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

Chapter Seventeen: The MiGs of Area 51

To engineer something is to apply scientific and technical know-how to create an entity from parts. To reverse engineer something is to take another manufacturer’s or scientist’s product apart with the specific purpose of learning how it was constructed or composed. The concept of reverse engineering is uniquely woven into Area 51 legend and lore, with conspiracy theorists claiming Area 51 engineers are reverse engineering alien spacecraft inside the secret base. Historically, reverse engineering has played an important role at Area 51, as exemplified in formerly classified programs, including one from the late 1960s and 1970s, to reverse engineer Russian MiGs.

It began one scorching-hot morning in August of 1966 when an Iraqi Air Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad. Redfa then made a sudden turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified Redfa that he was off course.

“Turn back immediately,” he was told. Instead, Redfa began flying in a zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey, then toward the Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There, one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.

Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.

The plan had been years in the making. Four years, to be exact, dating back to 1963, when Meir Amit first became head of the Mossad. Amit sat down with the Israeli air force and asked them what they would consider the single greatest foreign-intelligence contribution to national security. The answer was short, simple, and unanimous: bring us an MiG. The enemy air forces of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq all flew Russian MiGs. Before Redfa’s defection, the Mossad had tried twice, unsuccessfully, to acquire the airplane. In one case, an Egyptian-born Armenian intelligence agent known as John Thomas was caught in the act of espionage. His punishment was death; he and several coconspirators were hanged in an Egyptian public square.

For years, Mossad searched for a possible candidate for defection. Finally, in early 1966, they found a man who fit the profile in Munir Redfa, a Syrian Christian who had previously expressed feelings of persecution as a religious minority in a squadron of Muslims. Mossad dispatched a beautiful female intelligence agent to Baghdad on a mission. The agent worked the romance angle first, luring Redfa to Paris with the promise of sex. There, she told Redfa the truth about what she was after. In return for an Iraqi air force MiG, Redfa would be paid a million dollars and given a new identity and a safe haven for himself and his family. Redfa agreed.

With an MiG now in their possession, the Israelis set to work understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the aircraft in flight. If it ever came to war, the Israelis would be uniquely prepared for air combat. Which is exactly what happened in June of 1967. What Israel learned from Munir Redfa’s MiG ultimately allowed them to overpower the combined air forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan during the Six-Day War.

Back in Washington, CIA chief Richard Helms was briefed on Redfa’s story by James Jesus Angleton, the man running the CIA station in Tel Aviv. Angleton was a Harvard- and Yale-educated intelligence officer who had been in the espionage business for twentyfive years. Angleton, who died in 1987, remains one of the Agency’s most enigmatic and bellicose spies. He is famous within the Agency for many things, among them his idea that the Soviet propaganda machine worked 24-7 to create an ever-widening “wilderness of mirrors.” This wilderness, Angleton said, was the product of a myriad of KGB deceptions and stratagems that would one day ensnare, confuse, and overpower the West. Angleton believed that the Soviets could manipulate the CIA into believing false information was true and true information was false. The CIA’s inability to discern the truth inside a forest of Soviet disinformation would be America’s downfall, Angleton said.

James Jesus Angleton allegedly had as many enemies inside the Agency as inside the KGB, but Richard Helms trusted him. Helms and Angleton had known each other since World War II, when they worked in the OSS counterintelligence unit, X-2. In the 1960s, in addition to acting as the liaison between the CIA and the FBI, Angleton controlled the Israeli “account,” which meant he provided Helms with almost everything Helms knew about Israel.

During the course of negotiating the deal to get the MiG, the details of which remain classified, Angleton acquired additional information regarding Israel that he provided to Helms, and that Helms provided to the president. This included seemingly prophetic information about the Six-Day War before the Six-Day War began. The Israelis had been telling the State Department that they were in great danger from their Middle East neighbors when really, Helms explained to the president, Israel had the tactical advantage. Israel was playing the weak card in the hope of winning American military support. Helms also said that he’d recently met with a senior Israeli official whose visit he saw as “a clear portent that war might come at any time.” Coupled with Angleton’s assessment, Helms said this meant most likely in a matter of days. When Israel launched an attack three days later, Helms’s status with President Johnson went through the roof. “The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in the Johnson White House,” wrote a CIA historian.

