Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Chapter Fourteen: Drama in the Desert

Before he became president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to ride through rural Texas in his convertible Lincoln Continental with the top down. According to his biographer Randall B. Woods, Johnson also liked to keep a loaded shotgun in the seat next to him, which allowed him to pull over and shoot deer easily. On the night of October 4, 1957, the then senator was entertaining a group of fellow hunting enthusiasts at his rural retreat, in the dining room of his forty-foot-tall, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned hunting blind that Johnson called his “deer tower.” All around the edge of the lair were powerful spotlights that could be turned on with the flip of a switch, blinding unsuspecting deer that had come to graze and making it easier to kill them.

It was an important night for Johnson, one that would set the rest of his life on a certain path. October 4, 1957, was the night the Russians launched Sputnik, and the senator began an exuberant antiCommunist crusade. That very night, once the guests had gone home and the staff of black waiters had cleaned up, Johnson retired to his bedroom with newfound conviction. “I’ll be dammed if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon,” he told his wife, Lady Bird.

At the time, Lyndon Johnson was not just any senator. He was the Democratic majority leader, which made him the most powerful legislator in the United States. Within hours of Sputnik’s launch, Johnson seized on the Red Moon moment for political gain. The Russians were a threat to America’s existence, he declared: “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses.”

For many Americans, Johnson’s reaction was easier to comprehend than President Eisenhower’s seemingly muted response.

Before he was president, Eisenhower had spent his career as a soldier. He was a five-star general. As former commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower had faced many a deadly threat. He had led the invasion at Normandy and commanded the Allied Forces in the last great German offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, which meant he and his men shot at a lot more than blinded deer. In October of 1957, he believed that the 184-pound Russian satellite called Sputnik was not a cause for panic or alarm.

The nation felt quite different. The public consensus was that Sputnik gave reason for serious concern. The orb was seen as ominous and foreboding, a visual portent of more bad things to come from the skies, with 4 percent of Americans claiming to have seen Sputnik with their own eyes. In reality, explained historian Matthew Brzezinski, “What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R7 rocket casing that [Sputnik’s designer Sergei] Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite,” which in reality could only be seen by a person using a high-powered optical device. Motivated by the public’s alarm, Senator Lyndon Johnson provided a foil to Eisenhower’s nonconfrontation, demanding a “full and exhaustive inquiry” from Congress to learn how the Russians had beaten the Americans into space. In doing so, Johnson cemented his persona as being tough on Communists. In turn, this made him an inadvertent advocate for missile defense and the military-industrial complex. Ultimately, it forced him to be a proponent for the Vietnam War.

Now, six years and one month after Sputnik, Lyndon Johnson was president. Seven days after Kennedy was shot dead, Johnson sat in the Oval Office with CIA director John McCone being briefed on Oxcart and Area 51. Johnson loved the idea of the Agency’s secret spy plane, but not for the reasons anyone expected. Johnson seized on one detail in particular: the aircraft’s speed. At the time, the world was under the impression that the Russians held the record for airspeed, which was 1,665 miles per hour. When Johnson learned the men at Area 51 had repeatedly beaten that record, he wanted to make that fact publicly known. What better way to begin a presidency than by one-upping the Russians?

In reality, outing the most expensive secret spy plane program ever undertaken in order to win a competition with the Russians did not make the best national security sense. Surfacing Oxcart would compromise the Agency’s technological pole position in the overhead espionage field. Oxcart was singularly capable of flying “any place in the world,” McCone explained. It was almost “invisible” to Soviet radar, with a “radar cross section in the order of 1/1000 of [a] normal aircraft.” If McCone had had a crystal ball, he could have told the president that the Oxcart was so far ahead of its time, it would hold aviation records for sustained height and speed through the end of the century. Also in the room were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, the administration’s most powerful trio. Conveniently for the Pentagon, all three men agreed with President Johnson that outing the Oxcart was a terrific idea.

