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

Chapter Eight: Cat and Mouse Becomes Downfall

Francis Gary Powers never slept well the night before a mission flight. When his 2:00 a.m. wake-up call came on May 1, 1960, Powers felt particularly anxious. His flight had already been postponed twice. It was sweltering hot in the ancient city of Peshawar, Pakistan, and Powers had spent the night on a cot in an aircraft hangar inside the CIA’s secret facility there. Between the intense heat and the noise, sleep had been sporadic. The false starts had added a layer of uncertainty into the mix. Gary Powers got out of bed and took a shower. May was the hottest month in Pakistan. It was before 5:00 a.m. and yet the sun was already up, cooking the air. After only a few minutes, Powers would be drenched in sweat again. He dressed and ate his breakfast, all the while thinking about the radical mission that lay ahead. The Agency had never attempted to fly all the way across the Soviet Union before, from the southern border near Pakistan to the northern border near the Arctic Circle. From there, Powers would fly his U-2 to a secret CIA base in Norway and land. No Agency pilot had ever taken off and landed at two different bases in a U-2.

This overflight was particularly important to the CIA. Powers would gather valuable photographic information on two key sites. The first was the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the Soviets’ busiest missile launch base. Tyuratam was Russia’s Cape Canaveral, the place from where Sputnik had been launched. For years the CIA was aware of only one launchpad at Tyuratam. Now there were rumored to be two, and a U-2 overflight in April revealed preparations for an upcoming launch — of what exactly, the CIA wanted to know. After Tyuratam, Powers would fly across Siberia and head up to a facility at Plesetsk, 186 miles south of the city of Archangelsk, in the Arctic Circle. Plesetsk was alleged to be the Soviet’s newest missile-launch facility and was dangerously close to Alaska. Powers’s flight would cover a record 3,800 miles, 2,900 of which would be inside the Soviet Union. He would spend nine nerveracking hours over enemy territory. That would be a lot of time for the Soviets to try to shoot him down. The reverse would have been unthinkable. Imagine a Russian spy plane flying unmolested over the entire United States, from the East Coast to the West, snapping photographs that could provide details at two-and-a-half-foot increments from seventy thousand feet up.

After breakfast, Powers sat in the hangar waiting for a final weather check. He had already sweated through his long johns. Mother Nature always had the final say. For Powers, a slight wind change meant the schedule for his mission flight that morning was disrupted yet again. Not enough to cancel the mission, but enough so that his navigational maps had to be quickly corrected. The waiting was agonizing. It was also necessary. If his photographic targets were covered in clouds, images from the U-2’s camera would be useless. The navigators needed to calculate when and if the weather would clear. As Powers sat waiting it out, his commanding officer, Colonel Shelton, crossed the cement floor and indicated he wanted to speak with him.

Colonel Shelton extended his hand and opened his palm. At the center was a large silver coin. “Do you want the silver dollar?” the colonel asked Powers. What Shelton was offering was no ordinary American coin. It was a CIA suicide gadget, designed to conceal a tiny poison pin hidden inside. The pin, which the pilot could find in his pocket by rubbing a finger gently around the coin’s edge, was coated with a sticky brown substance called curare, the paralytic poison found in lethal Amazonian blowpipes. One prick of the poison pin and a pilot would be dead in seconds.

Gary Powers was one of the Agency’s most accomplished U-2 pilots. He had flown a total of twenty-seven missions, including ones over China. He had once suffered a potentially fatal flameout over the Soviet Union and managed to survive. On many occasions he had been offered the suicide pill, and on each previous mission he had said no. But on May 1, 1960, Powers unexpectedly accepted the pin from Colonel Shelton, then slid it into the pocket of his flight suit. Later, Powers would wonder if he’d had a premonition of what was to come.

At 5:20 a.m., it was go time. The personnel equipment sergeant strapped Powers into the cockpit of the U-2. Two men held a shirt over Powers’s head to protect him from the blaring sun and the heat while he went over radio codes with the Agency officer. Pilots knew never to use their radio while flying over denied territory, but they listened carefully for click codes being sent to them. A single click meant proceed. Three clicks meant turn around and head back to base. From under his heavy helmet, sweat poured down Powers’s face, making him feel helpless. Finally Colonel Shelton came out for a briefing. Powers’s overflight was now awaiting final approval by President Eisenhower himself. A last-minute delay like this had never happened before and Powers became convinced the flight would again be canceled for another day. Instead, at 6:20 a.m. a signal came from an intelligence officer. The two men who had been holding the shirt over Powers’s head climbed down off the ladders; the personnel equipment sergeant closed the canopy, sealing him into the airplane; and Gary Powers was cleared for takeoff.

Up he went. After the U-2’s extraordinarily steep and fast climb, Powers within minutes reached an altitude where it was 60 degrees below zero outside. No longer sweating, Powers switched on the U-2 autopilot mechanism so he could make notes in his flight log. Waiting was always a drag, offset immediately by the excitement of being up in the air. Using a pen, Powers wrote: “Aircraft #360, Sortie Number 4154, 0126 Greenwich Mean Time.” He listened for the one-click signal over the radio, which would let him know he was good to proceed. The click came. Powers settled in for what was supposed to be a total of thirteen hours of flying time. His overflight would be the Agency’s deepest penetration into the Soviet Union so far.

