By the time Ken Collins stepped foot on Okinawa, the Kadena Air Base occupied more than 10 percent of the island and accounted for nearly 40 percent of all islanders’ income. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was stationed at a secluded part of the base, the place from where Operation Black Shield would launch. No one was supposed to know the squadron was there. The project pilots were to keep an extremely low profile, living in a simple arrangement of Quonset huts almost identical to those at Area 51. Instead of on the sand-and-sagebrush landscape at Area 51, the facilities on Kadena sat in fields of green grass. Leafy ficus trees grew along little pathways. It was spring when the pilots arrived, which meant tropical flowers were in full bloom. The pilots’ residence was called Morgan Manor. An American cook kept the pilots fed, serving up high-protein diets on request. On days off the pilots drank bottled beer. Sometimes the men ventured out to have a drink or eat a meal at the officers’ club, where a full Filipino orchestra always played American dance tunes.
The Oxcart mission was covert and classified, and there would be “no plausible cover story” as to why an oddly shaped, triple-sonic aircraft would be flying in and out of the air base with regularity for the next year. For this reason, the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that Commander Slater “focus on security, not cover.” One idea was to “create the illusion of some sort of environmental or technical testing involved.” But no one believed that cover story would hold. Within a week of the first Oxcart landing on the tarmac at Kadena, an ominouslooking Russian trawler sailed into port and anchored within viewing distance of the extralong runway. “The Russians knew we were there and we knew they knew we were there,” Colonel Slater recalls.
Impossible as it seemed, the first Oxcart mission over the demilitarized zone in North Vietnam occurred as promised, just fifteen days after Helms made history for the CIA at that Target Tuesday lunch in May. CIA pilot Mele Vojvodich was assigned the first mission. He took off at 11:00 a.m. local time in a torrential downpour — the Oxcart’s first real ride in the rain. In the little more than nine minutes Vojvodich spent over North Vietnam, at a speed of Mach 3.1 and an altitude of 80,000 feet, the Oxcart photographed 70 of the 190 suspected surface-to-air missile sites. The mission went totally undetected by the Chinese and the North Vietnamese.
After the first mission was completed, the film was sent to a special processing center inside the Eastman Kodak plant in Rochester, New York. But by the time the photographic intelligence got back to field commanders in Vietnam, the intelligence was already several days old. The North Vietnamese were moving missile sites and mock-ups of missile sites around faster than anyone could keep track of them. The CIA realized it needed a dramatically faster turnaround time, which resulted in a photo center being quickly set up on the mainland in Japan. Soon, field commanders had intel in their hands just twenty-four hours from the completion of an Oxcart mission over North Vietnam.
Still, that did not stop the North Vietnamese from moving their missiles around and avoiding bombing raids. They had help from the Soviet Union. “That was the reason for the Russian trawler parked at the end of the Kadena runway. Someone was watching and taking notes every time we flew,” recalls Roger Andersen, who was stationed in the command post on Kadena, which he’d been in charge of setting up. “It was almost identical to the command post at Area 51, except it was smaller,” Andersen says.
On Kadena, the operations officers tried to trick the Russian spies in the trawler by flying at night, and yet of the first seven Black Shield missions flown, four were “detected and tracked.” The North Vietnamese were able to predict Oxcart’s overhead pass based on the time the aircraft left the base. With this information relayed by the Russians, the Communists’ Fan Song guidance radar was able to lock on the A-12’s beacon. The first attempted shoot-down happened during Operation Black Shield’s sixteenth mission. In photographs taken by the Oxcart, contrails of surface-to-air missiles can be seen below. Fortunately for the pilots, the missiles could not get up as high as the Oxcart. In this newest round of cat and mouse, Oxcart was resulting in a draw. Oxcart was fast, high, and stealthy. The aircraft could not be shot down. But the enemy knew the plane was there, meaning it was a long way from being invisible as Richard Bissell and President Eisenhower had originally planned.
