had actually worked.
Now, two decades later, at the Cuban missile crisis round table, Ledford showed the same foresight in preempting a potentially deadly situation. The first thing General Ledford did was present the CIA and the Air Force with a shoot-down analysis, detailing the odds for losing a U-2 on another overflight. The chances were one in six, Ledford said.
He pushed for the U-2 mission, arguing that it was better to know now if there really were nuclear missiles in Cuba than to wish you knew later on, when it could be too late. Once these cold hard facts were on the table, the heart of the debate became clear. The point of contention was not whether or not to fly the mission. Rather, it was who would fly the mission — the Air Force or the CIA. As it turned out, each organization wanted the job. President Kennedy felt the mission needed to involve a pilot wearing a blue U.S. Air Force pilot suit. Kennedy felt that if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down over Cuba, there would be too much baggage attached to the event, that it would rekindle hostilities over the Gary Powers shoot-down. But General Ledford knew what the president did not: that the CIA had higherquality U-2 airplanes, ones far less likely to end up getting shot down. Agency U-2s flew five thousand feet higher than their heavier Air Force U-2 counterparts, which were weighed down by additional reconnaissance gear. The CIA airplanes also had better electronic countermeasure packages, meaning they had more sophisticated means of jamming SA-2 missiles coming at them. So Ledford performed diplomatic wizardry by convincing the CIA to actually loan the Air Force its prized U-2 airplanes. With the fate of the free world at stake, the CIA and the Air Force agreed to work together to solve the crisis.
On October 14, an Air Force pilot flying a CIA U-2 brought home film footage of Cuba that the White House needed to see. Photographs showing nuclear missiles supplied by the Soviet Union and set up on missile stands in Cuba. Those eight canisters of film brought back by the CIA’s U-2 set in motion the Cuban missile crisis, bringing the world closer than it had ever come to all-out nuclear war. They would also give the work going on at Area 51 a shot in the arm. The Pentagon told the CIA they wanted the Oxcart operations ready immediately so the aircraft could be used to overfly Cuba. A CIA review of Oxcart, declassified in 2007, said it flatly: “The Oxcart program suddenly assumed greater significance than ever, and its achievement of operational status became one of the highest national priorities.”
Chapter Eleven: What Airplane?
Gardening helped CIA pilot Kenneth Collins relax. He had over a hundred rosebushes in his garden, which he and his wife, Jane, pruned together on weekends after Collins returned home from a long, mysterious week at the Ranch. At Area 51, where he worked as a project pilot, Collins went by the code name Ken Colmar. “Same first name because you will instantly respond to it when called,” Collins explains. “Colmar for the C, in case you had something monogrammed.” His call sign was Dutch 21 but most men on base called him the Iceman. The pressure-suit officers came up with the nickname. “I was known to show no emotion or irritation even after a particularly dangerous flight,” Collins recalls. The pressure-suit officers could gauge how tough a flight was by how sweaty a pilot’s underwear was when they helped pilots undress. Collins’s underwear was always remarkably dry.
Flying Oxcart was, to an Air Force pilot, the single most elite job in the nation at the time. Ken Collins “commuted” to Area 51 each week, flying in from sunny Southern California, where he and other pilots who now worked for the CIA pretended to live normal lives with their pretty wives and, ideally, a few children. Having a stable marriage and family had become a CIA-pilot mandate during Oxcart, something that was not in place during the U-2. It was Gary Powers’s alcoholic wife who’d triggered the change. Some in the Agency believed she put the secrecy of the entire U-2 program at risk with behavior that even they could not control. Once, Barbara Powers got it into her head to visit her husband at his clandestine post in Turkey. She made it as far as Athens before the officer assigned to watch her notified Powers that he would be out of a job if he couldn’t keep his impetuous wife in line. Ken Collins was told this story during his first interview at the Pentagon. Loose lips didn’t just sink ships, he was reminded; loose lips could trigger nuclear war. Collins also learned that his wife, Jane, would be subject to psychological screening were he to be accepted into a top secret program rumored to involve “space travel.”