In Moscow, two thousand miles to the east, it was still dark outside when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sat upright in bed, awakened by a ringing telephone. Defense minister Marshal Malinovsky was on the line. A high-flying aircraft had crossed the border over Afghanistan and was headed toward central Russia, Malinovsky said. Khrushchev became enraged. Today of all days. May 1 was Russia’s national holiday. The streets were festooned with banners and ribbons for the May Day parade. This could mean only one thing, Khrushchev later told his son, Sergei. Eisenhower was ridiculing him again. The Soviet premier’s Achilles’ heel was his lack of formal education; he’d dropped out of school to work in the coal mines after the fourth grade. With his poor reading and writing skills, Khrushchev hated feeling that a more educated world leader was trying to make him appear the fool.

The Americans were especially duplicitous regarding holidays, Khrushchev believed. Four years earlier, on the Fourth of July, the Americans had double-crossed him with their first overflight of the U-2. If that overflight was a kick in the ribs, today’s overflight was a sharp poke in the eye. “An uncomfortable situation was shaping up,” Russian colonel Alexander Orlov explained in a historical review of the incident written for the CIA in 1998. Orlov, who spent most of his forty-six-year military career with Russia’s air defense force, had been an eyewitness to the event; he was seated at the command post in Moscow when Gary Powers was shot down. “The May Day parade was scheduled to get underway at mid-morning and leaders of the party, the government and the Armed Forces were to be present as usual,” Orlov explained. “In other words, at a time when a major parade aimed at demonstrating Soviet military prowess was about to begin, a not-yet-identified foreign aircraft was flying over the heart of the country and Soviet air defenses appeared unable to shoot it down.”

Not if Khrushchev had his way. “Shoot down the plane by whatever means,” he shouted back at his defense minister. All across the country, the Soviet Air Force went on alert. Generals scrambled their fighter jets to go after Powers. In Siberia, officers from Soviet Air Defense Forces were summoned to their command posts with orders to shoot down the American spy. It was a matter of national pride. The orders came from Nikita Khrushchev himself.

Tucked snugly into the tiny cockpit of his U-2, Gary Powers sailed along. He was one and a half hours into his flight. The weather was proving to be worse than expected but clicks on the radio system indicated that he was to proceed. Over the majestic Hindu Kush mountain range, clouds rose all the way up to the top of the twenty-fivethousand-foot peaks, and the cloud cover made it difficult for Powers to determine exactly where he was on the map. Flying at seventy thousand feet meant the sky above him was pitch-black. Under normal circumstances he would have used the stars to determine where on the globe he was, but today his celestial navigation computations were unreliable — they’d been laid out for a 6:00 a.m. departure, not a 6:26 a.m. one. And so, with only a compass and sextant to keep him on track, Powers flew on. Spotting a break in the clouds, he determined his location to be just southeast of the Aral Sea, high above presentday Uzbekistan. Thirty miles to the north lay Powers’s first target: the Tyuratam Cosmodrome.

Realizing he was slightly off course, Powers was correcting back when suddenly he spotted the condensation trail of a jet aircraft below him. “It was moving fast, at supersonic speed, paralleling my course, though in the opposite direction,” Powers explained in his memoir Operation Overflight, published in 1970. Five minutes passed and now he knew at least one MiG was on his tail. Then he spotted another aircraft flying in the same direction as he was. “I was sure now they were tracking me on radar, vectoring in and relaying my headings to the aircraft” below him. But the MiG was so far below his U-2, it did not pose a real threat. Protected by height, Powers flew on. He felt confident he was out of harm’s way. First he passed over the Ural Mountains, once considered the natural boundary between the East and the West. He headed on toward Sverdlovsk, which was situated thirteen hundred miles inside Russia. Before the Communists took over, Sverdlovsk was called Yekaterinburg. It was there in 1918 that Czar Nicholas II and his family were lined up against a kitchen wall and shot, setting off the Communist Revolution that had made the Cold War a reality. To the Communists, the city of Sverdlovsk played an important role in the Soviet military-industrial complex, a place where tanks and rockets were built. It was also home to the Soviets’ secret bioweapons program, which on the date of Powers’s flight was not yet known to the CIA.

Nearing Sverdlovsk, Powers made a ninety-degree turn. He headed toward what appeared to be an airfield not marked on his map. Suddenly, large thunderclouds appeared, obscuring his view. He switched his cameras on. Powers had no idea that he was about to photograph a secret facility called Kyshtym 40, which produced nuclear material and also assembled weapons. Kyshtym 40 was as valuable to Russia as Los Alamos and Sandia combined were to the Americans.

