Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Chapter Eleven: What Airplane?

Gardening helped CIA pilot Kenneth Collins relax. He had over a hundred rosebushes in his garden, which he and his wife, Jane, pruned together on weekends after Collins returned home from a long, mysterious week at the Ranch. At Area 51, where he worked as a project pilot, Collins went by the code name Ken Colmar. “Same first name because you will instantly respond to it when called,” Collins explains. “Colmar for the C, in case you had something monogrammed.” His call sign was Dutch 21 but most men on base called him the Iceman. The pressure-suit officers came up with the nickname. “I was known to show no emotion or irritation even after a particularly dangerous flight,” Collins recalls. The pressure-suit officers could gauge how tough a flight was by how sweaty a pilot’s underwear was when they helped pilots undress. Collins’s underwear was always remarkably dry.

Flying Oxcart was, to an Air Force pilot, the single most elite job in the nation at the time. Ken Collins “commuted” to Area 51 each week, flying in from sunny Southern California, where he and other pilots who now worked for the CIA pretended to live normal lives with their pretty wives and, ideally, a few children. Having a stable marriage and family had become a CIA-pilot mandate during Oxcart, something that was not in place during the U-2. It was Gary Powers’s alcoholic wife who’d triggered the change. Some in the Agency believed she put the secrecy of the entire U-2 program at risk with behavior that even they could not control. Once, Barbara Powers got it into her head to visit her husband at his clandestine post in Turkey. She made it as far as Athens before the officer assigned to watch her notified Powers that he would be out of a job if he couldn’t keep his impetuous wife in line. Ken Collins was told this story during his first interview at the Pentagon. Loose lips didn’t just sink ships, he was reminded; loose lips could trigger nuclear war. Collins also learned that his wife, Jane, would be subject to psychological screening were he to be accepted into a top secret program rumored to involve “space travel.”

Collins and his family were moved from their home in South Carolina to a Los Angeles suburb called Northridge and into a fourbedroom raised ranch with a two-car garage and an avocado tree out front. He was thirty-six years old. Jane attended church and collected antique china. All four of Jane and Ken Collins’s children, two boys and two girls, maintained good grades in school. The neighbors were told Mr. Collins worked for Hughes Aircraft Company. Collins was told to report nosy neighbors to the CIA, and if any foreign-borns tried to befriend the Collinses, they were to notify the Agency, who would look into the matter.

Each Monday morning, Collins left his home and drove to Burbank Airport, nine miles to the southwest. There, he and the other Oxcart pilots climbed aboard Constellation propeller planes and headed to Area 51, never with more than two pilots per airplane — a guideline put into place after the Mount Charleston crash eight years earlier. The deaths of those top Agency and Air Force managers and scientists had set progress on the U-2 program back several months. Now, in 1963, Oxcart was already more than a year behind schedule. The Agency could not afford to lose any pilots. The vetting process alone took eighteen months and getting familiar with the aircraft took another year.

After leaving Burbank, Collins and his fellow pilots were flown, two by two, up over the Mojave Desert to the northeast, past China Lake, and into the Tikaboo Valley. Flying into the restricted airspace above the Nevada Test Site, Collins would look out the window and make a mental note of the ever-growing landscape of giant craters. The appearance of a new, moonlike subsidence crater was often a weekly occurrence now that nuclear testing had moved underground. When seen from above, the landscape at the Nevada Test Site looked like a battlefield after the apocalypse. For Collins, the destruction was a solid visual reminder of what scorched earth would look like after a nuclear war.

The Agency couldn’t have chosen a more dedicated pilot. Collecting intelligence on dangerous reconnaissance flights was Ken Collins’s life mission; it was what he did best. He seemed to be propelled by a natural talent and kept alive by an unknown force Collins called fate. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins believes. “When it comes for you, it comes,” and for whatever reason it was not time for death to come to him yet. This was a notion Collins formulated during the Korean War while flying reconnaissance missions and watching so many talented and brave fellow pilots die. How else but by fate did he survive all 113 combat missions he had flown? On those classified missions, the young Collins was armed with only a camera in the nose of his airplane as he flew deep into North Korea, sometimes all the way over the Yalu River, being fired at by MiG fighter jets. During the war, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and also the coveted Silver Star for valor, the third-highest military decoration a member of the armed services can receive. Both medals were pinned on Collins’s chest before he turned twenty-four.

