perimeter until he reached Washington State. There, he took another left turn and flew down over Oregon and into California. Finally, he took the aircraft down to twentyfive thousand feet and prepared for a scheduled refuel. Minutes later, Slater met up with the KC-135 that had been dispatched from the Air Force’s 903rd Air Refueling Squadron out of Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, California.
The process of taking on fuel was one of the more dangerous things an Oxcart pilot could do. In order to connect its fuel line to the tanker, the aircraft had to slow down to between 350 and 450 mph, so slow it could barely keep its grip on the sky. The issue of speed was equally taxing on the flying fuel tank. The KC-135 tanker had to travel at its top speed just to keep up with the slowed-down triple-sonic airplane. This was always a slightly nerve-racking process, complicated for Colonel Slater by the fact that a call came in over the emergency radio at exactly that time. Whatever was going on back at Area 51 that merited this emergency call was most likely not a welcome event.
Slater answered. It was Colonel Paul Bacalis, the man who’d taken over Ledford’s job as director of the Office of Special Activities for the CIA. Bacalis told Slater that an urgent call had come in for him from the Pentagon and he should get back to Area 51 immediately.
“I’m refueling,” Colonel Slater said.
“Finish and dump it,” Bacalis said. “Can’t it wait?” Colonel Slater asked. “No,” Bacalis said. “Where are you?” “I’m over California,” Colonel Slater said.
“Head out to sea, dump the fuel, and come home” was Colonel Bacalis’s command.
Slater let loose forty thousand pounds of fuel and watched it evaporate into the atmosphere. It was critical that he save ten thousand gallons of fuel to get home, not much more and definitely not less. Too little fuel and you wound up like Walt Ray. Too much fuel meant the aircraft could blow out its brakes on landing and overshoot the runway. Now, Slater needed to make a quick U-turn to head home. When traveling three times the speed of sound, the Oxcart needed 186 miles of space just to make the hook. This meant Slater’s U-turn took him from off the coast of Big Sur to high above Santa Barbara on a tight curve.
When Slater got back to base, Werner Weiss and Colonel Bacalis were waiting in his office. Both men wore grins. Colonel Bacalis dialed the Pentagon and handed Slater the telephone. As the phone rang, Bacalis told Slater what was happening so as to prepare him for the call.
Colonel Slater couldn’t believe his ears.
“‘The president has given Oxcart a go,’” Slater recalls Bacalis saying, and that “orders are en route.” Then came the ultimate challenge — one for which he was prepared. Bacalis asked Slater if he could deploy his men for Oxcart missions starting in fifteen days.
Chapter Sixteen: Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS Pueblo
The new director of the CIA, Richard M. Helms, had to work hard to become a member of President Johnson’s inner coterie. The president had once told his CIA director that he “never found much use for intelligence.” But eventually Helms managed to acquire a coveted seat at the president’s Tuesday lunch table. There, President Johnson and his closest advisers discussed foreign policy each week. Outsiders called the luncheons Target Tuesdays because so much of what was discussed involved which North Vietnamese city to bomb. In 1967, air battles were raging in the skies over Hanoi and Haiphong with so many more American pilots getting shot down than enemy pilots that the ratio became nine to one. The Pentagon had been unable to locate the surface-to-air missile sites in North Vietnam responsible for so many of the shoot-downs although they’d been looking for them all year. Thirty-seven U-2 missions had been flown since January, as had hundreds of low-flying Air Force drones. Still, the Pentagon had no clear sense of where exactly the Communist missile sites were located. There were other fears. The Russians were rumored to be supplying the North Vietnamese with surface-to-surface missiles, ones with enough range to reach American troops stationed in the south.