On the ground, a surface-to-air missile battalion tasked with guarding Kyshtym 40 had been tracking Powers’s flight. At exactly 8:53 local time, the air defense battalion commander there gave the official word. “Destroy target,” the commander said. A missile from an SA-2 fired into the air at Mach 3. Inside his airplane, Gary Powers was making notes for the official record — altitude, time, instrument readings — when he suddenly felt a dull thump. All around him, his plane became engulfed in a bright orange flash of light. “A violent movement shook the plane, flinging me all over the cockpit,” Powers later wrote. “I assumed both wings had come off. What was left of the plane began spinning, only upside down, the nose pointing upward toward the sky.” As the U-2 spun out of control, Powers’s pressure suit inflated, wedging him into the nose of the airplane. The U-2 was crashing. He needed to get out. Thrown forward as he was, if he pushed the button to engage the ejection seat, both of his legs would be severed. Powers struggled, impossibly, against gravity. He needed to get out of the airplane and he needed to hit the button that would trigger an explosion to destroy the airplane once he was gone, but he was acutely aware that he couldn’t get out of the airplane without cutting off his own legs. For a man who rarely felt fear, Gary Powers was on the edge of panic.

Suddenly, out of the chaos, three words came to him: Stop and think. An old pilot friend had once said that if he ever got in a jam, all he had to remember was to “stop and think.” His thoughts traveled back to his old training days at Area 51, back when the U-2 didn’t have an ejection seat. Back when escaping from the U-2 was the pilot’s job, not a mechanical one. Reaching up, Powers unlocked the airplane canopy. It flew off and sailed into the darkness. Instantly, the centrifugal force of the spinning airplane sucked him out into the atmosphere. He was free at last; all he needed to do was deploy his parachute. Then, to his horror, he realized that he was still attached to the airplane by his oxygen hoses. Powers tried to think through his options, but the gforces were too great. There was nothing he could do anymore. His fate was out of his hands. He blacked out.

Nearly two thousand miles away, at a National Security Agency listening post in Turkey, NSA operators eavesdropped on Soviet radar operators at Kyshtym 40 as operators there tried to shoot Gary Powers’s U-2 out of the sky. The NSA had participated in many U-2 missions before. It was their job to equip CIA planes with listening systems, special recorders that gathered electronic intelligence, or ELINT. The NSA operators knew something was wrong the moment they heard a Soviet MiG pilot, the one who was chasing Powers from below, talking to the missile operators at Kyshtym 40. “He’s turning left,” the MiG pilot said, helping the missile operator to target Powers’s exact location. Just a few moments later, NSA operators heard Kyshtym 40 say that Powers’s U-2 had disappeared from their radar screens.

NSA immediately sent a message to the White House marked CRITIC. Meanwhile, in the Soviet command post in Moscow, Russian colonel Alexander Orlov received an urgent report from Siberia: the American spy plane had been shot down. A missile had been fired and the target had disappeared from radar screen. The news was phoned to Khrushchev, who demanded physical proof. The White House sent a message to the CIA that was received by Bissell’s special assistant, Bob King. “Bill Bailey did not come home” was how Richard Bissell learned of the incident, in code.

Over Sverdlovsk, Francis Gary Powers was free-falling through the atmosphere. Somehow, he had detached from the spinning airplane. “My body [was] just falling perfectly free. It was a pleasant, exhilarating feeling,” Powers would later recall. It felt “even better than floating in a swimming pool.” His parachute deployed, and Powers floated into a wide, grassy field. His thoughts during the last ten thousand feet before the ground were sharp and clear. “Everything was cold, quiet, serene. There was no sensation of falling. It was as if I were hanging in the sky.” A large section of the aircraft floated by, “twisting and fluttering like a leaf.” Below him, the countryside looked beautiful. There were forests, lakes, roads, and small villages. The landscape reminded him of Virginia in the spring. As Powers floated down toward Earth, he noticed a small car driving down a dirt road alongside him, as if following his course. Finally, he made contact with the ground. The car stopped and men were helping him. One assisted with his chute. Another man helped him to his feet. A third man reached over to Powers’s survival pack and took his pistol. A crowd of approximately fifty people had gathered around. The men motioned for Powers to follow them. They loaded him into the front seat of a truck and began driving.

The men seemed friendly. One of them offered Powers a cigarette. The emblem on the cigarette pack was that of a dog. Taking it, Powers realized the incredible irony of it all. The brand was Laika, and its emblem was the world’s first space dog. Laika had flown inside Sputnik 2, the second Russian satellite to be launched from the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the CIA target that Powers had photographed a little over an hour before. Gary Powers sat back and smoked the cigarette, noting how remarkably like an American cigarette it was.

With the U-2 spy plane and the SA-2 missile system, the Americans and the Soviets had been playing a game of cat and mouse: constant pursuit, near captures, and repeated escapes. Now that game was over. Powers, like the mouse, had been caught. But there was a second, even greater catastrophe in the works. When the White House staff learned Powers’s U-2 had been shot down, they assumed he was dead. This was an assumption based on CIA “facts.” Richard Bissell had personally assured the president that in the unlikely event that an SA-2 missile was able to reach a U-2 and shoot it down, the pilot would not survive. “We believed that if a U-2 was shot down over Soviet territory, all the Russians would have was the wreckage of an aircraft,” Bissell later explained. And so, believing Gary Powers was dead, the White House denied that the airplane was on any kind of espionage mission, in opposition to Khrushchev’s very public accusation. For five days, the White House claimed that Gary Powers had been gathering high-altitude weather data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA.

