Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [84]
As they had been with the Manhattan Project, the various jobs going on at Area 51 were compartmentalized for Oxcart, so that every person worked within very strict need-to-know protocols. The radar people had no idea about the ELINT people, who had no idea what any of the search-and-rescue teams were up to. Each group worked on its part of the puzzle. Each man was familiar with his single piece. Only a few individuals, officers working in managerial capacities, understood a corner of the puzzle—at most. But someone had to act as a go-between among these disparate groups, and in this way, Freedman became an individual who knew a lot more than most about the inner workings of Area 51.
He also knew the layout of the base. Most Area 51 workers were confined to the building, or buildings, they worked in, the building they slept in, and the mess hall, where everybody dined together. As the Area 51 runner, Freedman “went to places out there that I don’t think other people even knew were out there.” For example, Freedman says, there was “the faraway runway where people who were not supposed to be seen by others were brought into the base.” Freedman tells a story of one such group, the exact date of which he can’t recall but that was during the Vietnam War. “One day I was out there delivering something to someone, it was three in the morning, and I watched an airplane land. Then I watched forty-one Vietnamese men get off the plane. I never saw the men again, but a few days later I was sent on an errand. My supervisor said, ‘Jim, can you go to Las Vegas and get me x number of pounds of a special kind of rice?’ I’d say it was fairly obvious who that rice was being requested for.” Freedman elaborates: “These [foreign nationals] were being trained to use state-of-the-art Agency equipment out at the Area, which they probably took with them when they left and went and put behind enemy lines.”
Freedman’s first job at the test site had been installing radios in EG&G vehicles used during weapons tests. Next, he was trained as an engineer in the art of wiring nuclear bombs. In the 1950s, Freedman participated in dozens of nuclear tests on the arming and firing party alongside Al O’Donnell at the test site and also at the Pacific Proving Ground. “I even managed to survive a helicopter crash in the Marshall Islands,” Freedman adds. In 1957, EG&G learned that Freedman had studied photography after high school and assigned him to a team photographing nuclear explosions. But by 1960, the nuclear-test-ban treaty was in effect, testing had moved underground, and Freedman’s life had taken what he called “a dull turn.”
One afternoon, he was sitting inside an EG&G warehouse in Las Vegas, cleaning camera equipment. “I was thinking about how fast office work gets boring when my boss walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, Jim, do you want to go work on a secret project?’” Freedman didn’t hesitate. “I said yes, because it sounded interesting, and I wound up at Area 51. I’d never heard of the place before I went there. I never knew it existed just over the hill from the Nevada Test Site where I’d worked for so many years. Neither did anyone else who didn’t have a need-to-know.” When Freedman arrived at Area 51, it felt to him “like I was arriving on the far side of the moon. You know about the bright side of the moon; well, in relative terms, that was what the test site was like. Area 51 was the dark side.” What began as a short-term contract in December of 1960 would last for Jim Freedman for the next fourteen