In 1975, Helms would unwittingly become an internationally recognized figure famous for destroying CIA documents to avoid having their secrets revealed. After allegations surfaced that the CIA had been running a human-research program called MKULTRA— which involved mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD— Helms as director of the CIA was asked to take the stand. While testifying to Congress, Helms stated that he had ordered all the MKULTRA files destroyed two years earlier, in 1973.
In the labyrinthine organizational chart that kept men at Area 51 in their respective places, no one was more important to the spy plane project’s overall progress than the commander of the base, a position granted to an Air Force officer whose salary came from the CIA. In 1965, the position was filled by Colonel Slater. Slater was the ideal commander. He was astute, practical, and an excellent listener, which put him in direct contrast to the more elitist Colonel Holbury, who’d held the position before. What the pilots appreciated most about Slater was that he was funny. Not sarcastic funny, but the kind of funny that reminded pilots not to take their jobs so seriously all the time. One of the first things Colonel Slater did after taking command of the base was to hang a sign over the House-Six bar that listed Slip Slater’s Basic Rules of Flying at Groom Lake. There were only three rules.
Try to stay in the middle of the air.
Do not go near the edges of it.
The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.
Like all the pilots at Area 51, Slater flew every chance he got. Now, as commander of the base, he began each day by making the first run. Around five thirty each morning, coffee mug in hand, Slater was driven by one of the enlisted men to the end of a runway, where he’d jump in an F-101 and fly around the Box on what he called “the weather run.” Because Area 51 had a large box of restricted airspace, Slater could fly in a manner not seen at other Air Force bases. Colonel Roger Andersen, who had been recruited to Area 51 to work in the command post, remembers the first time he flew with Slater in a two-seater T-33 to Groom Lake. “We were doing proficiency flying. I’d been getting teased by the other pilots because my background was flying tankers for the Air Force, not jets,” Andersen explains. “Up in the air, Slater says to me, ‘You need to loosen up, Andersen, Let’s rack it around.’ At which point Slater does a loop, a roll, and a spin… in a row. You could do that kind of thing up at Area 51.”
Everyone knew stories about Slater’s flying career: flying against the Germans in World War II, flying as the detachment commander for the Black Cats, and of course the remarkable story of his flying an airplane with a dead engine for a hundred miles on a glide — through a hurricane — in 1946. As a young hero just back from the war, Slater had been chosen by the Army Air Forces to fly a brand-new P-80 Shooting Star on a training mission from March Air Force Base to Jamaica. The P-80 was the first jet fighter used by the Army Air Forces at a time when jets in America were relatively new. As Slater remembers it, he was “one hundred miles out at sea off of Key West when the engine quit. I was just north of Cuba, which was under hurricane. There was turbine failure and a flameout so I turned around and glided back to the Keys.” Jet airplanes do not normally glide without engine thrust, at least not without a skilled pilot at the controls. When a jet engine loses all power, it usually crashes. Slater rode the jet stream for a hundred miles over the Atlantic Ocean until he found an abandoned airstrip at Marathon Key, in Florida, on which to land. The amazing story made its way to the pages of the New York Times.
Richard Helms was a fan of Slater, and before leaving Area 51 to get back to Washington, Helms made sure to congratulate Colonel Slater on all the fine work that had been achieved to get Oxcart operational. Now Slater had to be prepared to fly himself to Washington on a moment’s notice on Oxcart’s behalf. Over the next several months, Slater and General Ledford would be asked to participate in the top secret covert-action review board the 303 Committee, which would be assigning Oxcart its mission. (The 303 Committee was a successor to the Special Operations Group, which Bissell had been in charge of during his tenure at the CIA.)
Slater flew himself to Washington in an F-101 more times than he could count. There, however eloquently the Agency advocated on the Oxcart squadron’s behalf, the Pentagon put up roadblocks. Slater’s input had little effect on the naysayers. He was looked upon as the man in charge of a billion-dollar black operations program, a golden goose that the Air Force desperately wanted to wrest from the CIA. Every time the Agency proposed a mission, the review board denied the CIA’s request.
