Command and Control (33 page)

•   •   •

J
EFF
K
ENNEDY
WAS
FURIOUS
. They were just sitting there in the dark, at the end of the access road, with their thumbs up their asses, doing nothing, while the missile got ready to blow. Colonel Morris said they'd been ordered to wait for further instructions—period. The decisions were being made elsewhere, and nothing, nothing was to be done without the approval of SAC headquarters. Morris hadn't shared Kennedy's latest plan with the
command post, and nobody had asked to hear it. In fact, none of the PTS guys or launch crew members on the scene had been asked to give an opinion of what should be done.

Kennedy thought that was bullshit. They were there. They were ready to go. They had all the knowledge and experience you needed. What were they waiting for? Every minute they waited to do the job would make the job more dangerous.

At about 10:15, almost four hours after the accident, the Disaster Response Force arrived. But its commander, Colonel William Jones, had no authority at the site—a disaster hadn't occurred yet. The five vehicles in his convoy pulled off Highway 65 and parked along the access road. Members of his team got out of their trucks, introduced themselves, and distributed C-rations and cans of water.

Colonel Morris asked the flight surgeon who'd come with the ambulance, Captain Donald P. Mueller, to do him a favor. Mueller had never worked with the Disaster Response Force before. He was twenty-eight years old and happened to be the doctor on call at the base hospital that night. Morris asked him to speak with Mazzaro, the missile crew commander. Morris was concerned about Mazzaro: he didn't look well. He seemed anxious and tense. Mueller spent about forty-five minutes with Mazzaro, who admitted to feeling worried about his pregnant wife. Mazzaro wanted someone to call his wife and tell her that he was safe. Mueller assured him that she'd already been contacted—and that Fuller's wife, who was also pregnant, had been contacted, too. Both women knew their husbands were safe. The news made Mazzaro feel better, and he lay down in the back of the ambulance to rest.

•   •   •

S
ERGEANT
B
ROCKSMITH
WAS
HAVING
TROUBLE
supervising the evacuation of local residents. Colonel Jones and Colonel Morris would periodically sit in his truck and use his radio to speak with the command post. When one of them was on the Security Police Net, Brocksmith's officers couldn't communicate with each other. And his officers didn't have maps of the area. And they didn't have an evacuation plan or any formal guidance
about how an evacuation should proceed. The only map that Brocksmith had in his truck showed the location of nearby Titan II complexes. But it didn't show where any houses, farms, schools, or even streets were located.

The Missile Potential Hazard Team instructed Brocksmith to post officers in a roughly three-quarters-of-a-mile radius around 4-7. Two Missile Alarm Response Teams were available for the job, and a couple of Mobile Fire Teams (MFTs) had been sent from Little Rock. That gave Brocksmith ten military police officers to secure the area. The MARTs were trained to guard Titan II sites, the MFTs to defend the air base from sabotage and attack, using machine guns, grenade launchers, and M-16 rifles. The MFTs—most of whom had never seen a Titan II complex—left their machine guns and grenade launchers in Little Rock. Brocksmith established roadblocks on Highway 65 and stationed officers on County Roads 836 and 26, a pair of dirt roads that crossed the highway north and south of the missile complex. The officers on County Road 836 were forced to stop short of their assigned position. They'd encountered an old wooden bridge, and they were afraid to drive their truck over it.

The military police had no legal jurisdiction on civilian property and couldn't order anyone to evacuate. As officers knocked on doors in the middle of the night, carrying flashlights and M-16s, they found that most of the houses were empty. Sheriff Anglin or the state police had already been there. The handful of residents who'd refused to leave their homes generally fell into two categories: some were stubborn and defiant, while others, like Sam Hutto, were sneaky. Hutto kept returning to his farm, on back roads, to look after the cows.

The roughly two hundred officers in the security police squadron had been recalled to Little Rock Air Force Base.
Sergeant Donald V. Green was serving as a referee at a football game when he heard about the recall. Green quickly went home, changed into his uniform, and reported for duty. He was in his early thirties, born and raised in Old Town, Florida, a small rural community about forty miles west of Gainesville. He lived on the base with his wife and six-year-old son. And he loved being a military police officer, despite how most people viewed the job. Being a cook or a cop, those were the only two jobs at SAC that nobody seemed to want. Too
often, he thought, guys who'd flunked out of every technical school in the Air Force would be assigned to the military police. But the camaraderie among the officers was strong, their work interesting and important—even if it was rarely appreciated.