But now, as an Oxcart pilot, Collins kept his medals tucked away in a drawer, never mentioning that he had received them. As with many servicemen, glory was a difficult distinction to contemplate when so many of your fellows had died. Accepting fate as the hunter made things easier for Collins, which is how he dealt with the memory of his closest friend and former wingman from the Fifteenth Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Charles R. “Chuck” Parkerson. The two men had flown on many missions together, but there was one from which Parkerson never came home. “We had flown into North Korea and back out side by side,” Collins recalls. “We were almost home when Parkerson radioed me. He said the engine on his RF-80 had flamed out and he was unable to restart it. I saw he was losing altitude quickly and he knew that soon he would crash.” Parachuting into enemy territory meant certain death. “Over the radio, Parkerson asked me, ‘What should I do?’” Collins explains. “I said, ‘Fly out over the Yellow Sea and I’ll fly with you.’ I told him to bail out in the water and I’d send his coordinates back to base for a rescue team.” It seemed like a good idea, and Collins flew alongside his wingman as they headed toward the Yellow Sea. Parkerson prepared for a bailout. “But there was a problem,” Collins recalls. “The canopy on Parkerson’s RF-80 was stuck. Jammed. It wouldn’t open, which meant he was trapped inside the airplane. There was nothing I could do for my friend except to fly alongside him all the way until the end.” Collins watched Parkerson land his airplane on the sea. With Parkerson unable to get out of the sinking aircraft, Collins waited, watching from the air as his friend drowned. “When your time is up, it is up,” Collins recalls.

Ten years later, it was 1963, the Korean War was history, and there was an airplane to get ready at Area 51. After the twin-prop passed over the last set of hills on the Nevada Test Site’s eastern edge, the airstrip at Groom Lake came into view, and Collins thought about how no one but his fellow CIA pilots had any idea who he really was. During training missions, the papers in Collins’s flight pouch identified him only as a NASA weather pilot. His space-age-looking aircraft was registered to an airfield called Watertown Strip, Nevada. He was never to carry any personal effects with him in the airplane. When the Lockheed Constellation landed on the tarmac at Area 51, security guards took his ID and papers and locked them away in a metal box. Each Friday, before the afternoon flight home, Collins’s identity was returned to him.

His mission flight that day, May 24, 1963, should have been like any other flight. By now, there were a total of five Oxcarts being flighttested at Area 51, and Collins breezed through his prebriefing with the Lockheed engineers, making mental notes about the different tasks he was to perform during the flight. The engineers wanted to know how certain engine controls worked during acceleration and slow cruise. Today’s test would be subsonic with the high-performance aircraft traveling somewhere around 450 miles per hour, like a racehorse out for a trot. It was to be a short mission up over Utah, into Wyoming, and back to Area 51. Air Force chase pilot Captain Donald Donohue would start out following Collins in an F-101 Voodoo. Later, Jack Weeks, also an Oxcart project pilot, would pick up the task.

For a little over an hour, everything appeared to be normal. Heading into Wendover, Utah, Collins made note of a large cumulus cloud that lay ahead. As Collins slowed down, Jack Weeks signaled that he was going to head back to Area 51. The F-101 could not handle flying as slow as Collins needed to fly that day. Besides, from Weeks’s perspective, everything on the Oxcart looked fine. Collins gave Weeks the okay signal with one hand in the cockpit window and headed into the cloud.

“Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding, indicating a rapid loss of speed,” Collins recalls. In heavy clouds, Collins had no visual references to determine where he was. “I advanced the throttles to counter the loss of airspeed. But instead of responding, and without any warning, the aircraft pitched up and flipped over with me trapped underneath. Then it went into an inverted flat spin.” The Agency’s million-dollar A-12 Oxcart was unrecoverable and crashing. Collins needed to bail out.

