Along with a crew of more than one hundred men, the Agency brought its own horses to the crash site. Men from Groom Lake took to the desert terrain on horseback and began their search. For two days they scoured the ground, looking for stray pieces of airplane as well as for flight papers and maps that had been in the cockpit with Collins. “By the time we were done, we’d combed over every single square inch of ground,” Pizzo recalls. A massive C-124 transport plane hauled the pieces of the airplane back to Area 51. In a heavily guarded hangar there, what was left of the airplane was spread out, piece by piece, in an effort to re-create its shape.
Richard Bissell’s departure from Area 51 a year earlier had left a huge power vacuum at the base. There was a general feeling among the men working there now that the vacuum was being filled by Air Force brass. This made perfect sense. Whereas the U-2 was, in essence, a motorized glider, the A-12 Oxcart was the highest, fastest, most state-of-the-art piloted aircraft in the world. For men who prided themselves on airpower — as did everyone involved in the U.S. Air Force — the supersonic Oxcart was the top dog. The Area 51 facility was now one of the Air Force’s most prestigious billets, a place where officers got to be in charge of their “own little air force,” as Major General Paul Bacalis had once said. What this meant was that Pentagon favorites, usually World War II heroes who had survived dangerous, death-defying missions, were rewarded with key positions at Area 51. Men like Colonel Robert Holbury.
At Area 51, Holbury’s official title was air commander of the U.S. Air Force Special Activities Squadron at Las Vegas, the nonclassified reference name for Oxcart. A former fighter pilot during World War II, Holbury had been given a commendation by General Patton for a dangerous low-flying reconnaissance mission over the Saar River, in western Germany, which he survived despite coming under heavy enemy fire. This meant Holbury was the official wing commander at the base when Ken Collins crashed the first Oxcart spy plane. In Air Force culture, when an airplane crashes, someone has to take the blame. Collins explains: “In the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mind-set, if there’s an accident, the wing commander suffers the consequences.” Instead, Collins believes, Holbury tried to get Collins to be the fall guy. “Holbury didn’t want blame; he wanted a star. He wanted to become a general, so he tried to put the blame on me. After the crash, even before the investigation, he requested that I be fired.”
Collins was unwilling to accept that. Fortunately for Collins’s career, Kelly Johnson, the builder of the aircraft, didn’t care about blame as much as he wanted to find out what had gone wrong with his airplane. Listening to Collins describe what had happened during the debriefing, Johnson couldn’t figure out what caused the aircraft to crash. He wondered if there was something Collins had forgotten, or was maybe leaving out. “I was clear in my mind that the crash was a mechanical error and not a pilot error,” Collins explains. “So when Kelly Johnson asked would I try unconventional methods like hypnosis and truth serum, I said yes. I was willing to do anything I could to get to the truth.” While the Pentagon’s accident board conducted a traditional investigation, Collins submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of the crash.
Inside the flight surgeon’s office at Lockheed, Collins sat with a CIA-contracted hypnotist from Boston, “a small, rotund man dressed in a fancy suit,” as Collins recalls. “He tried very hard to put me in a trance, only it didn’t work. I don’t think he realized that hypnotizing a fighter pilot was not as easy as he thought it might be.” Next, Collins was injected with sodium thiopental, also known as truth serum. Collins remembers the day well. “I told my wife, Jane, I was going to work for a few hours, which was unusual to begin with because it was a Sunday. The point of the treatment was to see if I could remember details other than those I relayed in the original debrief with the CIA. But yes, even with the sodium pentothal in my system, everything I said was exactly the same. The treatment takes a lot out of you and after it was over, I was very unsteady on my feet. Three CIA agents brought me home late that Sunday evening. One drove my car, the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was still loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.”
When Collins woke up the next morning, he figured the only conclusion his wife could have drawn was that her husband had gone out on a Sunday and gotten drunk. Feeling bad, he confided in her that he’d been given truth serum and could not say anything more. Jane told her husband a story of her own. She said that he didn’t have to explain further because she had a pretty good idea what had happened to him on the job. Earlier in the week, Jane explained, immediately after Collins’s crash, family friend and fellow Oxcart pilot Walt Ray had broken protocol and called Jane from Area 51 to tell her that Ken had bailed out of an airplane but that he was all right. “Where is he?” Jane had asked. Walt Ray said he didn’t know. Jane then asked, “How can you know if Ken is okay if you don’t even know where he is?” At the time Walt Ray didn’t have an answer for that. So now, hangover or no hangover, Jane Collins was happy to have her husband home alive. After a lengthy investigation it was determined that a tiny, pencil-size part called a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash. The pitot tube measured the air coming into the aircraft and thereby controlled the airspeed indicator. Unlike in a car, where the driver can feel relative speed, in a plane, without a proper reading from an airspeed indicator, a pilot has no awareness of how fast he is going, and without correct airspeed information a pilot cannot land. When Collins flew into the cloud, the pitot tube reacted adversely to the moisture inside and froze. The false airspeed indicator caused the aircraft to stall. As a result of the stall, the Oxcart flipped upside down and crashed.
