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

Chapter Twenty: From Camera Bays to Weapons Bays, the Air Force Takes Control

What happened at Area 51 during the 1980s? Most of the work remains classified and very little else is known. One of the most sensational near catastrophes to happen at Area 51 during this time has never before been revealed — notably not even hinted at in Area 51 legend or lore. It involved a mock helicopter attack at the guard station that separates the Nevada Test Site from Area 51. So serious was the situation, which included semiautomatic weapons and a nuclear bomb, that both the Pentagon and the White House stepped in.

One of the greatest potential threats to Area 51 in terms of an enemy attack would be from low-flying aircraft or helicopter. “A helicopter would be the aerial vehicle of choice,” says Barnes. “Whereas an airplane would be seen airborne long before it reached its target, a helicopter could be trucked in and then launched only a short distance from the restricted area. In that case, the helicopter would breach the security protection before defending aircraft from Area 51 could become airborne.” Which is why, to prepare against such threats, security guards like Richard Mingus would often participate in counterattack tests using large low-flying helium balloons as targets. “The balloons simulated helicopters,” Mingus explains. The tests used aging V-10 °Commando armored personnel carriers, complete with mounted machine guns, left over from the Vietnam War. With four-wheel drive, high clearance, and excellent mobility, the retired amphibious armored car would ferry Mingus and his team of heavily armed sensitive assignment specialists as far as they could get up the mountain range, until the terrain became too steep.

“We’d park the V-100, run the rest of the way up the mountain with machine guns, set up on top of the mountain, and fire at these fortyinch weather balloons. There’d always be a driver, a supervisor, and a loader on the SAS team. We each had an assignment. One guy kept score.” Scores were important because the stakes were so high. The Nevada Test Site was the single most prolific atomic bombing facility in the world. It had a three-decade-long history of impeccable security, as did Area 51. Which is what made the breach that Mingus witnessed so radical.

It was a scorching-hot day during the Ronald Reagan presidency, the kind of day at the test site when people knew not to touch metal surfaces outside or they’d wind up getting burned. Mingus believes it was 1982 but can’t say for sure, as the event was specifically kept off of his Department of Energy logbook. No longer a security guard, Mingus had been promoted to security operations coordinator for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. At the time the near catastrophe occurred, the rank-and-file security entourage was escorting a nuclear device down Rainier Mesa Road. The bomb, one of eighteen exploded underground at the Nevada Test Site in 1982, was going to be exploded in an underground shaft. As the five-man security response team trailed behind the bomb transport vehicle (in an armored vehicle of its own), they made sure to keep a short distance behind the nuclear device, as was protocol. “There was a driver, a supervisor, a gunner operating the turret, a loader making sure the ammo feeds into the machine guns and doesn’t jam, and two riflemen,” Richard Mingus explains. There is always distance between the security team and the bomb: “One of the riflemen handles the tear gas and the other works the grenade launcher. You can shoot both weapons from either the shoulder or the hip. They’ll hit a target fifty or seventy-five yards away because if you find yourself under attack and having to shoot, you want distance. You don’t want the tear gas coming back and getting you in the nose.”

After the security response team and the nuclear bomb arrived at that day’s ground zero, a team of engineers and crane operators began the process of getting the weapon safely and securely inside an approximately eight-hundred-foot-deep hole that had been drilled into the desert floor and would house the bomb. Inserting a live nuclear weapon into a narrow, five-foot-diameter shaft required extraordinary precision by a single engineer operating a heavy metal crane. There was no room for error. The crane worked in hundred-foot increments, which in test site-speak were called picks. Only after the second pick was reached, meaning the bomb was two hundred feet down, was the security eased up. Then and only then would two of the men from the response team be released. Until that moment, the bomb was considered unsecured.

Richard Mingus had been part of dozens of ground zero teams over the past quarter of a century but on this particular morning circa 1982 Mingus was coordinating security operations for Livermore from inside a building called the control point, which was located in Area 6, ten miles from the bomb. The nuclear bomb was just about to reach the second pick when chaos entered the scene.

