Area 51 became like a Boy Scout camp on steroids, a stomping ground for the world’s fastest and now most expensive airplane. The six aircraft that would be used for deployment were put through a whole new battery of flight-simulation tests. Commander Slater kept pilot morale high and Pentagon dissent at bay. A bowling alley was built. The pilots kept in shape playing water sports in the Olympic-size swimming pool. They kept their minds clear flying model airplanes and hitting golf balls off the dry lake bed up into the hills. Even the contractors were encouraged to pick up the pace. Slater challenged a lazy work crew to dig a lake. Five decades later, Groom Lake’s artificial body of water would still be referred to as Slater Lake. With the aircraft now flying at full speed and maximum height, it was time to break performance records. In December of 1966, one of the pilots set a speed record that would last into the twenty-first century. Bill Park flew 10,195 miles in a little over six hours at an average speed of 1,660 miles per hour. Park had flown over all four corners of America and back to the base in less time than most men spend at the office on any given day. To the project pilots itching for missions, it seemed like they could be deployed any day. And then, in January of 1967, tragedy struck.
Project pilot Walt Ray was, by all accounts, a terrific pilot. He and his new wife, Diane, also made for good company with Ken Collins and his wife, Jane. Diane and Jane did not have to keep up any pretenses; they both accepted that they had no idea what their husbands really did besides fly airplanes. The Rays and the Collinses lived close to each other in the San Fernando Valley, and they would often go on holidays together. “Once we took a small prop plane and flew down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and spent a couple days down there playing tennis, swimming, and flying around,” Collins recalls. “There were so few runways in Mexico in the early sixties, mostly we landed in big fields. The goats would see us coming, or hear us coming; they’d run away, and we’d land. Walt Ray loved to fly as much as I did. We’d take turns flying the airplane.” Quiet and unassuming, Walt Ray also liked to hunt. “Right after New Year, Walt took me with him on a RON [remain overnight] in Montana. We did some hunting, spent the night in a motel, and flew home,” Roger Andersen remembers. The following day, on the afternoon of January 5, 1967, Walt Ray was flying an Oxcart on a short test flight. At the Ranch, it had been snowing. Walt Ray was passing over the tiny town of Farmington, New Mexico, at exactly 3:22 p.m. when he looked down and saw the black line on his fuel gauge move suddenly, dramatically, and dangerously to the left.
“I have a loss of fuel and I do not know where it is going,” Walt Ray told Colonel Slater through his headset, breaking radio silence to communicate on a radio frequency reserved for emergencies. The transcript would remain classified until 2007. “I think I can make it,” Walt Ray said. He was 130 miles from the tarmac at Area 51, flying subsonic to conserve fuel. But twenty minutes later, over Hanksville, Utah, Ray declared an emergency. He’d gotten the aircraft down to thirty thousand feet when one of its engines flamed out. The sixtyseven-million-dollar spy plane had run out of fuel.
“I’m ejecting” was the last thing Walt Ray said to Colonel Slater. When Walt Ray ejected, the seat he was strapped into was propelled away from the airplane by a small rocket. The strings of his parachute became tangled in his seat’s headrest, which meant he was unable to separate from his seat. Walt Ray fell thirty thousand feet without a parachute and crashed into the side of a mountain near Leith, Nevada. Within seconds of the pilot’s last transmission, Commander Slater gave the order to dispatch three aircraft from Area 51 to go find Walt Ray and whatever was left of his airplane. No one had any idea that the thirty-year-old pilot was already dead. In addition to the fleet of search-and-rescue that took off from Groom Lake, the Air Force dispatched four aircraft and two helicopters from Nellis Air Force Base. The crash site needed to be secured quickly before any civilians arrived on the scene.