Green was the noncommissioned officer in charge of training at the 308th. He taught MART teams everything they needed to know about the Titan II. The teams escorted warheads to and from launch sites, kept an eye on warheads as they were being mated to missiles, and responded whenever an alarm went off. Officers learned how to deal with antiwar protesters, saboteurs, and all sorts of false alarms. A bird flying past the tipsies could set them off, and then a two-man MART team would have to visit the site and investigate what had tripped them—because the complexes didn't have security cameras topside. A missile crew had no way of knowing whether the tipsies had been set off by a squirrel or a squad of Soviet commandos. A MART team usually stayed overnight at a launch control center in each sector, using that “home complex” as a base to oversee security at three or four neighboring sites.

Four-seven often served as a home complex, and one of Sergeant Green's teams had pointed out a major security breach there, just a few weeks before the accident. Green had been amazed by their discovery: you could break into a Titan II complex with just a credit card. Once the officers showed him how to do it, Green requested permission to stage a black hat operation at 4-7—an unannounced demonstration of how someone could sneak into the launch control center undetected. SAC had a long history of black hatting to test the security at its facilities. Black hat teams would plant phony explosives on bombers, place metal spikes on runways, infiltrate a command post and then hand a letter to the base commander that said, “You're dead.”
General LeMay liked to run these tests and to punish officers who failed them. After Green received the go-ahead to stage a black hat at 4-7, his men secretly practiced the break-in.

On the day of the exercise, Green and two of his officers, Donald G. Mowles, Jr., and Larry Crowder, began the subterfuge by setting off the tipsies at Launch Complex 374-8—about ten miles from Damascus, in the town of Little Texas. When the alarm sounded there, the MART team
stationed at 4-7 got a call and drove off to see what was wrong. Green and his men hurried to Damascus, jumped the perimeter fence at 4-7, carefully avoided the radar beams that set off the tipsies, and entered the access portal. Green picked up the phone and told the missile crew commander that “General Wyatt”—a fictitious, high-ranking officer—needed to see a schematic drawing in one of the technical manuals. When the crew commander hesitated, Green demanded his name and warned him the general would be unhappy with that response. The commander said he'd look for the drawing right away.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Crowder and Mowles jimmied the lock on the outer steel door with an ID card, ran down the stairs, and within seconds jimmied the door at the entrapment area, too. The men ran past the only security camera at the launch complex. But the missile crew wasn't looking at the television monitor—they were probably searching for that tech drawing—and the entrapment area didn't have a microphone to capture the sounds of a break-in.

Green ran back to the perimeter fence, climbed over it, got into his truck, drove a safe distance from the launch complex, and parked.

Crowder and Mowles hid outside blast door 6, waiting. When the MART team returned from the false alarm at the other launch site, it was given permission to reenter 4-7. The team was buzzed through the first two doors and walked downstairs to blast door 6—where it was surprised to hear a voice say, “You're dead.”

One of Green's men picked up the phone there and said, “Security team at blast door six.”

The door was opened, as were blast doors 7 and 8. Crowder and Mowles walked into the control center, feeling awfully pleased.

Steel plates were soon welded to the outer doors at Titan II sites so that intruders would need more than a credit card.

•   •   •

T
HE
DRIVE
TO
D
AMASCUS
SEEMED
to be taking forever, as the PTS convoy picked up equipment at two launch complexes, made three stops, and obeyed the speed limit.

“I've got a bad feeling about this,” Senior Airman David Livingston said. “Somebody's going to die out there tonight.”

The other members of Team B didn't like hearing Livingston talk that way. He wasn't a fearful or high-strung type. He was one of the most easygoing, laid-back guys at the base. If anything, Livingston was too laid back. He'd become legendary for his ability to sleep just about anywhere, anytime—and once he was out, it was almost impossible to wake him. Jeff Kennedy would sometimes have to bang on Livingston's door in the morning and yell at him and literally drag him out of bed. But nobody really minded, because once he was awake and alert, Livingston worked hard. He knew how to fix things. He was constantly tinkering with mechanical objects in his spare time—with citizens band radios, lawn mower engines, transmissions, and the old VW Beetle that he'd bought a few years earlier, right after graduating from high school. He loved to ride motorcycles and could pop a wheelie, lean back in the seat, and cruise.