“I was sitting at my desk at the control point when I got the call,” Mingus says. “Dick Stock, the device systems engineer supervising the shot at ground zero, says over the phone, ‘We’re under attack over at the device assembly building!’” In the 1980s, the device assembly building was the place where the bomb components were married with the nuclear material. Because there were several nuclear weapons tests scheduled for that same week, Mingus knew there were likely additional nuclear weapons in the process of being put together at the device assembly building, in Area 27, which Mingus had good reason to believe was now under attack. “Dick Stock said he heard the information coming over the radios that the guys on the security response team were carrying” on their belts. Now it was up to Mingus to make the call about what to do next.

In the twenty-six years he had been employed at the test site, Richard Mingus had worked his way up from security guard to Livermore’s operations coordinator. He was an American success story. After his father died in 1941, Mingus dropped out of high school to work the coal mines. Eventually he went back to school, got a diploma, and joined the Air Force to serve in the Korean War. At the test site, Mingus had paid his dues. For years he stood guard over classified projects in the desert, through scorching-hot summers and cold winters, all the while guarding nuclear bombs and lethal plutoniumdispersal tests. By the mid-1960s, Mingus had saved enough overtime pay to buy a home for his family, which now included the young son he and Gloria had always dreamed about. By the mid-1970s, Mingus had enough money to purchase a second home, a hunting cabin in the woods. By the early 1980s, he had been promoted so many times, he qualified for GS-12, which in federal service hierarchy is only three rungs below the top grade, GS-15. “I attended the school for nuclear weapons orientation at Kirtland Air Force Base and had passed a series of advanced courses,” Mingus says. “But nothing, and I mean nothing, prepares you for the experience of thinking the nuclear material you are guarding is under attack.”

During that chaotic morning, Mingus knew all he could afford to focus on was the bomb in the hole. “I thought to myself, Dick Stock said the bomb is almost two picks down the hole. We’re under attack here. What’s best? I asked myself. If someone put a gun to the head of the crane operator and said, ‘Get it out’ they’d have a live nuclear bomb in their possession. I knew I had to make a decision. Was it safer to pull the bomb up or keep sending it down? I decided it was better to have a big problem at ground zero than somewhere else so I gave the order. I said, ‘Keep the device going down.’”

Mingus had a quick conversation with Joe Behne, the test director, about what was going on. The men agreed Mingus should call the head of security for the Department of Energy, a woman by the name of Pat Williams. “She said, ‘Yes, we hear the same thing and we have to assume the same thing. We are under attack as far as I know,’” Mingus recalls.

Next Mingus called Larry Ferderber, the resident manager of the Nevada Test Site for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Two minutes later Ferderber confirms the same thing, he says, ‘I hear we’re under attack.’” Mingus and Behne went through the protocol checklist. “Joe and I discussed going down to the basement and destroying the crypto which was in my building. Then we decided that it was too early for that. When you look out and you see guns firing, like on the USS Pueblo, then it’s time to start destroying things. But not before.”

Instead, Mingus called Bill Baker, the man who ran the device assembly building. With an attack now confirmed by the spokesperson for the Department of Energy and the test site manager, Mingus had to work fast. “I asked Bill Baker what was going on,” Mingus recalls. “He said, real calm, ‘We’re fine over here. I’m looking out the window. I can see Captain Williams standing outside.’” Mingus got off the telephone and had another discussion with Joe Behne. “I told Joe, I said, ‘We can’t buy his word. He could be under duress. He could have a knife at his neck or a gun at his head.’”

Meanwhile, just a few miles to the east, hovering several hundred feet over the guard post between the test site and Area 51, a group of men were leaning out of a helicopter firing semiautomatic weapons at the guards on the ground. But the bullets in their weapons were blanks, not real ammunition, and the men in the helicopter were security guards from Wackenhut Security, not enemies of the state. Wackenhut Security had decided to conduct a mock attack of an access point to Area 51 to test the system for weaknesses. With astounding lack of foresight, Wackenhut Security had not bothered to inform the Department of Energy of their mock-attack plans.

