showing the B-70 bomber was not a practical airplane, LeMay was not about to give up his beloved bomber without a fight.
When the CIA first briefed President Kennedy on how high and how fast the A-12 Oxcart would fly, the president was astonished. His first question, according to CIA officer Norman Nelson, was “Could it be converted into a long-range bomber to replace the B-70?” LeMay was in the room when Kennedy asked the question. The thought of losing his pet program to the Agency drove General LeMay wild. He lobbied the Pentagon to move forward with the B-70, and he stepped up his public relations campaign, personally promoting the B-70 bomber program in magazine interviews from Aviation Week to Reader’s Digest. He was committed to appealing to as many Americans as possible, from aviation buffs to housewives. But by 1963, Kennedy was leaning toward canceling the B-70. In a budget message, he called it “unnecessary and economically unjustifiable.” Congress cut back its B-70 order even further. The original order for eighty-five had already been cut down to ten, and now Congress cut that to four.
LeMay was furious. He flew from Washington, DC, to Burbank, California, to see Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works. Longtime rivals, Kelly Johnson greeted LeMay with skepticism when LeMay asked for a briefing about the A-12. After Johnson was finished, LeMay gave Johnson a quid pro quo. “Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby anymore against the B-70,” LeMay said. Provided Kelly Johnson complied, LeMay promised to send Lockheed an Air Force purchase order for an interceptor version of Lockheed’s A-12 Oxcart, in addition to the preexisting order. For Lockheed, this would mean a big new invoice to send to the Air Force. At first, Kelly Johnson was suspicious of LeMay’s sincerity. That changed just a few weeks later when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed up at the Skunk Works with the secretary of the Air Force and the assistant secretary of defense in tow. Now McNamara asked for a briefing on the A-12, during which he took “copious notes.” Within a matter of months, the Pentagon ordered twenty-five more A-12 variants. The Pentagon already had a catchy name for its versions of the Oxcart. They would call them Blackbirds. Black because they had been developed in the dark by the CIA, and birds because they could fly. The meeting touched off the long-running battle between the two agencies over control of Area 51 and control of any U.S. government asset with wings. But this is exactly what had happened with the U-2. The CIA did all of the heavy lifting to get the aircraft aloft, only to have the program eventually taken over by the Pentagon for the Air Force.
At the Ranch, it was business as usual. No one but the generals had any idea that the CIA’s spy plane program now officially had in the Pentagon a formidable rival that threatened its very existence. Instead, pilots, engineers, operators, scientists, and Air Force enlisted men worked triple shifts, around the clock, to get the A-12 Oxcart mission ready. These were the men who made up and supported the 1129th Special Activities Squadron at Groom Lake.
The J-58 jet engines built by Pratt and Whitney had taken forever to finish but now they were ready to fly. In January of 1963 they were finally delivered to the Ranch. A host of new problems occurred when the engines were first powered up. In one instance, engineers suspected a foreign object was stuck in an engine’s heart, called the power plant, and was damaging internal parts. An X-ray showed the outline of a pen that had fallen into the engine’s cover, called a nacelle, during final assembly in Burbank. From then on, Lockheed workers got coveralls without breast pockets. There were other problems. The engines worked like giant vacuums. Once powered up on the tarmac, they sucked in every loose object lying around, including rocks and metal screws. As a solution, Area 51 workers took to sweeping and then vacuuming the runway before each flight. It was a tedious but necessary job.
The next goal was to get the airplane to cruise at Mach 3. Nearly five times as fast as any commercial airplane, this was an aerodynamic feat that had never been accomplished before. Pushing through the lower Mach numbers was a laborious and dangerous task. Performance margins were met gradually, with a new set of challenges cropping up each day. As the airplane reached higher speeds, the 500-plus-degree temperatures began melting electrical components, many of which had to be redesigned and rewired. Chuck Yeager is credited with breaking the sound barrier in 1947, but every time a new aircraft moves through the speed of sound, which is 768 miles per hour, complications can arise. In the case of the Oxcart, the sonic shock unexpectedly caused the fuselage to flex in such a way that many structural parts became dangerously compromised. These parts had to be redesigned and replaced.