Ken Collins’s crash in Utah caused the CIA to redouble its secrecy efforts regarding operations at Area 51. The press was told an F-105 crashed, and as of 2011, the Air Force still has it listed that way. Worried its cover was about to be blown, the Agency decided to shore up an accounting of who knew what about Oxcart. An analyst was assigned the task of combing through all the files the CIA had been keeping on journalists, civilians, and even retired Air Force personnel — anyone who showed a curiosity about what might be going on at Area 51. Beginning in the spring of 1963, the noted instances of what the CIA called “Project Oxcart Awareness Outside Cleared Community” drastically increased. Declassified in 2007 and never before made public, the CIA had been monitoring phone conversations of journalists who seemed interested in the Oxcart program. “Mr. Marvin Miles, Aviation Editor, Los Angeles Times, telephonically contacted Westinghouse Corp., Pittsburgh, attempting to confirm if employees of that firm were traveling covertly to ‘the desert’ each week in connection with top secret Project which he suspects may have ‘CIA’ association,” read one memo. Another stated that “Mr. Robert Hotz, Editor Aviation Week, indicated his awareness of developments at Burbank.” Of particular concern to the Agency was an article in the Hartford Courant that referred to the “secret development” of the J-58 engine. Another article in the Fontana, California, paper the Herald News speculated about the existence of Area 51, calling it a “super secret Project site.” An increasingly suspicious CIA worked overtime to monitor journalists, and they also monitored regular citizens, including a Los Angelesbased taxi driver who was described in a memo marked “classified” as once having asked a Pratt and Whitney employee if he was “en route to Nevada.”
With the Air Force steadily gaining a foothold in day-to-day operations at Area 51, it was the Air Force that the CIA should have been watching more closely in terms of the future of the spy plane program as a whole. It was not as if there weren’t writing on the wall. In the year before Collins’s crash, the Air Force had decided it wanted a Mach 3 Oxcart-type program of its own. Just as it had with the U-2, the Pentagon moved in on the CIA’s spy plane territory. Only with the Oxcart, the Air Force ordered not one but three Air Force variants for its stable. One version, the YF-12A, would be used as an attack aircraft, its camera bay retrofitted to hold two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. The second Oxcart variant the Air Force ordered could carry a drone on its back. The third was a two-seater version of the CIA’s stealth spy plane, only instead of being designed to conduct highspeed, high-altitude reconnaissance missions over enemy territory during peacetime, the Air Force supersonic spy plane was meant to go in and take pictures of enemy territory immediately after a nuclear strike by U.S. bomber planes — to see if any strategic targets had been missed. Designated the RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally inverted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech. Since the president is rarely ever “corrected,” the Air Force changed its letter designation, which is how the SR-71 Blackbird got its name. (Originally, the letters stood for “Reconnaissance/Strike.”)
There was no end to the irony in all of this. The Air Force’s Mach 3 airplanes were a far cry from President Eisenhower’s original idea to let the CIA create a spy plane with which to conduct espionage missions designed to prevent nuclear war. This new Air Force direction underscored the difference in the two services: the CIA was in the business of spying, and the Air Force was in the business of war.
There were other motives in play, including the ego of General Curtis LeMay. The Air Force had already spent eight hundred million dollars developing the B-70 bomber airplane — a massive, triangleshaped, Mach 3, eight- engined bomber that had been General LeMay’s passion project since its inception in 1959. When a fleet of eighty- five of these giant supersonic bombers was first proposed to Congress, LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Command, had his proposition met with cheers. But the Gary Powers shoot-down in May of 1960 had exposed the vulnerability of LeMay’s B-70 bombers, which would fly at the same height as the U-2. In 1963 LeMay was no longer head of the Strategic Air Command — instead, he was President Kennedy’s Air Force chief of staff. Despite evidence