Back at the control point, in Area 6, Richard Mingus’s telephone rang. It was Pat Williams, the woman in charge of security for the Department of Energy. “She was real brief,” Mingus says. “She said, ‘It was a test and we didn’t know about it.’ Then she just hung up.” Mingus was astonished. “Looking back, in all my years, I have to say it was one of the scariest things I’d ever run into. It was like kids were running the test site that day.” Mingus didn’t write up any paperwork on the incident. “I don’t believe I made a note in my record book,” he says. Instead, Mingus kept working. “We had a nuclear bomb to get down into its hole and explode.” Test director Joe Behne believes paperwork exists. “I know it’s in the record. It was not a minor incident,” he says. “For those of us that were there that day it was almost unbelievable, except we believed [briefly] it was real — that Ground Zero was being attacked from a warlike enemy. The incident is bound to be in the logbooks. All kinds of people got calls.”

Far from the test site, things did not return to calm so quickly. The Department of Energy notified the FBI, who notified the Pentagon and the White House that Area 51 was under attack. The Navy’s nucleararmed submarines were put on alert, which meant that Tomahawk cruise missiles were now targeting the Nevada Test Site and Area 51. Crisis was averted before things elevated further, but it was a close call. Troy Wade was at the Pentagon at the time and told Mingus he “remembers hearing about how high up it went.” Guards from Wackenhut Security lost their jobs, but like most everything at Area 51, there were no leaks to the press. Only with the publication of this book has the incident come to light.

The nuclear bomb Mingus was in charge of overseeing was live and not secured, meaning an actual attack on the test site at that moment would have raised the possibility of a nuclear weapon being hijacked by an enemy of the nation. But there was another reason that the nuclear submarines were put on alert that day: the extremely sensitive nature of a black project the Air Force was running at Area 51. The top secret aircraft being tested there was the single most important invention in U.S. airpower since the Army started its aeronautical division in 1907. Parked on the tarmac at Area 51 was the F-117 Nighthawk, the nation’s first stealth bomber.

The F-117 would radically change the way America fought wars. As a Lockheed official explained at a banquet honoring the F-117 in April of 2008, “Before the advent of stealth, war planners had to determine how many sorties were necessary to take out a single target. After the invention of the F-117 stealth bomber, that changed. It became, How many targets can we take out on a single sortie?”

Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick worked on each rendition of the stealth bomber, which began in the early 1970s with Harvey, a prototype aircraft named after the Jimmy Stewart film about an invisible rabbit. Harvey’s stealth qualities were initially engineered using slide rules and calculators, the same way Lockheed had developed the A-12 Oxcart. Only with the emergence of the mainframe computer, in 1974, did those tools become obsolete. “Two Lockheed engineers, named Denys Overholser and Dick Scherrer, realized that it might be possible to design a stealth aircraft that would take advantage of some of the results of a computer’s calculations,” Lovick says. “In 1974 computers were relatively new and most of them were the size of a car. Our computer at Lockheed ran on punch cards and had less than 60 K worth of memory.” Still, the computer could do what humans could not do, and that was endless calculations.

“The concept behind the computer program involved mirrors reflecting mirrors,” Lovick explains. Mathematician Bill Schroeder set to work writing Lockheed’s original computer code, called Echo. If the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton was correct and the Soviet security forces really were using black propaganda to create a “wilderness of mirrors” to ensnare the West, the Air Force was going to create its own set of reflective surfaces to beat the Russians back with the F-117 stealth bomber. “We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” Lovick says. “It was a radical idea and it worked.”

The next, on-paper incarnation of the F-117 Nighthawk began in 1974 and was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers didn’t have much hope it would actually fly. After the Hopeless Diamond concept went through a series of redesigns it became a fullscale mock-up of an aircraft and was renamed Have Blue. T. D. Barnes was the man in charge of radar testing Lockheed’s proof-ofconcept stealth bomber at Area 51. “Lockheed handed it over to us and we put it up on the pole,” Barnes says. “It was a very weird, very crude-looking thing that actually looked a lot like the ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Our job was to look at it from every angle using radar to see how it showed up on radar.” Radars had advanced considerably since the early days of the Cold War. “Initially, it was as visible as a big old barn,” says Barnes. So the Have Blue mock-up was sent back to the Skunk Works for more fine-tuning. Several months later, a new version of the mock-up arrived at Area 51. “Lockheed had changed the shape of the aircraft and a lot of the angles of the panels. Once we put the new mock-up on the pole it appeared to us as something around the size of a crow.” There was a final round of redesigns, then the airplane came back to Area 51 again. “We put it up on the pole and all we saw was the pole.” Now it was time for Lockheed to present the final rendition of the Have Blue to the Air Force, in hopes of landing the contract to build the nation’s first stealth bomber.

