Chapter Fifteen: The Ultimate Boys’ Club
At Groom Lake throughout the 1960s, at least once a month and always before dawn, base personnel would be shaken from their beds by a violent explosion. When the rumbling first started happening, Ken Collins would leap from bed as a sensation that felt like a massive earthquake rolled by. A nuclear bomb was being exploded next door, underground, just a few miles west of Oxcart pilots’ quarters. Next, the blast wave would hit Collins’s Quonset hut and then roll on, heading across the Emigrant Mountain Range with a surreal and unnatural force that made the coyotes wail.
In the years that Collins had been test-flying the Oxcart at Area 51, the Department of Defense had been testing nuclear bombs with bravado. After a while, being awoken before dawn meant little to Collins, and he’d roll over and go back to sleep. But on this one particular morning something felt different. It was a banging he was hearing, not a boom. Collins opened his eyes. Someone was indeed banging on his Quonset hut door. Next came a loud voice that sounded a lot like Colonel Slater’s. Collins leaped out of bed and opened his door. Colonel Slater had an unusual look of concern, and without explanation, he ordered Collins to get into his flight suit as fast as he could. This was a highly unusual request, Collins thought. It was definitely before dawn. Behind where Slater stood on the Quonset hut stoop, Collins could see it was still dark outside. For a brief moment, he feared the worst. Had America gone to war with the Soviets? What could possibly force an unplanned Oxcart mission flight? Rushing to put on his clothes, Collins heard Colonel Slater waking up the flight surgeon who lived in the apartment quarters next door.
Collins followed Slater in a run toward the hangar where the Oxcart lived. There he was quickly briefed on the situation: the Pentagon had
called to say that a Russian reconnaissance balloon was flying across the United States, floating with the prevailing winds in a westerly direction. Collins was to find the Soviet balloon — fast. Normally, the flight surgeon would have spent two hours just getting Collins into his pressure suit. That morning Collins was suited up and sitting in the cockpit of the Oxcart in a little over thirty minutes. Up he went, blasting off the tarmac, north then east, on direct orders by the Pentagon to “hunt and find” the Soviet weather balloon visually and using radar.
Up in the air it dawned on Collins what a wild-goose chase he was on. What would a Russian reconnaissance balloon look like? What were the chances of making visual contact with such a thing? At speeds of more than 2,200 mph, he was traveling more than half a mile each second. Even if he saw the balloon, in just a fraction of a second it would be behind him. Even worse, what if he actually did get that close to the flying object? If the Oxcart hit anything while moving at Mach 3, the plane would break apart instantly and he’d be toast.
Flying somewhere over the middle of the continent, Collins briefly identified an object on radar about 350 miles away. As instructed, he flew around the object in the tightest circle he could perform at Mach 3, which meant his circle had a radius of about 400 miles. He never saw the balloon with his own eyes.
After Collins returned to base, engineers scrambled to read the information on the data recorder. The incident has never been declassified. Admitting that the Soviets invaded U.S. airspace— whether in a craft or by balloon — is not something any U.S. official has ever done. Collins never asked any follow-up questions. That’s how it was to be a pilot: the less you knew, the better. He knew too many fellow pilots from Korea who had come home from POW camps missing fingernails — if they came home at all. Now, ten years later, pilots shot down over North Vietnam were experiencing the same kinds of torture, maybe worse. The less you knew, the better. That was the pilots’ creed.
