2011.
Lockheed kept the contract. Lovick got a huge Christmas bonus, and the A-12 got a code name, Oxcart. It was ironic, an oxcart being one of the slowest vehicles on Earth and the Oxcart being the fastest. On January 26, 1960, Bissell notified Johnson that the CIA was authorizing the delivery of twelve airplanes. The specs were laid out: Mach, 3.2 (2,064 knots, or.57 miles per second); range, 4,120 nautical miles; altitude, 84,500-97,600 feet. The aircraft was going to be five times faster than the U-2 and would fly a full three miles higher than the U-2. Skunk Works would move into production, and a facility needed to be readied for flight tests. There was only one place equipped to handle a spy plane that needed to be hidden from the world, including members of Congress, and that was Area 51.
It was January of 1960, and for the first time since the atomic bombs had shuttered the place, in the summer of 1957, Area 51 was back in business. Only this time, the CIA and the Air Force were comanaging an aircraft that was bigger, faster, and budgeted at nearly five times the cost of the U-2. The program would involve more than ten times as many people, and, as it had with the U-2, the CIA hired work crews from next door at the Nevada Test Site, men with top secret security clearances already in place. There were two immediate requirements for the new airplane: a much longer runway and a 1.32-million-gallon fuel farm. The construction of a new runway and the fuel farm began first. Millions of gallons of cement had to be hauled in, along with enough building materials to construct a small city. Trucking this kind of volume through the test site would draw too much attention to the project, so a new road was built, allowing access to Groom Lake from the north. Contractors worked under cover of night, resurfacing eighteen miles of highway through the tiny town of Rachel, Nevada, so fuel trucks carrying five hundred thousand gallons of specially modified fuel each month would not crack the roadbed with their heavy loads.
The A-12 Oxcart was a flying fuel tank. It held eleven thousand gallons, which made the tanks the largest portion of the airplane. The fuel had requirements the likes of which were previously unknown. During the refueling process, which would happen in the air, at lower altitudes and lower airspeeds, the temperature of the fuel would drop to ?90 degrees Fahrenheit. At Mach 3, it would heat up to 285 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature at which conventional fuels boil and explode. To allow for this kind of fluctuation, JP-7 was designed to maintain such a low vapor pressure that a person could not light it with a match. This made for many practical jokes, with those in the know dropping lit matches into a barrel of JP-7 to make those not in the know duck and run for cover. It also required extreme precision of the man who was chosen to be in charge of the fuels team, Air Force sergeant Harry Martin.
This meant Martin was one of the first men to return to the nearly deserted secret base. “Winters were freezing on Groom Lake,” Martin recalls, with temperatures dropping into the low teens. “I lived in a dilapidated trailer heated with kerosene. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I did that first winter at Area 51.” Martin had no idea what he was working on but gathered it was important when he was woken up in the middle of the night by a two-star general. “He said we had an important task. I thought to myself, ‘If a general is up working at this hour, then I’m up too.’ Working at Area 51 was the highlight of my career.”
The A-12 was original in every way, meaning it had unforeseen needs that came up at every turn. The eighty-five-hundred-foot runway had to be created piece by piece because the standard Air Force runways would not work when it came to Oxcart. The longitudinal sections had to be made much larger, and the joints holding them together needed to run parallel to the aircraft’s roll, not horizontal, as was standard with Air Force planes. Large, new aircraft hangars went into construction, ready to conceal what would become known as the CIA’s “own little air force.” Getting the Oxcart to fly would involve its own small fleet of aircraft: F-104 chase planes, proficiency-training airplanes, transport planes, and a helicopter for search and rescue.
