Richard Helms suggested an Oxcart be dispatched from nearby Kadena to photograph North Korea’s coast and try to locate the USS Pueblo before anyone even considered making a next move. As it stood, immediately after the Pueblo’s capture, there was no intelligence indicating exactly where the sailors were or where the ship was being held. Richard Helms counseled the president that if the goal was to get the eighty-two American sailors back, a ground attack or air attack couldn’t possibly achieve that end if no one knew where the USS Pueblo was. A reconnaissance mission would also enable the Pentagon to see if Pyongyang was mobilizing its troops for war over the event. Most important of all, it would give the crisis a necessary diplomatic pause.
Three days after the Pueblo’s capture, on January 26, Oxcart pilot Jack Weeks was dispatched on a sortie from Kadena to locate the missing ship. From the photographs Weeks took on that overflight, the United States pinpointed the Pueblo’s exact location as it floated in the dark-watered harbor in Changjahwan Bay. Before completing his mission but after taking the necessary photographs, Jack Weeks experienced aircraft problems. When he got back to base, he told his fellow pilots about the problems he’d had on the flight but not about his photographic success; detailed information regarding the USS Pueblo was so highly classified, very few individuals had any idea that Weeks’s mission had delivered photographs that had prevented war with North Korea.
“The [Oxcart] quickly located the captured Pueblo at anchor in Wonson harbor,” President Johnson’s national security adviser Walt Rostow revealed in 1994. “So we had to abandon any plans to hit them with airpower. All that would accomplish would be to kill a lot of people including our own. But the [Oxcart’s] photo take provided proof that our ship and our men were being held. The Koreans couldn’t lie about that.” The Pentagon’s secret war plan against North Korea was called off. Instead, negotiations for the sailors’ return began. But the eversuspicious administration, now deeply embroiled in political fallout from the Tet Offensive, worried the Pueblo incident could very well be another Communist double cross. What if North Korea was secretly mobilizing its troops for war? Three and a half weeks later, on February 19, 1968, Frank Murray was assigned to fly Oxcart’s second mission over North Korea. Murray’s photographs indicated that North Korea’s army was still not mobilizing for battle. But by then, the Pueblo was on its way to Pyongyang, where it remains today — the only American naval vessel held in captivity by a foreign power. Captain Bucher and his men were prisoners of North Korea for eleven months, tortured, put through mock executions, and made to confess espionage before finally being released. In 2008, a U.S. federal judge determined that North Korea should pay sixty-five million dollars in damages to several of the Pueblo’s crew, but North Korea has yet to respond.
A year had passed since Black Shield began. It was springtime on Kadena again. On days off Ken Collins and fellow pilot Jack Weeks would slip into their canvas shoes and swimming trunks and head out to the beach. The drive into the countryside was beautiful and relaxing, with its tropical bamboo forests and small ponds. Camellias and Japanese apricot trees were in bloom. There were beautiful sunsets to watch over the East China Sea. “We had a different rapport, Jack and I, than the other pilots, I think. We did more than just get along. Jack Weeks and I became friends,” Collins says.
When the two pilots weren’t at the beach, Collins and Weeks would take the 1129th Special Activities Squadron staff car, “an old clunker of a station wagon,” and head into Kozu, a sprawling little city of cement-block high-rises and crooked telephone poles. “Jack and I had kids who were about the same age. We’d head into Kozu and buy these little plastic airplanes and remote-control tank models which we intended to bring home to our kids. But sometimes we’d get bored back in Morgan Manor and open up the toy packages and end up making the little tank models for ourselves,” Collins recalls. “We had a lot of fun doing that.” Life’s simple pleasures during the Vietnam War.
The Agency’s six Oxcart pilots — Mele Vojvodich Jr., Jack W. Weeks, J. “Frank” Murray, Ronald J. “Jack” Layton, Dennis B. Sullivan, and Kenneth B. Collins — had collectively flown twenty-nine missions: twenty-four over North Vietnam, three over North Korea, and two over Cambodia and Laos. Countless surface-to-air missile sites had been located and destroyed as a result. Despite Pentagon fears, the photographs never located a single surface- to-surface missile able to reach American forces on the ground. “We also flew overhead during Air Force bombing raids, using our jamming systems on the bird to mess with the Communists’ antiaircraft systems,” Murray recalls. But for all the success of the CIA’s Oxcart program, the reality was that the Air Force’s Blackbird, the SR-71, was finally ready to deploy. The CIA could no longer compete with the Pentagon for Mach 3 missions, and the Oxcart program reached its inevitable end. “Even if you didn’t have a ‘need-to-know,’ it was obvious when the SR-71 Blackbirds started showing up,” Collins recalls. The Blackbirds were arriving on Kadena to take Oxcart’s place. The Air Force version of the Oxcart, with its two seats and reconnaissance/strike modifications, had officially won the battle between the CIA and the Air Force over anything with wings.