The story of Redfa’s defection made international headlines when it happened, in 1966. But what didn’t make the news was what happened once Israel finished with the MiG: the Soviet-made fighter was shipped to Area 51. Colonel Slater, who was commander of Area 51 at the time, remembers how “it arrived in the middle of the night, hidden inside a C-130 [cargo plane], hand-delivered by Israeli intelligence agents.” What had been a major coup for Israel was now an equally huge break for the United States. To the Israelis, the MiG was the most dangerous fighter in the Arab world. To the Americans, this was the deadly little aircraft that had been shooting down so many American fighter pilots over Vietnam. The Russians had been supplying the North Vietnamese with MiG-21 aircraft and MiG pilot training as well. Now, with an MiG at Area 51, Agency engineers once again had high-value foreign technology in their hands. “We could finally learn how to beat the MiG in air-to-air combat,” Colonel Slater explains.

The path to Area 51 is different for everyone. For T. D. Barnes it began in 1962 when the CIA wanted him to go to Vietnam to be an “adviser” there. Barnes was just back from Bamburg, Germany, where he’d been deployed during the Berlin Wall crisis, tasked with running Hawk missile sites along the border with Czechoslovakia. It had been two years since he’d worked on the CIA’s Project Palladium out of Fort Bliss.

“I said I’d go work for the Agency. But I had this dream of becoming an Army officer, which meant going through officer training school first. The Agency and the Army agreed and sent me to officer school.” There, during survival training Barnes ripped open his knees and got a rare blood disease. “It just about nearly killed me. I was never going to do combat. I’m lucky I didn’t die,” says Barnes. He recovered but because of the blood disability, he couldn’t go to Vietnam for the CIA. This also meant that after ten years of service, his military career was over. Barnes and his wife, Doris, moved home to Oklahoma and bought a house there with a yard for their two little girls, and one day when Doris was reading the classified section of the local newspaper, she found an advertisement of interest. “A contractor called Unitech was looking for telemetry and radar specialists that could work on a project involving space,” Barnes recalls.

Barnes figured Unitech was harvesting rйsumйs. “Getting a list of people who might be qualified to work on a highly specialized kind of a project if a contract were to materialize with, say, NASA down the road.” Barnes told Doris it wasn’t worth the phone call. Doris said to call anyway. “Within two days our house was on the market, we were packed up, and we were traveling to this little one-horse town in the Mojave Desert called Beatty.” Beatty, Nevada. Population somewhere around 426, depending on who wants to know.

In 1964, Beatty, Nevada, was one strange town. Situated 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it lay on a strip of land between Death Valley and Nevada’s atomic bomb range. Beatty had one sheriff — he was eighty years old, was a great shot with a rifle, and was missing most of his teeth. Beatty also had nine gas stations, eleven churches, an airstrip, and a whorehouse called the Vicky Star Ranch. Behind the facade, Beatty housed a collection of three- and four-letter federal agencies, many of which were working different angles on various overt and covert operations there. “Nobody knew what anybody else in Beatty was really doing there and since you didn’t have a need-toknow you didn’t ask,” recalls Barnes. Forty-five years later he still hadn’t “figured out what the service stations or the churches were a cover for.”

How Beatty worked and who was running whom left much to the imagination. “When Doris and I drove into town that first day,” Barnes recalls, “we pulled up to the service station to get some gas. One of the town characters, a semi-homeless person everyone called Panamint Annie, walked up to us and leaned against our car. She looked at me — it was summer — and she said, ‘Well, it’s hotter than Hell’s hubs, now isn’t it, Barnes?’ I thought, How the hell does she know my last name?” Technically, Barnes had been recruited by Unitech. It turned out they had a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, after all. “But there were lots of other agencies in Beatty who were working in the dark,” Barnes says. “Unitech was the sign on the door.”

