Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [56]
In the flat Nevada desert, Richard Mingus took to work in top secret nuclear security like a fish to water. He loved the formal protocols and the way everything was ordered. “I developed a reputation for being tough,” Mingus recalls. From the checklists to the radio codes, everything at the Nevada Test Site and at Area 51 worked with a military precision that Mingus thrived on. What others may have found monotonous, spending long hours guarding nuclear weapons in a vast desert-landscape setting, Mingus found challenging. He passed the pistol training with flying colors. He studied the manuals with such intensity, he ended up scoring in the top 90 percent of all the trainees. His excellence earned Mingus a position as one of only five men chosen to guard the top secret base over the hill from Yucca Flat. For employees of Federal Services, Incorporated, the first thing learned was that the facility was to be referred to only as Delta site. The radio channel on which Mingus and his colleagues spoke could be heard by guards all over the test site. The code was important; it was Delta, nothing more. Mingus remembered how everything at Area 51 worked with top secret/sensitive compartmented information protocols. “Even my sergeant wasn’t cleared to go over the hill to Delta. He was my superior but he didn’t have a need-to-know what I was doing over there,” Mingus explains. “So I was very curious the first time driving out there, looking out the window… wondering what’s ahead. When we got there, it was not very fancy at all. Just an airstrip in the desert. Later, we were told the place was also called Watertown but never to use that word. Over the radio we always referred to our position at Delta, never anything else.” That first day at Delta, aka Area 51, Richard Mingus and his four colleagues were met by a CIA security representative at the west-facing perimeter gate. “He drove us into the area. We went straight to the admin building, which was just a little wooden structure with a patch cord telephone system sitting there on a desk. The sergeant looked at me, pointed to a chair, and said, ‘Dick, that’s your post.’” A surge of intimidation swept over Mingus. “A country boy like me, I looked at the phone system and I thought, This is the hottest spot on the post, the place where all the communication from the CIA comes in. I had never used a switchboard before and I knew if I wanted to keep my job I’d have to learn real fast. As it turns out, there was plenty more time to learn. The phone almost never rang. ‘Thirty-two thirty-two,’ that’s how I answered the telephone. There were not many calls. And when someone did call, they would almost always ask for the same person, a [generic] name like Joe Smith, the code name for the commander at the base.”
At Area 51, Mingus and his colleagues rotated through four sentry posts: the administration building, the top of a seventy-five-foot water tower, and the east and west gates. The gate positions were used to control access to Area 51 by land. On more than one occasion, Mingus turned away what he calls “overly curious Air Force,” individuals who “just because they had rank, they thought they should be able to come on in.” Mingus denied access to anyone not badged for Area 51. “A few times things got real tense. We worked on strict orders and it was my job to keep people out.” The water-tower post at the facility was used by guards to keep an eye on the sky. “We were on the lookout for a rogue helicopter or small aircraft, that type of thing,” Mingus recalls. During this time, the security guards got to know many of the U-2 pilots. “They’d fly low enough over me so I could see their faces in the cockpit. They got a kick out of flying over our security posts. They’d buzz over