Back in Washington, behind closed doors, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson he no longer believed the war in Vietnam could be won. This did not sit well with the president, and in February of 1968, Robert McNamara stepped down. In his place came a new secretary of defense named Clark Clifford who “reaffirmed the original decision to end the A-12 program and mothball the aircraft.” The men from the 1129th began packing up to head home to Area 51. The missions were over. The drawdown phase had begun.
Jack Weeks and Denny Sullivan were each given the assignment of flying an A-12 Oxcart back to Area 51; Collins was scheduled to do final engine tests from Kadena. But during the last weeks of the program, Jack Weeks became ill, so Collins stepped in, completing back-to-back rotations in Weeks’s place. With the schedule change, it would now be Collins and Sullivan who would fly the A-12s home, with Weeks doing the final engine check, on June 4, 1968, and not Collins, as originally planned.
Collins and Sullivan returned to Area 51 to keep up on proficiency flying in preparation for their final transcontinental flights. When it was time to return to Kadena, they flew from Groom Lake to Burbank in a Lockheed propeller plane and then took a commercial flight from the West Coast all the way to Tokyo. “That night, we had dinner in the Tokyo Hilton,” Collins remembers. “We finished up dinner and were heading back up to the rooms when we heard on the radio that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles.” Stunned, Collins went downstairs to buy a newspaper, the English-language version of the Tokyo Times. “There, in the lower right-hand corner of the paper, a small article caught my eye. The headline read something like ‘HighAltitude Crash of a U.S. Air Force Airplane.’ Well, that was enough to get my attention. I had a terrible feeling I knew what ‘high-altitude’ meant.”
The following day, Collins and Sullivan flew to the island of Kadena. An Agency driver picked them up at the airport. As soon as the door shut and the men were alone, the driver turned around and said solemnly, “We lost an airplane.”
“We lost a pilot,” Collins said.
It was former U-2 pilot Tony Bevacqua who was assigned to fly the search mission for Jack Weeks and his missing airplane. After Bevacqua had left Groom Lake, in 1957, he’d spent the next eight years flying dangerous U-2 reconnaissance missions and atomic sampling missions all over the world, from Alaska to Argentina. During the Vietnam War, Bevacqua flew SR-71 reconnaissance missions over Hanoi. (On one mission, on July 26, 1968, the photographs taken from the camera on his Blackbird show two SA-2 missiles being fired up at him.) But no single mission would stay with him into old age like the mission he was asked to fly on June 5, 1968, looking for Jack Weeks.
Bevacqua had arrived on Kadena the month before, having been selected to fly the Air Force version of the Oxcart, the SR-71. “All I had been told that day was that someone was missing,” Bevacqua remembers. “I didn’t have a need to know more. But I think I knew that the pilot was CIA.” The downed pilot, he learned, might be floating somewhere in the South China Sea, approximately 520 miles east of the Philippines and 625 miles south of Okinawa. “As I set out, my heart was pumped up and I was thinking, Maybe I will find this guy. I remember anticipation. Hopeful anticipation of maybe seeing a little yellow life raft floating somewhere in that giant sea.” Instead, Bevacqua saw nothing but hundreds of miles of open water. “It was like looking for a drop of water in the ocean,” Bevacqua remembers. The day after the mission, Bevacqua went to the photo interpreters to ask if they’d found anything on the film. “They said, ‘No, sorry. Not a thing.’ And that was the end of that,” Bevacqua explains.
Jack Weeks was gone. Vanished into the sea. Neither his body nor any part of the airplane was ever recovered. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins muses, recalling the destiny of his friend Jack Weeks. “I was supposed to be flying that aircraft that day but Jack got sick and we switched in the rotation. Jack Weeks went down. I’m still here.”
The 1129th Special Activities Squadron had reached its end. The CIA held a special secret ceremony at Area 51 for the remaining Oxcart pilots and their wives. Some of the pilots had their pictures taken with the aircraft but