But Khrushchev had evidence, which he would soon make public. With great bravado, on May 5, he gathered all thirteen hundred members of the Soviet parliament inside the Great Kremlin Palace speaking hall and addressed them from the stage. The United States has been making a fool of Mother Russia, Khrushchev declared. The Americans had been sending spy planes over the Soviet Union for nearly four years. To underscore the significance of what had happened, Khrushchev gave a bold analogy. “Just imagine what would have happened had a Soviet aircraft appeared over New York, Chicago or Detroit? That would mean the outbreak of war!” Amid gasps of horror, Khrushchev explained how the Soviet Union had first used diplomatic channels to protest the spy flights. That he had called upon the U.N. Security Council to take action, but nothing was done. Just four days earlier, Khrushchev explained, on May 1, yet another illegal espionage mission had occurred. Only this time the Soviets had succeeded in shooting down the spy plane. The audience broke into wild cheers. Then came the heart of the matter in the form of a question. It was also Khrushchev’s bait. “Who sent this aircraft across the Soviet frontier?” he asked. “Was it the American Commander-inChief who, as everyone knows, is the president? Or was this aggressive act performed by Pentagon militarists without the president’s knowledge? If American military men can take such action on their own, the world should be greatly concerned.” By now, Khrushchev’s audience members were stomping their feet.

Halfway across the world, President Eisenhower continued to have no idea that Gary Powers was alive and had been talking to his captors. All the White House and the CIA knew was that the Soviets had a wrecked U-2 in their possession. Khrushchev had laid a dangerous trap, one in which President Eisenhower got caught. The White House sent its press officer Walter Bonney to the press room to greet journalists and to tell the nation a lie. Gary Powers’s weathersampling airplane was supposed to be flying over Turkey. Instead, it had gone astray. Two days later, on May 7, Khrushchev sprung his trap. “Comrades,” he told the parliament, who’d been gathered for a second revelatory speech. “I must let you in on a secret.” He smiled. “When I made my report two days ago I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane and we also have the pilot who is quite alive and kicking,” Khrushchev said. For the United States, it was a diplomatic disaster of the worst order.

The president was trapped. Were he to deny knowing what his “militarists” were up to, he would appear uninformed by his own military. Were he to admit that he had in fact personally authorized Powers’s flight, it would become clear he’d lied earlier when he claimed the downed airplane had been conducting weather research, not espionage. So despondent was the commander in chief about his untenable position that when he walked into the Oval Office two days later, he told his secretary Ann Whitman, “I would like to resign.” Spying on Russia and defying Soviet airspace was one thing; lying about it after being caught red-handed made the president look like a liar in the eyes of the world. In 1960, American presidents were expected to be truth tellers; there was no public precedent for lying.

Khrushchev demanded an apology from his nemesis. Eisenhower wouldn’t bow. Apologizing would only open Pandora’s box. There were too many overflights to make them transparent. There had been at least twenty-four U-2 flights over Russia and hundreds more bomber overflights by General LeMay. To reveal the dangerous game of cat and mouse that had been going on in secret — at a time when thermonuclear weapons on both sides were ready to fly — would likely shock and frighten people more than having a president who lied. A national poll revealed that more than half of adult Americans believed they were more likely to die in a thermonuclear war with the Russians than of old age. So Eisenhower made the decision to keep the focus on Gary Powers’s flight only and admit that he personally had authorized it. This was “the first time any nation had publicly admitted it was engaged in espionage,” noted Eisenhower’s lead U-2 photo interpreter at the time, Dino Brugioni.

Khrushchev could play the game too. And he did so by making a dangerous, offensive move. By the summer of 1960, he had authorized a Soviet military base to be set up in Cuba. The island, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, was in America’s backyard. Khrushchev’s plan was to put nuclear warheads in striking distance of Washington, DC. In this way, Soviet missiles could be launched from Havana and obliterate the nation’s capital in just twenty-five minutes’ time. Khrushchev was showing Eisenhower that he could play cat and mouse too.

Immediately after Gary Powers had been shot down in his U-2 and picked up by the Soviets, he was flown from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, where he was put in a cell inside Lubyanka Prison, which doubled as headquarters for the KGB. There, his interrogation began. Powers had already decided on a tactic. He’d tell the Russians the truth, but “with definite limitation.” The KGB wanted to know about Area 51. Where had he trained to fly the U-2? Powers was asked. According to Powers’s memoir, he told the KGB that training took place at a base on the West Coast called Watertown. Powers wrote that the Soviets believed Watertown was located in Arizona and that they produced a map of the state, asking him to mark Watertown’s exact location. Whether the Soviets were playing a game with Powers or whether he was telling his readers the truth but “with definite limitation” remains unclear. Either way, trial transcripts from August of 1960, declassified by the CIA in 1985, revealed that the Soviets knew exactly where Watertown was and that it was located inside the Nevada Test Site. During Powers’s trial, Soviet procurator-general Rudenko asked his comrade judges if they were familiar with “the deposition of the accused Powers which he gave in the preliminary investigations and here in court on the preparations for flights in the U-2 aircraft at the Las Vegas firing range (poligon) in the Nevada desert,” and then he fingered the base as being used by the CIA for “the training in the use of special reconnaissance aircraft.” Not before the publication of this book has it been understood that the KGB clearly knew about Area 51 during the Powers trial.

