The Secret Genesis of Area 51 Read online

  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2017 by TD Barnes

  All rights reserved

  First published 2017

  e-book edition 2017

  ISBN 978.1.43966.242.7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940927

  print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.805.5

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  I dedicate this book to all my contemporaries who served the Central Intelligence Agency at its Groom Lake operating facility at Area 51 and its affiliated power projection locations throughout the world.

  I also dedicate this book to my family and friends who never knew for half a century that I worked at Area 51 or what I did.

  For it is the lot of some men to be assigned duties about which they may not speak. Such work is not for every man. But, those who accept the burdens implicit in this silent labor realize a camaraderie and sense of value known to few. Nothing can steal or erase these memories. They will last always, untarnished, ever better.

  —former Area 51 commander Colonel Larry McClain

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. An Uneasy Truce

  2. The War that Wasn’t

  3. A Young Agency versus the Old Guard

  4. Scouting for Area 51

  5. Organizing in Secrecy

  6. We Can’t Tell You the Assignment, Gentlemen

  7. Flying the Angel

  8. Watertown Goes Operational

  9. The Overflight Missions

  10. Back at the Ranch

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I first acknowledge my wife, Doris, and my two daughters, Deborah and Tamera. Doris didn’t know until 2009 where I worked or for whom during all the years she dropped me off in a secured area at Nellis AFB to catch a plane on Monday morning and picked me up when I returned Friday evening. She learned from Director Michael Hayden at Langley that I was at Area 51 working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on black projects. Our daughters knew where I worked because they, too, worked in the black world after I left it. They did not know until Doris did what my work was because it was still classified top secret up to that point. Neither Doris nor I know what they did because what they did is still classified.

  I especially acknowledge my Area 51 CIA contemporaries, known as the Roadrunners, for whom I have been honored to serve as the alumni president for years. These are the CIA, Air Force and contractors working at or directly affiliated with the CIA projects at Area 51, many of them identified in this book.

  I acknowledge the following individuals for their contributions to the CIA’s era at Area 51:

  Dr. David Robarge, PhD, the CIA’s chief historian and author of Archangel: CIA’s Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft.

  The Honorable Gene Poteat, retired CIA, for his technical contributions to Area 51. Poteat fathered information warfare. With Project PALLADIUM, he forever changed the course of U.S. aerial reconnaissance.

  Helen H. Kleyla, who compiled the report declassified by the CIA and herein referenced by me. The declassified report documents the political turmoil leading to the Central Intelligence Agency establishing Area 51. Kleyla served the CIA for thirty years, much of it as the assistant to CIA’s Dick Bissell. Kleyla was the first woman to set foot at the CIA facility in Area 51.

  Richard Mervin Bissell Jr., the Central Intelligence Agency officer responsible for the U-2 spy plane. Bissell and Herbert Miller, another CIA officer, chose Area 51 as the CIA’s test facility. As the CIA’s DD/P (deputy director of plans), Bissell also oversaw the early stages of Project OXCART, the development of the Lockheed A-12.

  Dr. Albert D. “Bud” Wheelon, PhD, the first CIA deputy director of science and technology, for his support of Project OXCART. I acknowledge Wheelon’s friendship and support of my oral history endeavors.

  CIA Area 51 commanders Richard Newton, Werner Weiss and Richard A “Dick” Sampson for their leadership that made Area 51 what it is today.

  CIA’s John Parangosky, project manager for OXCART, for developing America’s first stealth plane that today remains the world’s fastest and highest-flying manned air-breathing aircraft ever.

  Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson and all the other corporate management and employees supporting the CIA at Area 51.

  In this acknowledgment, I include the historians, writers and aviation enthusiasts whose research and support brought to light the rich and historical legacy of the CIA at Area 51.

  Lastly, I acknowledge all my contemporaries who served at or supported those serving at Area 51. These include the unnamed agency, military and civilians whose participation remains buried or lost beneath the shroud of compartmentalized secrecy. Many remain unknown and are destined never to receive the acknowledgment deserved.

  INTRODUCTION

  World War II ended with Europe devastated. Vast swaths of Europe and Asia lay in ruins, with the world population of 2 billion reduced by 4 percent, 80 million people killed (670,846 of them servicemen and women) and 30,314 missing. The front lines in Europe were silent, but for how long?

  The world’s largest country, the Communist Russia Federation—better known as the Soviet Union or the USSR (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)—France, England and the United States divided the Alliedoccupied Germany. However, the Soviet Union, a union of various subnational republics, wanted more; it wanted revenge for over twenty-seven million of its people killed during World War II. The two colonialist allies, France and England, wanted to regain their colonies occupied by the enemy during the war. They all expected the United States to foot the bill to rebuild Europe even though the United States was still waging war against Japan in the Pacific.