That the groundbreaking spy plane was trapped in a stalemate between the CIA and the Air Force was, at first, unbelievable to Colonel Slater. Throughout his career, Slater had moved effortlessly between different armed services and intelligence worlds, applying his talents wherever they were needed most. As a twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot, Slater flew eighty-four missions over France and Germany in a P-47 Thunderbolt. When the Army desperately needed support from airmen during the Battle of the Bulge, Slater fought side by side with soldiers on the ground at the bloody Siege of Bastogne. Later, as commander of the Black Cat Squadron flying dangerous missions over mainland China, Slater wore both CIA and Air Force hats with ease. The common goal was gathering intelligence. Colonel Slater saw no rivalry among the men.
During that winter of 1966, flying back and forth between Area 51 and the Pentagon, Slater had a front-row seat for the power struggle between the Air Force and the CIA. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had changed his mind again on the usefulness of Oxcart in Vietnam. He decided to wait until the Air Force SR-71 program came online. Bud Wheelon believes that “McNamara was delaying finding a mission for the Oxcart on purpose. He was an empire builder. Oxcart did not fit into his empire because it was never his.” With each month that passed, the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird was that much closer to being operations-ready, and the men in charge of Blackbird were in McNamara’s chain of command. As soon as the Air Force’s spy plane was ready, the CIA’s almost identical spy plane would be out of a job.
In June of 1966, Richard Helms was made director of the CIA. Now one of the most powerful men in Washington, Helms lobbied hard on Oxcart’s behalf, and in July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff voted in favor of sending Oxcart over North Vietnam to gather intelligence on missile sites there. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk dug in their heels and again offered dissent. Both men argued that putting CIA planes on the ground at the U.S. Air Force base in Okinawa, Japan, posed too great a political risk. McNamara was playing the same card he had played with John McCone when McCone was running the CIA, namely, that if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down on an espionage mission, the president would face the same backlash that Eisenhower had after the Gary Powers incident.
In August, a vote for or against Oxcart deployment was tallied in the presence of President Johnson. The majority voted against deployment, and the president upheld that decision. The ice around the Oxcart program was getting thin. Colonel Slater responded as best he knew how: when the going gets tough, the tough keep flying. Back at Area 51, he was determined to keep his men mission-ready. There was no point in letting his men know that the program was on the verge of collapse. Who could have imagined that the seminal Oxcart was in danger of being mothballed before it ever got a job? Instead, Slater gave his men a new goal. He wanted them to shave six days off the time it took the squadron to go from mission notification to deployment overseas. It had been a twenty-one-day response time; Slater now wanted it reduced by nearly 30 percent.
Area 51 became like a Boy Scout camp on steroids, a stomping ground for the world’s fastest and now most expensive airplane. The six aircraft that would be used for deployment were put through a whole new battery of flight-simulation tests. Commander Slater kept pilot morale high and Pentagon dissent at bay. A bowling alley was built. The pilots kept in shape playing water sports in the Olympic-size swimming pool. They kept their minds clear flying model airplanes and hitting golf balls off the dry lake bed up into the hills. Even the contractors were encouraged to pick up the pace. Slater challenged a lazy work crew to dig a lake. Five decades later, Groom Lake’s artificial body of water would still be referred to as Slater Lake. With the aircraft now flying at full speed and maximum height, it was time to break performance records. In December of 1966, one of the pilots set a speed record that would last into the twenty-first century. Bill Park flew 10,195 miles in a little over six hours at an average speed of 1,660 miles per hour. Park had flown over all four corners of America and back to the base in less time than most men spend at the office on any given day. To the project pilots itching for missions, it seemed like they could be deployed any day. And then, in January of 1967, tragedy struck.
Project pilot Walt Ray was, by all accounts, a terrific pilot. He and his new wife, Diane, also made for good company with Ken Collins and his wife, Jane. Diane and Jane did not have to keep up any pretenses; they both accepted that they had no idea what their husbands really did besides fly airplanes. The Rays and the Collinses lived close to each other in the San Fernando Valley, and they would often go on holidays together. “Once we took a small prop plane and flew down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and spent a couple days down there playing tennis, swimming, and flying around,” Collins recalls. “There were so few runways in Mexico in the early sixties, mostly we landed in big fields. The goats would see us coming, or hear us coming; they’d run away, and we’d land. Walt Ray
