Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [86]
Weapons were not allowed on Lockheed transport planes flying in and out of Area 51 from McCarran Airport. But Freedman’s level of clearance was such that security did not examine the things he carried with him. “The next trip to Area 51, I put my rifle in a box with an oscilloscope,” Freedman explains, “and that’s how I got my hunting rifle out there.”
Meierdierck found a helicopter pilot to fly the men into the mountains north of Area 51 to photograph the old mines there. Then he dropped the two men and their hunting rifles off at a favored spot on Groom Mountain where Area 51 officials liked to surreptitiously hunt deer. Meierdierck told the helicopter pilot to return the next day.
From on top of Groom Mountain, the view down over Area 51 was spectacular. It was, as Kirkpatrick had speculated, a perfect place for a Soviet spy to disguise himself as a deer hunter and take notes. During the day, you could see the buildings down at Area 51 spread out in an H formation to the west of the runways. Jeeps and vans could be seen ferrying workers around. If you had binoculars, you could get a clear look at what was going on. At night, the whole place went dark; most of the buildings that had windows kept the curtains drawn. If an aircraft needed to land at night, the lights would quickly flash on, illuminating the runway. The airplane would land and the lights would quickly go off, bathing the valley in darkness once again.
For Freedman, the hunting trip dragged on a little long. “Hank was stubborn,” Freedman explains. “He said he wasn’t leaving until he got a deer. And he preferred to hunt on his own, so he suggested we split up and meet back at the campsite for dinner.” Which is what they did. “There was very little for us to talk about,” Freedman says. “We both knew we were on top secret projects. You couldn’t afford to talk. Everyone had a wife and a family. No one could afford to lose their job.” One subject the men could discuss was hunting. Only three years had passed since the last aboveground atomic tests had detonated across the valley down below. Freedman wondered if anyone who caught a deer up on Groom Mountain should even consider eating it because “the deer ate the foliage which was contaminated from alpha particles from all the tests.” As it turned out, the men did not catch any deer anyway.
Come Monday, the helicopter pilot returned, and by the end of the next day, Freedman was sitting in his dining room in Las Vegas, eating dinner with his wife and kids. He was able to get his hunting rifle out of Area 51 the same way he got it in: “Inside the oscilloscope case.”
Not long after Lyman Kirkpatrick filed his final inspector general’s report on Area 51, Richard Bissell resigned. This was not before he had been offered a lesser job at CIA, as the director of the Office of Science and Technology. But in that new capacity Bissell’s need-to-know would have been drastically reduced. In CIA parlance, having one’s access curbed was an insult. Instead, he chose to leave the Agency.
Without Richard Bissell in charge of the secret CIA facility, what would become of Area 51? And who would run the Oxcart reconnaissance program? The decision about Bissell’s replacement went up the chain of command to President Kennedy. He had been in office for less than a year and already he was up to his elbows in CIA backlash. President Kennedy’s new secretary of defense was a man named Robert McNamara, an intellectually minded Harvard Business School graduate who had won the Legion of Merit during World War II for performing firebomb analysis from behind a desk. Now, as secretary of defense, after