Some performance benchmarks came surprisingly quickly. In July of 1963, Lou Schalk flew briefly at Mach 3, much to the Agency’s delight. But sustaining flight for ten minutes at Mach 3 took another seven months to achieve. Every flight was like an operational mission, with navigators plotting a course and making maps days before as they worked to test the Oxcart’s internal navigation system, or INS. “When you’re flying at that altitude and that speed, you need big checkpoints to validate information from the INS,” recalls navigator Sam Pizzo. “Any old geographical landmark, like a mountain or a river, would not do. The Oxcart traveled too fast. Pilots would have to look for landmarks on the scale of the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes,” says the veteran navigator. “You can’t imagine what new territory this was for a navigator. No amount of experience can prepare you when you work on an airplane that goes two or three times as fast as anything you navigated for before.”
The essence of Area 51 was that everything that happened there happened big. Because all efforts were being made on orders of the president, and given the colossal scale of secrecy surrounding the project, there was a deeply patriotic sense that the free world depended on the work being performed at Area 51. The men worked tirelessly and with phenomenal ingenuity to overcome challenges that would have stymied countless others. And yet the strange paradox underlying all efforts at the Ranch was that Project Oxcart was also subject to unforeseeable world events. It could be given the ax at a moment’s notice — which is what almost happened on November 22, 1963.
It was late in the day after a rainstorm and Captain Donald Donohue was working with a crew out on the dry lake bed. An F-101 chase plane had run off the airstrip and sunk into a layer of gypsum that was several inches deep. Working with a group of engineers and mechanics, Donohue led the efforts to lay down several long planks of steel that could then be used to tow the airplane out of where it had become stuck in the soggy lake bed.
“Pizzo came out,” Donohue remembers. “He looked kinda pale. Then he said, ‘Clean up and go home.’ Well, something was not right. Sam Pizzo was a lot more talkative than that. Then he said something to the effect of ‘We’ll call you if we need you to come back.’”
“What the hell is going on?” Donohue remembers asking. “President Kennedy has just been assassinated, in Dallas,” Pizzo said solemnly.
It was a terrible shock, Donohue remembers. “Our commander in chief. Dead? I recall it like it was yesterday. Pizzo was right. We had to go home and wait this thing out. When [Lyndon] Johnson was vice president, he was entirely unaware about the existence of the A-12 program. And he didn’t have a clue about Area 51.” The future of Oxcart was contingent on the new president’s call.
With President Kennedy dead, Lyndon Johnson would be briefed on the CIA’s secret domestic base by CIA director John McCone on his eighth day as commander in chief. Until then, what Johnson would decide about the CIA’s supersonic spy plane program was anybody’s guess. The relationship between a new president and the CIA is always tenuous starting out. What happened to President Kennedy with the CIA and the Bay of Pigs raised the bar in terms of jeopardy for all future presidents of the United States. Only time would tell if Lyndon Johnson would authorize the completion of the Agency’s Mach 3 spy plane out at Area 51.
Chapter Twelve: Covering Up the Cover-Up
Jim Freedman remembers the first time he brought up the subject of UFOs with his EG&G supervisor at Area 51. It was sometime in the middle of the 1960s and “UFOs were a pretty big thing,” Freedman explains. Flying saucer sightings had made their way into the news with a fervor not seen since the late 1940s. “I heard through the rumor mill that one of the UFOs had gone to Wright-Pat and was then brought to a remote area of the test site,” Freedman says. “I heard it was in Area 22. I was driving with my supervisor through the test site one day and I told him what I had heard and I asked him what he thought about that. Well, he just kept looking at the road. And then he turned to me and he said, ‘Jim, I don’t want to hear you mention anything like that, ever again, if you want to keep your job.’” Freedman made sure never to bring the subject of UFOs up again when he was at work.
In the mid-1960s, sightings of unidentified flying objects around Area 51 reached unprecedented heights as
