below the top grade, GS-15. “I attended the school for nuclear weapons orientation at Kirtland Air Force Base and had passed a series of advanced courses,” Mingus says. “But nothing, and I mean nothing, prepares you for the experience of thinking the nuclear material you are guarding is under attack.”
During that chaotic morning, Mingus knew all he could afford to focus on was the bomb in the hole. “I thought to myself, Dick Stock said the bomb is almost two picks down the hole. We’re under attack here. What’s best? I asked myself. If someone put a gun to the head of the crane operator and said, ‘Get it out’ they’d have a live nuclear bomb in their possession. I knew I had to make a decision. Was it safer to pull the bomb up or keep sending it down? I decided it was better to have a big problem at ground zero than somewhere else so I gave the order. I said, ‘Keep the device going down.’”
Mingus had a quick conversation with Joe Behne, the test director, about what was going on. The men agreed Mingus should call the head of security for the Department of Energy, a woman by the name of Pat Williams. “She said, ‘Yes, we hear the same thing and we have to assume the same thing. We are under attack as far as I know,’” Mingus recalls.
Next Mingus called Larry Ferderber, the resident manager of the Nevada Test Site for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Two minutes later Ferderber confirms the same thing, he says, ‘I hear we’re under attack.’” Mingus and Behne went through the protocol checklist. “Joe and I discussed going down to the basement and destroying the crypto which was in my building. Then we decided that it was too early for that. When you look out and you see guns firing, like on the USS Pueblo, then it’s time to start destroying things. But not before.”
Instead, Mingus called Bill Baker, the man who ran the device assembly building. With an attack now confirmed by the spokesperson for the Department of Energy and the test site manager, Mingus had to work fast. “I asked Bill Baker what was going on,” Mingus recalls. “He said, real calm, ‘We’re fine over here. I’m looking out the window. I can see Captain Williams standing outside.’” Mingus got off the telephone and had another discussion with Joe Behne. “I told Joe, I said, ‘We can’t buy his word. He could be under duress. He could have a knife at his neck or a gun at his head.’”
Meanwhile, just a few miles to the east, hovering several hundred feet over the guard post between the test site and Area 51, a group of men were leaning out of a helicopter firing semiautomatic weapons at the guards on the ground. But the bullets in their weapons were blanks, not real ammunition, and the men in the helicopter were security guards from Wackenhut Security, not enemies of the state. Wackenhut Security had decided to conduct a mock attack of an access point to Area 51 to test the system for weaknesses. With astounding lack of foresight, Wackenhut Security had not bothered to inform the Department of Energy of their mock-attack plans.
Back at the control point, in Area 6, Richard Mingus’s telephone rang. It was Pat Williams, the woman in charge of security for the Department of Energy. “She was real brief,” Mingus says. “She said, ‘It was a test and we didn’t know about it.’ Then she just hung up.” Mingus was astonished. “Looking back, in all my years, I have to say it was one of the scariest things I’d ever run into. It was like kids were running the test site that day.” Mingus didn’t write up any paperwork on the incident. “I don’t believe I made a note in my record book,” he says. Instead, Mingus kept working. “We had a nuclear bomb to get down into its hole and explode.” Test director Joe Behne believes paperwork exists. “I know it’s in the record. It was not a minor incident,” he says. “For those of us that were there that day it was almost unbelievable, except we believed [briefly] it was real — that Ground Zero was being attacked from a warlike enemy. The incident is bound to be in the logbooks. All kinds of people got calls.”
Far from the test site, things did not return to calm so quickly. The Department of Energy notified the FBI, who notified the Pentagon and the White House that Area 51 was under attack. The Navy’s nucleararmed submarines were put on alert, which meant that Tomahawk cruise missiles were now targeting the Nevada Test Site and Area 51. Crisis was averted before things elevated further, but it was a close call. Troy Wade was at the Pentagon at the time and told Mingus he “remembers hearing about how high up it went.” Guards from Wackenhut Security lost their jobs, but like most everything at Area 51, there were no leaks to the press. Only with the publication of this book has the incident come to light.
