that a Defense Nuclear Agency review board would later call “poorly instrumented and hastily executed.” They did so with total disregard for potentially catastrophic effects on the planet, not to mention the effect it would have decades later on the arms race in space. According to the same report, Killian was aware of the risk and took a gamble. There had been discussions regarding the possibility that the Teak and Orange shots really could burn holes in the ozone. But those “pre-event discussions were inconclusive,” the report said. And so the scientists went forward on the assumption that if a hole happened, it would later be closed.
In reality, Killian and others had no idea what would or would not happen when the megaton bomb exploded in the upper atmosphere. “And they didn’t factor in to their equations what could have happened if they failed,” recalls Al O’Donnell. “We were lucky. When the Teak bomb exploded right over our heads on Johnston Island, we thought we might be goners. It was an enormous bright white-light blast.” The men did not have radio communications for eight hours. “All the birds on the island that had been pestering us during the setup, these big fearless birds we called Gooney birds, after the bomb went off, they just disappeared. Or maybe they died.” When Admiral Parker of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project finally reached O’Donnell and the rest of the EG&G crew by radio from his office in the Pentagon, his words were: “Are you still there?”
If American citizens were in the dark about the megaton thermonuclear weapons tests being conducted by the American military in space, the Russians certainly were not. They forged ahead with an unprecedented weapons test of their own. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tsar Bomba, detonated over northern Russia, flattened entire villages in surrounding areas and broke windows a thousand miles away in Finland. Anyone within a fourhundred-mile radius who was staring at the blast would have gone blind. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told the United Nations Assembly that the purpose of the test was to “show somebody Kuzka’s mother”—to show somebody who’s boss. The world was racing toward catastrophe. Would the A-12 spy planes heading to Area 51 really help, or would overhead espionage prove to be nothing more than a drop in the bucket?
Chapter Ten: Wizards of Science, Technology, and Diplomacy
Harry Martin stood on the tarmac mesmerized by the beauty of the Oxcart. With its long, shiny fuselage, the airplane resembled a cobra with wings. As the master fuels sergeant, Martin had been at Area 51 since the very first days of the Oxcart program, back when the tarmac he was standing on was being poured as cement. Now, something big was happening at Area 51. The Oxcart had arrived and it was getting ready to fly. For more than a week, Martin had watched dignitaries come and go, touching down and taking off in Air Force jets. The generals would inevitably show up in the hangar where Martin worked because it was the place where the airplane stayed. Martin’s job was to prep the aircraft with fuel, which for weeks had been leaking as if through a sieve.
Martin had caught glimpses of General LeMay, shorter than he’d expected but chomping on his signature cigar like he did on the cover of magazines. Martin had also seen General Doolittle, of the harrowing World War II Doolittle Raid. Harry Martin never shook hands with any of the generals; they were busy and way above his pay grade. Besides, Martin’s left hand was wrapped in a bandage, which made work slightly challenging, although he was most grateful to still have a thumb. Martin had been working with a saw and a pipe the week before when his tool slipped and nearly severed his most important finger. Fortunately, a flight surgeon was working with a project pilot in the hangar next door and Martin got his thumb sewn together fast.
It was April 25, 1962. Just a few buildings down from where Martin worked, Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk sat in a recliner inside a Quonset hut taking a nap when a man from the Agency put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Lou, wake up!” The Oxcart was ready and it was time for Lou Schalk to fly. Two physiological support division officers helped Schalk into a flight suit, which looked like a coverall. There was no need for a pressure suit because today Schalk was only going to make a taxi test. Out on the tarmac, an engineer rolled up a metal set of stairs and Schalk climbed up into the strange-looking aircraft. There were no observers other than the crew. John Parangosky, who authored a secret interagency monograph called “The Oxcart History,” declassified in 2007, noted that if anyone had been watching he would have been unable to process what he was looking at. “A casual observer would have been startled by the appearance of this vehicle; he would have perhaps noticed especially its extremely long, slim shape, its two enormous jet engines, its long, sharp projecting nose, and its swept-back wings which appeared far too short to support the fuselage in flight.” It was a revolutionary airplane, Parangosky wrote, able to fly at three times the speed of sound for more than three thousand miles without refueling — all the way from Nevada to DC in less than an hour. “Toward the end of its flight, when fuel began to run low, it could cruise at over 90,000 feet.”