As deputy director of the CIA, Richard Helms was a huge fan of Oxcart. He worked closely on the program with Bud Wheelon, whose efforts earned him the title of first director of science and technology for the CIA. Now that Richard Bissell was gone, there were few men in the Agency as devoted to the Area 51 spy plane program as Wheelon and Helms. Whereas Wheelon saw his position at the CIA as a temporary one — he signed on for a four-year contract, fulfilled it, and left the CIA — Helms was a career Agency man. He’d worked closely with Bissell on the U-2 from its inception and he knew what important intelligence could come from overhead photographs. The United States learned more about the Soviets’ weapons capabilities from its first U-2 overflight than it had in the previous ten years from its spies on the ground. Off McNamara’s inquiry about possibly using the Oxcart on spy missions over North Vietnam, Helms made a personal trip out to Area 51 to sign off on Oxcart design specifications himself. Helms was also acutely aware of the Air Force’s plans to push Oxcart out of the way in favor of their own reconnaissance spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird. If Helms could get a mission for Oxcart, the chances of the CIA maintaining its supersonic espionage program greatly increased.
Almost everyone who visited Area 51 became enamored with the desert facility, and Helms was no exception. It was impossible not to be fascinated by the power and prestige the secret facility embodied. It was the quintessential boys’ club, both exotic and elite. Most of all, it gave visitors the sense of being a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC. There were no cars to drive — instead, Agency shuttles moved men around the base. No radio, almost no TV. As a visitor to Area 51, Helms was particularly careful not to step on any powerful Air Force toes. The base was, operations-wise, Air Force turf now. The CIA was in charge of missions, but there were no missions, which only underscored a growing sense of Agency impotence. The Air Force controlled most of the day-to-day operations on the base, including proficiency flights and air-to-air refuelings, which were practiced regularly so everyone in the 1129th Special Activities Squadron stayed in shape.
During his visit, Helms kept a relatively low profile, making sure to spend more of his time in the field — on the airstrip with the pilots and in the aircraft hangars with the engineers — than drinking White Horse Scotch with Air Force brass in the House-Six bar. During test flights, Helms liked to roll up his sleeves and stand on the tarmac when the Oxcart took off. He likened the experience to standing on the epicenter of an 8.0 earthquake and described the great orange fireballs that spewed out of the Oxcart’s engines as “hammers from hell.” Helms, an upper-middle-class intellectual from Philadelphia, loved colorful language. He’d once told a room of military men that the Vietnam War was “like an incubus,” a nightmarish male demon that creeps up on sleeping women and has intercourse with them. Helms’s grandiose language, most likely intentional, separated him from straight-talking military men.
Despite playing a key role in planning and executing covert operations in Vietnam, Richard Helms did not believe the United States could win the war there. This posture kept him out of step with Pentagon brass. Helms believed Vietnam was fracturing consensus about America’s need to win the Cold War, which he saw as the more important battle at hand. He was an advocate of using technology to beat the Russians by way of overhead reconnaissance from satellites and spy planes, which was why he liked Oxcart so much. And unlike Pentagon and State Department officials, who, for the most part, cautioned the president against ever sending spy planes over the Soviet Union again, Helms, like McCone, felt the president should do just that. “The only sin in espionage is getting caught,” Helms once said. He believed the best intelligence was “objective intelligence.” Photographs didn’t have an opinion and couldn’t lie. Helms attributed his respect for objectivity to his working as a journalist for the wire service United Press International. In 1936, a then twenty-four-year-old Richard Helms got his first big scoop: covering the Berlin Olympics as a reporter, he was invited to interview Adolf Hitler. Six years later, Helms would be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor organization to the CIA, to spy on Hitler’s men.
With Richard Helms at Area 51 in December of 1965, the Oxcart was finally declared operational. Celebrations were in order. One of the
pilots offered to fly a C-130 Hercules on a seafood run to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where Werner Weiss had coolers full of lobsters, oysters, and crab legs ready to be taken to Area 51. Big-budget black operations had stomach-size perks too. After such feasts, the kitchen staff buried the shells in compost piles along the base perimeter, and the joke among Air Force support staff was that future archaeologists digging in the area would think Groom Lake had been an ocean as late as the 1960s.