America’s space agency set up shop in Beatty in the mid-1960s in order to develop programs that would help get man to the moon. But before NASA landed on Earth’s nearest celestial body, they had to conquer space, and to do so, they needed help from the U.S. Air Force. And before NASA conquered space, they had to get to the edge of space, which was why Barnes was in Beatty. He was hired to work on NASA’s X-15 rocket plane, a prototype research vehicle that looked and acted more like a missile with wings than an airplane. Each day, Barnes got picked up for work by a NASA employee named Bill Houck, who drove a federal van around town and made a total of ten stops to retrieve all the members of the secret team. They would drive out to the edge of town and begin the short trek to the top of a chaparral-covered mountain where one hangar that was roughly the size of a tennis court, three trailers, and a number of radar dishes made up the NASA high-range tracking station at Beatty. Day after day, the ten-man crew of electronics and radar wizards manned stateof-the-art electronic systems, tracking the X-15 as it raced across the skies above the Mojave, from the Dryden Flight Research Center in California up toward the edge of space. Once, the airplane was forced to make an emergency landing on a dry lake bed not far from Beatty. There was a rule prohibiting transport trucks to haul cargo through Death Valley after dark on weekends, which meant the X-15 rocket had to spend the night in Barnes’s driveway. His daughters, ages five and eight, spent the weekend running circles around the James Bondlooking rocket ship parked out front cheering “Daddy’s spaceship!” No one else in Beatty said a thing.

To get into the air, the X-15 was jettisoned off a B-52 mother ship, after which its rocket engine would launch it into the atmosphere like a missile until it reached the edge of space. Touching the tip of space, the X-15 would then turn around and “fly” home, getting up to speeds of Mach 6. That kind of speed made for an incredibly bumpy ride. In a matter of months, Barnes became a hypersonic-flight-support expert. He monitored many things, including telemetry, and was always amazed watching how each of the pilots responded differently to physical stress. “We knew more about what was going on with the pilots’ bodies than the pilots knew themselves. From Beatty, we monitored everything. Their heart rates, their pulse, and also everything going on with the pilot and the plane.” In case of an accident, NASA had emergency crews set up across California, Nevada, and Utah on various dry lake beds where the X-15 could land if need be. One of those lake beds was Groom Lake. Barnes says, “From watching my radars, I knew something was going on over there at Groom. I could see things on my radar I wasn’t supposed to see. One of those ‘things’ went really, really fast. Later, when I was briefed on Oxcart, I figured out what I had been watching. But at the time, I didn’t have a need-to-know so I didn’t say anything about what I saw at Groom Lake and nobody asked.”

The X-15 was an exciting and fast-paced project to work on, with groundbreaking missions happening twice a week. As it was with so many of the early projects involving high-speed and high-altitude flight, many different agencies were involved in the program, not just NASA. The Air Force funded a large part of the program. The CIA didn’t care about space travel but they were very interested in the ram-jet technology on the X-15, something they had wanted to use on their own D-21 drone. “Everyone monitored each other, technology-wise,” Barnes says. To keep the various parties in the loop, there was a designated radio network set up for everyone involved in the project. “There were people from Vandenberg Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range, Dryden, and CIA monitoring what was going on all day long.”

Even though he was only twenty-seven years old, Barnes was the most senior radar specialist in Beatty. And almost immediately he noticed there seemed to be a major problem with the radar. “We tracked the X-15 with radar stations at Edwards, in California, and at Ely, in Nevada. My radar in Beatty was fine but I noticed there was a problem at Edwards and Ely. When the X-15 was parked on the tarmac at either place, the radars there read that it was at an altitude of two thousand feet instead of being on the ground.”

Barnes got on the radio channel and told mission control at the Dryden Flight Research Center about the problem. Dryden blamed it on the radar at Beatty, even though Barnes’s radar agreed with the airplane’s. Over the radio network, Barnes argued his point. The site manager in Beatty was horrified that Barnes dared to challenge his superiors and shot Barnes a dirty look. Back down, he mouthed silently. Barnes complied. But just a few weeks later, when he learned that the X-15 was going through a fitting and there weren’t going to be any flights for three weeks, Barnes seized the moment. “Now would be a good time to fix your radar problem,” Barnes said into the radio network. There were dozens of senior officials listening in. “There was silence on the channel,” Barnes remembers. “My site manager whirled around on his chair and glared at me. ‘You’re on your own, Barnes,’ he said. Another one of the other guys, Bill Houck, leaned over to my station, gave me a big old grin and a thumbs-up. But Dryden still wouldn’t listen to me. They said the problem was inherent to the radar. That it couldn’t be fixed.”