The director of science and engineering at Skunk Works, a man named Ed Martin, went to Lovick for some advice. “Ed Martin asked me how I thought the aircraft might appear on enemy radar. I explained that if the Oxcart showed up as being roughly equivalent to the size of a man, the Have Blue would appear to a radar like a seven-sixteenthinch metal sphere — roughly the size of a ball bearing.” Ed Martin loved Lovick’s analogy. A ball bearing. That was something a person could relate to. Before Martin left for Washington, DC, Lovick went to the Lockheed tool shop and borrowed a bag of ball bearings. He wanted Ed Martin to have a visual reference to share with the Air Force officials there. “Later, I learned the ball-bearing illustration was so effective that the customers began rolling the little silvery spheres across the conference table. The analogy has become legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about the stealthy F117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as tiny as a ball bearing.” In 1976, Lockheed won the contract. Immediately, they began manufacturing two Have Blue aircraft in the legendary Skunk Works Building 82. The man in charge of engineering, fabrication, and assembly of the pair of stealth bombers was Bob Murphy, the same person who twenty-one years earlier had begun his career in a pair of overalls at Area 51, working for Kelly Johnson as chief mechanic on the U-2.

Testing a bomber plane would be a radically different process from testing a spy plane, and the F-117 was the first bomber to be flighttested at Area 51. Most notably, the new bomber would require testing for accuracy in dropping bombs on targets. For nearly twenty-five years, the CIA and the Air Force had been flying spy planes and drones in the Box. But there was simply not enough flat square footage at Groom Lake to drop bombs. There was also the issue of sound. With multiple projects going on at Area 51, not everyone was cleared for the F-117.

A second site was needed, and for this, the Air Force turned to the Department of Energy, formerly the Atomic Energy Commission. A land-use deal was struck allowing the Air Force to use a preexisting, little-known bombing range that the Atomic Energy Commission had quietly been using for decades. It was deep in the desert, within the Connecticut-size Nevada Test and Training Range. Located seventy miles northwest of Area 51, the Tonopah Test Range was almost in Death Valley and had been in use as a bombing range and missilelaunch facility for Sandia Laboratories since 1957. The Department of Energy had no trouble carving a top secret partition out of the 624square-mile range for the Air Force’s new bomber project. To be kept entirely off the books, the secondary black site was named Area 52. Like Area 51, Area 52 has never been officially acknowledged.

The sparsely populated, high-desert outpost of Tonopah, Nevada, was once the nation’s most important producer of gold and silver ore. In 1903, eighty-six million dollars in metals came out of the area’s mines, nearly two billion in 2011 dollars, and at the turn of the century, thirty thousand people rushed to the mile-high desert city seeking treasure there. Tonopah’s nearest neighbor, the town of Beatty, where T. D. Barnes lived in the 1960s, became known in 1907 as the Chicago of the West. For several years the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad maintained a rail line between the two cities, which at one point was the West’s busiest rail line. And then, almost overnight and like so many towns ensnared in the gold rush, Tonopah went bust. Within ten years, it was just a few families too many to be called a ghost town. Even the railroad company ripped up its steel tracks and carted them away for better use. Packs of wild horses and antelope came back down from the mountains and began to graze as they had before the boom, pulling weeds and scrub from the parched desert landscape between the Cactus and the Kawich mountain ranges. When a group of weaponeers from Sandia descended upon the area four decades later, in 1956, they were thrilled with what they found. Tonopah was a perfect place for “secret testing [that] could be conducted safely and securely.” Years later, boasting to their corporate shareholders, the Sandians, as they called themselves, would quote Saint Paul of Tarsus to sum up their mission at Tonopah Test Range: “test all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Between 1957 and 1964, Sandia dropped 680 bombs and launched 555 rockets from what was now officially but quietly called the Sandia National Laboratories’ Outpost at Tonopah. In 1963, Sandia conducted a series of top secret plutonium-dispersal tests, similar to the Project 57 test that had been conducted at Groom Lake just a few years earlier. Called Operation Roller Coaster, three dirty bomb tests were performed to collect biological data on three hundred animals placed downwind from aerosolized plutonium clouds generated from three Sandia nuclear weapons. With seven hundred Sandians hard at work in the desert flats for Operation Roller Coaster, a report called it Sandia’s “highlight of 1963.” Tonopah was so far removed from the already far removed and restricted sites at Area 51 and the Nevada Test Site that no one outside a need-to-know had ever even heard of it.

