coyotes wail.
In the years that Collins had been test-flying the Oxcart at Area 51, the Department of Defense had been testing nuclear bombs with bravado. After a while, being awoken before dawn meant little to Collins, and he’d roll over and go back to sleep. But on this one particular morning something felt different. It was a banging he was hearing, not a boom. Collins opened his eyes. Someone was indeed banging on his Quonset hut door. Next came a loud voice that sounded a lot like Colonel Slater’s. Collins leaped out of bed and opened his door. Colonel Slater had an unusual look of concern, and without explanation, he ordered Collins to get into his flight suit as fast as he could. This was a highly unusual request, Collins thought. It was definitely before dawn. Behind where Slater stood on the Quonset hut stoop, Collins could see it was still dark outside. For a brief moment, he feared the worst. Had America gone to war with the Soviets? What could possibly force an unplanned Oxcart mission flight? Rushing to put on his clothes, Collins heard Colonel Slater waking up the flight surgeon who lived in the apartment quarters next door.
Collins followed Slater in a run toward the hangar where the Oxcart lived. There he was quickly briefed on the situation: the Pentagon had
called to say that a Russian reconnaissance balloon was flying across the United States, floating with the prevailing winds in a westerly direction. Collins was to find the Soviet balloon — fast. Normally, the flight surgeon would have spent two hours just getting Collins into his pressure suit. That morning Collins was suited up and sitting in the cockpit of the Oxcart in a little over thirty minutes. Up he went, blasting off the tarmac, north then east, on direct orders by the Pentagon to “hunt and find” the Soviet weather balloon visually and using radar.
Up in the air it dawned on Collins what a wild-goose chase he was on. What would a Russian reconnaissance balloon look like? What were the chances of making visual contact with such a thing? At speeds of more than 2,200 mph, he was traveling more than half a mile each second. Even if he saw the balloon, in just a fraction of a second it would be behind him. Even worse, what if he actually did get that close to the flying object? If the Oxcart hit anything while moving at Mach 3, the plane would break apart instantly and he’d be toast.
Flying somewhere over the middle of the continent, Collins briefly identified an object on radar about 350 miles away. As instructed, he flew around the object in the tightest circle he could perform at Mach 3, which meant his circle had a radius of about 400 miles. He never saw the balloon with his own eyes.
After Collins returned to base, engineers scrambled to read the information on the data recorder. The incident has never been declassified. Admitting that the Soviets invaded U.S. airspace— whether in a craft or by balloon — is not something any U.S. official has ever done. Collins never asked any follow-up questions. That’s how it was to be a pilot: the less you knew, the better. He knew too many fellow pilots from Korea who had come home from POW camps missing fingernails — if they came home at all. Now, ten years later, pilots shot down over North Vietnam were experiencing the same kinds of torture, maybe worse. The less you knew, the better. That was the pilots’ creed.
As deputy director of the CIA, Richard Helms was a huge fan of Oxcart. He worked closely on the program with Bud Wheelon, whose efforts earned him the title of first director of science and technology for the CIA. Now that Richard Bissell was gone, there were few men in the Agency as devoted to the Area 51 spy plane program as Wheelon and Helms. Whereas Wheelon saw his position at the CIA as a temporary one — he signed on for a four- year contract, fulfilled it, and left the CIA — Helms was a career Agency man. He’d worked closely with Bissell on the U-2 from its inception and he knew what important intelligence could come from overhead photographs. The United States learned more about the Soviets’ weapons capabilities from its first U-2 overflight than it had in the previous ten years from its spies on the ground. Off McNamara’s inquiry about possibly using the Oxcart on spy missions over North Vietnam, Helms made a personal trip out to Area 51 to sign off on Oxcart design specifications himself. Helms was also acutely aware of the Air Force’s plans to push Oxcart out of the way in favor of their own reconnaissance spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird. If Helms could get a mission for Oxcart, the chances of the CIA maintaining its supersonic espionage program greatly increased.