The reason for the trio’s desire for transparency was that the Air Force had clear designs on cutting the CIA loose from the business of spy planes once and for all. Outing a program made the need for cover obsolete. Before Kennedy’s assassination, the Air Force high command had been writing secret proposals arguing for ways in which they could take over Oxcart. Four months earlier, Air Force commander General Schriever wrote a memo to Eugene Zuckert, secretary of the Air Force, suggesting that “an incident during the flight test program could force a disclosure.” The CIA had gotten lucky with Ken Collins’s Oxcart crash, General Schriever said, but if another one of the Agency’s secret spy planes were to crash “it would be extremely difficult to avoid some public release.” The subtext being that maybe there was a way that the Air Force could help facilitate this public disclosure. There was a final option, one that involved getting “the President on board.” A few weeks before Kennedy’s death, the Air Force had gone to him with a proposal to make Oxcart public; Kennedy had said to sit tight. Now it appeared that President Johnson was going to be much easier to manipulate.

To counter Air Force demands McCone tried a different approach, one that involved money. He told the president that more than half of Oxcart’s budget had already been spent producing fifteen airplanes.

To expose Oxcart now was a terrible idea, McCone said, not just in terms of national security but because it would be a colossal waste of money. Johnson agreed. But the president still wanted to one-up the Russians, so he settled on a slightly different plan. Through a veil of half-truths, he would out the Air Force’s attack version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, as the speed-breaker. The YF-12 would be given a false cover, the fictitious name A-11. Respecting McCone’s national security concerns, the actual A-12 Oxcart program — its true speed, operational ceiling, and near invisibility to radar — would remain classified top secret until the CIA declassified the Oxcart program, in 2007.

Three months later, on February 29, 1964, Johnson held a press conference in the International Treaty Room at the State Department. “The world record for aircraft speed, currently held by the Soviets, has been repeatedly broken in secrecy by the… A-11,” President Johnson declared from the podium, thrilled to give the Russians a poke in the ribs. At Area 51, caught off guard by the requirement to do a presidential dog-and-pony show, the 1129th Special Activities Squadron scrambled to get an airplane to Edwards Air Force Base in California for a press junket, which was called for immediately after the president’s grand announcement. Two YF-12s belonging to the Air Force but being tested at Area 51 were quickly flown in from Groom Lake and driven into a special hangar at Edwards. The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they set off the hangar’s sprinkler system, which mistook the high-temperature metal for a fire. When the press junket began, the aircraft were still dripping wet. Never mind; no one noticed. Like the president, the reporters were enamored by the notion of Mach 3 speed. Of much more significance was what the event meant to the CIA. The rivalry between the Agency and the Air Force for control over Oxcart was hotter than ever.

With the two departments’ gloves off, the fate of Oxcart now hung precariously in the balance. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara snidely told CIA director John McCone that he doubted the Oxcart would ever be used. If it was used, McNamara said, it would “probably have to be done without the specific knowledge of the President,” alluding to the Gary Powers shoot-down. Never again could a president be linked to a CIA aerial espionage mission. John McCone shot back that he had “every intention of using Oxcart and had so advised the President.” McNamara may have won the battle by getting President Johnson to surface part of the Oxcart program, but McCone was letting him know on behalf of the Agency that the Pentagon hadn’t yet won the war.

A second Air Force-Agency debate that involved the fate of the Oxcart, which in turn involved the fate of Area 51, centered on improvements in satellite and drone technology. McNamara told McCone that these two platforms would eventually eliminate the need for the Agency’s expensive, cumbersome Oxcart program. And yet both men knew that for the time being, Oxcart could deliver what satellites could not, and on two separate but equally important counts. In the six years since Sputnik, satellites had advanced to the degree that their spy images were good, though not great. But satellites had an inherent limitation in the world of espionage: they worked on fixed schedules. This would forever negate any element of surprise. The average satellite took ninety minutes to circle the world, and overflight schedules were easily determined by analysts at NORAD. The ironically named Oxcart was an attack espionage vehicle: quick and versatile, nimble and shrewd, with overpasses that would be totally unpredictable to any enemy. But most of all, in terms of clear photographic intelligence, nothing could compete with what Oxcart was about to be able to deliver to the president: two-and-a-half-foot blocks of detail made clear by film frames shot from seventeen miles up.