Twenty-three hours passed. No pilot, no airplane. A U-2 was sent aloft to photograph the general area where Walt Ray was believed to have gone down. While the U-2 pilots flew high, Roger Andersen flew in low, in a T-33. The terrain was challenging, and it was difficult to see the ground. “There was cactus and vegetation everywhere; we had to conserve fuel and fly as low as we could,” Andersen explains. Helicopter pilot Charlie Trapp found the aircraft first. “I saw these large film pieces rolling across the top of a ridge,” Trapp recalls. “I landed where I could and let my parajumpers jump out. They ran over to the Oxcart, what was left of it, and when they came back they said, ‘Walt’s not in there and neither is his ejection seat.’” The Oxcart had crashed in the remote high desert on a mountain slope dotted with chaparral. Trapp and his crew went back to Area 51 and, with the navigators’ help, mapped out on the board in the command post all the places where Walt Ray might have landed after ejection. Then they went back out and continued the search.
Charlie Trapp found Walt Ray uphill from the crash site, three miles away. “I caught a glimpse of light reflecting from his helmet,” Trapp recalls. “He was still in his seat, under a large cedar tree.” A perimeter was set up and the dirt roads leading up to the crash site were barricaded and secured by armed guards. Herds of wild horses watched as trucks rolled in and workers carted up the jet wreckage to take back to Groom Lake. The entire process took nine days. After an investigation, officials determined that a faulty fuel gauge was all that was wrong with the triple-sonic spy plane. At first, the gauge had erroneously indicated to Walt Ray he had enough fuel to get back to the Ranch. Minutes later the gauge told him he was about to run out of fuel.
One man’s tragedy can become another man’s opportunity, which is what happened to Frank Murray after Walt Ray was killed. After the accident, General Ledford came out to the area to participate in the ensuing investigation. When Ledford was ready to return to Washington, he asked Frank Murray to fly him home. “Up in the air,” Murray recalls, “Ledford said to me over the radio, ‘How’d you like to fly the plane?’ I said, ‘Throw me in that puddle, boss’ and that was about the extent of the pilot-selection process for me.” Murray was given Walt Ray’s call sign of Dutch 20. No longer a chase pilot, Murray was now part of the CIA’s elite team of overhead espionage pilots.
Defense Department officials used the tragic death of Walt Ray and the loss of another CIA aircraft to their advantage. The Office of the Budget and the Office of the Secretary of Defense met alone, in secret, without representation from the CIA. There, they highlighted the fact that the CIA’s several-hundred-million-dollar black budget operation had produced fifteen airplanes, five of which had already crashed. They presented their findings to President Johnson with the recommendation that the Oxcart program be “phased out.”
Richard Helms was furious. In an eight-page letter to the president, he told Johnson that to mothball the Oxcart would be a scandalous waste of an asset. The CIA had successfully and meticulously managed 435 spy plane overflights by the U-2 in thirty hostile countries, and only one, the Gary Powers crash, had produced an international incident, Helms said. But the Gary Powers incident had actually strengthened the argument as to why the CIA, not the Air Force, should run the spy plane program, Helms explained. It was because Powers was an intelligence officer, and not a military man, that the Soviets hadn’t taken retaliatory action against the United States. Ultimately Powers had been released in a Soviet spy exchange. Helms further strengthened his argument by stating that, unlike the military, the CIA “controls no nuclear weapons, which rules out any propaganda suggestion that an irrational act by some subordinate commander might precipitate a nuclear war.” Helms had a point. But would the president see things his way?
The following month, in February of 1967, Colonel Slater was again summoned to Washington. It was his fifth trip in six months. In a roomful of 303 Committee members, Slater was told the Oxcart would be terminated effective January 1, 1968. There was no room for debate. The Oxcart’s fate had been decided. The case was closed. Slater was instructed to return to Ar
ea 51 and keep his squadron operations ready while the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird passed its final flight tests. Even though Colonel Slater was Air Force to his core he was very much for the CIA’s Oxcart program. Slater was the program’s commander, and at that moment, the Oxcart was undeniably the most remarkable aircraft in the world.
Colonel Slater had flown himself to Washington in an F-101 and now he had to fly himself home. He was uncharacteristically disheartened by it all. Stopping at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to refuel, Slater showed his identification documents, which pushed him to the front of the refueling line, ahead of a two-star general who had been waiting there. With everyone staring at him and wondering who this officer was, Slater considered the irony of it all. In justifying why Oxcart was being terminated, the 303 Committee claimed that the Oxcart exemplified CIA black budget excess. From Slater’s perspective, save for a few line-cutting perks, the Oxcart was worth every Agency dime. The scientific barriers broken by the Oxcart program would likely impress scientists and engineers in another thirty years. It was the incredible sense of achievement shared by everyone involved that Slater would miss most. But so it goes, thought Slater. Oxcart would never get a mission, and the American public would probably never know what the CIA had been able to accomplish, in total secrecy, at Groom Lake — at least not for a long time.