Because the Oxcart would fly five times as fast as the U-2, the Agency needed a lot more restricted airspace at Area 51. Flying at speeds of 2,200 miles per hour, an Oxcart pilot would need a 186-mile swath just to make a U-turn. This meant an additional 38,400 acres of land around the base were withdrawn from public access, allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to extend the restricted airspace from a 50-square-mile box to 440 square miles. FAA employees were instructed not to ask questions about anything flying above forty thousand feet. The same was true at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
While the base was being readied for delivery of the twelve aircraft, pole testing continued on the lake bed at Area 51. All the while, the CIA feared the Russians were watching from space. Across the world, at NII-88, Sergei Korolev had designed a Soviet spy satellite called Object D, but the CIA did not know what exactly it was capable of. Also under way was a follow-on espionage platform called Zenit, a modified version of the Vostok spacecraft that had been equipped with cameras to photograph American military installations from space. The Russians took great delight in rubbing what they learned in the face of the State Department. Once, using diplomatic channels, they passed a simple sketch of the exact shape of Lockheed’s top secret airplane to the CIA, whose employees were baffled as to how the enemy could have known such a thing, in view of the fact that operations personnel had been very careful to avoid the orbiting Soviet snoopers. Was there a double agent among them? The CIA, ever paranoid about KGB infiltration, worried in private that there could be a spy inside Area 51. Lovick finally figured it out: the Russians were using infrared satellites. In the desert heat, which could reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, the mock-up of the aircraft left a heat signature as it sat on the tarmac while technicians were waiting to hoist it up on the test pole. The sketch reflected that.
While the Russians watched from space, the CIA continued to monitor and translate the Soviets’ reaction to its aerial reconnaissance program. Memos from Soviet chief marshal of artillery S. Varentsov revealed the Russians’ growing furor over the speed at which the United States was advancing its spy planes. Varentsov lamented that the Russians’ own program had barely moved beyond technology from World War II. On the one hand, this was positive news for the CIA. In the world of overhead espionage, the Russians had been forced into a defensive posture. But it was also a double-edged sword. The Soviets couldn’t advance their aerial reconnaissance program because so much of their efforts went into advancing surface-to-air missile technology. If the capitalist foes were going to continue to fly over Mother Russia, Nikita Khrushchev was hell-bent on shooting them down.
Chapter Eight: Cat and Mouse Becomes Downfall
Francis Gary Powers never slept well the night before a mission flight. When his 2:00 a.m. wake-up call came on May 1, 1960, Powers felt particularly anxious. His flight had already been postponed twice. It was sweltering hot in the ancient city of Peshawar, Pakistan, and Powers had spent the night on a cot in an aircraft hangar inside the CIA’s secret facility there. Between the intense heat and the noise, sleep had been sporadic. The false starts had added a layer of uncertainty into the mix. Gary Powers got out of bed and took a shower. May was the hottest month in Pakistan. It was before 5:00 a.m. and yet the sun was already up, cooking the air. After only a few minutes, Powers would be drenched in sweat again. He dressed and ate his breakfast, all the while thinking about the radical mission that lay ahead. The Agency had never attempted to fly all the way across the Soviet Union before, from the southern border near Pakistan to the northern border near the Arctic Circle. From there, Powers would fly his U-2 to a secret CIA base in Norway and land. No Agency pilot had ever taken off and landed at two different bases in a U-2.
This overflight was particularly important to the CIA. Powers would gather valuable photographic information on two key sites. The first was the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, the Soviets’ busiest missile launch base. Tyuratam was Russia’s Cape Canaveral, the place from where Sputnik had been launched. For years the CIA was aware of only one launchpad at Tyuratam. Now there were rumored to be two, and a U-2 overflight in April revealed preparations for an upcoming launch — of what exactly, the CIA wanted to know. After Tyuratam, Powers would fly across Siberia and head up to a facility at Plesetsk, 186 miles south of the city of Archangelsk, in the Arctic Circle. Plesetsk was alleged to be the Soviet’s newest missile-launch facility and was dangerously close to Alaska. Powers’s flight would cover a record 3,800 miles, 2,900 of which would be inside the Soviet Union. He would spend nine nerveracking hours over enemy territory. That would be a lot of time for the Soviets to try to shoot him down. The reverse would have been unthinkable. Imagine a Russian spy plane flying unmolested over the entire United States, from the East Coast to the West, snapping photographs that could provide details at two-and-a-half-foot increments from seventy thousand feet up.
After breakfast, Powers sat in the hangar waiting for a final weather check. He had already sweated through his long johns. Mother Nature always had the final say. For Powers, a slight wind change meant the schedule for his