Almost everyone who visited Area 51 became enamored with the desert facility, and Helms was no exception. It was impossible not to be fascinated by the power and prestige the secret facility embodied. It was the quintessential boys’ club, both exotic and elite. Most of all, it gave visitors the sense of being a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC. There were no cars to drive — instead, Agency shuttles moved men around the base. No radio, almost no TV. As a visitor to Area 51, Helms was particularly careful not to step on any powerful Air Force toes. The base was, operations-wise, Air Force turf now. The CIA was in charge of missions, but there were no missions, which only underscored a growing sense of Agency impotence. The Air Force controlled most of the day-to-day operations on the base, including proficiency flights and air-to-air refuelings, which were practiced regularly so everyone in the 1129th Special Activities Squadron stayed in shape.
During his visit, Helms kept a relatively low profile, making sure to spend more of his time in the field — on the airstrip with the pilots and in the aircraft hangars with the engineers — than drinking White Horse Scotch with Air Force brass in the House-Six bar. During test flights, Helms liked to roll up his sleeves and stand on the tarmac when the Oxcart took off. He likened the experience to standing on the epicenter of an 8.0 earthquake and described the great orange fireballs that spewed out of the Oxcart’s engines as “hammers from hell.” Helms, an upper-middle-class intellectual from Philadelphia, loved colorful language. He’d once told a room of military men that the Vietnam War was “like an incubus,” a nightmarish male demon that creeps up on sleeping women and has intercourse with them. Helms’s grandiose language, most likely intentional, separated him from straight-talking military men.
Despite playing a key role in planning and executing covert operations in Vietnam, Richard Helms did not believe the United States could win the war there. This posture kept him out of step with Pentagon brass. Helms believed Vietnam was fracturing consensus about America’s need to win the Cold War, which he saw as the more important battle at hand. He was an advocate of using technology to beat the Russians by way of overhead reconnaissance from satellites and spy planes, which was why he liked Oxcart so much. And unlike Pentagon and State Department officials, who, for the most part, cautioned the president against ever sending spy planes over the Soviet Union again, Helms, like McCone, felt the president should do just that. “The only sin in espionage is getting caught,” Helms once said. He believed the best intelligence was “objective intelligence.” Photographs didn’t have an opinion and couldn’t lie. Helms attributed his respect for objectivity to his working as a journalist for the wire service United Press International. In 1936, a then twenty-four-year-old Richard Helms got his first big scoop: covering the Berlin Olympics as a reporter, he was invited to interview Adolf Hitler. Six years later, Helms would be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor organization to the CIA, to spy on Hitler’s men.
With Richard Helms at Area 51 in December of 1965, the Oxcart was finally declared operational. Celebrations were in order. One of the pilots offered to fly a C-130 Hercules on a seafood run to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where Werner Weiss had coolers full of lobsters, oysters, and crab legs ready to be taken to Area 51. Big-budget black operations had stomach-size perks too. After such feasts, the kitchen staff buried the shells in compost piles along the base perimeter, and the joke among Air Force support staff was that future archaeologists digging in the area would think Groom Lake had been an ocean as late as the 1960s.
As secret and compartmentalized as the base was, the mess hall was the one place where the men gathered together to break bread. Technical assistants would rub elbows with three- and four-star generals visiting there. Ernie Williams, who had helped find Area 51’s first well in 1955 and now helped coordinate meals, loved it when Werner Weiss invited him into the mess hall to eat steaks with generals who wore stars on their chests. And after the meal was over, the men would again go their separate ways. The Special Projects program managers and the engineering nerds usually retired to their quarters to play poker and drink bottled beer. The scientists were known to return to their respective hangars, where they’d stay up until all hours of the night engrossed in various problems they needed to solve. The Air Force guys went to the House-Six bar to roll dice, have a drink, and share war stories.
When on base, Richard Helms was known to stop in for a drink. He was a great conversationalist but almost always refrained from telling stories about himself. And as far as World War II was concerned, Helms rarely discussed the subject. In 1945, as a young OSS officer, Helms had worked in postwar Berlin. He was one of the key players in Operation Paperclip; Helms had been tasked with finding a group of Hitler’s former scientists and offering them positions on classified programs back in the United States. Jobs involving biological weapons, rockets, and stealth. Years later, Helms justified his recruitment of former Nazis by saying that if the scientists hadn’t come to work for us, they’d have gone to work for “them.” Helms knew things other men did not know. At the Agency he was the man who kept the secrets.
