sailboard out to Area 51, and the pilots pulled rank and got the men in the machine shop to affix wheels to the bottom of the board. “We took the thing out to Groom Lake when the wind was blowing really hard,” Trapp recalls. “It didn’t go that fast but we didn’t care.”
Of all the pastimes, the unanimous favorite was flying model airplanes using remote control. “We had two areas for flying model planes,” Trapp recalls. “Out on the grass by the golf course, and on the tarmac out on the dry lake. Sometimes the airplanes would go so far and so high they’d get lost. A guy would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, when you’re out in the helicopter, can you keep your eye out for my model plane? It’s got a five-foot wing span and yellow wings.’ We found ways to entertain ourselves at Area 51. We had to; there weren’t any girls.”
The man who took the model airplane flying most seriously was Frank Murray. He was also the chase pilot with the most flying time during Project Oxcart. “You could always find Frank sitting in his room gluing model airplanes together,” Colonel Slater recalls. “That was his idea of fun. Or maybe he was the only guy at 51 who wasn’t half-drunk at eleven o’clock at night.” Which is how Murray accumulated the most flying time. “If somebody’s kid got hurt in the middle of the night, which happened more than you think, and I need a pilot to get someone off base fast, I’d round up Frank,” Colonel Slater explains. When master fuels sergeant Harry Martin’s grandfather died, it was Frank Murray who flew him back east so he could get to the funeral in time. “Frank was always willing to do the job,” Colonel Slater explains. “Most people require time off from flying. Not Frank.”
Murray flew model airplanes to keep his head clear for flying real airplanes. “Everyone had their different thing,” Colonel Slater says. “Bud Wheelon from CIA used to want to play tennis at midnight when he was on base. Some liked to go hunting up in the mountains by the old Sheehan mine. Holbury used to like to make the guard dogs run. Some guys threw rocks at rattlesnakes. I liked to drive around in the jeep and find petrified wood.”
As an Oxcart chase pilot, Murray spent his days and nights chasing the Mach 3 airplane in the F-101. The Voodoo was a two-seat, supersonic jet fighter the Air Force used to accompany the Oxcart on takeoffs and landings. “We flew it with Oxcart up through the special operating area, or Yuletide, which was the airspace just north of the base,” Murray explains. “The Agency had us fly alongside the Oxcart in the Voodoo until we couldn’t keep up with the Oxcart anymore.” Flying chase meant Murray got assigned most of the grunt work and enjoyed little of the glamour. “I was a little jealous of the Oxcart pilots,” he admits. “How can a pilot not be? But I was happy as a pig in the Voodoo. For a farm boy from San Diego, flying chase for the 1129th was a good time.”
Murray flew the F-101 doing just about everything that needed to be done in support of Oxcart operations. This included flying against the Red Dog simulators, observing tanker refuels, overseeing takeoffs and landings, and flying Lockheed photographers around on CIA photo shoots. But Murray’s path in life took a significant redirection when General Ledford, the head of the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, decided he wanted to learn how to fly the F-101 while he was overseeing activities at Area 51. Murray recalls: “The general had been a bomber pilot in World War Two but he hadn’t ever flown anything as fast as the Voodoo could go, which was around twelve hundred or thirteen hundred miles per hour. So he decided that he wanted to learn how to fly it and when it came to choosing an IP, an instructor pilot, the general chose me.”
Murray now had to teach a legendary war hero, someone who also happened to be the highest-ranking military officer on the Oxcart program, how to fly supersonic. It might have been a daunting task. Except that it was not in Frank Murray’s character to be apprehensive. To Murray, it sounded like fun. “Out at the Ranch we had eight 101s that ran chase and one of them was a two-holer, with two cockpits and two sticks. ‘Come on, Frankie,’ the general said. He got in the back and up we went.”