  In April 1945, following the death of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, the new U.S. president, Harry S. Truman, rather than using “get along” diplomacy as Roosevelt did, berated Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov over his spread of communism. At the same time, the United States was financially supporting rebuilding its colonialist allies, England and France, and their liberated colonies to prevent them falling to the Soviet communist movement. The United States extended $400 million in military aid to Greece and Turkey, signaling its intent to contain communism in the Mediterranean.

  After providing nearly $11 billion in aid to several European countries between 1945 and 1947 through the United Nations Relief and Recovery Administration, the Truman administration announced the Marshall Plan in June 1947 to provide aid to sixteen nations. The Soviet Union took an increasingly hostile view of the Marshall Plan, refusing East Bloc participation and calling it an “imperialist ploy” for the enslavement of Europe. In September 1947, the Soviets founded the Communist Information Bureau, which ordered party members to mobilize against the Marshall Plan. French and Italian communists responded by staging strikes and intensive propaganda campaigns.

  Thus, it came to be that the Soviet Union returned to its Red Army ways of rebuilding by occupying the liberated countries, forcefully spreading communism throughout Eastern Europe.

  In the war against Japan, Maj
or General Curtis LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force B-29s had conducted an unprecedented five-month fire blitz using four B-29 groups operating from India, staging through China to spew incendiaries within the maximum range of southern Japan. The hellish low-level aerial incendiary firebombing of Japan from the air in night attacks had Tokyo burning following the single most destructive attack on a city in the history of warfare, killing some 250,000 civilians and maiming many more. One raid, the Meetinghouse raid, indiscriminately killed more people than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki that supposedly ended the war with Japan. Only ten cities larger than 100,000 people escaped the attacks, which were so extensive that they resorted to bombing towns of 30,000 people or fewer.

  By May 1945, the Japanese had lost the war in the Pacific and were making requests for peace. On August 3, 1945, Japan offered to surrender but withdrew the offer because the Potsdam Conference called for an unconditional surrender, exposing many of Japan’s top government officials to face war crimes trials like those ongoing against Germany’s leaders in Europe.

  On August 9, 1945, exactly three months after the surrender of Germany and between the August 6 American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the massive and battlehardened Red Army steamrolled into Manchuria. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria, known as the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation or Operation August Storm, played a significant part in the Japanese government’s decision to surrender unconditionally on August 15, 1945.

  Soviet troops brushed aside scattered Japanese resistance and sliced through what had once been an elite Japanese army, only stopping when they ran out of gas, to occupy Manchuria, where about 700,000 troops looted and terrorized the people of Mukden in three days of rape and pillage. Many Japanese settlers chose mass suicide over the approaching Soviet army. Mothers killed their children before killing themselves or being mercy-killed by the Japanese forces.

  The decisive Soviet invasion, in a single stroke, evaporated all of Japan’s strategic and diplomatic options. While the invasion of Manchuria contributed to the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II, it also provided an opportunity for the Soviets to occupy Manchuria and the northern portions of the Korean peninsula under the control of communistbacked regimes.

  For President Truman, the Soviet invasion made ending the war extremely time sensitive. He needed the atomic bomb to win the war before the Russians, who had done in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years. Giving the Russians credit for winning the war would give the perception of Soviet military power and enhance communism.

  Japan had no allies, the war had destroyed its fleet, its islands were under a naval blockade and its cities were burning from months of concentrated firebomb air attacks when, on August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb (nicknamed “Little Boy”) on Hiroshima. Two days later, the United States dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki.

  Dictator Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, the general secretary of the central committee of the Soviet Union, saw the dropping of the bomb as the United States intimidating the Soviet Union, using its atomic advantage for imperialism.

  THE UNITED STATES SOUGHT INTELLIGENCE

  TOO LITTLE AND TOO LATE

  In July 1941, Roosevelt had appointed William Joseph Donovan, a United States soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat, as the coordinator of information, the nation’s first peacetime, nondepartmental intelligence organization. However, this appointment occurred too late for Donovan to develop the knowledge to prevent the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Only after the surprise attack by Japan did the president form the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to collect and analyze the strategic information required by the joint chiefs of staff. Even then, the Office of Strategic Services only conducted special operations not assigned to other agencies.

  William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the father of American intelligence and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat during World War II. Wikipedia.

  The forming of the Office of Strategic Services shaped a lasting U.S. intelligence hierarchy in the United States; the office shared jurisdiction over foreign intelligence activities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation but left the military branches to conduct intelligence operations in their areas of responsibility.