Which is how the Oxcart, already scheduled for cancellation, serendipitously got its mission — during a Target Tuesday lunch. On May 16, 1967, Helms made one last play on behalf of the CIA’s beloved spy plane, nine years in the making but just a few days away from being mothballed for good. Helms told the president that by deploying the Oxcart on missions over North Vietnam, war planners could get those high-resolution photographs of the missile sites they had been looking for. “Sharp point photographs, not smudged circles,” Helms promised the president. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, angling hard for Air Force control of aerial reconnaissance, had promised the president that the SR-71 Blackbird, the Air Force version of the Oxcart, was almost operations-ready. But the mission had to happen now, CIA director Helms told the president. It was already May. Come June, Southeast Asia would be inundated with monsoons. Weather was critical for good photographs, Helms said. Cameras can’t photograph through clouds. President Johnson was convinced. Before the dessert arrived, Johnson authorized the CIA’s Oxcart to deploy to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan.
It was a coup for the CIA. By the following morning, the airlift to Kadena from Area 51 had begun. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was being deployed for Operation Black Shield. A million pounds of matйriel, 260 support crew, six pilots, and three airplanes were en route to the East China Sea. Nine years after Kelly Johnson presented physicist Edward Lovick with his drawing of the first Oxcart, Johnson would write in his log notes: “the bird should leave the nest.”
Kadena Air Base was located on the island of Okinawa just north of the Tropic of Cancer in the East China Sea. It was an island scarred by a violent backstory, haunted by hundreds of thousands of war dead. Okinawa had been home to the single largest land-sea-air battle in the history of the world. This was the same plot of land where, twenty-two years earlier, the Allied Forces fought the Japanese. Okinawa was the last island before mainland Japan. Over the course of eighty-two days in the spring of 1945, the battle for the Pacific reached its zenith. At Okinawa, American casualties would total 38,000 wounded and 12,000 killed or missing. Japan’s losses were inconceivable in today’s wars: 107,000 soldiers dead and as many as 100,000 civilians killed. When Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru finally capitulated, giving the island over to U.S. forces on June 21, 1945, he did so with so much shame in his heart that he committed suicide the following day. Thousands of Okinawans felt the same way and leaped off the island’s high coral walls. After the smoke settled and the blood soaked into the earth, Okinawa belonged to the U.S. military. Two decades later, it still did.
By the time Ken Collins stepped foot on Okinawa, the Kadena Air Base occupied more than 10 percent of the island and accounted for nearly 40 percent of all islanders’ income. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was stationed at a secluded part of the base, the place from where Operation Black Shield would launch. No one was supposed to know the squadron was there. The project pilots were to keep an extremely low profile, living in a simple arrangement of Quonset huts almost identical to those at Area 51. Instead of on the sand-and-sagebrush landscape at Area 51, the facilities on Kadena sat in fields of green grass. Leafy ficus trees grew along little pathways. It was spring when the pilots arrived, which meant tropical flowers were in full bloom. The pilots’ residence was called Morgan Manor. An American cook kept the pilots fed, serving up high-protein diets on request. On days off the pilots drank bottled beer. Sometimes the men ventured out to have a drink or eat a meal at the officers’ club, where a full Filipino orchestra always played American dance tunes.
The Oxcart mission was covert and classified, and there would be “no plausible cover story” as to why an oddly shaped, triple-sonic aircraft would be flying in and out of the air base with regularity for the next year. For this reason, the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that Commander Slater “focus on security, not cover.” One idea was to “create the illusion of some sort of environmental or technical testing involved.” But no one believed that cover story would hold. Within a week of the first Oxcart landing on the tarmac at Kadena, an ominouslooking Russian trawler sailed into port and anchored within viewing distance of the extralong runway. “The Russians knew we were there and we knew they knew we were there,” Colonel Slater recalls.
Impossible as it seemed, the first Oxcart mission over the demilitarized zone in North Vietnam occurred as promised, just fifteen days after Helms made history for the CIA at that Target Tuesday lunch in May. CIA pilot Mele Vojvodich was assigned the first mission. He took off at 11:00 a.m. local time in a torrential downpour — the Oxcart’s first real ride in the rain. In the little more than nine minutes Vojvodich spent over North Vietnam, at a speed of Mach 3.1 and an altitude of 80,000 feet, the Oxcart photographed 70 of the 190 suspected surface-to-air missile sites. The mission went totally undetected by the Chinese and the North Vietnamese.
After the first mission was completed, the film was sent to a special processing center inside the Eastman
