SR71 Beale Edwards First Okinawa Trip

We drove across the US in about a week to Marysville, California. A local Motel was our home for a week until our furniture arrived, and we could move into the rental; 5 miles south of town. The entire SR71 operation at Beale was under the 9th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing (9th SRW). The 9th SRW came out of another operation on Beale at the time, the 4200th Squadron, which was as or more secret that we were. I reported to Frank Kiel and after ID’s, car passes and associated paperwork, reported to the field shop. What the 4200th was doing is for someone else to tell.
It should be noted that the Air Force staffed the SR71 program with the ‘cream of the crop’, from the staff, to the crews, to the maintainers to the analysts. They were well qualified in every aspect of their assigned duties. What they didn’t know, they learned fast. The reason AIL was able to support the program for so long was because the AF would rotate people every 3 to 4 years. Once Air Force personnel got comfortable with equipment they would be transferred to a new assignment. It was hard to pass on the acquired knowledge in that amount of time.
After getting IDs and car passes to get on base and meeting the Air Force people in the field shop, there was very little to do since the SR71 and all the equipment was involved in flight testing at Edwards AFB. With nothing for me to do at Beale, I volunteered to go to Edwards to do whatever I could to help. Since the AIL field shop at Edwards, run by Mike Fierro, was fully manned and the AGE still in Deer Park. There was a need for analysts to evaluate the processed ELINT data, I was assigned to work for Jim Thompson in his evaluation group. I knew about antennas and RF but nothing about ELINT but caught on quickly. On weekends I would travel to Marysville or often fly a Lockheed shuttle flight from Edwards to Beale. Monday morning Beale to Edwards and Friday evening return. When that was not available it was drive or a commercial flight.
After several months of analysis of ELINT data at Edwards the AGE equipment was being shipped to Edwards to check out the AIL developed ELINT System. I told Jim that I would be going to the field shop to run the AGE but he got Greg Stephenson to have me remain in analysis because of the workload and Stan Grzebyk accompanied the AGE and became the expert in the field shop on that equipment. It was an exciting time at Edwards with the SR71 in flight test status and the U2 flying out of north base at Edwards. The B70 had crashed in June 1966.
The ELINT processing computers were Control Data Corporation (CDC) 3200 and the program had some of the first produced by CDC. As I recall, Sal Altomare and Dave Barbour were the processing gurus at the time. I remember spending a lot of after work time at the Bar and around the pool at the Desert INN in Lancaster discussing what should be done with the software and how to develop calibration software programs that could use known ground sites to improve accuracy. Many beer fueled software discussions went into the wee hours.
Sometime in late 1966 the SR71 finally came to Beale AFB and I could sleep in the house I had rented. It was on 10 acres with several horses being boarded in an adjacent barn which my children were able to ride accompanied by an adult. I never went back to work in the field shop and when the dust finally cleared I was the surviving AIL ELINT analyst at Beale. Mike Fierro came up from Edwards to take over the AIL office and Frank Kiel was PCS’ed to Okinawa, Japan to run the AIL operation at Kadena Air Force Base. The AIL Okinawa operation consisted of Frank Keil, Bob Williams, John Giannese, and Stan Grzebyk, Ron Badamo and George Adamo arrived as replacements. When Frank Kiel left Marysville to go to Okinawa he gave me his entire bar supplies. As a result, I ended up with quite a variety which lasted me quite a few years since I didn’t drink hard liquor at the time.
An interesting aspect of the early field assignment at Beale was that when we sent in receipts for living expenses, we were instructed to remove all evidence of our location from the paperwork. This soon became a joke to us. No one at AIL other that the 1912 program office folks could know where we were but everyone we dealt with in the local area knew we worked for AIL. We had bank accounts, forms to fill out for almost everything, banking, renting, etc. and wondered if the enemy spy network was too stupid to figure it all out. In 1970 I graduated with a Master of Science in Systems Management degree from USC. The courses were taught at Beale AFB and I was the only civilian, most of the students were SR71 crew members, pilots and RSOs.
As I got further involved with the ELINT analysis and working with the Air Force analysts I started to program in Fortran. We had a at least a weekly conference call with the 1912 program office in Deer Park usually with Shelly Katz on the Deer Park end. As software bugs were uncovered I would make any changes in the processing software as necessary. After some time the next software release would come from AIL accompanied by programmers to install it. In time I became very good at writing programs for in depth analysis of the data to the pulse level. It became necessary for me to travel to Okinawa when operational problems occurred that impacted ELINT processing. Later, when the SR71 became operational at Mildenhall AFB in England in addition to the operation at Kadena I would go TDY about once a year to one of the locations to update the processing software.
The first SR71 operational mission flown from Kadena was over North Viet Nam in March 1968. The SR71 was flown by the Air Force and replaced the A12 flown by the CIA. Several of the first pilots of the SR program came out of the A12 program. AIL was involved with the SR program from its very start in the early 1960s until the end of the program in the 1990s.
As a side note I did not find out until October 2007, during an SR71 symposium at March AFB where I was a panel speaker, that the ‘Blue Feather’ clearances were a CIA designation. This information was from an SR pilot that came from the A12 program.
My first trip to Kadena was in July 1969. It is easy for me to remember the time because I saw the live image of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon on a TV in the lobby of the Koza Palace Hotel where I stayed during the TDY. The trip was on an AF KC135 refueling tanker, Beale to Hickam to Kadena. Landing in a hot afternoon at Kadena being greeted by AIL and AF troops with ice cold beer as we got off the plane and assisting in unloading baggage while drinking beer is a fond memory.
I found out that TDY to Kadena was one of the best kept secrets in the Air Force. I remember processing ELINT data following a flight over North Viet Nam and finishing sometime just before dawn. Then the civilian part of the operation would go to breakfast at some little Okinawa eatery at 4am and have steak and eggs for about $2. Golf during the day, ELINT processing during the night, this was the routine when TDY during the early days of operational missions. Sleep was a often neglected option.