Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [124]
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
But that was just semantics. Test ban treaty or not, the Department of Defense had no intention of putting down its swords. The men were fully committed to the long haul that was the Cold War.
Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than for its top secret work for the CIA. “The first jamming system was called Red Dog; later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an electronic pulse. The work was exciting when the airplanes were flying and there was actual data to collect, but if the Red Dog system failed and needed fixing, it meant a lot of waiting around.
These were the early days of electronic warfare, and there were not a lot of Red Dog spare parts lying around. As a result, Ken Swanson worked many long weekends at Area 51. Swanson says that sometimes he and his Sylvania colleague felt like they were the only ones on the base. One weekend the men took the Area 51 motor pool’s four-wheel-drive vehicle up to Bald Mountain, the tallest peak on the Groom Range, to have a look around. “We found a bunch of old Model Ts and had no idea what they were doing there,” Swanson recalls. Another time he went solo to investigate the old mines. “I was wearing tennis shoes and Bermuda shorts and I bumped into a bunch of rattlers sunning themselves. Next time I went back, I wore snake boots,” he says. During winter weekends, there were even fewer people at Area 51, and for entertainment, after a long day performing high-tech electronic-countermeasures work, Swanson would go joyriding around the dry lake bed. He’d borrow an Econoline van from the motor pool, take it out on the frozen tarmac, and do spins. “But I stopped after I had the van on two wheels once,” Swanson says.
With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG&G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars. An equally important part of the radar testing system was the radar pole that had to be installed on the top of Bald Mountain. For that, the CIA recruited one of the best rescue helicopter pilots in the country, Charlie Trapp.
“I was minding my own business in South Carolina,” Trapp recalls, “when these guys from the Air Force called me up and asked if I want to come fly a two-airplane helo unit in Nevada, one hundred miles from the nearest town. They said it was important and that I’d have to be able to hover and land at nine thousand feet.” Trapp thought it sounded interesting as well as challenging and he signed on. “We flew in from Nellis in the H-43 [helicopter] and before we even landed at Area 51, they said, ‘Let’s go see how you land on top of the mountain first,’ that’s how important the mountain project was to the beginning of my Area 51 assignment.” For months, Trapp hauled cement in thousand-pound buckets from the Area 51 operations center up to the top of Bald Mountain. “I’d hover over the top and lower the equipment down,” Trapp explains. “There were high winds and serious dust storms.” Finally, Trapp helicoptered in the one-hundred-foot-long radar pole, which a team of workers cemented into place. Mission accomplished. “We did such a good