For American pilots flying over North Vietnam, the real danger remained down low, halfway between Oxcart and the earth, at around forty-five thousand feet. That was where the surface-to-air missiles and the MiG fighter jets were shooting down U.S. pilots at the horrifying nine-to-one rate. Ken Collins recalled what this felt like at the time: “During Black Shield, we, as pilots, were relatively safe at eighty-five thousand feet. It was the pilots who were flying lower than us who were really the ones in harm’s way. These were guys most of us had been in the Air Force with, before we got sheep-dipped and began flying for the CIA.”
Extraordinary pilots like Hervey Stockman. Stockman had been the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2, on July 4, 1956. Eleven years later, on June 11, 1967, Stockman was flying over North Vietnam, searching for information about North Vietnam weapons depots, when he was involved in a midair crash. A pilot of exceptional skill and remarkable courage, Stockman was on his 310th mission in a career that had covered three wars when his F-4 C Phantom fighter jet collided with another airplane in his wing. He and Ronald Webb both survived the bailout. Upon landing, they were captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, beaten, and taken prisoner. Stockman would spend the next five years and 268 days as a prisoner of war in a seven-by-seven-foot cell. First he was housed in the notoriously brutal Hanoi Hilton. Later, he was moved to other, equally grim prisons over the course of his incarceration. During Black Shield, the CIA tasked Oxcart pilots with search missions to find U.S. airmen who’d gone down over North Vietnam. The cameras on the Oxcarts took miles of photographs, seeking information on the prison complexes where American heroes like Hervey Stockman and hundreds of other POWs were being held, but to no avail. The North Vietnamese moved captured POWs around almost as often as they moved missile sites around.
The captured pilots became a purposeful part of Communist propaganda campaigns against the West. The POWs were beaten, tortured, chained, and dragged out in front of cameras, often forced to denounce the United States. If the Communists wanted to create unrest at home, which they did, they succeeded by using captured pilots for their own propaganda gains. All across America, opposition to the war was on the rise. The White House and the Pentagon fought back with propaganda and erroneous facts. “We are beginning to win this struggle,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey boasted on NBC’s Today show in November of 1967. While closed-door hearings for the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed that U.S. bombing campaigns were having little to no effect on winning the war, Humphrey told America that more Communists were laying down arms than picking them up. That our anti-Communist “purification” programs in Vietnam were going well. Later that same month, America’s top commander, General Westmoreland, dug his own grave. He told the National Press Club that the Communists were “unable to mount a major offensive.” That America might have been losing the war in 1965, but now America was winning in Vietnam. In an interview with Time magazine, Westmoreland taunted the Communists by calling them weak. “I hope they try something because we are looking for a fight,” he declared. Which is exactly what he got. At the end of January, the Communists pretended to agree to a three-day cease-fire to celebrate the new year, which in Vietnamese is called Tet Nguyen Dan. Instead, it was a double-cross. On January 31, 1968, the Communists launched a surprise attack on the U.S. military and the forces of South Vietnam. The notorious Tet Offensive stunned the Pentagon. It also resulted in violent antiwar protests. The Tet Offensive was a major turning point in America’s losing the Vietnam War.
It was at this same time that another major crisis occurred, one in which Oxcart played a secret role, the precise details of which were only made public in 2007. On the foggy morning of Januar
y 23, 1968, approximately two thousand miles to the northeast of Vietnam, the U.S. Navy ship USS Pueblo sailed into icy waters off the coast of North Korea and dropped anchor. The Pueblo’s cover story was that it was conducting scientific research; really, it was on an espionage mission, a joint NSA-Navy operation with the goal of gathering signals intelligence, or SIGINT. In addition to the regular crew, there were twenty-eight signals intelligence specialists working behind locked doors in a separate and restricted part of the vessel. Parked 15.8 miles off North Korea’s Ung-do Island, technically the Pueblo was floating in international waters.
North Korea’s Communist regime did not see it that way. The ship was close enough to be eavesdropping on Wonson harbor, which made it an open target for the North Korean People’s Army, the KPA. After one of the Pueblo’s crew members picked up on radar that a KPA ship was approaching fast, Pueblo’s captain, Lloyd M. Bucher, went up to the bridge to have a look around. Through his binoculars, Bucher saw not just a military ship but one with its rocket launchers aimed directly at the Pueblo. Bucher ordered certain flags to be raised, ones that indicated the USS Pueblo was on a surveying mission, something the North Koreans obviously already did not buy. Within minutes, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Lacy spotted several small vessels on the horizon: torpedo boats coming from Wonson. Next, two MiG-21 fighter jets appeared on the scene.
