Chapter Fourteen: Drama in the Desert
Before he became president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to ride through rural Texas in his convertible Lincoln Continental with the top down. According to his biographer Randall B. Woods, Johnson also liked to keep a loaded shotgun in the seat next to him, which allowed him to pull over and shoot deer easily. On the night of October 4, 1957, the then senator was entertaining a group of fellow hunting enthusiasts at his rural retreat, in the dining room of his forty-foot-tall, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned hunting blind that Johnson called his “deer tower.” All around the edge of the lair were powerful spotlights that could be turned on with the flip of a switch, blinding unsuspecting deer that had come to graze and making it easier to kill them.
It was an important night for Johnson, one that would set the rest of his life on a certain path. October 4, 1957, was the night the Russians launched Sputnik, and the senator began an exuberant antiCommunist crusade. That very night, once the guests had gone home and the staff of black waiters had cleaned up, Johnson retired to his bedroom with newfound conviction. “I’ll be dammed if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon,” he told his wife, Lady Bird.
At the time, Lyndon Johnson was not just any senator. He was the Democratic majority leader, which made him the most powerful legislator in the United States. Within hours of Sputnik’s launch, Johnson seized on the Red Moon moment for political gain. The Russians were a threat to America’s existence, he declared: “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses.”
For many Americans, Johnson’s reaction was easier to comprehend than President Eisenhower’s seemingly muted response.
Before he was president, Eisenhower had spent his career as a soldier. He was a five-star general. As former commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower had faced many a deadly threat. He had led the invasion at Normandy and commanded the Allied Forces in the last great German offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, which meant he and his men shot at a lot more than blinded deer. In October of 1957, he believed that the 184-pound Russian satellite called Sputnik was not a cause for panic or alarm.
The nation felt quite different. The public consensus was that Sputnik gave reason for serious concern. The orb was seen as ominous and foreboding, a visual portent of more bad things to come from the skies, with 4 percent of Americans claiming to have seen Sputnik with their own eyes. In reality, explained historian Matthew Brzezinski, “What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R7 rocket casing that [Sputnik’s designer Sergei] Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite,” which in reality could only be seen by a person using a high-powered optical device. Motivated by the public’s alarm, Senator Lyndon Johnson provided a foil to Eisenhower’s nonconfrontation, demanding a “full and exhaustive inquiry” from Congress to learn how the Russians had beaten the Americans into space. In doing so, Johnson cemented his persona as being tough on Communists. In turn, this made him an inadvertent advocate for missile defense and the military-industrial complex. Ultimately, it forced him to be a proponent for the Vietnam War.
Now, six years and one month after Sputnik, Lyndon Johnson was president. Seven days after Kennedy was shot dead, Johnson sat in the Oval Office with CIA director John McCone being briefed on Oxcart and Area 51. Johnson loved the idea of the Agency’s secret spy plane, but not for the reasons anyone expected. Johnson seized on one detail in particular: the aircraft’s speed. At the time, the world was under the impression that the Russians held the record for airspeed, which was 1,665 miles per hour. When Johnson learned the men at Area 51 had repeatedly beaten that record, he wanted to make that fact publicly known. What better way to begin a presidency than by one-upping the Russians?
In reality, outing the most expensive secret spy plane program ever undertaken in order to win a competition with the Russians did not make the best national security sense. Surfacing Oxcart would compromise the Agency’s technological pole position in the overhead espionage field. Oxcart was singularly capable of flying “any place in the world,” McCone explained. It was almost “invisible” to Soviet radar, with a “radar cross section in the order of 1/1000 of [a] normal aircraft.” If McCone had had a crystal ball, he could have told the president that the Oxcart was so far ahead of its time, it would hold aviation records for sustained height and speed through the end of the century. Also in the room were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, the administration’s most powerful trio. Conveniently for the Pentagon, all three men agreed with President Johnson that outing the Oxcart was a terrific idea.
