Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [145]
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 résumés. “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