Collins had no idea how close he was to the Earth’s surface because he was in the middle of a cloud and couldn’t see out of it. He also did not know if he was over a mountain range, which would mean he had even less time to eject. Collins closed his visor and grabbed the ejection ring that was positioned between his legs. He pushed his head firmly against the headrest and pulled. This kind of radical ejection from a prized top secret aircraft is not easy to forget, and Collins recalls dramatic details. “The canopy of the aircraft flew off and disappeared but I was still upside down, with the aircraft on top of me,” he explains. “Having pulled the D-ring, my boot stirrups snapped back. The explosive system in the seat rocket engaged, shooting me downward and away from the aircraft.” First Collins separated from the Oxcart. Next he separated from his seat. After that, he was a body falling through the air until a small parachute called a drogue snapped open, slowing his body down. In his long history of flying airplanes, this was the first time Collins had ever had to bail out. Falling to Earth, he tried to get a sense of what state he might be over. Was he in Nevada or Utah? The ground below him appeared to be high-desert terrain, low hills but no mountains that he could see. He was still too high up to discern if there were roads. As he floated down, in the distance he spotted the heavy black aircraft tumbling through the air until it disappeared from sight. “I remember seeing a large, black column of smoke rise up from the desert floor and thinking, That’s my airplane.” Only now there was nothing left of it but an incinerated hunk of titanium smoldering on the ground. Fate was a hunter, all right.

Suddenly, Collins felt his parachute break away and he began to free-fall once again. Had his luck run out? he wondered. Was today the day he was going to die? But then, as suddenly as the one parachute had broken away, he felt another tug at his shoulders, and a second parachute blossomed above him. This one was more than twice the size of the drogue. He began to float gently toward Earth. Collins hadn’t been told that the A-12 Oxcart ejection system had two separate parachutes. The first parachute, or drogue, was small enough to slow the pilot down and get him to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Then the drogue chute would jettison away in advance of the main parachute deploying. This large, thirty-five-foot-diameter landing aid was the one most pilots were familiar with.

With the ground below him quickly getting closer, Collins could see roads and sagebrush. He wondered how long it might take for anyone to locate him. When fellow pilot Jack Weeks had left him, just minutes before the crash, everything on Collins’s aircraft had seemed fine, but because of secrecy protocols, Collins had not made radio contact with the command post before he bailed out. He could see that he was most likely somewhere north of the Salt Lake salt flats. Collins tucked his legs up and assumed the landing position. When he hit the ground, he rolled. His mind went through the checklist of what to do next.

Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the back of their pickup.”

The men, who appeared to be local ranchers, sized up Collins. Because the flight had been subsonic, Collins was wearing a standard flight suit and not a high-altitude pressure suit, which would have made him look like an astronaut or an alien and likely prompted a lot more questions. Instead, the ranchers asked Collins if he wanted a ride. They said they knew exactly where his airplane had crashed, and if he hopped in, they’d give him a ride back to his plane. Until that moment, no civilian without a top secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the Oxcart, and Collins had strict orders to keep it that way. He’d been briefed on what to do in a security breach such as this one, given a cover story by the Agency that fit perfectly with the proximity to the Nevada Test Site — and with the times. Collins told the ranchers that his aircraft was an F-105 fighter jet and that it had a nuclear weapon on board. The men’s expressions changed from helpful to fearful. “They got very nervous and said if I wanted a ride, I better jump in quick because they were not staying around Wendover for long,” Collins recalls.

The ranchers drove Collins to the nearest highway patrol office. There, he jumped out, took his airplane canopy from the back of the truck, and watched the men speed off. Collins reached into the pocket of his flight suit. Inside, he found the note that read call this number, followed by a telephone number. Also in his pocket was a dime. Inside the highway patrol office, Collins asked the officer on duty where he could find the nearest pay phone. The man pointed around to the side of the building, and using the Agency’s dime, Collins made the phone call that no Agency pilot ever wants to make. A little less than an hour later, Kelly Johnson’s private airplane landed in Wendover, Utah, along with several men from the CIA. After a brief exchange of words so Kelly Johnson could confirm that Collins was physically okay, Collins boarded the airplane. During the two-hour flight to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, no one said a word. “There would be plenty of talking to do during the debriefing,” Collins says, “and with the Agency’s tape recorders taking everything down.” A crash of a CIA spy plane meant someone had some explaining to do.