By now, Barnes had gotten friendly with the X-15 pilots. Even though they had never met in person, a great rapport had developed between them; understandable, given how much time they spent communicating on headset during flights. Barnes cared about the pilots’ safety more than he cared about what his site manager perceived to be insubordination on his part. So Barnes told Dryden exactly what he believed was true. “I’ve been in radar long enough to know there’s no such thing as an inherent problem in radar,” Barnes said. “I agree with the airplane. If you don’t fix your radar, you’re gonna kill one of the pilots one of these days.”

There was a deathly silence on the network. Back at Dryden, the communication had been overheard by the pilots who were in the pilots’ lounge. X-15 pilot “Joe Walker got on a headset and said, ‘Effective immediately, there will be no X-15 flights until the radar problem is fixed.’” Now Dryden had no choice but to get on it. First, they flew up to the Beatty tracking station in a T-33, where they flew calibration flights to compare radar data with the airplane’s altimeter. At Ely, they did the same thing. Barnes was right. The radar at Beatty was correct. Though both agreed with their data, the Dryden Flight Research Center and the Ely tracking station were off by two thousand feet. The radars were torn down and reassembled, to no avail. It was finally discovered that they were vintage radars, left over from World War II, and they had never been retrofitted with the field modification the way the radar at Beatty had. Unitech got a huge Christmas bonus, and no one got killed.

Of major significance for Barnes was that somewhere off in the black operations ether a man named John Grace had been listening as the whole scenario went down. John Grace worked for the CIA, and Barnes’s name rang a bell. Grace asked his staff to look into this Barnes character, the man whose unique confidence in radar had wound up saving the day. Grace wanted to get Barnes hired for a project that would be coming to Groom Lake — something that even Barnes had been in the dark on back then.

Working at Beatty meant running multiple jobs, and there was a second aircraft Barnes was in charge of tracking — the XB-70. This experimental program was all that remained of General LeMay’s oncebeloved B-70 bomber now that it had been canceled by Congress, despite four billion dollars invested. The X in front of B-70 indicated that the bomber was now an experimental test bed for supersonic transport. It was a behemoth of an airplane, the fastest-flying sixengined aircraft in the world. On June 8, 1966, the mission for the day was a photo op with the XB-70 as the centerpiece. An F-4, an F-5, a T-38, and an F-104 would fly in formation alongside. Barnes was in charge of monitoring telemetry, radar, and communications from the Beatty tracking station. “General Electrics had built the engines on all six airplanes flying that day,” Barnes says. “They wanted a photograph of all their aircraft flying in a tight formation for the cover of their shareholders’ meeting manual that year.”

It was a clear day, with very little natural turbulence in the air. The six aircraft took off from Dryden and headed west. About thirty minutes later, the pilots began getting into formation over the Mojave Desert. Barnes was monitoring data and listening on headphones. Using his personal Fischer recording system, Barnes was also taping the pilot transmissions. For this particular photo op, the X-15 pilot, Joe Walker, whom Barnes had gotten to know well, was flying in the F-104. Walker was on the right wing of the aircraft and was trying to hold his position when turbulence by the XB-70’s six engines made him uncomfortable. “Walker came on the radio and spoke very clearly,” Barnes recalls. “He said, ‘I’m opposing this mission. It is too turbulent and it has no scientific value.’”

Only a few seconds later, a catastrophic midair collision occurred. “We heard the pilots screaming, ‘Midair! Midair! And I realized at first the XB-70 didn’t know it had been hit,” Barnes remembers. Joe Walker’s F-104 had slammed into the much larger airplane, caught fire, and exploded. On the XB-70, both vertical stabilizers had been shorn off, and the airplane began to crash. Continuing to pick up speed, the XB-70 whirled uncontrollably into a flat spin. As it headed toward the ground, parts of the aircraft tore loose. One of the XB-70 pilots, Al White, ejected. The other, Major Carl Cross, was trapped inside the airplane as it slammed into the desert floor. There, just a few miles from Barstow, California, it exploded into flames.

