Isegoria

The Oxcart’s J-58 jet engines developed by Pratt and Whitney were finally delivered in 1963, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), but not without complications:

A host of new problems occurred when the engines were first powered up. In one instance, engineers suspected a foreign object was stuck in an engine’s heart, called the power plant, and was damaging internal parts. An X-ray showed the outline of a pen that had fallen into the engine’s cover, called a nacelle, during final assembly in Burbank. From then on, Lockheed workers got coveralls without breast pockets.

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The engines worked like giant vacuums. Once powered up on the tarmac, they sucked in every loose object lying around, including rocks and metal screws. As a solution, Area 51 workers took to sweeping and then vacuuming the runway before each flight. It was a tedious but necessary job.

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As the airplane reached higher speeds, the 500-plus-degree temperatures began melting electrical components, many of which had to be redesigned and rewired.

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In the case of the Oxcart, the sonic shock unexpectedly caused the fuselage to flex in such a way that many structural parts became dangerously compromised. These parts had to be redesigned and replaced.

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Every flight was like an operational mission, with navigators plotting a course and making maps days before as they worked to test the Oxcart’s inertial navigation system, or INS. “When you’re flying at that altitude and that speed, you need big checkpoints to validate information from the INS,” recalls navigator Sam Pizzo. “Any old geographical landmark, like a mountain or a river, would not do. The Oxcart traveled too fast. Pilots would have to look for landmarks on the scale of the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes,” says the veteran navigator. “You can’t imagine what new territory this was for a navigator. No amount of experience can prepare you when you work on an airplane that goes two or three times as fast as anything you navigated for before.”

After Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins’ experimental spy plane crashed, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA redoubled its efforts to keep the project secret:

Declassified in 2007 and never before made public, the CIA had been monitoring phone conversations of journalists who seemed interested in the Oxcart program. “Mr. Marvin Miles, Aviation Editor, Los Angeles Times, telephonically contacted Westinghouse Corp., Pittsburgh, attempting to confirm if employees of that firm were traveling covertly to ‘the desert’ each week in connection with top secret Project which he suspects may have ‘CIA’ association,” read one memo. Another stated that “Mr. Robert Hotz, Editor Aviation Week, indicated his awareness of developments at Burbank.” Of particular concern to the Agency was an article in the Hartford Courant that referred to the “secret development” of the J-58 engine. Another article in the Fontana, California, paper the Herald News speculated about the existence of Area 51, calling it a “super secret Project site.” An increasingly suspicious CIA worked overtime to monitor journalists, and they also monitored regular citizens, including a Los Angeles–based taxi driver who was described in a memo marked “classified” as once having asked a Pratt and Whitney employee if he was “en route to Nevada.”

The Agency should have been more concerned about its rival:

Just as it had with the U-2, the Pentagon moved in on the CIA’s spy plane territory. Only with the Oxcart, the Air Force ordered not one but three Air Force variants for its stable. One version, the YF-12A, would be used as an interceptor aircraft, its camera bay retrofitted to hold two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. The second Oxcart variant the Air Force ordered could carry a drone on its back. The third was a two-seater version of the CIA’s stealth spy plane, only instead of being designed to conduct high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance missions over enemy territory during peacetime, the Air Force supersonic spy plane was meant to go in and take pictures of enemy territory immediately after a nuclear strike by U.S. bomber planes—to see if any strategic targets had been missed. Designated the RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally inverted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech. Since the president is rarely ever “corrected,” the Air Force changed its letter designation, which is how the SR-71 Blackbird got its name. (Originally, the letters stood for “Reconnaissance/ Strike.”)

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The Air Force had already spent eight hundred million dollars developing the B-70 bomber airplane — a massive, triangle-shaped, Mach 3, six-engined bomber that had been General LeMay’s passion project since its inception in 1959. When a fleet of eighty-five of these giant supersonic bombers was first proposed to Congress, LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Command, had his proposition met with cheers. But the Gary Powers shoot-down in May of 1960 had exposed the vulnerability of LeMay’s B-70 bombers, which would fly at the same height as the U-2. In 1963 LeMay was no longer head of the Strategic Air Command — instead, he was President Kennedy’s Air Force chief of staff. Despite evidence showing the B-70 bomber was not a practical airplane, LeMay was not about to give up his beloved bomber without a fight.