Back in the control room at Groom Lake, navigator Sam Pizzo had a monumental amount of work on his hands. News of Collins’s crash had just hit the command post, and it was up to Colonel Holbury, the air commander of Detachment 1 of the 1129th U.S. Air Force Special Activities Squadron, to put together a search team for the crash site. “Maintenance guys, security guys, navigators, we all took off in trucks and airplanes and headed to Utah,” Pizzo explains. With Collins confirmed alive, the goal now was to locate every single piece of the wrecked airplane, “every nut, bolt, and sliver of fuselage.” The efforts would be staged from an old, abandoned airfield northwest of the dry lakes. These were the same facilities where World War II bombers had practiced for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb runs. The quarters there, long since deserted, were rudimentary. There was no running water or heat. This meant the men from Groom Lake brought their own cooks, cots, and gear as part of their crash-recovery team.

Once they found the site, the work crew had a lot of digging to do. The aircraft, Article #123, hadn’t broken apart in flight, but given the speed at which it had hit the earth, huge sections of the airplane had become buried. Critically important was locating every loose piece of the titanium fuselage. The metal was rare and expensive, and the fact that the Agency’s spy plane was hand-forged from titanium was a closely held secret. If a news reporter or a local got a hold of even the smallest piece of the aircraft, its unusual composition would raise questions that might threaten the cover of the entire Oxcart program. Equally critical to national security was making sure the radarabsorbing materials, known as composite and that covered the entire airplane, remained in government control. If a piece of the plane got into the wrong hands, the results could be disastrous: the Russians could learn the secret of stealth.

Along with a crew of more than one hundred men, the Agency brought its own horses to the crash site. Men from Groom Lake took to the desert terrain on horseback and began their search. For two days they scoured the ground, looking for stray pieces of airplane as well as for flight papers and maps that had been in the cockpit with Collins. “By the time we were done, we’d combed over every single square inch of ground,” Pizzo recalls. A massive C-124 transport plane hauled the pieces of the airplane back to Area 51. In a heavily guarded hangar there, what was left of the airplane was spread out, piece by piece, in an effort to re-create its shape.

Richard Bissell’s departure from Area 51 a year earlier had left a huge power vacuum at the base. There was a general feeling among the men working there now that the vacuum was being filled by Air Force brass. This made perfect sense. Whereas the U-2 was, in essence, a motorized glider, the A-12 Oxcart was the highest, fastest, most state-of-the-art piloted aircraft in the world. For men who prided themselves on airpower — as did everyone involved in the U.S. Air Force — the supersonic Oxcart was the top dog. The Area 51 facility was now one of the Air Force’s most prestigious billets, a place where officers got to be in charge of their “own little air force,” as Major General Paul Bacalis had once said. What this meant was that Pentagon favorites, usually World War II heroes who had survived dangerous, death-defying missions, were rewarded with key positions at Area 51. Men like Colonel Robert Holbury.

At Area 51, Holbury’s official title was air commander of the U.S. Air Force Special Activities Squadron at Las Vegas, the nonclassified reference name for Oxcart. A former fighter pilot during World War II, Holbury had been given a commendation by General Patton for a dangerous low-flying reconnaissance mission over the Saar River, in western Germany, which he survived despite coming under heavy enemy fire. This meant Holbury was the official wing commander at the base when Ken Collins crashed the first Oxcart spy plane. In Air Force culture, when an airplane crashes, someone has to take the blame. Collins explains: “In the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mind-set, if there’s an accident, the wing commander suffers the consequences.” Instead, Collins believes, Holbury tried to get Collins to be the fall guy. “Holbury didn’t want blame; he wanted a star. He wanted to become a general, so he tried to put the blame on me. After the crash, even before the investigation, he requested that I be fired.”

Collins was unwilling to accept that. Fortunately for Collins’s career, Kelly Johnson, the builder of the aircraft, didn’t care about blame as much as he wanted to find out what had gone wrong with his airplane. Listening to Collins describe what had happened during the debriefing, Johnson couldn’t figure out what caused the aircraft to crash. He wondered if there was something Collins had forgotten, or was maybe leaving out. “I was clear in my mind that the crash was a mechanical error and not a pilot error,” Collins explains. “So when Kelly Johnson asked would I try unconventional methods like hypnosis and truth serum, I said yes. I was willing to do anything I could to get to the truth.” While the Pentagon’s accident board conducted a traditional investigation, Collins submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of the crash.