In October of 1979, construction for an F-117 Nighthawk support facility at Tonopah began inside Area 52. The facility at Area 51 served as a model for the facility being built at Area 52. Similarly styled runways and taxiways were built, as well as a maintenance hangar, using crews already cleared for work on Nevada Test Site contracts. Sixteen mobile homes were carted in, and several permanent support buildings were constructed. Sandia didn’t want to draw attention to the project, so the Air Force officers assigned to the base were ordered to grow their hair long and to grow beards. Sporting a hippie look, as opposed to a military look, was less likely to draw unwanted attention to a highly classified project cropping up in the outer reaches of the Nevada Test Site. That way, the men could do necessary business in the town of Tonopah.

The two facilities, Area 51 and Area 52, worked in tandem to get the F-117 battle-ready. When the mock attack at the guard gate at Area 51 occurred, in 1982, test flights of the F-117—which only ever happened at night — were already in full swing. For some weeks, a debate raged as to how an act of idiocy by a small group of Wackenhut Security guards nearly outed a billion-dollar aircraft as well as two top secret military test facilities that had remained secret for thirty years. An estimated ten thousand personnel had managed to keep the F-117 program in the dark. There was a collective mopping of the brow and succinct orders to move on, and then, two years later, the program was nearly outed again when an Air Force general broke protocol and decided to take a ride in one of Area 51’s prized MiG fighter jets.

Death of Lieutenant General Robert M. Bond on April 26, 1984, in Area 25 of the Nevada Test Site was an avoidable tragedy. With 267 combat missions under his belt, 44 in Korea and 213 in Vietnam, Robert M. Bond was a highly decorated Air Force pilot revered by many. At the time of his accident, he was vice commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, which made him a VIP when it came to the F-117 program going on at Area 51. In March of 1984, General Bond arrived at the secret facility to see how things were progressing. The general’s visit should have been no different than those made by the scores of generals whose footsteps Bond was following in, visits that began back in 1955 with men like General James “Jimmy” Doolittle and General Curtis LeMay. The dignitaries were always treated in high style; they would eat, drink, and bear witness to top secret history being made. Following in this tradition, General Bond’s first visit went without incident. But in addition to being impressed by the F-117 Nighthawk, General Bond was equally fascinated by the MiG program, which was still going on at Area 51. In the fifteen years since the CIA had gotten its hands on Munir Redfa’s MiG-21, the Agency and the Air Force had acquired a fleet of Soviet-made aircraft including an MiG-15, an MiG-17, and, most recently, the supersonic MiG-23. Barnes says, “We called it the Flogger. It was a very fast plane, almost Mach 3. But it was squirrelly. Hard to fly. It could kill you if you weren’t well trained.”

On a visit to Area 51 the following month, General Bond requested to fly the MiG-23. “There was some debate about whether the general should be allowed to fly,” Barnes explains. “Every hour in a Soviet airplane was precious. We did not have spare parts. We could not afford unnecessary wear and tear. Usually a pilot would train for at least two weeks before flying a MiG. Instead, General Bond got a briefing while sitting inside the plane with an instructor pilot saying, ‘Do this, do that.’” In other words, instead of undergoing two weeks of training, General Bond pulled rank.

Just a few hours later, General Bond was seated in the cockpit of the MiG, flying high over Groom Lake. All appeared to be going well, but just as he crossed over into the Nevada Test Site, Bond radioed the tower on an emergency channel. “I’m out of control,” General Bond said in distress. The MiG was going approximately Mach 2.5. “I’ve got to get out, I’m out of control” were the general’s last words. The MiG had gone into a spin and was on its way down. Bond ejected from the airplane but was apparently killed when his helmet strap broke his neck. The general and the airplane crashed into Area 25 at Jackass Flats, where the land was still highly contaminated from the secret NERVA tests that had gone on there.