“It was so damn senseless,” Barnes says. “A damn photograph.” The worst was yet to come. “A lot of people blamed Joe Walker. Easy, because he was dead. There was, of course, the tape of him saying he was opposing the mission. That the vortex on the damn XB-70 was sucking him in. Bill Houck, the NASA monitor at our station, asked me to give him the tape recording to send to Dryden. Once NASA got a hold of it,” Barnes says, “someone there quietly disposed of it.”

The XB-70 tragedy more or less closed down the program, and the X-15 rocket plane program was finishing up as well. For Barnes, life in Beatty was nearing an end, but one afternoon, Barnes received a phone call. A man identifying himself as John Grace wanted to know if he’d like to come work on an “interesting project” not far away. “Grace said it would be a commute from Las Vegas,” Barnes says. Grace told Barnes he would have to get a top secret clearance first. Whatever it was, it sounded exciting. Barnes told Grace, “Sign me up.” T. D. Barnes was officially on his way to Groom Lake.

In March of 1968, his top secret clearance finally in place, Barnes learned his new employer was going to be EG&G. He was instructed by a “handler” to arrive at a remote, unmarked hangar at McCarran Airport for his first day at work. There, Barnes was met by a man who shook his hand and escorted him into a small Constellation airplane. “They didn’t say anything to me about where we were going and I knew enough about black operations not to ask. It was a nice, quiet ride in the airplane. Just before we landed at Area 51, I heard the pilot say to the copilot, ‘They’ve got the doughnut out.’ Then the pilots quickly closed all the curtains on the airplane so when we landed I couldn’t see a thing. I wondered what the doughnut was. I didn’t ask. I was taken to the EG&G Special Projects building and introduced to our group. The boss said, ‘What’s your first name?’ I said, ‘T.D.’ He said, ‘Not anymore. You’re Thunder out here.’” Later that first day, Barnes was taken inside one of the hangars at Area 51. “They opened the door. There sat a Russian MiG. They said, ‘This here’s the doughnut.’ I got a chuckle about that. The pilots who’d brought me to the area had no idea that the whole reason I’d been brought in was because of the doughnut.”

Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil. Colonel Slater, overseeing Black Shield in Kadena at the time, remembers getting a call in the middle of the night from one of his staff, Jim Simon. “Simon called me up all excited and said, ‘Slater, you are not going to believe this!’ He told me about the MiG. How it landed at [Area] 51 in the middle of the night, hidden inside a cargo plane. How it was accompanied by someone from a foreign government. Simon couldn’t get over it and I couldn’t wait to see it,” Slater remembers. Oxcart pilot Frank Murray remembers the excitement of seeing it as well. During Operation Black Shield Murray was on rotation between Area 51 and Kadena when he was taken into the secret hangar to have a look at the MiG. “It was a tiny little sucker, considering how deadly it was,” Murray says. “We couldn’t believe we had a captured one up there at the Ranch.”

T. D. Barnes and the EG&G Special Projects Group at Area 51 got to work reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG — taking it apart and putting it back together again. All the engineers knew that this was the best way to really understand how something had been built. The EG&G Special Projects Group appeared to have advance expertise in this technical process of reverse engineering aircraft. At the time, no one knew why, and Barnes, new to the EG&G engineering team, knew better than to ask. He was excited to get to work. “We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio… everything. Then we put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation equipment.” Still, Barnes and his crew were stumped. How was it that this Soviet plane was beating the supposedly more capable U.S. fighters in air-to-air engagements? No one could explain why. So a second program was conceived, the MiG’s Have Doughnut tactical phase. During the Have Doughnut, the MiG would begin flying tactical missions against U.S. airplanes in the skies over Groom Lake. The Air Force said it wasn’t interested but the Navy leaped at the chance.

“Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn fast,” Barnes says. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions over Groom Lake. Mock air battles between the MiG and American fighter jets were a daily event for a period of six weeks during the spring of 1968. The program (not including its Area 51 locale) was declassified by the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division in October of 1997 and by the Defense Intelligence Agency in March of 2000. “We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains. Constant flying takes a toll on any aircraft, but with a captured enemy airplane this proved especially challenging. “Since no spare parts were available, ground crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”

There were repercussions from the Soviets. “The fact that we had a MiG at Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five minutes.” Up to this point, the Soviets had gotten used to monitoring the routine activity at the base, which consisted primarily of takeoffs and landings of the Oxcart and a few drones. But once the MiG showed up, the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division appeared on the scene too, and with them came various models of Soviet-built radar systems captured in the Middle East. And once the Soviets discovered engineers at Groom Lake were testing these foreign radar systems, they again decided to monitor the situation more closely from overhead.