The reason for the trio’s desire for transparency was that the Air Force had clear designs on cutting the CIA loose from the business of spy planes once and for all. Outing a program made the need for cover obsolete. Before Kennedy’s assassination, the Air Force high command had been writing secret proposals arguing for ways in which they could take over Oxcart. Four months earlier, Air Force commander General Schriever wrote a memo to Eugene Zuckert, secretary of the Air Force, suggesting that “an incident during the flight test program could force a disclosure.” The CIA had gotten lucky with Ken Collins’s Oxcart crash, General Schriever said, but if another one of the Agency’s secret spy planes were to crash “it would be extremely difficult to avoid some public release.” The subtext being that maybe there was a way that the Air Force could help facilitate this public disclosure. There was a final option, one that involved getting “the President on board.” A few weeks before Kennedy’s death, the Air Force had gone to him with a proposal to make Oxcart public; Kennedy had said to sit tight. Now it appeared that President Johnson was going to be much easier to manipulate.
To counter Air Force demands McCone tried a different approach, one that involved money. He told the president that more than half of Oxcart’s budget had already been spent producing fifteen airplanes.
To expose Oxcart now was a terrible idea, McCone said, not just in terms of national security but because it would be a colossal waste of money. Johnson agreed. But the president still wanted to one-up the Russians, so he settled on a slightly different plan. Through a veil of half-truths, he would out the Air Force’s attack version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, as the speed-breaker. The YF-12 would be given a false cover, the fictitious name A-11. Respecting McCone’s national security concerns, the actual A-12 Oxcart program — its true speed, operational ceiling, and near invisibility to radar — would remain classified top secret until the CIA declassified the Oxcart program, in 2007.
Three months later, on February 29, 1964, Johnson held a press conference in the International Treaty Room at the State Department. “The world record for aircraft speed, currently held by the Soviets, has been repeatedly broken in secrecy by the… A-11,” President Johnson declared from the podium, thrilled to give the Russians a poke in the ribs. At Area 51, caught off guard by the requirement to do a presidential dog-and-pony show, the 1129th Special Activities Squadron scrambled to get an airplane to Edwards Air Force Base in California for a press junket, which was called for immediately after the president’s grand announcement. Two YF-12s belonging to the Air Force but being tested at Area 51 were quickly flown in from Groom Lake and driven into a special hangar at Edwards. The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they set off the hangar’s sprinkler system, which mistook the high- temperature metal for a fire. When the press junket began, the aircraft were still dripping wet. Never mind; no one noticed. Like the president, the reporters were enamored by the notion of Mach 3 speed. Of much more significance was what the event meant to the CIA. The rivalry between the Agency and the Air Force for control over Oxcart was hotter than ever.
With the two departments’ gloves off, the fate of Oxcart now hung precariously in the balance. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara snidely told CIA director John McCone that he doubted the Oxcart would ever be used. If it was used, McNamara said, it would “probably have to be done without the specific knowledge of the President,” alluding to the Gary Powers shoot-down. Never again could a president be linked to a CIA aerial espionage mission. John McCone shot back that he had “every intention of using Oxcart and had so advised the President.” McNamara may have won the battle by getting President Johnson to surface part of the Oxcart program, but McCone was letting him know on behalf of the Agency that the Pentagon hadn’t yet won the war.
A second Air Force-Agency debate that involved the fate of the Oxcart, which in turn involved the fate of Area 51, centered on improvements in satellite and drone technology. McNamara told McCone that these two platforms would eventually eliminate the need for the Agency’s expensive, cumbersome Oxcart program. And yet both men knew that for the time being, Oxcart could deliver what satellites could not, and on two separate but equally important counts. In the six years since Sputnik, satellites had advanced to the degree that their spy images were good, though not great. But satellites had an inherent limitation in the world of espionage: they worked on fixed schedules. This would forever negate any element of surprise. The average satellite took ninety minutes to circle