Further, the trial revealed that the Soviets also had a much clearer picture of the inner workings of the American military-industrial complex and its defense-contracting system than the CIA had previously known. Rudenko was able to name “Lockheed company” as the manufacturer of the U-2. He argued that the existence of the “Las Vegas firing range,” aka Area 51, and the Lockheed spy plane exemplified what he called a “criminal conspiracy” between “a major American capitalist company, an espionage and reconnaissance center, and the military of America.” In his speech to the USSR International Affairs Committee, Rudenko had correctly identified the three players in the triangle of Area 51: defense contractors, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon.

After a three-day trial, the Soviets determined that Gary Powers, having been caught spying on Russia, exposed the United States for what it really was: “an enemy of the peace.” Powers was sentenced to ten years in prison. President Eisenhower was judged to be a “follower of Hitler,” the lowest insult in the Russian lexicon. Hitler had doublecrossed Khrushchev’s predecessor, Joseph Stalin, in 1941, and the result of that double cross was twenty million Russians dead. In comparing Eisenhower to Hitler, Khrushchev was sending a clear message: diplomacy was off the table. The upcoming east-west summit in Paris was canceled. How bad could things get?

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics issued a press release identifying Watertown as the U-2 training facility but stating falsely that it was no longer used as a training base. The Russians knew that statement was meant to mislead the American public and not Russia’s intelligence service, the KGB — and the CIA knew the Soviets had first-person information about Area 51 in the form of Gary Powers, not just photographic images of the facility from the satellites they’d been sending overhead.

With the White House absorbing the fallout from the Gary Powers affair, the CIA and the Air Force were deeply involved in the Mach 3 replacement for the U-2 out at the Ranch. The 8,500-foot-long runway, designated 14/32 and believed to be the longest in the world, had been finished, complete with a two-mile semicircular extension called the Hook, which would allow an A-12 pilot extra room for maneuvering were he to overshoot the runway. Four new aircraft hangars were built, designated 4, 5, 6, and 7. The former U-2 hangars whose metal doors had buckled in the atomic blast were converted into maintenance facilities and machine shops. Navy housing units, 140 in all, were transported to the base and laid out in neat rows. The commissary was expanded, as was the movie house and fire station. Richard Bissell had a tennis court put in, and plans for an Olympic-size swimming pool were drawn. The airspace over the entire region was given its own designation, R-4808N, separate from what had previously been designated Prohibited Area P-275; it included the Nevada Test Site, Area 13, and Area 51. All the CIA was waiting for was Lockheed’s delivery of the A-12 airplanes.

At Lockheed, each Mach 3 aircraft was literally being hand forged, part by part, one airplane at a time. The production of the aircraft, according to Richard Bissell, “spawned its own industrial base. Special tools had to be developed, along with new paints, chemicals, wires, oils, engines, fuel, even special titanium screws. By the time Lockheed finished building the A-12, they themselves had developed and manufactured thirteen million different parts.” It was the titanium that first held everything up. Titanium was the only metal strong enough to handle the kind of heat the Mach 3 aircraft would have to endure: 500- to 600-degree temperatures on the fuselage’s skin and nearly 1,000 degrees in places close to the engines. This meant the titanium alloy had to be pure; nearly 95 percent of what Lockheed initially received had to be rejected. Titanium was also critically sensitive to the chemical chlorine, a fact Lockheed engineers did not realize at first. During the summer, when chlorine levels in the Burbank water system were elevated to fight algae, inside the Skunk Works, airplane pieces started to mysteriously corrode. Eventually, the problem was discovered, and the entire Skunk Works crew had to switch over to distilled water. Next it was discovered that titanium was also sensitive to cadmium, which was what most of Lockheed’s tools were plated with. Hundreds of toolboxes had to be reconfigured, thousands of tools tossed out. The next problem was power related. Wind-tunnel testing in Burbank was draining too much electricity off the local grid. If a reporter found out about the electricity drain, it could lead to unwanted questions. NASA offered Kelly Johnson an alternative wind-tunnel test facility up in Northern California, near the Mojave, which was where Lockheed engineers ended up — performing their tests late at night under cover of darkness. The complicated nature of all things Oxcart pushed the new spy plane further and further behind the schedule.

At Area 51, the concern continued to be stealth. The radar results from the pole tests were promising, but as the Oxcart advanced, so did Soviet countermeasures to shoot it down. Russia was spending billions of rubles on surface-to-air missile technology and the CIA soon learned that the Oxcart’s new nemesis was a system called Tall King. Getting hard data on Tall King’s exact capabilities before the Oxcart went anywhere near it was now a top priority for the CIA.