Colonel Slater waited for his airplane to be refueled and thought about the journey home, likely his last from DC to Area 51. It was a mistake to cancel Oxcart, Slater thought. But he also knew that his opinion didn’t matter. His skills as a commander were what he was counted on for. He would return to Area 51 and, like all good military men, follow orders.
Three months later, on a balmy spring day in May of 1967, Colonel Slater decided he was going to take the Oxcart for a last ride. Some of the pilots had four hundred hours in the air in the Oxcart. Walt Ray had had 358 when he died. Colonel Slater had only ten. Why not take the world’s most scientifically advanced aircraft out for a ride while he still had the chance? Soon, the Oxcart would disappear into the experimental-test-plane graveyard. There, it would collect dust in some secret military hangar way out in Palmdale, California, where no one would ever fly it again. Slater went to visit Werner Weiss to see if Weiss could arrange for Slater to take one last Mach 3 ride.
“Consider it done,” Werner Weiss said to Colonel Slater’s request. Up in the air, Slater quickly took the Oxcart to seventy thousand feet. Slater had forgotten how light the Oxcart was. It had an airframe like a butterfly, which allowed pilots to get it up so high. Flying at Mach 2.5 made things hot inside the cockpit. It was like an oven set on warm. If Slater were to take off his glove and touch the window, he’d get a second-degree burn. He moved up to Mach 3 cruising speed at ninety thousand feet, traveling the seven hundred miles to Billings, Montana, in about twenty-three minutes.
The fallacy was that at this height and speed, a pilot could look out the window and take in the view. You couldn’t. Even when you reached cruising height, you had to keep your eyes on every gauge, oscillator, and scope in front of you. There were too many things to pay attention to. Too many things that could go wrong.
Colonel Slater headed toward the Canadian border, where he took a left turn and flew along the U.S. perimeter until he reached Washington State. There, he took another left turn and flew down over Oregon and into California. Finally, he took the aircraft down to twentyfive thousand feet and prepared for a scheduled refuel. Minutes later, Slater met up with the KC-135 that had been dispatched from the Air Force’s 903rd Air Refueling Squadron out of Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, California.
The process of taking on fuel was one of the more dangerous things an Oxcart pilot could do. In order to connect its fuel line to the tanker, the aircraft had to slow down to between 350 and 450 mph, so slow it could barely keep its grip on the sky. The issue of speed was equally taxing on the flying fuel tank. The KC-135 tanker had to travel at its top speed just to keep up with the slowed-down triple-sonic airplane. This was always a slightly nerve-racking process, complicated for Colonel Slater by the fact that a call came in over the emergency radio at exactly that time. Whatever was going on back at Area 51 that merited this emergency call was most likely not a welcome event.
Slater answered. It was Colonel Paul Bacalis, the man who’d taken over Ledford’s job as director of the Office of Special Activities for the CIA. Bacalis told Slater that an urgent call had come in for him from the Pentagon and he should get back to Area 51 immediately.
“I’m refueling,” Colonel Slater said.
“Finish and dump it,” Bacalis said. “Can’t it wait?” Colonel Slater asked. “No,” Bacalis said. “Where are you?” “I’m over California,” Colonel Slater said.
“Head out to sea, dump the fuel, and come home” was Colonel Bacalis’s command.
Slater let loose forty thousand pounds of fuel and watched it evaporate into the atmosphere. It was critical that he save ten thousand gallons of fuel to get home, not much more and definitely not less. Too little fuel and you wound up like Walt Ray. Too much fuel meant the aircraft could blow out its brakes on landing and overshoot the runway. Now, Slater needed to make a quick U-turn to head home. When traveling three times the speed of sound, the Oxcart needed 186 miles of space just to make the hook. This meant Slater’s U-turn took him from off the coast of Big Sur to high above Santa Barbara on a tight curve.