Inside the flight surgeon’s office at Lockheed, Collins sat with a CIA-contracted hypnotist from Boston, “a small, rotund man dressed in a fancy suit,” as Collins recalls. “He tried very hard to put me in a trance, only it didn’t work. I don’t think he realized that hypnotizing a fighter pilot was not as easy as he thought it might be.” Next, Collins was injected with sodium thiopental, also known as truth serum. Collins remembers the day well. “I told my wife, Jane, I was going to work for a few hours, which was unusual to begin with because it was a Sunday. The point of the treatment was to see if I could remember details other than those I relayed in the original debrief with the CIA. But yes, even with the sodium pentothal in my system, everything I said was exactly the same. The treatment takes a lot out of you and after it was over, I was very unsteady on my feet. Three CIA agents brought me home late that Sunday evening. One drove my car, the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was still loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.”

When Collins woke up the next morning, he figured the only conclusion his wife could have drawn was that her husband had gone out on a Sunday and gotten drunk. Feeling bad, he confided in her that he’d been given truth serum and could not say anything more. Jane told her husband a story of her own. She said that he didn’t have to explain further because she had a pretty good idea what had happened to him on the job. Earlier in the week, Jane explained, immediately after Collins’s crash, family friend and fellow Oxcart pilot Walt Ray had broken protocol and called Jane from Area 51 to tell her that Ken had bailed out of an airplane but that he was all right. “Where is he?” Jane had asked. Walt Ray said he didn’t know. Jane then asked, “How can you know if Ken is okay if you don’t even know where he is?” At the time Walt Ray didn’t have an answer for that. So now, hangover or no hangover, Jane Collins was happy to have her husband home alive. After a lengthy investigation it was determined that a tiny, pencil-size part called a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash. The pitot tube measured the air coming into the aircraft and thereby controlled the airspeed indicator. Unlike in a car, where the driver can feel relative speed, in a plane, without a proper reading from an airspeed indicator, a pilot has no awareness of how fast he is going, and without correct airspeed information a pilot cannot land. When Collins flew into the cloud, the pitot tube reacted adversely to the moisture inside and froze. The false airspeed indicator caused the aircraft to stall. As a result of the stall, the Oxcart flipped upside down and crashed.

Ken Collins’s crash in Utah caused the CIA to redouble its secrecy efforts regarding operations at Area 51. The press was told an F-105 crashed, and as of 2011, the Air Force still has it listed that way. Worried its cover was about to be blown, the Agency decided to shore up an accounting of who knew what about Oxcart. An analyst was assigned the task of combing through all the files the CIA had been keeping on journalists, civilians, and even retired Air Force personnel — anyone who showed a curiosity about what might be going on at Area 51. Beginning in the spring of 1963, the noted instances of what the CIA called “Project Oxcart Awareness Outside Cleared Community” drastically increased. Declassified in 2007 and never before made public, the CIA had been monitoring phone conversations of journalists who seemed interested in the Oxcart program. “Mr. Marvin Miles, Aviation Editor, Los Angeles Times, telephonically contacted Westinghouse Corp., Pittsburgh, attempting to confirm if employees of that firm were traveling covertly to ‘the desert’ each week in connection with top secret Project which he suspects may have ‘CIA’ association,” read one memo. Another stated that “Mr. Robert Hotz, Editor Aviation Week, indicated his awareness of developments at Burbank.” Of particular concern to the Agency was an article in the Hartford Courant that referred to the “secret development” of the J-58 engine. Another article in the Fontana, California, paper the Herald News speculated about the existence of Area 51, calling it a “super secret Project site.” An increasingly suspicious CIA worked overtime to monitor journalists, and they also monitored regular citizens, including a Los Angelesbased taxi driver who was described in a memo marked “classified” as once having asked a Pratt and Whitney employee if he was “en route to Nevada.”

With the Air Force steadily gaining a foothold in day-to-day operations at Area 51, it was the Air Force that the CIA should have been watching more closely in terms of the future of the spy plane program as a whole. It was not as if there weren’t writing on the wall. In the year before Collins’s crash, the Air Force had decided it wanted a Mach 3 Oxcart-type program of its own. Just as it had with the U-2, the Pentagon moved in on the CIA’s spy plane territory. Only with the Oxcart, the Air Force ordered not one but three Air Force variants for its stable. One version, the YF-12A, would be used as an attack aircraft, its camera bay retrofitted to hold two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. The second Oxcart variant the Air Force ordered could carry a drone on its back. The third was a two-seater version of the CIA’s stealth spy plane, only instead of being designed to conduct highspeed, high-altitude reconnaissance missions over enemy territory during peacetime, the Air Force supersonic spy plane was meant to go in and take pictures of enemy territory immediately after a nuclear strike by U.S. bomber planes — to see if any strategic targets had been missed. Designated the RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally inverted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech. Since the president is rarely ever “corrected,” the Air Force changed its letter designation, which is how the SR-71 Blackbird got its name. (Originally, the letters stood for “Reconnaissance/Strike.”)