To understand countermeasures, the CIA initiated an esoteric research-and-development program called Project Palladium. The program would get its legs over Cuba and eventually move to Area 51. It would involve ELINT. In 1960, “there were many CIA officers who thought ELINT was a dirty word,” recalls Gene Poteat, the engineer in charge of Project Palladium, which originated with the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. Poteat was one of the early pioneers who helped change that perception inside the CIA. “We needed to know the sensitivity of Soviet radar receivers and the proficiency of its operators,” Poteat explains. With Khrushchev using Cuba as a military base in the Western Hemisphere, the CIA saw an opportunity. “When the Soviets moved into Cuba with their missiles and associated radar, we were presented with a golden opportunity to measure the system sensitivity of the SA-2 aircraft missile radar,” says Poteat. To do this, the CIA needed a brigade of missile wizards. This included men like T. D. Barnes. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes was a CIA asset at an age when most men hadn’t graduated from college yet. Married at seventeen to his highschool sweetheart, Doris, Barnes became a self-taught electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up, and reselling them for five times the amount. In doing so, he went from bitter poverty — raised on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity or running water — to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. Barnes credited his mother for his becoming one of the CIA’s most important radar countermeasure experts. “My mom saw an article on radar in Life magazine when I was no more than nine or ten. She said I should write a school report on the subject and so I did. That’s when I got bit with the radar bug.”

At age seventeen, Barnes lied about his age to join the National Guard so he could go fight in Korea. He dreamed of one day being an Army officer. Two years later he was deployed to the 38th Parallel to defend the region alongside a British and a Turkish infantry company. It was in Korea that Barnes began his intelligence career at the bottom of the chain of command. “I was the guy who sat on the top of the hill and looked for enemy soldiers. If I saw ’em coming, it was my job to radio the information back to base,” Barnes recalls. He loved the Army. The things he learned there stayed with him all his life: “Never waste a moment. Shine your boots when you’re sitting on the pot. Always go to funerals. Look out for your men.” Once, in Korea, a wounded soldier was rushed onto the base. Barnes overheard that the man needed to be driven to the hospital, but because gas was scarce, all vehicles had to be signed out by a superior. With no superior around, Barnes worried the man might die if he didn’t get help fast, so he signed his superior’s name on the order. “I was willing to take the demerit,” Barnes explains. His actions caught the attention of the highest-ranking officer on the base, Major General Carl Jark, and later earned him a meritorious award. When the war was over General Jark pointed Barnes in the direction of radar and electronics. “He suggested I go to Fort Bliss and get myself an education there,” Barnes explains. So T.D. and Doris Barnes headed to Texas. There, Barnes’s whole world would change. And it didn’t take long for his exceptional talents to come to the attention of the CIA.

Barnes loved learning. At Fort Bliss, he attended classes for Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules missile school by day and classes at Texas Western University by night for the next fifty-four months. These were the missiles that had been developed a decade earlier by the Paperclip scientists, born originally of the German V-2 rocket. At Fort Bliss, Barnes read technical papers authored by former Nazi scientists. Sometimes the Paperclip scientists taught class. “No one really thought of them as former Nazis,” says Barnes. “They were the experts. They worked for us now and we learned from them.” By early 1960, Barnes was a bona fide missile expert. Sometimes, when a missile misfired over at the White Sands Missile Range, it was T.D. Barnes who was dispatched to disarm the missile sitting on the test stand. “I’d march up to the missile, take off the panel, and disconnect the wires from the igniter,” Barnes recalls. “When you are young, it doesn’t occur to you how dangerous something is.” Between the academics and the hands-on experience, Barnes developed an unusual aptitude in an esoteric field that the CIA was just getting involved in: ELINT. Which was how at the age of twenty-three, T. D. Barnes was recruited by the CIA to participate in a top secret game of chicken with the Russians that was part of Project Palladium. Although Barnes didn’t know it then, the work he was doing was for the electronic countermeasure systems that would later be installed on the A-12 Oxcart and on the ground at Area 51.

American military aviation began at the Fort Bliss airfield in 1916, when the First Aero Squadron used it as a staging base while hunting Pancho Villa in nearby Mexico. Now, almost half a century later, the airfield, called Biggs, was part of the Strategic Air Command and served as home base for heavy bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress. Beginning in 1960, the facility was also a staging area for secret CIA missions that were part of Project Palladium, and that same year, T. D. Barnes found himself standing on the tarmac at Biggs Airfield watching a group of airmen as they delicately loaded a Hawk missile into the cargo bay of an airplane. Weapons are supposed to go in the weapons bay, Barnes thought to himself. But the project Barnes was participating in was unusual, dangerous, and top secret. Barnes did not have a need-to-know what the big picture involved and he knew better than to ask. Instead, he climbed into the cargo bay and sat down beside the missile. “We had the nose cone off and part of the skin off too. The missile was loaded on a stand inside the plane. It was my job to watch the electronics respond,” Barnes explains. The airplane and its crew took off from the airbase and headed for Cuba. The plan was for the airplane to fly right up to the edge of Cuban airspace but not into it. Moments before the airplane crossed into Cuban airspace, the pilot would quickly turn around and head home. By then, the Russian radar experts working the Cuban radar sites would have turned on their systems to track the U.S. airplane. Russian MiG fighter jets would be sent aloft to respond. The job of Project Palladium was to gather the electronic intelligence being sent out by the radar stations and the MiGs. That was the first step in figuring out how to create a jamming system for the A-12 at Area 51.