The newly acquired Soviet radar systems started cropping up around the western edges of the Groom dry lake bed and also around Slater Lake, which was about a mile northwest of the main hangars. Technical evaluation of the radar was quickly assigned to Barnes. He requested a Nike missile system and was surprised at just how quickly his request was filled. “I think the CIA went and got a Nike missile system at my old stomping ground, Fort Bliss, just about the very next day,” Barnes says. With radars scattered all over the range, including acquisition radar that rotated and searched for incoming targets, a geek like Barnes had a field day. “We used the Nike to track the MiGs and other airplanes to evaluate their ECM against X-band radar.” What Barnes did not know was that these radar systems were being acquired for the upcoming radar cross-section analysis of an Air Force plane in the works. The Russians had no idea what the Air Force was dreaming up either, but they were duly angry about the captured radars that were now sitting in the hills overlooking Groom Lake.

“We were pinned down,” says Barnes. For weeks on end, the Special Projects Group couldn’t turn on a single radar system; the Russians were monitoring the area that intensely. Barnes and his group passed the time by playing mind games with the Soviets. They painted strange shapes on the tarmac, “funny-looking impossible aircraft,” which they then heated up with portable heaters to confuse the Soviets who were shooting infrared satellite pictures of the work going on there. “We got a kick out of imagining what the Russians thought of our new airplanes,” Barnes says. With all the time on their hands, Barnes and his group of twenty-three electronics specialists began dreaming up other ways to entertain themselves. They made up riddles. They placed bets. They played with mixed chemicals that made their tennis sneakers glow in the dark. They rewired the Special Projects motor pool car so it would give the first guy to drive it a series of low-voltage shocks. They rigged up a tall TV antenna on top of their living quarters, hoping to draw reception from Las Vegas. Instead, they tapped into an international channel broadcast out of Spain. “For many months, all we watched were bullfights in Madrid,” Barnes recalls.

This was a group of highly trained specialists gathered to pioneer radar technology, so when they finally ran out of practical jokes and bullfights, their attention turned back to problem solving. They started to occupy themselves by examining minutiae on printouts from radar returns. In a serendipitous way, this led to a technological breakthrough at Groom Lake. The EG&G Special Projects Group figured out they could identify specific types of aircraft by the tiniest nuances in the patterns their radar signatures left on various radar systems. This was made possible by the group’s unusual advantage of having two things at their disposal: several bands of radar, which allowed them to compare results, and an entire fleet of military aircraft, which were to be used in the tactical phase of the exploitation of the MiG.

What would normally have been a technical endeavor to determine electronic countermeasures against enemy aircraft became a major breakthrough in the further development of stealth technology. From studying the minutiae, Barnes and his fellow radar experts identified what the enemy could and could not see on their radars back home. This information would eventually be shared with Lockheed during radar testing at Area 51, as Lockheed further developed stealth. Technology was doing for humans what humans had forever been trying to do for themselves; to spy on the enemy means to learn as much about him as he knows about himself. That was the technical breakthrough. There was a tactical breakthrough as well. The ultrasecret MiG program at Area 51 gave birth to the Top Gun fighterpilot school, a fact that would remain secret for decades. Officially called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, the program was established a year after the first MiG arrived, in March of 1969, and based out of Miramar, California. Instructor pilots who had fought mock air battles over Groom Lake against Munir Redfa’s MiG began training Navy pilots for sorties against Russian MiGs over Vietnam. When these Top Gun-trained Navy pilots resumed flying in Southeast Asia, the results were radically different than the deadly nine-to-one ratio from before. The scales had tipped. Now, American pilots would begin shooting down North Vietnamese pilots at a ratio of thirteen to one. The captured Soviet-made MiG-21 Fishbed proved to be an aerial warfare coup for the United States. And what followed was a quid pro quo. To thank the Israelis for supplying the United States with the most prized and unknowable aircraft in the arsenal of its archnemesis, America began to supply Israel with jet fighters to assist Israel in keeping its rivals at bay.