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Special to the Times

How a dusty phone nearly set off a war

By K.V. WILT
Published December 17, 2006

Those who knew my father know that he prized honesty and was not given to embellishment - unless he was kidding or weaving an elaborate joke. His stories were either "true," because they actually happened, or "good," because they were shocking, bizarre, improbable.

However, those who know him also know he made it difficult for others to distinguish between "true" and "good," in a couple of ways. First, Henry Lee was trickster-sly, handsome, adventurous and masterful. Second, he told all stories, "true" and "good," in the same offhand, matter-of-fact, unmodulated manner.

The story you are about to read is my father's. He told it to me over light coffee and Dutch Masters cigars at a nursing home in Tampa, where he was patiently awaiting death. I preserve it here in the first person, and believe it to be both true and good.

* * *

The time was the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 22, 1962. We had just come to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. I was supervising air traffic control, working the midnight shift in the RAPCON - Radar Approach Control - which tracked and guided airplanes by radar and conventional means. President Kennedy had issued the Cubans an ultimatum to remove all the Russian missiles or risk war. Because U.S. forces were on alert, all air traffic across the entire nation was terminated. There was not a plane in the sky.

So, for one of the few times in my career, we turned on the RAPCON lights, and I decided that we would thoroughly clean the facility. Moving a radar console that had been butted flush with my desk, the supervisor's desk, I discovered a dust-encrusted red phone. Neither I nor anyone else on the shift had known it was there. I checked all the operating manuals. Nothing. So, thinking it must have been an old maintenance phone, I picked up the receiver. Not hearing a tone or vibration, I replaced it and resumed the cleaning.

A few moments later an air traffic controller's voice came over the hotline from the tower, asking if I was aware of an Air Defense Command scramble. I said, "Negative." Immediately, the controller - Oglesby was his name - barked, "F-86's taking off, abort, abort!" on the emergency radio, a frequency that all aircraft are required to monitor.

Two F-6 fighters had taxied out of their special Air Defense hangar onto the runway and had begun their takeoff roll, to attack predetermined targets in Cuba. The dirty red phone had automatically set off the claxon horn in the alert hangar, without signaling the RAPCON or the tower.

I detailed everything in the shift log and advised the RAPCON officer in charge of the incident. At 8 a.m. I turned the RAPCON over to the next shift adviser with instructions, "Do not touch that phone."

I went home and showered, shaved, put on a clean uniform and ate breakfast with your mother, awaiting the call I knew was coming. About 9 a.m., Colonel Tate, the commanding officer, called and told me to be present at a 10 a.m. meeting in the base commander's office.

The meeting, attended by all the base officials connected with the alerting procedures, opened with a heated discussion of the false scramble. I explained the exact details of the night before, over and over again. After the situation sank in, they all sat stunned. How could such a foolproof and fail-safe operation allow an unauthorized scramble phone to exist? As you can imagine, the lines were dismantled that morning.

In the next couple of days, the mystery of the phone was solved. About 10 years before, in the early '50s, Air Defense Command had worked closely with the regional air traffic control center in New York. The Air Defense Command would alert the center, which in turn would pass the information to the RAPCONs on the various bases. The RAPCONs would pick up the mystery telephone, and the claxon horns in the alert hangars would automatically sound, signaling the scramblers.

The system was changed in the late '50s. The Air Defense Command determined to alert the New York center, which in turn alerted its contingents on the individual air bases scattered across the U.S. They disconnected all the alert phones. But one.

[Last modified December 16, 2006, 20:39:30]