During the previous summer, Livingston had visited his family in Heath, Ohio, a small town surrounded by cornfields in the central part of the state, where his father drove a truck and his mother worked as a clerk at a nearby Air Force base. He'd ridden his motorcycle there and back for a long weekend, a round trip of about fifteen hundred miles. He lived off base in a double-wide trailer, planned to ask his landlord's niece to marry him, and couldn't decide whether to move with her to California or sign on for another four years with SAC. The hardest part about leaving the Air Force, Livingston thought, would be saying good-bye to his loud, rowdy PTS buddies. They felt like family.

Senior Airman Greg Devlin was riding next to Livingston in the truck. At first he thought Livingston was joking about the bad vibes and the premonition of death. But it wasn't funny. And then Livingston said it again.

“Somebody's going to die tonight, I can feel it.”

“Don't even be kidding around with stuff like that,” Devlin said. “Don't even be talking about that.”

Devlin wasn't very superstitious. He just didn't like to dwell on bad
things. The job was full of risks, and if something dangerous had to be done, his attitude was: okay, let's go do it. There was no use talking about it or thinking about it too much. He was the type of person who instinctively ran toward a fire, not from it. And he didn't like to waste time worrying about it first.

Devlin, like Livingston, had grown up in Ohio, graduated from high school in 1977, and joined the Air Force that year. Devlin had to miss his high school graduation; it was held the day after he reported for duty. During basic training, he was seventeen years old. His father and his uncles had been Marines, but Devlin was drawn to the Air Force. He wanted to become a pilot or an airplane mechanic. The Air Force decided, instead, that he would become a Titan II propellant transfer system technician. At training school, he desperately missed his high school sweetheart, Annette Buchanan. With her mother's blessing, they soon got married, and Annette joined him in Arkansas. She was sixteen. The newlyweds started out in a small trailer and then made a down payment on their first house, when Devlin turned nineteen. The house was in Jacksonville, not far from Little Rock Air Force Base. His friends didn't like to throw parties in the dormitories, because they always had to worry about the dorm monitors and the dorm guards. And so almost every weekend, the parties were held at Devlin's house. A fair amount of alcohol was consumed. And if a party got a little out of hand, Devlin knew how to deal with it. He was friendly, courteous, even tempered—and a Golden Gloves boxer, just like his father, his uncles, and one of his grandfathers had been. Devlin trained at a local gym. He fought as a junior middleweight and had recently scored five straight knockouts. When he asked people to quiet down at a party, they generally did.

•   •   •

A
T
THE
COMMAND
POST
, a checklist was slowly being prepared. Each step had to be discussed on the Missile Potential Hazard Net and then approved by General Leavitt. Colonel Moser spoke on behalf of his team, after listening to the recommendations of the K crew and everyone else on
the net. At about eleven o'clock, a consensus seemed to have emerged, and Moser read the latest plan aloud:

1. An airman in a RFHCO suit would carry a portable vapor detector to one of the silo's exhaust vents, place the detector's probe into the white cloud rising from the vent, and measure the amount of fuel vapor. The measurement would give them a sense of whether the silo was safe to enter. At a level of about 18,000 parts per million (ppm), the RFHCO would start to melt. At 20,000 ppm, the fuel vapor could spontaneously combust, without any exposure to a spark or flame, just from the friction caused by the movement of air. Waving your hand through the fuel vapor, at that concentration, could ignite it. The portable vapor detector—a blue rectangular steel box that weighed about twelve pounds, with a round gauge on top—wasn't an ideal instrument for the task. It “pegged out” and shut off when the vapor level reached a maximum of 250 ppm. But it was the best they had.
   
2. If the proportion of fuel vapor rising from the exhaust shaft was lower than 200 ppm, a couple of airmen in RFHCOs would enter the launch complex through the access portal. Everybody on the hazard net agreed that the escape hatch was too narrow for someone in a RFHCO suit to fit through it.
   
3. After proceeding through the two outer doors, the airmen would open blast doors 6 and 7 manually with a portable hydraulic pump. Using electricity to open the blast doors might create a spark.
   
4. The airmen would enter the blast lock and look at the readout from the Mine Safety Appliance. It would tell them the vapor level in the silo. If the level was below 200 ppm, the men would open blast door 9, walk down the long cableway, enter the silo, and vent the stage 1 fuel tank.
   
5. The airmen would bring a portable vapor detector with them. And if it registered a vapor level higher than 200 ppm at any point during those first four steps, the men would get out of the launch complex as quickly as possible, leaving the doors open behind them.