While McNamara and McCone fought, a presidential election loomed for Johnson. Nikita Khrushchev, ever the antagonist, decided to make things difficult for the saber-rattling Texan. During the campaign summer of 1964, the increasingly bellicose Khrushchev declared that any U-2s flying over Cuba would be shot down. The CIA saw the threat by the Soviet dictator as an opportunity to let Oxcart show its stuff, and McCone pushed President Johnson for an official mission. Finally, the president approved the Oxcart for Operation Skylark, a plan to fly missions over Cuba if Khrushchev showed signs of putting missiles in Cuba again. Skylark provided a terrific opportunity for the CIA to flex its overhead muscle and gain an edge on the Air Force. The only problem was that out at Area 51, the Oxcart wasn’t quite ready.

Collins sat in the cockpit of the world’s fastest aircraft as it climbed through sixty thousand feet. On this particular flight, navigators had him flying north to the border of Canada, where he was to turn around and head back. Flight-testing the Oxcart was the best job in the world, according to Ken Collins. Most jobs came with a daily routine, and for Collins each day of work at Area 51 meant another performance field to tackle — anything but routine.

For months, the pilots had been testing the hydraulics, navigation system, and flight controls on the aircraft. After each flight, the data from flight recorders was analyzed by a team of Lockheed engineers. Changes were made daily at Groom Lake. The wiring continued to be problematic until replacement materials that could withstand 800 degrees were finally located. Another problem that took forever to solve involved the buildup of the liquid chemical triethylborane (TEB) that had been preventing the engine afterburners from starting. Finally, that too was solved. But one dangerous problem remained, and that was the dreaded un-starts.

Moving through seventy-five thousand feet now, Collins watched the gauges in front of him. It was −70 degrees Fahrenheit outside with exhaust gas coming out of both engines at 3,400 degrees Fahrenheit. Each one of a pair of specially designed J-58 turbojet engines behind him generated as much power as all four of the turbines on the 81,000ton ocean liner the Queen Mary. It was those insanely powerful engines that enabled the aircraft to fly so high and so fast. But the Queen Mary carried more than three thousand people; the Oxcart just one. Collins counted on those engines. If anything went wrong with either of them it could mean catastrophe. Carefully, he moved the aircraft through the dangerous window between Mach 2.5 and Mach 2.8, which translates to something around 2,000 mph — as fast as a rifle bullet goes. Getting up to and through that speed asked more of the aircraft than anything else. It was also the place where an un-start was most likely to occur, and why Collins was counting on the aircraft engines to perform.

To the pilots, there was nothing scarier than an engine un-start. To the engineers, there was nothing to explain the cause of it. Flying at a certain pitch, one of the two J-58 engines could inexplicably experience an airflow cutoff and go dead. At that speed, the inlets were swallowing ten thousand cubic feet of air each second. One engineer likened this to the equivalent of two million people inhaling at once; an un-start was like all those people suddenly cut short of air. During the ten seconds it took to correct the airflow problem — one engine dead, the other generating enough power to propel an ocean liner — a violent yawing would occur as the aircraft twisted on a vertical axis. This caused a pilot to get slammed across the cockpit while desperately trying to restart the dead engine. The fear was that the pilot could get knocked unconscious, which would mean the end of the pilot, and the end of the airplane.