As secret and compartmentalized as the base was, the mess hall was the one place where the men gathered together to break bread. Technical assistants would rub elbows with three- and four-star generals visiting there. Ernie Williams, who had helped find Area 51’s first well in 1955 and now helped coordinate meals, loved it when Werner Weiss invited him into the mess hall to eat steaks with generals who wore stars on their chests. And after the meal was over, the men would again go their separate ways. The Special Projects program managers and the engineering nerds usually retired to their quarters to play poker and drink bottled beer. The scientists were known to return to their respective hangars, where they’d stay up until all hours of the night engrossed in various problems they needed to solve. The Air Force guys went to the House-Six bar to roll dice, have a drink, and share war stories.
When on base, Richard Helms was known to stop in for a drink. He was a great conversationalist but almost always refrained from telling stories about himself. And as far as World War II was concerned, Helms rarely discussed the subject. In 1945, as a young OSS officer, Helms had worked in postwar Berlin. He was one of the key players in Operation Paperclip; Helms had been tasked with finding a group of Hitler’s former scientists and offering them positions on classified programs back in the United States. Jobs involving biological weapons, rockets, and stealth. Years later, Helms justified his recruitment of former Nazis by saying that if the scientists hadn’t come to work for us, they’d have gone to work for “them.” Helms knew things other men did not know. At the Agency he was the man who kept the secrets.
In 1975, Helms would unwittingly become an internationally recognized figure famous for destroying CIA documents to avoid having their secrets revealed. After allegations surfaced that the CIA had been running a human-research program called MKULTRA— which involved mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD— Helms as director of the CIA was asked to take the stand. While testifying to Congress, Helms stated that he had ordered all the MKULTRA files destroyed two years earlier, in 1973.
In the labyrinthine organizational chart that kept men at Area 51 in their respective places, no one was more important to the spy plane project’s overall progress than the commander of the base, a position granted to an Air Force officer whose salary came from the CIA. In 1965, the position was filled by Colonel Slater. Slater was the ideal commander. He was astute, practical, and an excellent listener, which put him in direct contrast to the more elitist Colonel Holbury, who’d held the position before. What the pilots appreciated most about Slater was that he was funny. Not sarcastic funny, but the kind of funny that reminded pilots not to take their jobs so seriously all the time. One of the first things Colonel Slater did after taking command of the base was to hang a sign over the House-Six bar that listed Slip Slater’s Basic Rules of Flying at Groom Lake. There were only three rules.
Try to stay in the middle of the air.
Do not go near the edges of it.
The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.
Like all the pilots at Area 51, Slater flew every chance he got. Now, as commander of the base, he began each day by making the first run. Around five thirty each morning, coffee mug in hand, Slater was driven by one of the enlisted men to the end of a runway, where he’d jump in an F-101 and fly around the Box on what he called “the weather run.” Because Area 51 had a large box of restricted airspace, Slater could fly in a manner not seen at other Air Force bases. Colonel Roger Andersen, who had been recruited to Area 51 to work in the command post, remembers the first time he flew with Slater in a two-seater T-33 to Groom Lake. “We were doing proficiency flying. I’d been getting teased by the other pilots because my background was flying tankers for the Air Force, not jets,” Andersen explains. “Up in the air, Slater says to me, ‘You need to loosen up, Andersen, Let’s rack it around.’ At which point Slater does a loop, a roll, and a spin… in a row. You could do that kind of thing up at Area 51.”
Everyone knew stories about Slater’s flying career: flying against the Germans in World War II, flying as the detachment commander for the Black Cats, and of course the remarkable story of his flying an airplane with a dead engine for a hundred miles on a glide — through a hurricane — in 1946. As a young hero just back from the war, Slater had been chosen by the Army Air Forces to fly a brand-new P-80 Shooting Star on a training mission from March Air Force Base to Jamaica. The P-80 was the first jet fighter used by the Army Air Forces at a time when jets in America were relatively new. As Slater remembers it, he was “one hundred miles out at sea off of Key West when the engine quit. I was just north of Cuba, which was under hurricane. There was turbine failure and a flameout so I turned around and glided back to the Keys.” Jet airplanes do not normally glide without engine thrust, at least not without a skilled pilot at the controls. When a jet engine loses all power, it usually crashes. Slater rode the jet stream for a hundred miles over the Atlantic Ocean until he found an abandoned airstrip at Marathon Key, in Florida, on which to land. The amazing story made its way to the pages of the New York Times.