General Bond’s death opened the possible exposure of five secret programs and facilities, including the MiG program, the F-117 program, Area 51, Area 52, and the nuclear reactor explosions at Jackass Flats. Unlike the deaths of CIA pilots flying out of Area 51, which could be concealed as generic training accidents, the death of a general required detailed explanation. If the press asked too many questions, it could trigger a federal investigation. One program had to come out of the dark to keep the others hidden. The Pentagon made the decision to out the MiG. Quietly, Fred Hoffman, a military writer with the Associated Press, was “leaked” information that Bond had in fact died at the controls of a Soviet MiG-23. The emphasis was put on how the Pentagon was able to obtain Soviet-bloc aircraft and weaponry from allies in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “The government has always been reluctant to discuss such acquisitions for fear of embarrassing the friendly donors, but the spotlight was turned anew on the subject after a three-star Air Force general was killed April 26 in a Nevada plane crash that was quickly cloaked in secrecy,” Hoffman wrote, adding “sources who spoke on condition they remain anonymous have indicated the MiG-23, the most advanced Soviet warplane ever to fall permanently into U.S. hands, was supplied to this country by Egypt.”

With this partial cover, the secrets of Area 51, Area 52, Area 25, and the F-117 were safe. It would be another four years before the public had any idea the F-117 Nighthawk existed. In November of 1988, a grainy image of the arrowhead-shaped, futuristic-looking craft was released to an awestruck public despite the fact that variations of the F-117 had been flying at Area 51 and Area 52 for eleven years. By 1974, the Agency had ceded control of Area 51. Some insiders say the transition occurred in 1979, but since Area 51 does not officially exist, the Air Force won’t officially say when this handover occurred. Certainly this had to have happened by the time the stealth bomber program was up and running; the F-117 program was the holy grail of Pentagon black projects — and, during that time period, the Air Force dominated Area 51. Having no business in bombs, the CIA maintained a much smaller presence there than historically it had before. During the 1970s, the Agency’s work concentrated largely on pilotless aircraft, or drones. Hank Meierdierck, the man who wrote the manual for the U2 at Area 51, was in charge of one such CIA drone project, which began in late 1969. Code-named Aquiline, the six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a small television camera in its nose and photo equipment and air-sampling sensors under its wings. Some insiders say it had been designed to test for radiation in the air as well as to gather electronic intelligence, or ELINT. But Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer ever assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, offers a different version of events. “Spy satellites flying over the Caspian Sea delivered us images of an oddly shaped, giant, multi-engined watercraft moving around down there on the surface. No one had any idea what this thing was for, but you can be sure the Agency wanted to find out. That is what the original purpose of Aquiline was for,” Poteat reveals. “To take close-up pictures of the vehicle so we could discern what it was and what the Soviets might be thinking of using it for. Since we had no idea what it was, we made up a name for it. We called it the Caspian Sea Monster,” Poteat explains. Project Aquiline remains a classified project, but in September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranopian, which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline drone was designed to spy on.

At Area 51, Hank Meierdierck selected his former hunting partner Jim Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone program. “It flew low and was meant to follow along communication lines in foreign countries and intercept messages,” Freedman says. “I believe the plan was to launch it from a submarine while it was waiting in port.” The Aquiline team consisted of three pilots trained to remotely control the bird, with Freedman offering operational support. “Hank got the thing to fly,” Freedman recalls. Progress was slow and “it crash-landed a lot.” The program ended when the defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, gave a bid for the job that Meierdierck felt was ninety-nine million dollars over budget. McDonnell Douglas would not budge on their bid so Hank recommended that the CIA cancel Project Aquiline, which he said they did. After the program was over, Hank Meierdierck managed to take a mock-up of the Aquiline drone home with him from the area. “He had it sitting on his bar at his house down in Las Vegas,” Freedman recalls.