As Collins moved through Mach 2.7, the Earth below him hurtled by at an astonishing rate of more than half a mile each second. The aircraft’s preset flight path kept it away from urban centers, bridges, and dams for safety reasons, and from Indian burial grounds for political reasons. Once, a pilot flying over semirural West Virginia had to restart an engine at thirty thousand feet. The resulting sonic boom shattered a chimney inside a factory on the ground, and two men working there were crushed to death. And if a pilot had to bail out, as Collins had in 1963, the aircraft needed significant amounts of remote land on which to crash. At 123,000 pounds, this airplane had about as much glide in it as a tire iron falling from the sky.

Collins pushed the aircraft through Mach 2.8. In another forty-five seconds he would be out of the danger zone. Nearing eighty-five thousand feet, the inevitable tiny black dots began to appear on the aircraft windshield, sporadic at first, like the first drops of summer rain. Only a few months earlier, scientists at Area 51 had been baffled by those black dots. They worried it was some kind of high-atmosphere corrosion until the mystery was solved in the lab. It turned out the black spots were dead bugs that were cycling around in the upper atmosphere, blasted into the jet stream by the world’s two superpowers’ rally of thermonuclear bombs. The bugs were killed in the bombs’ blasts and sent aloft to ninety thousand feet in the ensuing mushroom clouds where they gained orbit.

Collins was just seconds away from Mach 3, which meant cruising altitude at last. If there was a brief moment where he might allow himself to relax, maybe even glance outside at the round Earth below and enjoy the cruise, that moment would come soon. But then the unstart happened. In a critical instant, the airplane banged and yawed so dramatically it was as if the airplane’s tail were trying to catch its nose. Collins’s body was flung forward in his harness. His plastic flight helmet crashed against the cockpit glass, denting the helmet and nearly knocking him unconscious. As the airplane slid across the atmosphere, Collins steeled himself and restarted the engine. The aircraft’s second engine kicked back into motion almost as quickly as it had stopped.

Things in the cockpit returned to normal. Inside his pressure suit, Collins felt his heart beating like a jackhammer in his chest. Fate really is a hunter, he thought. It lurks behind you in constant pursuit. When it will catch up to you and take you is anybody’s guess.

Death didn’t get him this time, and for that he was grateful. But somebody needed to fix this un-start problem, fast. With his feet firmly planted on the earth again, Collins discussed the issue of the un-starts with Bill Park during his debrief. Park was Lockheed’s chief flight-test pilot and he always sat patiently with the project pilots after their flights, listening intently about what went on during the flight and what needed work. No detail was too small. Park agreed with Collins; the un-start problem was major and had to be fixed before somebody died. Park was the liaison between the project pilots and Kelly Johnson, and Park was directed to Lockheed’s thermodynamicist Ben Rich to get the unstart problem solved. Park had experienced his own share of un-starts, and giving Ben Rich an ultimatum was not something he had any problem with.

Rich’s office was sparely decorated with a few trophies and some plaques on the walls. There were papers everywhere, and pencils with the erasers gone. A hand-cranked calculator and a metal slide rule sat on Rich’s desk. Park set his flight helmet down — it had its own crack, similar to Collins’s — and pointed to it. “Fix it,” Park said. “And I mean the un-start problem, not my helmet. Time to suit up, Ben. Time for you to see how it feels.” The pilots figured that the only way to get Ben Rich to understand just how unacceptable this un-start business was would be to have Rich experience the nightmare scenario himself, and there just happened to be a two-seater version of the Oxcart on base. The Air Force was currently testing its drone-carrying version of the Oxcart, the M-21/D-21, in the skies over Groom Lake, and the pilots had seen the two-seater going in and out of the hangar all week. Park told Ben Rich the time had come for him to take a Mach 3 ride.