Captain Bucher now had a national security nightmare on his hands. His boat was filled with thousands of classified papers, cryptographic manuals, and encryption machines. Most significantly, the Pueblo carried a KW-7 cipher machine, which was the veritable Rosetta stone of naval encryption. The captain considered sinking his ship, which would take forty-seven minutes, but later explained that he knew if he had done so a gun battle was certain to ensue. Most of the Pueblo’s life rafts would be shot at and destroyed. Without life rafts, the men would die in the icy waters in a matter of minutes, Bucher was certain. He made the decision to flee.
The North Korean ship raised a flag that signaled “Heave to or I will open fire on you.” Captain Bucher raised a signal flag in response: “Thank you for your consideration. I am departing the area.” But the North Koreans opened fire. Bucher himself was hit, taking shrapnel in his foot and backside. As the Pueblo took off, the North Koreans continued to fire, killing a U.S. sailor named Duane Hodges.
Meanwhile, behind the secret door, SIGINT specialists smashed cipher equipment with axes and shoved documents into a small incinerator there. Despite the speed at which the analysts worked to burn the secret papers, 90 percent of the documents survived. Sixtyone minutes after being shot, Captain Bucher was no longer in control of his ship. The North Korean People’s Army stormed the Pueblo and took the captain and his eighty-two crew members hostage. For the first time in 160 years, an American vessel had been seized by a foreign nation. The timing could not have been worse. America was already losing one war.
President Johnson was outraged. Within hours of the Pueblo’s capture, the Pentagon began secretly preparing for war against North Korea. The following day, McNamara summoned the war council to lay out plans for a ground attack. “Our primary objective is to get the men of the Pueblo back,” McNamara said, emphasizing just how secret his plan was to remain: “No word of the discussion in this meeting should go beyond this room.” A stunning air attack over North Korea was laid out. An estimated fifteen thousand tons of bombs would be dropped from the air to complement the ground assault. Given the huge numbers of soldiers and airmen fighting in Vietnam, the war with North Korea would require a call-up of the reserves. A massive U.S. strategic airlift was set in motion, designated Operation Combat Fox. That the North Vietnamese were just six days from launching the sneak attack called the Tet Offensive was not yet known. A war with North Korea over the USS Pueblo would have been a war America could ill afford.
Richard Helms suggested an Oxcart be dispatched from nearby Kadena to photograph North Korea’s coast and try to locate the USS Pueblo before anyone even considered making a next move. As it stood, immediately after the Pueblo’s capture, there was no intelligence indicating exactly where the sailors were or where the ship was being held. Richard Helms counseled the president that if the goal was to get the eighty-two American sailors back, a ground attack or air attack couldn’t possibly achieve that end if no one knew where the USS Pueblo was. A reconnaissance mission would also enable the Pentagon to see if Pyongyang was mobilizing its troops for war over the event. Most important of all, it would give the crisis a necessary diplomatic pause.
Three days after the Pueblo’s capture, on January 26, Oxcart pilot Jack Weeks was dispatched on a sortie from Kadena to locate the missing ship. From the photographs Weeks took on that overflight, the United States pinpointed the Pueblo’s exact location as it floated in the dark-watered harbor in Changjahwan Bay. Before completing his mission but after taking the necessary photographs, Jack Weeks experienced aircraft problems. When he got back to base, he told his fellow pilots about the problems he’d had on the flight but not about his photographic success; detailed information regarding the USS Pueblo was so highly classified, very few individuals had any idea that Weeks’s mission had delivered photographs that had prevented war with North Korea.