The Cubans and their Russian patrons could not have had any idea whether the Americans were playing another game of chicken or if this act meant war. “Soviet MiGs would scramble toward us,” Barnes recalls. “At the time, ECM [electronic countermeasure] and ECCM [electronic counter-countermeasure] technology were still new to both the plane and the missile. We’d transmit a Doppler signal from a radar simulator which told their MiG pilots that a missile had locked on them. When the Soviet pilots engaged their ECM against us, my job was to sit there and watch how our missile’s ECCM responded. If the Soviet signal jammed our missile and made it drift off target, I’d tweak my missile’s ECCM electronics to determine what would override a Soviet ECM signal.” Though primitive by today’s standards, what Barnes and the NSA agents with him inside the aircraft did laid the early groundwork for electronic warfare today. “Inside the airplane, we’d record the frequencies to be replayed back at Fort Bliss for training and design. Once we got what we wanted we hauled ass out of the area to avoid actual contact with Soviet planes.”

The info that Barnes and his colleagues were getting over Cuba was filling in gaps that had previously been unknown. Back at Fort Bliss, Barnes and the others would interpret what NSA had captured from the Soviet/Cuban ECM transmissions that they had recorded during the flight. In listening to the decrypted Soviet responses to the antagonistic moves, the CIA learned what the Soviets could and could not see on their radars. This technology became a major component in further developing stealth technology and electronic countermeasures and was why Barnes was later placed by the CIA to work at Area 51. For the U.S. Air Force, this marked the beginning of a new age of information warfare.

Even though the U.S. military airplane with a team of engineers, NSA agents, and a Hawk missile hidden inside would U-turn and fly away at the last moment, just before violating Cuban airspace, “there were repercussions,” according to Barnes. “It scared the living daylights out of them and it escalated things.” In January of 1961, Khrushchev gathered a group of Cuban diplomats at their embassy in Moscow. “Alarming news is coming from Cuba at present, news that the most aggressive American monopolists are preparing a direct attack on Cuba,” Khrushchev told the group. Barnes believes Khrushchev “may have been referring to our messing with them with our Hawk missiles homing in on their planes.” Were that the case, Khrushchev had a valid point. But the mercurial dictator had his own difficulties in sticking to the facts. Disinformation was a hallmark of the Soviet propaganda machine.

To a roomful of Cuban diplomats, many of whom knew otherwise, Khrushchev falsely claimed, “What is more, [the Americans] are trying to present the case as though rocket bases of the Soviet Union are being set up or are already established in Cuba. It is well known that this is foul slander. There is no Soviet military base in Cuba.” Actually, this is exactly what the Soviets were doing. “Of course we knew better, and on January 3, 1961, severed all diplomatic ties with Cuba,” Barnes explains.

Ten days later, the CIA convened its Special Group, a secret committee inside the National Security Council that had oversight regarding CIA covert activities. A formal decision was made that Castro’s regime “must be overthrown.” The man in charge of making sure this happened was Richard Bissell. In addition to being the highest-ranking CIA officer in the Special Operations Group, Bissell was also the most trusted CIA officer in the eyes of John F. Kennedy, the dashing new president. Before taking office, a member of the White House transition team asked Kennedy who he trusted most in the intelligence community. “Richard Bissell,” Kennedy said without missing a beat.

Bissell’s official title was now deputy director of plans. As innocuous as it sounded, DDP was in fact a euphemism for chief of covert operations for the CIA. This meant Bissell was in charge of the Agency’s clandestine service, its paramilitary operations. The office had previously been known as the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC. As deputy director of plans, Richard Bissell would be doing a lot more than playing a gentleman’s spy game from the air. The CIA’s paramilitary operations spilled blood. During these covert antiCommunist operations, men were dying in droves from Hungary to Greece to Iran, and all of these operations had to be planned, staged, and approved by the deputy director of plans.

In such a position there was writing on the wall, script that Richard Bissell did not, or chose not to, see. The man he was replacing was Frank Wisner, his old friend and the man who first introduced Bissell to the CIA. It was Frank Wisner who’d knocked on Bissell’s door unannounced and then spent a fireside evening in Bissell’s Washington, DC, parlor eleven years before. It was Wisner who had originally asked Bissell to siphon off funds from the Marshall Plan and hand them over to the CIA, no questions asked. Wisner had served the Agency as deputy director of plans from August 1951 to January 1959, but by the end of the summer of 1958, the job proved too psychologically challenging for him — Frank Wisner had begun displaying the first signs of madness. The diagnosis was psychotic mania, according to author Tim Weiner. Doctors and drugs did not help. Next came the electroshock treatment: “For six months, his head was clamped into a vise and shot through with a current sufficient to fire a hundred-watt light bulb.” Frank Wisner emerged from the insane asylum zombielike and went on to serve as the CIA’s London station chief. A broken man, Wisner did not last long overseas. He shuffled in and out of mad-houses for years until finally forced to retire in 1962: “He’d been raving about Adolf Hitler, seeing things, hearing voices. He knew he would never be well.” Tragically, on October 29, 1965, Wisner was getting ready to go hunting with his old CIA friend Joe Bryan at his country estate when he took a shotgun out of his gun cabinet and put a bullet in his own head.