In a burst of what he would later describe as “a crazy moment of weakness,” Ben Rich agreed. Rich was a self-described Jewish nerd. Totally unathletic, he was a kid who never made the high school baseball team. Before joining Skunk Works, Ben Rich had only one claim to fame: being awarded a patent for designing a nickelchromium heating system that prevented a pilot’s penis from freezing to his urine elimination pipe. He was a design wizard, not an airplane cowboy. He’d never come close to flying supersonic before, and he had absolutely no desire to go that fast. But he was chief engineer for Skunk Works, so fixing the un-start problem was his job. “I’ll do it,” Ben Rich said.

Before Ben Rich could get into the world’s fastest aircraft, he had to go through a battery of physical tests. You can’t just climb into an aircraft that gets up to ninety thousand feet without being checked out in a pressure suit in an altitude chamber first. The flight surgeons on base prepped Rich for tests, the way they usually did pilots. Rich passed the physical and a few early stress tests but when he got to the pressure-chamber test — the one that simulated ejection at fifty thousand feet — things did not go as the engineer had planned. The moment the chamber door closed behind Ben Rich, he panicked. “I was sucking oxygen like a marathon runner and screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’” Rich later recalled. Without ever getting close to simulating what it was like to fly at Mach 3, let alone experiencing an un-start at that speed, Ben Rich admitted in his memoir that he had still nearly dropped dead from fright.

But the point was made. Rich dedicated all his efforts to fixing the un-start problem. Like so many engineering challenges facing the scientists at Area 51, fixing it involved great ingenuity. In this case, Rich and his team didn’t exactly fix the problem. Instead, they created a go-around that made things not so life-threatening for the pilots. Rich invented an electronic control that made sure that when one engine experienced an un-start, the second engine dropped its power as well. The control switch would then restart both engines at the same time. After the new fix, pilots were notified of the un-start by a loud buzzing noise in the cockpit. And as far as nearly getting knocked unconscious at 2,000 miles per hour, Oxcart pilots could cross that off their lists of concerns.

In addition to the problems the pilots were having getting the airplane up to speed, there were problems with the electronic countermeasures, or ECMs. The reports being analyzed back at Langley said if Operation Skylark was to happen over Cuba, cruise speed would have to be at a minimum Mach 2.8, because there was a real chance that the Soviet radar systems in Cuba would be able to detect Oxcart flights and possibly even shoot them down. While Project Palladium officers continue to work on jamming methods, the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon decided that the solution lay in working to enhance stealth. The phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further. This meant that Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick and the radar cross-section team were summoned back to Area 51.

In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project Kempster-Lacroix, Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined, would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the ground.

Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with KempsterLacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Force changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.

It was ironic, to say the least. Not the flip-flopping by the Air Force but the concerns about radiation. By 1964, the government had exploded 286 nuclear bombs within shouting distance of Area 51. One year earlier, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty prohibiting nuclear testing in the air, space, or sea. The initiative had been in the works for years but negotiations had repeatedly failed. Now that it was finally signed, testing had moved underground. Neither superpower trusted the other to honor the commitment for very long, and the number of tests per month actually accelerated after the treaty; the idea was to stay weapons-ready in the event one side broke the treaty. Between September 1961 and December 1964, a record-breaking 162 bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site inside underground tunnels and shafts. Nearly half of these explosions resulted in the “accidental release of radioactivity” into the atmosphere.

In addition to weapons tests, the nuclear laboratories were racing to find ways to use nuclear bombs for “peaceful applications.” This included ideas like widening the Panama Canal or blowing up America’s natural geography to make room for future highways and homes. These proposed earthmoving projects fell under the rubric of Project Plowshares, a name chosen from a verse in the Old Testament, Micah 4:3: And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.

But that was just semantics. Test ban treaty or not, the Department of Defense had no intention of putting down its swords. The men were fully committed to the long haul that was the Cold War.

Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than for its top secret work for the CIA. “The first jamming system was called Red Dog; later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an electronic pulse. The work was exciting when the airplanes were flying and there was actual data to collect, but if the Red Dog system failed and needed fixing, it meant a lot of waiting around.

