T. D. Barnes and the EG&G Special Projects Group at Area 51 got to work reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG—taking it apart and putting it back together again. All the engineers knew that this was the best way to really understand how something had been built. The EG&G Special Projects Group appeared to have advance expertise in this technical process of reverse engineering aircraft. At the time, no one knew why, and Barnes, new to the EG&G engineering team, knew better than to ask. He was excited to get to work. “We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio… everything. Then we put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation equipment.” Still, Barnes and his crew were stumped. How was it that this Soviet plane was beating the supposedly more capable U.S. fighters in air-to-air engagements? No one could explain why. So a second program was conceived, the MiG’s Have Doughnut tactical phase. During the Have Doughnut, the MiG would begin flying tactical missions against U.S. airplanes in the skies over Groom Lake. The Air Force said it wasn’t interested but the Navy leaped at the chance.
“Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn fast,” Barnes says. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions over Groom Lake. Mock air battles between the MiG and American fighter jets were a daily event for a period of six weeks during the spring of 1968. The program (not including its Area 51 locale) was declassified by the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division in October of 1997 and by the Defense Intelligence Agency in March of 2000. “We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains. Constant flying takes a toll on any aircraft, but with a captured enemy airplane this proved especially challenging. “Since no spare parts were available, ground crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”
There were repercussions from the Soviets. “The fact that we had a MiG at Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five minutes.” Up to this point, the Soviets had gotten used to monitoring the routine activity at the base, which consisted primarily of takeoffs and landings of the Oxcart and a few drones. But once the MiG showed up, the U.S. Air Force Foreign Technology Division appeared on the scene too, and with them came various models of Soviet-built radar systems captured in the Middle East. And once the Soviets discovered engineers at Groom Lake were testing these foreign radar systems, they again decided to monitor the situation more closely from overhead.
The newly acquired Soviet radar systems started cropping up around the western edges of the Groom dry lake bed and also around Slater Lake, which was about a mile northwest of the main hangars. Technical evaluation of the radar was quickly assigned to Barnes. He requested a Nike missile system and was surprised at just how quickly his request was filled. “I think the CIA went and got a Nike missile system at my old stomping ground, Fort Bliss, just about the very next day,” Barnes says. With radars scattered all over the range, including acquisition radar that rotated and searched for incoming targets, a geek like Barnes had a field day. “We used the Nike to track the MiGs and other airplanes to evaluate their ECM against X-band radar.” What Barnes did not know was that these radar systems were being acquired for the upcoming radar cross-section analysis of an Air Force plane in the works. The Russians had no idea what the Air Force was dreaming up either, but they were duly angry about the captured radars that were now sitting in the hills overlooking Groom Lake.