When Slater got back to base, Werner Weiss and Colonel Bacalis were waiting in his office. Both men wore grins. Colonel Bacalis dialed the Pentagon and handed Slater the telephone. As the phone rang, Bacalis told Slater what was happening so as to prepare him for the call.
Colonel Slater couldn’t believe his ears.
“‘The president has given Oxcart a go,’” Slater recalls Bacalis saying, and that “orders are en route.” Then came the ultimate challenge — one for which he was prepared. Bacalis asked Slater if he could deploy his men for Oxcart missions starting in fifteen days.
Chapter Sixteen: Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS Pueblo
The new director of the CIA, Richard M. Helms, had to work hard to become a member of President Johnson’s inner coterie. The president had once told his CIA director that he “never found much use for intelligence.” But eventually Helms managed to acquire a coveted seat at the president’s Tuesday lunch table. There, President Johnson and his closest advisers discussed foreign policy each week. Outsiders called the luncheons Target Tuesdays because so much of what was discussed involved which North Vietnamese city to bomb. In 1967, air battles were raging in the skies over Hanoi and Haiphong with so many more American pilots getting shot down than enemy pilots that the ratio became nine to one. The Pentagon had been unable to locate the surface-to-air missile sites in North Vietnam responsible for so many of the shoot-downs although they’d been looking for them all year. Thirty-seven U-2 missions had been flown since January, as had hundreds of low-flying Air Force drones. Still, the Pentagon had no clear sense of where exactly the Communist missile sites were located. There were other fears. The Russians were rumored to be supplying the North Vietnamese with surface-to-surface missiles, ones with enough range to reach American troops stationed in the south.
Which is how the Oxcart, already scheduled for cancellation, serendipitously got its mission — during a Target Tuesday lunch. On May 16, 1967, Helms made one last play on behalf of the CIA’s beloved spy plane, nine years in the making but just a few days away from being mothballed for good. Helms told the president that by deploying the Oxcart on missions over North Vietnam, war planners could get those high-resolution photographs of the missile sites they had been looking for. “Sharp point photographs, not smudged circles,” Helms promised the president. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, angling hard for Air Force control of aerial reconnaissance, had promised the president that the SR-71 Blackbird, the Air Force version of the Oxcart, was almost operations-ready. But the mission had to happen now, CIA director Hel
ms told the president. It was already May. Come June, Southeast Asia would be inundated with monsoons. Weather was critical for good photographs, Helms said. Cameras can’t photograph through clouds. President Johnson was convinced. Before the dessert arrived, Johnson authorized the CIA’s Oxcart to deploy to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan.
It was a coup for the CIA. By the following morning, the airlift to Kadena from Area 51 had begun. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was being deployed for Operation Black Shield. A million pounds of matйriel, 260 support crew, six pilots, and three airplanes were en route to the East China Sea. Nine years after Kelly Johnson presented physicist Edward Lovick with his drawing of the first Oxcart, Johnson would write in his log notes: “the bird should leave the nest.”
Kadena Air Base was located on the island of Okinawa just north of the Tropic of Cancer in the East China Sea. It was an island scarred by a violent backstory, haunted by hundreds of thousands of war dead. Okinawa had been home to the single largest land-sea-air battle in the history of the world. This was the same plot of land where, twenty-two years earlier, the Allied Forces fought the Japanese. Okinawa was the last island before mainland Japan. Over the course of eighty-two days in the spring of 1945, the battle for the Pacific reached its zenith. At Okinawa, American casualties would total 38,000 wounded and 12,000 killed or missing. Japan’s losses were inconceivable in today’s wars: 107,000 soldiers dead and as many as 100,000 civilians killed. When Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru finally capitulated, giving the island over to U.S. forces on June 21, 1945, he did so with so much shame in his heart that he committed suicide the following day. Thousands of Okinawans felt the same way and leaped off the island’s high coral walls. After the smoke settled and the blood soaked into the earth, Okinawa belonged to the U.S. military. Two decades later, it still did.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 29