There was no end to the irony in all of this. The Air Force’s Mach 3 airplanes were a far cry from President Eisenhower’s original idea to let the CIA create a spy plane with which to conduct espionage missions designed to prevent nuclear war. This new Air Force direction underscored the difference in the two services: the CIA was in the business of spying, and the Air Force was in the business of war.

There were other motives in play, including the ego of General Curtis LeMay. The Air Force had already spent eight hundred million dollars developing the B-70 bomber airplane — a massive, triangleshaped, Mach 3, eight-engined bomber that had been General LeMay’s passion project since its inception in 1959. When a fleet of eighty-five of these giant supersonic bombers was first proposed to Congress, LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Command, had his proposition met with cheers. But the Gary Powers shoot-down in May of 1960 had exposed the vulnerability of LeMay’s B-70 bombers, which would fly at the same height as the U-2. In 1963 LeMay was no longer head of the Strategic Air Command — instead, he was President Kennedy’s Air Force chief of staff. Despite evidence showing the B-70 bomber was not a practical airplane, LeMay was not about to give up his beloved bomber without a fight.

When the CIA first briefed President Kennedy on how high and how fast the A-12 Oxcart would fly, the president was astonished. His first question, according to CIA officer Norman Nelson, was “Could it be converted into a long-range bomber to replace the B-70?” LeMay was in the room when Kennedy asked the question. The thought of losing his pet program to the Agency drove General LeMay wild. He lobbied the Pentagon to move forward with the B-70, and he stepped up his public relations campaign, personally promoting the B-70 bomber program in magazine interviews from Aviation Week to Reader’s Digest. He was committed to appealing to as many Americans as possible, from aviation buffs to housewives. But by 1963, Kennedy was leaning toward canceling the B-70. In a budget message, he called it “unnecessary and economically unjustifiable.” Congress cut back its B-70 order even further. The original order for eighty-five had already been cut down to ten, and now Congress cut that to four.

LeMay was furious. He flew from Washington, DC, to Burbank, California, to see Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works. Longtime rivals, Kelly Johnson greeted LeMay with skepticism when LeMay asked for a briefing about the A-12. After Johnson was finished, LeMay gave Johnson a quid pro quo. “Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby anymore against the B-70,” LeMay said. Provided Kelly Johnson complied, LeMay promised to send Lockheed an Air Force purchase order for an interceptor version of Lockheed’s A-12 Oxcart, in addition to the preexisting order. For Lockheed, this would mean a big new invoice to send to the Air Force. At first, Kelly Johnson was suspicious of LeMay’s sincerity. That changed just a few weeks later when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed up at the Skunk Works with the secretary of the Air Force and the assistant secretary of defense in tow. Now McNamara asked for a briefing on the A-12, during which he took “copious notes.” Within a matter of months, the Pentagon ordered twenty-five more A-12 variants. The Pentagon already had a catchy name for its versions of the Oxcart. They would call them Blackbirds. Black because they had been developed in the dark by the CIA, and birds because they could fly. The meeting touched off the long-running battle between the two agencies over control of Area 51 and control of any U.S. government asset with wings. But this is exactly what had happened with the U-2. The CIA did all of the heavy lifting to get the aircraft aloft, only to have the program eventually taken over by the Pentagon for the Air Force.

At the Ranch, it was business as usual. No one but the generals had any idea that the CIA’s spy plane program now officially had in the Pentagon a formidable rival that threatened its very existence. Instead, pilots, engineers, operators, scientists, and Air Force enlisted men worked triple shifts, around the clock, to get the A-12 Oxcart mission ready. These were the men who made up and supported the 1129th Special Activities Squadron at Groom Lake.