“The [Oxcart] quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson harbor,” President Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow revealed in 1994. “So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower. All that would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people including our own. But the [Oxcart’s] photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held. The Koreans couldn’t lie about that.” The Pentagon’s secret war plan against North Korea was called off. Instead, negotiations for the sailors’ return began. But the eversuspicious administration, now deeply embroiled in political fallout from the Tet Offensive, worried the Pueblo incident could very well be another Communist double cross. What if North Korea was secretly mobilizing its troops for war? Three and a half weeks later, on February 19, 1968, Frank Murray was assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea. Murray’s photographs indicated that North Korea’s army was still not mobilizing for battle. But by then, the Pueblo was on its way to Pyongyang, where it remains today — the only American naval vessel held in captivity by a foreign power. Captain Bucher and his men were prisoners of North Korea for eleven months, tortured, put through mock executions, and made to confess espionage before finally being released. In 2008, a U.S. federal judge determined that North Korea should pay sixty-five million dollars in damages to several of the Pueblo’s crew, but North Korea has yet to respond.
A year had passed since Black Shield began. It was springtime on Kadena again. On days off Ken Collins and fellow pilot Jack Weeks would slip into their canvas shoes and swimming trunks and head out to the beach. The drive into the countryside was beautiful and relaxing, with its tropical bamboo forests and small ponds. Camellias and Japanese apricot trees were in bloom. There were beautiful sunsets to watch over the East China Sea. “We had a different rapport, Jack and I, than the other pilots, I think. We did more than just get along. Jack Weeks and I became friends,” Collins says.
When the two pilots weren’t at the beach, Collins and Weeks would take the 1129th Special Activities Squadron staff car, “an old clunker of a station wagon,” and head into Kozu, a sprawling little city of cement-block high-rises and crooked telephone poles. “Jack and I had kids who were about the same age. We’d head into Kozu and buy these little plastic airplanes and remote-control tank models which we intended to bring home to our kids. But sometimes we’d get bored back in Morgan Manor and open up the toy packages and end up making the little tank models for ourselves,” Collins recalls. “We had a lot of fun doing that.” Life’s simple pleasures during the Vietnam War.
The Agency’s six Oxcart pilots — Mele Vojvodich Jr., Jack W. Weeks, J. “Frank” Murray, Ronald J. “Jack” Layton, Dennis B. Sullivan, and Kenneth B. Collins — had collectively flown twenty-nine missions: twe
nty-four over North Vietnam, three over North Korea, and two over Cambodia and Laos. Countless surface-to-air missile sites had been located and destroyed as a result. Despite Pentagon fears, the photographs never located a single surface-to-surface missile able to reach American forces on the ground. “We also flew overhead during Air Force bombing raids, using our jamming systems on the bird to mess with the Communists’ antiaircraft systems,” Murray recalls. But for all the success of the CIA’s Oxcart program, the reality was that the Air Force’s Blackbird, the SR-71, was finally ready to deploy. The CIA could no longer compete with the Pentagon for Mach 3 missions, and the Oxcart program reached its inevitable end. “Even if you didn’t have a ‘need-to-know,’ it was obvious when the SR-71 Blackbirds started showing up,” Collins recalls. The Blackbirds were arriving on Kadena to take Oxcart’s place. The Air Force version of the Oxcart, with its two seats and reconnaissance/strike modifications, had officially won the battle between the CIA and the Air Force over anything with wings.
Back in Washington, behind closed doors, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson he no longer believed the war in Vietnam could be won. This did not sit well with the president, and in February of 1968, Robert McNamara stepped down. In his place came a new secretary of defense named Clark Clifford who “reaffirmed the original decision to end the A-12 program and mothball the aircraft.” The men from the 1129th began packing up to head home to Area 51. The missions were over. The drawdown phase had begun.
Jack Weeks and Denny Sullivan were each given the assignment of flying an A-12 Oxcart back to Area 51; Collins was scheduled to do final engine tests from Kadena. But during the last weeks of the program, Jack Weeks became ill, so Collins stepped in, completing back-to-back rotations in Weeks’s place. With the schedule change, it would now be Collins and Sullivan who would fly the A-12s home, with Weeks doing the final engine check, on June 4, 1968, and not Collins, as originally planned.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 30