  One could argue that Truman’s treatment of the Russian leader, Stalin, merely inflamed him and changed the course of history. One could also wonder the motives for dropping the two atomic bombs on a defeated nation willing to surrender.

  Regardless of the reasons, the use of the atomic bomb alienated Stalin. Russia next invaded Japanese Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. But then the giant bear, Russia, spread its communist dominance by occupying the countries it liberated from the Japanese. The Red Army remained in liberated Korea north of the thirty-eighth parallel, dividing the Korean peninsula into Soviet and U.S. occupation zones along that line.

  History has shown that the end of World War II brought a sentiment throughout the United States of returning to normalcy. Unfortunately, the leaders considered normalcy as demobilizing wartime agencies. The Soviet Union was still occupying North Korea and threatening to do the same with South Korea, making it one Korea—a communist Korea. Nonetheless, President Truman withdrew American troops from South Korea, and a month following the surrender of Japan, he signed Executive Order 9621, terminating the Office of Strategic Services. He said it was because Donovan’s civilian and military rivals feared the man they called “Wild Bill Donovan” creating a peacetime intelligence service modeled on the Office of Strategic Services.

  Why? Was this the reason, or was it to squash any questions about how the war with Japan ended?

  DECLASSIFICATION

  In March 2016, the Central Intelligence Agency declassified and released a report titled “CIA, Directorate of Science and Technology (DST), History of the Office of Special Activities (OSA) from Inception to 1969.” This report officially confirmed that the CIA was responsible for developing the mythical, highly classified Area 51 in Nevada. The author, an Area 51 veteran, could now respond to these two issues and many others that this declassification released for the telling. This book answers five questions: who, what, where, when and why. However, it does not venture into the still classified post-CIA era at Area 51.

  CHAPTER 1

  AN UNEASY TRUCE

  ALLIES AND COMMUNISTS

  The United States and its allies had much more to fear than the American president’s and the military services’ fear of Donovan and each of them protecting their turf. They quickly learned that more war was the normalcy for the Russians. Soviet amphibious forces were landing in Korea even while the Soviet Union was invading Manchuria, and shortly afterward, the French Far East Expeditionary Corps of the Provisional Government of the French Republic entered Vietnam to restore colonial rule.

  Where diplomacy might have prevented another war, Russia was not the only one alienated by President Truman. At this point, Ho Chi Minh did not have the communist label that came later for political reasons. Where Roosevelt opposed the French resuming their colonization of Indochina, Truman did the opposite.

  When Truman pulled the plug on the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS’s Special Operations Team Number 13, code-named the “Deer Team,” was in French Indochina training Viet Minh guerrillas, gathering intelligence in the waning days of World War II and collaborating with Ho Chi Minh for his coming to power.

  With the surrender of Japan, Vietnam was for the first time in two thousand years free of occupation. With Roosevelt dead, Ho Chi Minh pleaded with President Truman to keep the French from returning to rule his country. President Truman ignored his request and, instead, insulted Ho Chi Minh by giving him a small number of Colt .45 semi-automatic pistols to show that “Ho had the support of the United States.”

  A
lost opportunity for the United States, it pulled the Office of Strategic Services team out of Vietnam and opposed Ho Chi Minh’s attempt for the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam by supporting the French resuming their colonialism. This lack of aid forced Ho to seek the assistance of communist Russia to keep the French out. Consequently, Vietnam emerged from World War II as the Viet Minh—a communist and nationalist liberation movement under the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. The resulting First Indochina War would last until July 1954, with the United States paying 80 percent of the cost of a war that France would lose and the United States would continue until April 1975—an inevitable war to contain Soviet-sponsored communism.

  By early 1946, Truman had realized that his disbanding the Office of Strategic Services had blinded the United States to what the Russians were doing militarily. He realized the lack of vital intelligence on Soviet Union activities coming from the rivalry that existed among the military services having independent information-gathering means. To avoid exacerbating these rivalries, the president first established the Central Intelligence Group in 1946. He ultimately created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to provide U.S. leaders with a strategic warning of an attack by the Soviet Union.

  Also, in 1947, two years after the end of World War II, President Truman’s fear of communism was such that he created the Truman Doctrine as an American foreign policy to counter the Soviet geopolitical spread during the Cold War. He fueled the political and military tension with the Soviet Union by providing aid to Greece and Turkey to prevent them from falling into the Soviet sphere. The doctrine further pledged aid to all nations threatened by Soviet expansionism. This difference in policy brought the Cold War to a head. The USSR saw no way to defend its borders except to extend them as it continued its consolidating control over the Eastern Bloc states. The United States countered this with a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power by extending military and financial aid to the countries of Western Europe. Truman signed the Marshall Plan into effect, costing the United States $12.4 billion.