These were the early days of electronic warfare, and there were not a lot of Red Dog spare parts lying around. As a result, Ken Swanson worked many long weekends at Area 51. Swanson says that sometimes he and his Sylvania colleague felt like they were the only ones on the base. One weekend the men took the Area 51 motor pool’s four-wheel-drive vehicle up to Bald Mountain, the tallest peak on the Groom Range, to have a look around. “We found a bunch of old Model Ts and had no idea what they were doing there,” Swanson recalls. Another time he went solo to investigate the old mines. “I was wearing tennis shoes and Bermuda shorts and I bumped into a bunch of rattlers sunning themselves. Next time I went back, I wore snake boots,” he says. During winter weekends, there were even fewer people at Area 51, and for entertainment, after a long day performing high-tech electronic-countermeasures work, Swanson would go joyriding around the dry lake bed. He’d borrow an Econoline van from the motor pool, take it out on the frozen tarmac, and do spins. “But I stopped after I had the van on two wheels once,” Swanson says.

With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG&G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surfaceto-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars. An equally important part of the radar testing system was the radar pole that had to be installed on the top of Bald Mountain. For that, the CIA recruited one of the best rescue helicopter pilots in the country, Charlie Trapp.

“I was minding my own business in South Carolina,” Trapp recalls, “when these guys from the Air Force called me up and asked if I want to come fly a two-airplane helo unit in Nevada, one hundred miles from the nearest town. They said it was important and that I’d have to be able to hover and land at nine thousand feet.” Trapp thought it sounded interesting as well as challenging and he signed on. “We flew in from Nellis in the H-43 [helicopter] and before we even landed at Area 51, they said, ‘Let’s go see how you land on top of the mountain first,’ that’s how important the mountain project was to the beginning of my Area 51 assignment.” For months, Trapp hauled cement in thousandpound buckets from the Area 51 operations center up to the top of Bald Mountain. “I’d hover over the top and lower the equipment down,” Trapp explains. “There were high winds and serious dust storms.” Finally, Trapp helicoptered in the one-hundred-foot-long radar pole, which a team of workers cemented into place. Mission accomplished. “We did such a good job, the CIA gave us air medals,” Trapp says. On his way back down to Area 51 in the helicopter, Trapp would fly around the different mountain peaks. “Once, I came across an old graveyard. In a helicopter you can hover and look. The graves were made of piles of rocks. I remember two of them were really small. They must have been kids’ graves.” The mountain had a psychological pull with many of the men at Area 51 during the Oxcart years. It was also the only place the men were allowed to go that was technically “off base.”

Down on the tarmac, every time an A-12 Oxcart took off, it was Trapp’s job to hang out airborne, two hundred feet above the runway and off to one side, “in case the aircraft crashed,” Trapp explains. “My helicopter contained firefighting equipment, and I always had two PJs with me, para-rescue jumpers, [who perform] like a Navy SEAL. It was a lot of work having us airborne and I told the boss, Colonel Holbury, that I could be airborne in less than two minutes’ time. So the policy changed.” Instead, Trapp was on standby in the event of an accident, “which meant I got to drive the only golf cart around the Area 51 base.” The golf cart came in handy at night. “We played a lot of poker in the House-Six bar,” Trapp explains. “The loser had to do the late-night cheeseburger run over to the mess hall. With the golf cart, you could get there and back in five minutes.”

For all the technology that was around at Area 51, entertainment was decidedly old-school. “We did a lot of arm wrestling,” Trapp says. “Some guys played racquetball and other guys played three-hole golf.” When Trapp gained ten pounds eating so many late-night cheeseburgers, he was ordered to lose the weight or risk losing his job. To assist in the effort, Colonel Holbury challenged Trapp to weekly rounds of squash. Once, someone brought a sailboard out to Area 51, and the pilots pulled rank and got the men in the machine shop to affix wheels to the bottom of the board. “We took the thing out to Groom Lake when the wind was blowing really hard,” Trapp recalls. “It didn’t go that fast but we didn’t care.”

