One day, in the late summer of 1961, just two months after the Bay of Pigs became public, Jim Freedman was walking around the base with a checklist of tasks. His priority job that week struck him as a very odd, very low-tech request. In a world of cutting-edge science and technological gadgets relating to espionage, the supervisor wanted Freeman to help Area 51 carpenters locate more plywood. “The workers were transforming a set of steps into a ramp,” he explains. “This was happening all over the base. Lots of doorsills were becoming lots of ramps and I remember thinking, There’s a lot of money going into getting something low and on wheels to be able to move around this base.” Freedman knew not to ask questions. “But when a small airplane landed, and out came a man in the wheelchair, I watched my boss, Werner Weiss of the CIA, meet the man out on the tarmac. And I knew from watching their interaction just how important this man was to the CIA. He had white-silvery hair. A very memorable figure in a wheelchair. For years, I looked for him on TV.” Freedman never saw the man on TV, but the man was Lyman Kirkpatrick, inspector general for the CIA. Working on presidential orders to assess Area 51, Kirkpatrick is the only CIA inspector general known to have visited the base. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, Kirkpatrick managed to meticulously cover the rugged high-desert terrain. After Kirkpatrick examined the various buildings he asked to be driven around the outer edges of the base. There, he found what he considered to be a security flaw. “The high and rugged northeast perimeter of the immediate operating area, which I visited in order to see for myself, is not under government ownership,” Kirkpatrick wrote in his report, which was declassified in 2004 but has since been removed from the CIA library archives. “It is subject to a score or more of mineral claims, at least one of which is visited periodically by its owner,” Kirkpatrick wrote, referring to the Black Metal and Groom mines. “Several claims are sites of unoccupied buildings or cellars which together with the terrain in general afford excellent opportunity for successful penetration by a skilled and determined opposition,” Kirkpatrick warned. As inspector general for the CIA, Kirkpatrick was concerned that the base was not “rigorously protected against sabotage,” most notably by “air violations.” In the game of cat and mouse between the Soviet Union and the United States, tensions were at an all-time high. First there had been the Gary Powers incident, in May of 1960. Less than a year later came the CIA’s failed commando operation at the Bay of Pigs. The president had been advised that the Soviets could be preparing their own operation as payback for either of those events. Former president Eisenhower told Kennedy that “the failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would otherwise not do,” and Lyman Kirkpatrick warned that one type of sabotage operation the Soviets could be considering might involve hitting Area 51. It would be a strike between the eyes, meant to harm the office of the president in the view of the people. After Gary Powers, the White House had promised that the Watertown facility had been closed down. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the president promised to rein in covert activity by the CIA. Any public revelation that Area 51 existed would expose the fact that the CIA, the Air Force, and defense contractors were all working together on a black project to overfly Russia again—despite presidential assurances that they would do no such thing. If the nation were to discover the Mach 3 spy plane project moving forward at Area 51, what would they think about the president’s promises? Area 51 was a target in exposure alone, the inspector general said.
Jim Freedman was one of the men assigned to photograph and assess the mines in the mountains—the terrain that Kirkpatrick had said would “afford excellent opportunity for successful penetration.” Freedman’s superior, Hank Meierdierck, decided to make a hunting trip out of the task. Meierdierck was a living legend at Area 51. In 1956 he had worked as the CIA’s instructor pilot on base, teaching the Project Aquatone pilots how to fly the U-2. Now, during Oxcart, Hank Meierdierck had an office at the Pentagon but most of his time was spent out at Area 51. “One day Hank asked me if I liked to hunt,” recalls Jim Freedman. “I said yes. Well, Hank smiled and said, ‘Good. Bring your rifle out next time.’”
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.