The pressure that came with being the deputy director of plans for the CIA was, for some, as treacherous as a loaded gun.

As workers toiled away at Area 51 getting ready for the arrival of the Oxcart spy plane, Richard Bissell focused on his orders to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. By 1961, the Agency decided that Bahнa de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs, was the perfect place to launch its “paramilitary plan.” The little sliver of coastline on the south shore of the island was barely inhabited. A few summer cottages were scattered among little bays, used mostly for fishing and swimming, and there was a valuable asset nearby in “an airstrip not far from the beach.”

Surely, the U-2 spy plane could help in gathering intel, Bissell decided. After Gary Powers was shot down, President Eisenhower had promised the world there would be no spy missions over Russia, but that promise did not include dangerous Soviet proxies like Cuba. In his new position as deputy director of plans, Bissell had used the U-2 to gather intelligence before. Its photographs had been helpful in planning paramilitary operations in Laos and the Dominican Republic. And in Cuba, overhead photographs taken by the Agency’s U-2s revealed important details regarding the terrain just up the beach from the Bay of Pigs beach. Photo interpreters determined that the swampland in the area would be hard to run in unless the commandos familiarized themselves with preexisting trails. As for the water landing itself, from seventy thousand feet in the air, the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs looked flat and lovely. But because cameras could not photograph what lay underwater, Bissell had no idea that just beneath the surface of the sea there was a deadly coral reef that would later greatly impede the water landing by commandos.

Hundreds of pages, declassified after thirty years, reveal the hand of economics wizard Richard Bissell in the design of the paramilitary operation. Bissell painstakingly outlined: “Contingency Plans… Probabilities… Likelihood, chance of success… Plans for Operation ‘T,’… Operation ‘Z,’… Phase 1, Phase 2, and Phase 3… Pre-Day Day plans… D-Day plans… Post D-Day plans… Unattributable actions by the Navy… Post-Recognition Plans… Arguments for maximum sabotage… Arguments for simultaneous defection… Feasibility of declaration of war by certain Central American states… Disclosures… Non-Disclosures… Continuation of Psychological Warfare Plans… How to deal, and how not to deal with the press.” For all the organization and preplanning, the operation might have been successful. But there are many reasons why it failed so tragically. When the Bay of Pigs operation was over, hundreds of CIA-trained, anti-Castro Cuban exiles were killed on approach or left to die on the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs. Those that lived to surrender were imprisoned and later ransomed back to the United States. When the story became public, so did brigade commander Pepe San Roman’s last words before his capture: “Must have air support in the next few hours or we will be wiped out. Under heavy attacks by MiG jets and heavy tanks.” Pepe San Roman begged Richard Bissell for help. “All groups demoralized… They consider themselves deceived.” By the end of the day, Richard Bissell’s world had begun to fall irreparably apart. The Bay of Pigs would be his downfall.

There was plenty of blame to go around but almost all of it fell at the feet of the CIA. In the years since, it has become clear that equal blame should be imputed to the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and President Kennedy. Shortly before he died, Richard Bissell blamed the mission’s failure on his old rival General Curtis LeMay. Bissell lamented that if LeMay had provided adequate air cover as he had promised, the mission would most likely have been a success. The Pentagon has historically attributed LeMay’s failure to send B-26 bombers to the Bay of Pigs to a “time zone confusion.” Bissell saw the mix-up as personal, believing that LeMay had been motivated by revenge. That he’d harbored a grudge against Bissell for the U-2 and Area 51. Whatever the reason, more than three hundred people were dead and 1,189 anti-Castro guerrillas, left high and dry, had been imprisoned. The rivalry between Bissell and LeMay was over, and the Bay of Pigs would force Richard Bissell to leave government service in February of 1962. There were many government backlashes as a result of the fiasco. One has been kept secret until now, namely that President Kennedy sent the CIA’s inspector general at the time, Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr., out to Area 51 to write up a report on the base. More specifically, the president wanted to assess what other Richard Bissell disasters in the making might be coming down the pipeline at Area 51.

Adding friction to an already charged situation was the fact that by some accounts, Kirkpatrick held a grudge. Before the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell was in line to succeed Allen Dulles as director of the CIA, and eight years earlier, Lyman Kirkpatrick had worn those coveted shoes. But like Bissell, Kirkpatrick was cut down in his prime. Kirkpatrick’s loss came not by his own actions but by a tragic blow beyond his control. On an Agency mission to Asia in 1952, Lyman Kirkpatrick contracted polio and became paralyzed from the waist down. Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Kirkpatrick was relegated to the role of second-tier bureaucrat.

In a world of gentlemen spy craft and high-technology espionage, bureaucracy was considered glorified janitorial work. But when Kirkpatrick was dispatched to Area 51 by JFK, the fate and future of the secret base Richard Bissell had built in the Nevada desert lay in Lyman Kirkpatrick’s hands.