Of all the pastimes, the unanimous favorite was flying model airplanes using remote control. “We had two areas for flying model planes,” Trapp recalls. “Out on the grass by the golf course, and on the tarmac out on the dry lake. Sometimes the airplanes would go so far and so high they’d get lost. A guy would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, when you’re out in the helicopter, can you keep your eye out for my model plane? It’s got a five-foot wing span and yellow wings.’ We found ways to entertain ourselves at Area 51. We had to; there weren’t any girls.”

The man who took the model airplane flying most seriously was Frank Murray. He was also the chase pilot with the most flying time during Project Oxcart. “You could always find Frank sitting in his room gluing model airplanes together,” Colonel Slater recalls. “That was his idea of fun. Or maybe he was the only guy at 51 who wasn’t half-drunk at eleven o’clock at night.” Which is how Murray accumulated the most flying time. “If somebody’s kid got hurt in the middle of the night, which happened more than you think, and I need a pilot to get someone off base fast, I’d round up Frank,” Colonel Slater explains. When master fuels sergeant Harry Martin’s grandfather died, it was Frank Murray who flew him back east so he could get to the funeral in time. “Frank was always willing to do the job,” Colonel Slater explains. “Most people require time off from flying. Not Frank.”

Murray flew model airplanes to keep his head clear for flying real airplanes. “Everyone had their different thing,” Colonel Slater says. “Bud Wheelon from CIA used to want to play tennis at midnight when he was on base. Some liked to go hunting up in the mountains by the old Sheehan mine. Holbury used to like to make the guard dogs run. Some guys threw rocks at rattlesnakes. I liked to drive around in the jeep and find petrified wood.”

As an Oxcart chase pilot, Murray spent his days and nights chasing the Mach 3 airplane in the F-101. The Voodoo was a two-seat, supersonic jet fighter the Air Force used to accompany the Oxcart on takeoffs and landings. “We flew it with Oxcart up through the special operating area, or Yuletide, which was the airspace just north of the base,” Murray explains. “The Agency had us fly alongside the Oxcart in the Voodoo until we couldn’t keep up with the Oxcart anymore.” Flying chase meant Murray got assigned most of the grunt work and enjoyed little of the glamour. “I was a little jealous of the Oxcart pilots,” he admits. “How can a pilot not be? But I was happy as a pig in the Voodoo. For a farm boy from San Diego, flying chase for the 1129th was a good time.”

Murray flew the F-101 doing just about everything that needed to be done in support of Oxcart operations. This included flying against the Red Dog simulators, observing tanker refuels, overseeing takeoffs and landings, and flying Lockheed photographers around on CIA photo shoots. But Murray’s path in life took a significant redirection when General Ledford, the head of the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, decided he wanted to learn how to fly the F-101 while he was overseeing activities at Area 51. Murray recalls: “The general had been a bomber pilot in World War Two but he hadn’t ever flown anything as fast as the Voodoo could go, which was around twelve hundred or thirteen hundred miles per hour. So he decided that he wanted to learn how to fly it and when it came to choosing an IP, an instructor pilot, the general chose me.”

Murray now had to teach a legendary war hero, someone who also happened to be the highest-ranking military officer on the Oxcart program, how to fly supersonic. It might have been a daunting task. Except that it was not in Frank Murray’s character to be apprehensive. To Murray, it sounded like fun. “Out at the Ranch we had eight 101s that ran chase and one of them was a two-holer, with two cockpits and two sticks. ‘Come on, Frankie,’ the general said. He got in the back and up we went.”