The nuclear bomb Mingus was in charge of overseeing was live and not secured, meaning an actual attack on the test site at that moment would have raised the possibility of a nuclear weapon being hijacked by an enemy of the nation. But there was another reason that the nuclear submarines were put on alert that day: the extremely sensitive nature of a black project the Air Force was running at Area 51. The top secret aircraft being tested there was the single most important invention in U.S. airpower since the Army started its aeronautical division in 1907. Parked on the tarmac at Area 51 was the F-117 Nighthawk, the nation’s first stealth bomber.
The F-117 would radically change the way America fought wars. As a Lockheed official explained at a banquet honoring the F-117 in April of 2008, “Before the advent of stealth, war planners had to determine how many sorties were necessary to take out a single target. After the invention of the F-117 stealth bomber, that changed. It became, How many targets can we take out on a single sortie?”
Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick worked on each rendition of the stealth bomber, which began in the early 1970s with Harvey, a prototype aircraft named after the Jimmy Stewart film about an invisible rabbit. Harvey’s stealth qualities were initially engineered using slide rules and calculators, the same way Lockheed had developed the A-12 Oxcart. Only with the emergence of the mainframe computer, in 1974, did those tools become obsolete. “Two Lockheed engineers, named Denys Overholser and Dick Scherrer, realized that it might be possible to design a stealth aircraft that would take advantage of some of the results of a computer’s calculations,” Lovick says. “In 1974 computers were relatively new and most of them were the size of a car. Our computer at Lockheed ran on punch cards and had less than 60 K worth of memory.” Still, the computer could do what humans could not do, and that was endless calculations.
“The concept behind the computer program involved mirrors reflecting mirrors,” Lovick explains. Mathematician Bill Schroeder set to work writing Lockheed’s original computer code, called Echo. If the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton was correct and the Soviet security forces really were using black propaganda to create a “wilderness of mirrors” to ensnare the West, the Air Force was going to create its own set of reflective surfaces to beat the Russians back with the F-117 stealth bomber. “We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” Lovick says. “It was a radical idea and it worked.”
The next, on-paper incarnation of the F-117 Nighthawk began in 1974 and was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers didn’t have much hope it would actually fly. After the Hopeless Diamond concept went through a series of redesigns it became a fullscale mock-up of an aircraft and was renamed Have Blue. T. D. Barnes was the man in charge of radar testing Lockheed’s proof-ofconcept stealth bomber at Area 51. “Lockheed handed it over to us and we put it up on the pole,” Barnes says. “It was a very weird, very crude-looking thing that actually looked a lot like the ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Our job was to look at it from every angle using radar to see how it showed up on radar.” Radars had advanced considerably since the early days of the Cold War. “Initially, it was as visible as a big old barn,” says Barnes. So the Have Blue mock-up was sent back to the Skunk Works for more fine-tuning. Several months later, a new version of the mock-up arrived at Area 51. “Lockheed had changed the shape of the aircraft and a lot of the angles of the panels. Once we put the new mock-up on the pole it appeared to us as something around the size of a crow.” There was a final round of redesigns, then the airplane came back to Area 51 again. “We put it up on the pole and all we saw was the pole.” Now it was time for Lockheed to present the final rendition of the Have Blue to the Air Force, in hopes of landing the contract to build the nation’s first stealth bomber.
The director of science and engineering at Skunk Works, a man named Ed Martin, went to Lovick for some advice. “Ed Martin asked me how I thought the aircraft might appear on enemy radar. I explained that if the Oxcart showed up as being roughly equivalent to the size of a man, the Have Blue would appear to a radar like a seven- sixteenthinch metal sphere — roughly the size of a ball bearing.” Ed Martin loved Lovick’s analogy. A ball bearing. That was something a person could relate to. Before Martin left for Washington, DC, Lovick went to the Lockheed tool shop and borrowed a bag of ball bearings. He wanted Ed Martin to have a visual reference to share with the Air Force officials there. “Later, I learned the ball-bearing illustration was so effective that the customers began rolling the little silvery spheres across the conference table. The analogy has become legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about the stealthy F117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as tiny as a ball bearing.” In 1976, Lockheed won the contract. Immediately, they began manufacturing two Have Blue aircraft in the legendary Skunk Works Building 82. The man in charge of engineering, fabrication, and assembly of the pair of stealth bombers was Bob Murphy, the same person who twenty-one years earlier had begun his career in a pair of overalls at Area 51, working for Kelly Johnson as chief mechanic on the U-2.
Testing a bomber plane would be a radically different process from testing a spy plane, and the F-117 was
