William E. Smith Interview, 25 August 2001(b)

‹‹ Interview Index
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24

	I'm not mistaken was notorious for having difficulty with the alarms, and on some occasions we had Camper Teams out there almost continually. So it could have been that there were Camper Teams on both.
JK:	Oh, OK.
WS:	But if that team were working and as I recall the officer called it in, notified the officer in charge, a captain in charge, and they shut the site up. He said "we're leaving here." Some of his crew had seen, from what I understand, had seen the light as well, not just the Camper member but also some of the Targeting Team.
JK:	Pretty close.
WS:	Pretty close, they said "very close." It went down by some trees not far away, that is what they were saying to us, and we said "Oh my gosh, what's going on here now?" I remember him calling in said "well, we can do this another time it's just not worth us being out here."
JK:	So how unusual would it be to have a Targeting Team working at that time of night?
WS:	Well they'd come out at midnight sometimes and work all night. That would not be unusual, no.
TT:	How unusual that they would stop their procedures?
WS:	Highly unusual.
TT:	So they were concerned about security?
WS:	They were concerned about their lives probably or not being able to explain what was happening. They weren't so concerned about security, that's our business, and this guy wanted to get his team out of there because he wasn't sure what was going on, and of course, our people were happy to leave too [laughs].
JK:	Now we did have one man who was air conditioning guy from the 91^st MIMS who was out there that night, and his memory is that Oscar-6 was a training site and never on strategic alert while he was there.
WS:	That may have been true based upon what they were doing, but we had to treat them all the same. If it didn't have a missile in, it was a category "B" resource. If it had a missile in it, it was category "A." Many times they had missiles on them, we had other training facilities around the system too. My understanding was that when it had a missile and a warhead, whether it was armed or not, it was category "A" and we had to treat it the same for security purposes.

‹‹ Previous Page — Next Page ››