Frank Murray volunteered to fight on the ground, or at least low to the ground, in Vietnam. “During Black Shield, no one had any idea where I’d been. Quite a few people thought maybe I’d dodged the war. I decided to go back in and fly airplanes in combat in Vietnam.” In November of 1970, Murray was sent to the Nakhon Phanom Air Base on the Mekong River across from Laos, where he volunteered to fly the A-1 Skyraider—a propeller-driven, single-seat airplane that was an anachronism in the jet age. “It flew about a hundred and sixty-five miles per hour at cruise,” says Murray. “I went from flying the fastest airplane in the world to the slowest one. The Oxcart taxied faster than the A-1 flew.” Because the Skyraider flew so slow, it was one of the easiest targets for the Vietcong. One in four Skyraiders sent on rescue missions was shot down. “We got shot at often but the Skyraider had armaments and I shot back.” In his one-year tour of duty, Murray, the squadron commander, flew sixty-four combat missions. The Skyraider’s most famous role was as the escort for the helicopters sent in to rescue wounded soldiers from the battlefield. “Our mission was to support the Jolly Green Giants. We pulled quite a few wounded Green Berets out of the battlefield that year.”
Colonel Slater was assigned to the position of vice commander of the Twentieth Tactical Fighter Wing at the Wethersfield Air Force Base in England. By all accounts, he was well on the way to becoming a general in the U.S. Air Force. Then tragedy struck. Colonel Slater’s eldest daughter, Stacy, was in Sun Valley, Idaho, on her honeymoon when the private plane she was flying in with her husband struck a mountain peak and crashed. Stranded on the side of a frozen mountain for twenty-four hours, Stacy Slater Bernhardt was paralyzed from the waist down. The recovery process was going to be long and painful, and the outcome was entirely unknown. “My wife, Barbara, and I needed to be with our daughter, with our family, so I requested to be transferred back to the United States,” Colonel Slater says. For Slater, a career military man, the decision was simple. “Love of country, love of family.”
Back in America, and after many months, his daughter recovered with near-miraculous results (she learned to walk with crutches). Colonel Slater was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base, where he began flying the Air Force’s attack version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, which comes equipped to carry two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. “I loved it,” Slater says, always the optimist. “I enjoyed working for the CIA, but no matter how old I get, I will always be a fighter pilot at heart.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The MiGs of Area 51
To engineer something is to apply scientific and technical know-how to create an entity from parts. To reverse engineer something is to take another manufacturer’s or scientist’s product apart with the specific purpose of learning how it was constructed or composed. The concept of reverse engineering is uniquely woven into Area 51 legend and lore, with conspiracy theorists claiming Area 51 engineers are reverse engineering alien spacecraft inside the secret base. Historically, reverse engineering has played an important role at Area 51, as exemplified in formerly classified programs, including one from the late 1960s and 1970s, to reverse engineer Russian MiGs.
It began one scorching-hot morning in August of 1966 when an Iraqi Air Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad. Redfa then made a sudden turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified Redfa that he was off course.
“Turn back immediately,” he was told. Instead, Redfa began flying in a zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey, then toward the Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There, one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.
Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.
The plan had been years in the making. Four years, to be exact, dating back to 1963, when Meir Amit first became head of the Mossad. Amit sat down with the Israeli air force and asked them what they would consider the single greatest foreign-intelligence contribution to national security. The answer was short, simple, and unanimous: bring us an MiG. The enemy air forces of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq all flew Russian MiGs. Before Redfa’s defection, the Mossad had tried twice, unsuccessfully, to acquire the airplane. In one case, an Egyptian-born Armenian intelligence agent known as John Thomas was caught in the act of espionage. His punishment was death; he and several coconspirators were hanged in an Egyptian public square.