Barnes loved learning. At Fort Bliss, he attended classes for Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules missile school by day and classes at Texas Western University by night for the next fifty-four months. These were the missiles that had been developed a decade earlier by the Paperclip scientists, born originally of the German V-2 rocket. At Fort Bliss, Barnes read technical papers authored by former Nazi scientists. Sometimes the Paperclip scientists taught class. “No one really thought of them as former Nazis,” says Barnes. “They were the experts. They worked for us now and we learned from them.” By early 1960, Barnes was a bona fide missile expert. Sometimes, when a missile misfired over at the White Sands Missile Range, it was T.D. Barnes who was dispatched to disarm the missile sitting on the test stand. “I’d march up to the missile, take off the panel, and disconnect the wires from the igniter,” Barnes recalls. “When you are young, it doesn’t occur to you how dangerous something is.” Between the academics and the hands-on experience, Barnes developed an unusual aptitude in an esoteric field that the CIA was just getting involved in: ELINT. Which was how at the age of twenty-three, T. D. Barnes was recruited by the CIA to participate in a top secret game of chicken with the Russians that was part of Project Palladium. Although Barnes didn’t know it then, the work he was doing was for the electronic countermeasure systems that would later be installed on the A-12 Oxcart and on the ground at Area 51.
American military aviation began at the Fort Bliss airfield in 1916, when the First Aero Squadron used it as a staging base while hunting Pancho Villa in nearby Mexico. Now, almost half a century later, the airfield, called Biggs, was part of the Strategic Air Command and served as home base for heavy bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress. Beginning in 1960, the facility was also a staging area for secret CIA missions that were part of Project Palladium, and that same year, T. D. Barnes found himself standing on the tarmac at Biggs Airfield watching a group of airmen as they delicately loaded a Hawk missile into the cargo bay of an airplane. Weapons are supposed to go in the weapons bay, Barnes thought to himself. But the project Barnes was participating in was unusual, dangerous, and top secret. Barnes did not have a need-to-know what the big picture involved and he knew better than to ask. Instead, he climbed into the cargo bay and sat down beside the missile. “We had the nose cone off and part of the skin off too. The missile was loaded on a stand inside the plane. It was my job to watch the electronics respond,” Barnes explains. The airplane and its crew took off from the airbase and headed for Cuba. The plan was for the airplane to fly right up to the edge of Cuban airspace but not into it. Moments before the airplane crossed into Cuban airspace, the pilot would quickly turn around and head home. By then, the Russian radar experts working the Cuban radar sites would have turned on their systems to track the U.S. airplane. Russian MiG fighter jets would be sent aloft to respond. The job of Project Palladium was to gather the electronic intelligence being sent out by the radar stations and the MiGs. That was the first step in figuring out how to create a jamming system for the A-12 at Area 51.
The Cubans and their Russian patrons could not have had any idea whether the Americans were playing another game of chicken or if this act meant war. “Soviet MiGs would scramble toward us,” Barnes recalls. “At the time, ECM [electronic countermeasure] and ECCM [electronic counter-countermeasure] technology were still new to both the plane and the missile. We’d transmit a Doppler signal from a radar simulator which told their MiG pilots that a missile had locked on them. When the Soviet pilots engaged their ECM against us, my job was to sit there and watch how our missile’s ECCM responded. If the Soviet signal jammed our missile and made it drift off target, I’d tweak my missile’s ECCM electronics to determine what would override a Soviet ECM signal.” Though primitive by today’s standards, what Barnes and the NSA agents with him inside the aircraft did laid the early groundwork for electronic warfare today. “Inside the airplane, we’d record the frequencies to be replayed back at Fort Bliss for training and design. Once we got what we wanted we hauled ass out of the area to avoid actual contact with Soviet planes.”
The info that Barnes and his colleagues were getting over Cuba was filling in gaps that had previously been unknown. Back at Fort Bliss, Barnes and the others would interpret what NSA had captured from the Soviet/Cuban ECM transmissions that they had recorded during the flight. In listening to the decrypted Soviet responses to the antagonistic moves, the CIA learned what the Soviets could and could not see on their radars. This technology became a major component in further developing stealth technology and electronic countermeasures and was why Barnes was later placed by the CIA to work at Area 51. For the U.S. Air Force, this marked the beginning of a new age of information warfare.
Even though the U.S. military airplane with a team of engineers, NSA agents, and a Hawk missile hidden inside would U-turn and fly away at the last moment, just before violating Cuban airspace, “there were repercussions,” according to Barnes. “It scared the living daylights out of them and it escalated things.” In January of 1961, Khrushchev gathered a group of Cuban diplomats at their embassy in Moscow. “Alarming news is coming from Cuba at present, news that the most aggressive American monopolists are preparing a direct attack on Cuba,” Khrushchev told the group. Barnes believes Khrushchev “may have been referring to our messing with them with our Hawk missiles homing in on their planes.” Were that the case, Khrushchev had a valid point. But the mercurial dictator had his own difficulties in sticking to the facts. Disinformation was a hallmark of the Soviet propaganda machine.