But of course there were no casual observers present at Area 51. On that sunny day at Area 51 in April of 1962, this was the only A-12 Oxcart that Lockheed had completed for the CIA so far.
As for all the remarkable things the aircraft had been meticulously designed to do, it wasn’t able to do any of them yet. Sitting on the tarmac, the aircraft was 160,000 pounds of titanium outfitted with millions of dollars’ worth of expensive equipment that no one yet knew how to work, certainly not above seventy thousand feet. Like its predecessor the U-2, the Oxcart was an aircraft without a manual. Unlike the U-2, this aircraft was technologically forty years ahead of its time. Some of the records the Oxcart would soon set would hold all the way into the new millennium.
Lou Schalk fired up the engines and began rolling down the runway for the taxi test. To everyone’s surprise, including Lou Schalk’s, the aircraft unexpectedly got lift. Given the enormous engine power, the aircraft suddenly started flying — lifting up just twenty feet off the ground. Stunned and horrified, Kelly Johnson watched from the control tower. “The aircraft began wobbling,” Johnson wrote in his notes, which “set up lateral oscillations which were horrible to see.” Johnson feared the airplane might crash before its first official flight. Schalk was equally surprised and decided not to try to circle around. Instead he set the plane down as quickly as he could. This meant landing in the dry lake bed, nearly two miles beyond where the runway ended. When it hit the earth, the aircraft sent up a huge cloud of dust, obscuring it from view. Schalk turned the plane around and drove back toward the control towers, still engulfed in a cloud of dust and dirt. When he got back, the Lockheed engineers ran up to the airplane on the metal rack of stairs. Kelly Johnson had only four words for Schalk: “What in Hell, Lou?” For about fifteen very tense minutes, Johnson had thought Lou Schalk had wrecked the CIA’s only Oxcart spy plane.
The following day, Schalk flew again, this time with Kelly Johnson’s blessings but still not as an official first flight. Harry Martin was standing on the tarmac when the aircraft took off. “It was beautiful. Remarkable. Just watching it took your breath away,” Martin recalls. “I remember thinking, This is cool. And then, all of a sudden, as Schalk rose up in the air, pieces of the airplane started to fall off!” The engineers standing next to Martin panicked. Harry Martin thought for sure the airplane was going to crash. But Lou Schalk kept flying. The pieces of the airplane were thin slices of the titanium fuselage, called fillets. Their sudden absence did not affect low-altitude flight. Schalk flew for forty minutes and returned to Area 51. It was mission accomplished for Schalk but not for the engineers. They spent the next four days roaming around Groom Lake attempting to locate and reattach the pieces of the plane. Still, it was a milestone for the CIA. Three years, ten months, and seven days had passed since Kelly Johnson first presented his plans for a Mach 3 spy plane to Richard Bissell, and here was the Oxcart, finally ready for its first official flight.
Agency officials were flown in from Washington to watch and to celebrate. Jim Freedman coordinated pickups and deliveries between McCarran Airport and the Ranch. It was a grand, congratulatory affair with lots of drinking in the newly constructed bar, called House-Six. Rare film footage of the historic event, shot by the CIA, shows men in suits milling around the tarmac slapping one another on the back over this incredible flying machine. They watch the aircraft take off and disappear from view. Schalk traveled up to thirty thousand feet, flew around in the restricted airspace for fifty-nine minutes, and came back down. His top speed was four hundred miles per hour. Watching from the tarmac was Richard Bissell, tall and gangly, wearing a dark suit and a porkpie hat. Bissell had been invited to attend the groundbreaking event as a guest of Kelly Johnson. It was a significant gesture; the two men had become friends, and Kelly Johnson was notably making a point. “Part of what made Kelly Johnson such a good man was that he was extremely loyal to the people he considered his friends,” Ed Lovick explains. For Bissell, the visit to Area 51 had to have been bittersweet. It would be the last time he would ever set foot at the facility he had overseen for