General Ledford began to spend more and more time at the Ranch, where, in addition to the serious work being done, operations had taken on a boys’ club atmosphere. After a day of intense flying, nights were spent eating, socializing, and having drinks. “Sometimes, on the late side of things after dinner, Ledford would get a hair in his hat that he wanted to get back to Washington to see his wife, Polly,” Murray says. “He’d slap me on the back. That was my cue to take him home.” Home, in Washington, DC, was 2,500 miles away, and with supersonic aircraft at one’s disposal, this could actually happen this late at night. “Ledford was my student but he was also the general so on these trips home, I started letting him sit in the front of the plane; I’d sit in back. Well, all those hours flying back and forth from Area 51 to Washington, that cemented it. He was my boss but he also became my friend.” Ledford had other friends as well, several in high places at the Air Force, which made getting back to the East Coast from Nevada in the middle of the night a relatively easier trip. “Ledford had a buddy who was still in SAC, an air division commander at Blytheville Air Force Base in northeast Arkansas, just about halfway between 51 and Washington. Ledford would radio him when we were up in the air approaching the next state over and he’d say, ‘Have you got a tanker in the area?’ If he did or didn’t you could bet your fifty there’d be a tanker lining up next to you somewhere over Arkansas,” Murray says. What this meant was that when Murray and the general were traveling from Area 51 to the East Coast late at night, they never even had to stop for gas.
After a little more than two hours in the air, the men would land at Andrews Air Force Base and taxi up to the generals’ quarters — similar to a luxury hotel suite on the base — and enjoy a postflight scotch. “Ledford had a fancy setup on base quarters that had a fully equipped bar,” Murray explains. “We’d have a pop and chat a little before his wife, Polly, arrived to pick him up and take him home. I’d spend the night in the generals’ quarters. Get some sleep and in the morning head home to 51.”
It was an exciting time for Frank Murray. He couldn’t have imagined living this life. Only a few years earlier, he’d been flying Voodoos at Otis Air Force Base as part of the Air Defense Command when he had seen an interesting sign tacked on a bulletin board that read NASA is looking for F-101 chase pilots. He thought working for NASA sounded like fun. He had no idea that was just a cover story and that the Air Force, not NASA, was really looking for chase pilots for the Oxcart program at Area 51. Murray applied and got in. He moved the family to Nevada and swore an oath not to tell anyone what he did, not even Stella, his wife. But he knew his family would be super proud of him. For a farm boy from San Diego, he was at the top of his game.
While Project Oxcart worked to get mission-ready, back in Washington the widening of the conflict in Vietnam by the Communists in the north was becoming a nightmare for President Johnson. He had won the favor of the people back in 1957 by declaring Communism to be the world’s greatest threat. In comparison to the thermonuclear-armed Soviet Union, Vietnam was to Johnson a sideshow. But it was also a piece in the widely held domino theory: if Vietnam fell to Communism, the whole region would ultimately fall. President Johnson had inherited Vietnam from President Kennedy when it was a political crisis and not yet a war. That changed in the second summer Johnson held office, in August of 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon declared that the U.S. Navy had suffered an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam against the USS Maddox, and the National Security Agency had evidence, McNamara said. This event allowed Johnson to push the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress, which authorized war. (In 2005 NSA released a detailed confession admitting that its intelligence had been “deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack.”) To avenge the USS Maddox attack, Johnson ordered air attacks against the North Vietnamese, sending Navy pilots on bombing missions over North Vietnam. When a number of U.S. pilots were shot down, the North Vietnamese took them as prisoners of war.
The war’s escalation led Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to perform an about-face regarding Oxcart. The Agency’s spy plane could be vitally useful after all, McNamara now said, certainly when it came to gathering intelligence in North Vietnam. The Agency knew the Russians had begun supplying surface-to-air missile systems to the Communists in North Vietnam, and now they were shooting down American boys. Both the Air Force and the Agency sent U-2s on reconnaissance missions, and these overflights revealed that missile sites were being set up around Hanoi. But the Pentagon needed far more specific target information. In June, McNamara sat down with the CIA and began drawing up plans to get the Oxcart ready for its first mission at last.
Chapter Fifteen: The Ultimate Boys’ Club
At Groom Lake throughout the 1960s, at least once a month and always before dawn, base personnel would be shaken from their beds by a violent explosion. When the rumbling first started happening, Ken Collins would leap from bed as a sensation that felt like a massive earthquake rolled by. A nuclear bomb was being exploded next door, underground, just a few miles west of Oxcart pilots’ quarters. Next, the blast wave would hit Collins’s Quonset hut and then roll on, heading across the Emigrant Mountain Range with a surreal and unnatural force that made the