Richard Helms was a fan of Slater, and before leaving Area 51 to get back to Washington, Helms made sure to congratulate Colonel Slater on all the fine work that had been achieved to get Oxcart operational. Now Slater had to be prepared to fly himself to Washington on a moment’s notice on Oxcart’s behalf. Over the next several months, Slater and General Ledford would be asked to participate in the top secret covert-action review board the 303 Committee, which would be assigning Oxcart its mission. (The 303 Committee was a successor to the Special Operations Group, which Bissell had been in charge of during his tenure at the CIA.)
Slater flew himself to Washington in an F-101 more times than he could count. There, however eloquently the Agency advocated on the Oxcart squadron’s behalf, the Pentagon put up roadblocks. Slater’s input had little effect on the naysayers. He was looked upon as the man in charge of a billion-dollar black operations program, a golden goose that the Air Force desperately wanted to wrest from the CIA. Every time the Agency proposed a mission, the review board denied the CIA’s request.
That the groundbreaking spy plane was trapped in a stalemate between the CIA and the Air Force was, at first, unbelievable to Colonel Slater. Throughout his career, Slater had moved effortlessly between different armed services and intelligence worlds, applying his talents wherever they were needed most. As a twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot, Slater flew eighty-four missions over France and Germany in a P-47 Thunderbolt. When the Army desperately needed support from airmen during the Battle of the Bulge, Slater fought side by side with soldiers on the ground at the bloody Siege of Bastogne. Later, as commander of the Black Cat Squadron flying dangerous missions over mainland China, Slater wore both CIA and Air Force hats with ease. The common goal was gathering intelligence. Colonel Slater saw no rivalry among the men.
During that winter of 1966, flying back and forth between Area 51 and the Pentagon, Slater had a front-row seat for the power struggle between the Air Force and the CIA. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had changed his mind again on the usefulness of Oxcart in Vietnam. He decided to wait until the Air Force SR-71 program came online. Bud Wheelon believes that “McNamara was delaying finding a mission for the Oxcart on purpose. He was an empire builder. Oxcart did not fit into his empire because it was never his.” With each month that passed, the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird was that much closer to being operati
ons-ready, and the men in charge of Blackbird were in McNamara’s chain of command. As soon as the Air Force’s spy plane was ready, the CIA’s almost identical spy plane would be out of a job.
In June of 1966, Richard Helms was made director of the CIA. Now one of the most powerful men in Washington, Helms lobbied hard on Oxcart’s behalf, and in July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff voted in favor of sending Oxcart over North Vietnam to gather intelligence on missile sites there. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk dug in their heels and again offered dissent. Both men argued that putting CIA planes on the ground at the U.S. Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan, posed too great a political risk. McNamara was playing the same card he had played with John McCone when McCone was running the CIA, namely, that if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down on an espionage mission, the president would face the same backlash that Eisenhower had after the Gary Powers incident.
In August, a vote for or against Oxcart deployment was tallied in the presence of President Johnson. The majority voted against deployment, and the president upheld that decision. The ice around the Oxcart program was getting thin. Colonel Slater responded as best he knew how: when the going gets tough, the tough keep flying. Back at Area 51, he was determined to keep his men mission-ready. There was no point in letting his men know that the program was on the verge of collapse. Who could have imagined that the seminal Oxcart was in danger of being mothballed before it ever got a job? Instead, Slater gave his men a new goal. He wanted them to shave six days off the time it took the squadron to go from mission notification to deployment overseas. It had been a twenty-one-day response time; Slater now wanted it reduced by nearly 30 percent.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 28