John Gerth was head of security and counterintelligence for the Department of Defense on the Tacit Blue and B-2 stealth aircraft programs at Northrop. This an edited transcript of an oral history interview of John Gerth, conducted by Peter Westwick. John Gerth was born in Norfolk, VA on 11 November 1945. His father was in the Navy and the family moved often, finally settling in Long Beach in 1953. He was taking classes at Santa Ana Junior College in 1966 when he got a draft notice and volunteered for the Air Force. He served two years with the Air Force in the Philippines and then five years, from 1969 to 1974, in West Berlin, providing logistics support for the US military and intelligence agencies. He then returned to the States to work for the Air Force on counterintelligence and fraud in the defense industry. He also obtained a BA in government from Chapman University and an MA in international relations at USC. He resigned from the Air Force in 1979 and was immediately brought back as a civilian DOD employee to lead the DOD’s security and counterintelligence office for stealth programs on site at Northrop in Hawthorne. In that position he oversaw personnel security, facility security, and information security for the Tacit Blue and B-2 programs. He remained in that position from 1979 until 1993, when he became special agent for DOD security and counterintelligence for USAF Electronic Systems Command. From 1998 to 2001 he was special agent for DOD security and counterintelligence at a test site at an undisclosed location in Nevada. He retired from defense work in 2001. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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