General Ledford began to spend more and more time at the Ranch, where, in addition to the serious work being done, operations had taken on a boys’ club atmosphere. After a day of intense flying, nights were spent eating, socializing, and having drinks. “Sometimes, on the late side of things after dinner, Ledford would get a hair in his hat that he wanted to get back to Washington to see his wife, Polly,” Murray says. “He’d slap me on the back. That was my cue to take him home.” Home, in Washington, DC, was 2,500 miles away, and with supersonic aircraft at one’s disposal, this could actually happen this late at night. “Ledford was my student but he was also the general so on these trips home, I started letting him sit in the front of the plane; I’d sit in back. Well, all those hours flying back and forth from Area 51 to Washington, that cemented it. He was my boss but he also became my friend.” Ledford had other friends as well, several in high places at the Air Force, which made getting back to the East Coast from Nevada in the middle of the night a relatively easier trip. “Ledford had a buddy who was still in SAC, an air division commander at Blytheville Air Force Base in northeast Arkansas, just about halfway between 51 and Washington. Ledford would radio him when we were up in the air approaching the next state over and he’d say, ‘Have you got a tanker in the area?’ If he did or didn’t you could bet your fifty there’d be a tanker lining up next to you somewhere over Arkansas,” Murray says. What this meant was that when Murray and the general were traveling from Area 51 to the East Coast late at night, they never even had to stop for gas.

After a little more than two hours in the air, the men would land at Andrews Air Force Base and taxi up to the generals’ quarters — similar to a luxury hotel suite on the base — and enjoy a postflight scotch. “Ledford had a fancy setup on base quarters that had a fully equipped bar,” Murray explains. “We’d have a pop and chat a little before his wife, Polly, arrived to pick him up and take him home. I’d spend the night in the generals’ quarters. Get some sleep and in the morning head home to 51.”

It was an exciting time for Frank Murray. He couldn’t have imagined living this life. Only a few years earlier, he’d been flying Voodoos at Otis Air Force Base as part of the Air Defense Command when he had seen an interesting sign tacked on a bulletin board that read NASA is looking for F-101 chase pilots. He thought working for NASA sounded like fun. He had no idea that was just a cover story and that the Air Force, not NASA, was really looking for chase pilots for the Oxcart program at Area 51. Murray applied and got in. He moved the family to Nevada and swore an oath not to tell anyone what he did, not even Stella, his wife. But he knew his family would be super proud of him. For a farm boy from San Diego, he was at the top of his game.

While Project Oxcart worked to get mission-ready, back in Washington the widening of the conflict in Vietnam by the Communists in the north was becoming a nightmare for President Johnson. He had won the favor of the people back in 1957 by declaring Communism to be the world’s greatest threat. In comparison to the thermonuclear-armed Soviet Union, Vietnam was to Johnson a sideshow. But it was also a piece in the widely held domino theory: if Vietnam fell to Communism, the whole region would ultimately fall. President Johnson had inherited Vietnam from President Kennedy when it was a political crisis and not yet a war. That changed in the second summer Johnson held office, in August of 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon declared that the U.S. Navy had suffered an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam against the USS Maddox, and the National Security Agency had evidence, McNamara said. This event allowed Johnson to push the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress, which authorized war. (In 2005 NSA released a detailed confession admitting that its intelligence had been “deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack.”) To avenge the USS Maddox attack, Johnson ordered air attacks against the North Vietnamese, sending Navy pilots on bombing missions over North Vietnam. When a number of U.S. pilots were shot down, the North Vietnamese took them as prisoners of war.

The war’s escalation led Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to perform an about-face regarding Oxcart. The Agency’s spy plane could be vitally useful after all, McNamara now said, certainly when it came to gathering intelligence in North Vietnam. The Agency knew the Russians had begun supplying surface-to-air missile systems to the Communists in North Vietnam, and now they were shooting down American boys. Both the Air Force and the Agency sent U-2s on reconnaissance missions, and these overflights revealed that missile sites were being set up around Hanoi. But the Pentagon needed far more specific target information. In June, McNamara sat down with the CIA and began drawing up plans to get the Oxcart ready for its first mission at last.