The J-58 jet engines built by Pratt and Whitney had taken forever to finish but now they were ready to fly. In January of 1963 they were finally delivered to the Ranch. A host of new problems occurred when the engines were first powered up. In one instance, engineers suspected a foreign object was stuck in an engine’s heart, called the power plant, and was damaging internal parts. An X-ray showed the outline of a pen that had fallen into the engine’s cover, called a nacelle, during final assembly in Burbank. From then on, Lockheed workers got coveralls without breast pockets. There were other problems. The engines worked like giant vacuums. Once powered up on the tarmac, they sucked in every loose object lying around, including rocks and metal screws. As a solution, Area 51 workers took to sweeping and then vacuuming the runway before each flight. It was a tedious but necessary job.

The next goal was to get the airplane to cruise at Mach 3. Nearly five times as fast as any commercial airplane, this was an aerodynamic feat that had never been accomplished before. Pushing through the lower Mach numbers was a laborious and dangerous task. Performance margins were met gradually, with a new set of challenges cropping up each day. As the airplane reached higher speeds, the 500-plus-degree temperatures began melting electrical components, many of which had to be redesigned and rewired. Chuck Yeager is credited with breaking the sound barrier in 1947, but every time a new aircraft moves through the speed of sound, which is 768 miles per hour, complications can arise. In the case of the Oxcart, the sonic shock unexpectedly caused the fuselage to flex in such a way that many structural parts became dangerously compromised. These parts had to be redesigned and replaced.

Some performance benchmarks came surprisingly quickly. In July of 1963, Lou Schalk flew briefly at Mach 3, much to the Agency’s delight. But sustaining flight for ten minutes at Mach 3 took another seven months to achieve. Every flight was like an operational mission, with navigators plotting a course and making maps days before as they worked to test the Oxcart’s internal navigation system, or INS. “When you’re flying at that altitude and that speed, you need big checkpoints to validate information from the INS,” recalls navigator Sam Pizzo. “Any old geographical landmark, like a mountain or a river, would not do. The Oxcart traveled too fast. Pilots would have to look for landmarks on the scale of the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes,” says the veteran navigator. “You can’t imagine what new territory this was for a navigator. No amount of experience can prepare you when you work on an airplane that goes two or three times as fast as anything you navigated for before.”

The essence of Area 51 was that everything that happened there happened big. Because all efforts were being made on orders of the president, and given the colossal scale of secrecy surrounding the project, there was a deeply patriotic sense that the free world depended on the work being performed at Area 51. The men worked tirelessly and with phenomenal ingenuity to overcome challenges that would have stymied countless others. And yet the strange paradox underlying all efforts at the Ranch was that Project Oxcart was also subject to unforeseeable world events. It could be given the ax at a moment’s notice — which is what almost happened on November 22, 1963.

It was late in the day after a rainstorm and Captain Donald Donohue was working with a crew out on the dry lake bed. An F-101 chase plane had run off the airstrip and sunk into a layer of gypsum that was several inches deep. Working with a group of engineers and mechanics, Donohue led the efforts to lay down several long planks of steel that could then be used to tow the airplane out of where it had become stuck in the soggy lake bed.

“Pizzo came out,” Donohue remembers. “He looked kinda pale. Then he said, ‘Clean up and go home.’ Well, something was not right. Sam Pizzo was a lot more talkative than that. Then he said something to the effect of ‘We’ll call you if we need you to come back.’”

“What the hell is going on?” Donohue remembers asking. “President Kennedy has just been assassinated, in Dallas,” Pizzo said solemnly.

It was a terrible shock, Donohue remembers. “Our commander in chief. Dead? I recall it like it was yesterday. Pizzo was right. We had to go home and wait this thing out. When [Lyndon] Johnson was vice president, he was entirely unaware about the existence of the A-12 program. And he didn’t have a clue about Area 51.” The future of Oxcart was contingent on the new president’s call.

With President Kennedy dead, Lyndon Johnson would be briefed on the CIA’s secret domestic base by CIA director John McCone on his eighth day as commander in chief. Until then, what Johnson would decide about the CIA’s supersonic spy plane program was anybody’s guess. The relationship between a new president and the CIA is always tenuous starting out. What happened to President Kennedy with the CIA and the Bay of Pigs raised the bar in terms of jeopardy for all future presidents of the United States. Only time would tell if Lyndon Johnson would authorize the completion of the Agency’s Mach 3 spy plane out at Area 51.