Collins and his family were moved from their home in South Carolina to a Los Angeles suburb called Northridge and into a fourbedroom raised ranch with a two-car garage and an avocado tree out front. He was thirty-six years old. Jane attended church and collected antique china. All four of Jane and Ken Collins’s children, two boys and two girls, maintained good grades in school. The neighbors were told Mr. Collins worked for Hughes Aircraft Company. Collins was told to report nosy neighbors to the CIA, and if any foreign-borns tried to befriend the Collinses, they were to notify the Agency, who would look into the matter.
Each Monday morning, Collins left his home and drove to Burbank Airport, nine miles to the southwest. There, he and the other Oxcart pilots climbed aboard Constellation propeller planes and headed to Area 51, never with more than two pilots per airplane — a guideline put into place after the Mount Charleston crash eight years earlier. The deaths of those top Agency and Air Force managers and scientists had set progress on the U-2 program back several months. Now, in 1963, Oxcart was already more than a year behind schedule. The Agency could not afford to lose any pilots. The vetting process alone took eighteen months and getting familiar with the aircraft took another year.
After leaving Burbank, Collins and his fellow pilots were flown, two by two, up over the Mojave Desert to the northeast, past China Lake, and into the Tikaboo Valley. Flying into the restricted airspace above the Nevada Test Site, Collins would look out the window and make a mental note of the ever-growing landscape of giant craters. The appearance of a new, moonlike subsidence crater was often a weekly occurrence now that nuclear testing had moved underground. When seen from above, the landscape at the Nevada Test Site looked like a battlefield after the apocalypse. For Collins, the destruction was a solid visual reminder of what scorched earth would look like after a nuclear war.
The Agency couldn’t have chosen a more dedicated pilot. Collecting intelligence on dangerous reconnaissance flights was Ken Collins’s life mission; it was what he did best. He seemed to be propelled by a natural talent and kept alive by an unknown force Collins called fate. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins believes. “When it comes for you, it comes,” and for whatever reason it was not time for death to come to him yet. This was a notion Collins formulated during the Korean War while flying reconnaissance missions and watching so many talented and brave fellow pilots die. How else but by fate did he survive all 113 combat missions he had flown? On those classified missions, the young Collins was armed with only a camera in the nose of his airplane as he flew deep into North Korea, sometimes all the way over the Yalu River, being fired at by MiG fighter jets. During the war, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and also the coveted Silver Star for valor, the third-highest military decoration a member of the armed services can receive. Both medals were pinned on Collins’s chest before he turned twenty-four.
But now, as an Oxcart pilot, Collins kept his medals tucked away in a drawer, never mentioning that he had received them. As with many servicemen, glory was a difficult distinction to contemplate when so many of your fellows had died. Accepting fate as the hunter made things easier for Collins, which is how he dealt with the memory of his closest friend and former wingman from the Fifteenth Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Charles R. “Chuck” Parkerson. The two men had flown on many missions together, but there was one from which Parkerson never came home. “We had flown into North Korea and back out side by side,” Collins recalls. “We were almost home when Parkerson radioed me. He said the engine on his RF-80 had flamed out and he was unable to restart it. I saw he was losing altitude quickly and he knew that soon he would crash.” Parachuting into enemy territory meant certain death. “Over the radio, Parkerson asked me, ‘What should I do?’” Collins explains. “I said, ‘Fly out over the Yellow Sea and I’ll fly with you.’ I told him to bail out in the water and I’d send his coordinates back to base for a rescue team.” It seemed like a good idea, and Collins flew alongside his wingman as they headed toward the Yellow Sea. Parkerson prepared for a bailout. “But there was a problem,” Collins recalls. “The canopy on Parkerson’s RF-80 was stuck. Jammed. It wouldn’t open, which meant he was trapped inside the airplane. There was nothing I could do for my friend except to fly alongside him all the way until the end.” Collins watched Parkerson land his airplane on the sea. With Parkerson unable to get out of the sinking aircraft, Collins waited, watching from the air as his friend drowned. “When your time is up, it is up,” Collins recalls.
Ten years later, it was 1963, the Korean War was history, and there was an airplane to get ready at Area 51. After the twin-prop passed over the last set of hills on the Nevada Test Site’s eastern edge, the airstrip at Groom
