Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [173]
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 nuclear-armed 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