Project Aquiline was not the CIA’s first attempt to gather intelligence using cover from the animal kingdom. Project Ornithopter involved a birdlike drone designed to blend in with nature by flapping its wings. And a third, even smaller drone was designed to look like a crow and land on windowsills in order to photograph what was going on inside CIA-targeted rooms. The tiniest drone program, orchestrated in the early 1970s, was Project Insectothopter, an insect-size aerial vehicle that looked like a dragonfly in flight. Insectothopter had an emerald green minifuselage and, like Ornithopter, flapped its wings, which were powered by a miniature engine that ran on a tiny amount of gas. Through its Office of Research and Development, or ORD, the CIA had also tried turning live birds and cats into spies. In one such program, CIA-trained pigeons flew around Washington, DC, with birdsize cameras strapped to their necks. The project failed after the extra weight tired out the pigeons and they hobbled back to headquarters on foot instead of in flight. Another CIA endeavor, Acoustic Kitty, involved putting electronic listening devices in house cats. But that project also backfired after too many cats strayed from their missions in search of food. One acoustic kitty got run over by a car. The Agency’s pilotlessvehicle projects were forever growing in ambition and in size. One robotic drone from the early 1970s, a project financed with DARPA, was disguised to look like an elephant — ready to do battle in the jungles of Vietnam.

Several projects, like Aquiline, involved only a handful of specialaccess personnel. But a few other projects took place on a considerably larger scale. In July of 1974, the CIA’s Special Activities Division filed a memorandum of agreement with the Air Force to set up a classified project at Area 51 that was extensive enough that it required five hangars of its own. Aerospace historian Peter Merlin, who wrote monographs for NASA, explains: “The top-secret project, with a classified code-name, was expected to last about one year. Six permanent personnel were assigned to the test site, with up to 20 personnel on site during peak periods of short duration activity.” The Air Force designated Hangar 13 through Hangar 17, located at the south end of the facility, as CIA-only. What mysterious project the CIA was working on there, those without a need-to-know have no idea. The work remains classified; rumor is that it was a Mach 5 or Mach 6 drone.

Some operations at Groom Lake in the 1970s involved the Agency’s desire to detect facilities for weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, including bioweapons and chemical weapons, before those weapons facilities were in full-production mode. This work, the CIA felt, could ideally be performed by laying sensors on the ground that were capable of “sniffing” the air. Since the 1950s, the Agency had been advancing its use of sensor drones to detect WMD signatures by monitoring changes in the air, the soil, and an area’s energy consumption. Early efforts had been made using U-2 pilots, who had to leave the safety of high-altitude flight and get down dangerously low in order to shoot javelinlike sensors into the earth. But those operations, part of Operation Tobasco, risked exposure. Several U-2 pilots had already been shot down. Because these delicate sensors needed to be accurately placed very close in to the WMD-producing facilities, it was an ideal job for a stealthy, low-flying drone.

Decades before anyone had rekindled an interest in drones, the CIA saw endless possibilities in them. But to advance drone technology required money, and in 1975, a Senate committee investigating illegal activity inside the CIA, chaired by Senator Frank Church and known as the Church Committee, did considerable damage to the Agency’s reputation as far as the general public was concerned. Budgets were thinned. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which began in 1977, CIA discretionary budgets were at an all-time low, and the CIA didn’t get very far with its drones — until late 1979, when the Agency learned about a lethal anthrax accident at a “probable biological warfare research, production and storage installation” in Sverdlovsk, Russia — the same location where Gary Powers had been taking spy photographs when his U-2 was shot down nineteen years before. As a result of the Sverdlovsk bioweapons accident, the CIA determined that as many as a hundred people had died from inhaling anthrax spores. The incident gave the CIA’s drone program some legs. But without interest from the Air Force, drones were perceived largely as the Agency’s playthings.

For twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1999, the CIA and the Air Force rarely worked together on drone projects at Area 51. This lack of cooperation was evident, and succinctly summed up in an interview Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave Time magazine in April of 2008. Gates said that when he was running the CIA, in 1992, he discovered that “the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot.” That changed in the winter of 2000, when the two organizations came together to work on a new drone project at Area 51, one that would forever change the face of warfare and take both agencies toward General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s Victory Over Japan Day prediction that one day in the future, wars would be fought by aircraft without pilots sitting inside. In the year 2000, that future was now.

The project involved retrofitting a CIA reconnaissance drone, called Predator, with antitank missiles called Hellfire missiles, supplied by the army. The target would be a shadowy and obscure terrorist the CIA was considering for assassination. He lived in Afghanistan, and his name was Osama bin Laden.