup effort would have been terribly useful, as was revealed eight years and eight months after Project 57 unfurled. On the morning of January 17, 1966, a reallife dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs — with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons — collided midair with a refueling tanker over the Spanish countryside.
On the morning of the accident, an Air Force pilot and his six-man crew were participating in an exercise that was part of Operation Chrome Dome, something that had begun in the late 1950s as part of Strategic Air Command. In a show of force inherent to the military doctrine of the day — something called mutual assured destruction, or MAD — airplanes regularly circled Earth carrying thermonuclear bombs. The idea behind MAD was that if the Soviet Union were to make a sneak attack on America, SAC bombers would already be airborne to strike back at Moscow with nuclear weapons of their own, thereby assuring the mutual destruction of both sides.
That morning, the bomber lined up with the tanker and had just begun refueling when, in the words of pilot Larry Messinger, “all of a sudden, all hell seemed to break loose” and the two aircraft collided. There was a massive explosion and the men in the fuel tanker were instantly incinerated. Somehow Messinger, his copilot, the instructor pilot, and the navigator managed to eject from the airplane carrying the bombs. Their parachutes deployed, and the