When the CIA first briefed President Kennedy on how high and how fast the A-12 Oxcart would fly, the president was astonished. His first question, according to CIA officer Norman Nelson, was “Could it be converted into a long-range bomber to replace the B-70?” LeMay was in the room when Kennedy asked the question. The thought of losing his pet program to the Agency drove General LeMay wild. He lobbied the Pentagon to move forward with the B-70, and he stepped up his public relations campaign, personally promoting the B-70 bomber program in magazine interviews from Aviation Week to Reader’s Digest. He was committed to appealing to as many Americans as possible, from aviation buffs to housewives. But by 1963, Kennedy was leaning toward canceling the B-70. In a budget message, he called it “unnecessary and economically unjustifiable.” Congress cut back its B-70 order even further. The original order for eighty-five had already been cut down to ten, and now Congress cut that to four.

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“Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby anymore against the B-70,” LeMay said. Provided Kelly Johnson complied, LeMay promised to send Lockheed an Air Force purchase order for an interceptor version of Lockheed’s A-12 Oxcart, in addition to the preexisting order. For Lockheed, this would mean a big new invoice to send to the Air Force. At first, Kelly Johnson was suspicious of LeMay’s sincerity. That changed just a few weeks later when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed up at the Skunk Works with the secretary of the Air Force and the assistant secretary of defense in tow. Now McNamara asked for a briefing on the A-12, during which he took “copious notes.” Within a matter of months, the Pentagon ordered twenty-five more A-12 variants. The Pentagon already had a catchy name for its versions of the Oxcart. They would call them Blackbirds. Black because they had been developed in the dark by the CIA, and birds because they could fly.

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The CIA did all of the heavy lifting to get the aircraft aloft, only to have the program eventually taken over by the Pentagon for the Air Force.

Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins was taking the experimental spy plane out for a subsonic test run, like a race horse out for a trot, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), when something went wrong:

“Suddenly, the altimeter was rapidly unwinding, indicating a rapid loss of speed,” Collins recalls. In heavy clouds, Collins had no visual references to determine where he was. “I advanced the throttles to counter the loss of airspeed. But instead of responding, and without any warning, the aircraft pitched up and flipped over with me trapped underneath. Then it went into an inverted flat spin.” The Agency’s million-dollar A-12 Oxcart was unrecoverable and crashing. Collins needed to bail out.

Collins had no idea how close he was to the Earth’s surface because he was in the middle of a cloud and couldn’t see out of it. He also did not know if he was over a mountain range, which would mean he had even less time to eject. Collins closed his visor and grabbed the ejection ring that was positioned between his legs. He pushed his head firmly against the headrest and pulled. This kind of radical ejection from a prized top secret aircraft is not easy to forget, and Collins recalls dramatic details. “The canopy of the aircraft flew off and disappeared but I was still upside down, with the aircraft on top of me,” he explains. “Having pulled the D-ring, my boot stirrups snapped back. The explosive system in the seat rocket engaged, shooting me downward and away from the aircraft.” First Collins separated from the Oxcart. Next he separated from his seat. After that, he was a body falling through the air until a small parachute called a drogue snapped open, slowing his body down. In his long history of flying airplanes, this was the first time Collins had ever had to bail out. Falling to Earth, he tried to get a sense of what state he might be over. Was he in Nevada or Utah? The ground below him appeared to be high-desert terrain, low hills but no mountains that he could see. He was still too high up to discern if there were roads. As he floated down, in the distance he spotted the heavy black aircraft tumbling through the air until it disappeared from sight. “I remember seeing a large, black column of smoke rise up from the desert floor and thinking, That’s my airplane.” Only now there was nothing left of it but an incinerated hunk of titanium smoldering on the ground. Fate was a hunter, all right.

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Collins unclipped himself from the parachute and began collecting everything around him. Flight-protocol pages and filmstrips of navigational maps fluttered across the desert. As he hurried to collect the top secret papers, he was surprised to hear a car motor in the distance. Looking up, he saw a pickup truck bouncing toward him along a dirt desert road. “As it got closer, I could see there were three men in the front cab,” Collins recalls. “The truck pulled alongside me and came to a stop. I could see they had my aircraft canopy in the back of their pickup.”

The men, who appeared to be local ranchers, sized up Collins. Because the flight had been subsonic, Collins was wearing a standard flight suit and not a high-altitude pressure suit, which would have made him look like an astronaut or an alien and likely prompted a lot more questions. Instead, the ranchers asked Collins if he wanted a ride. They said they knew exactly where his airplane had crashed, and if he hopped in, they’d give him a ride back to his plane. Until that moment, no civilian without a top secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the Oxcart, and Collins had strict orders to keep it that way. He’d been briefed on what to do in a security breach such as this one, given a cover story by the Agency that fit perfectly with the proximity to the Nevada Test Site—and with the times. Collins told the ranchers that his aircraft was an F-105 fighter jet and that it had a nuclear weapon on board. The men’s expressions changed from helpful to fearful. “They got very nervous and said if I wanted a ride, I better jump in quick because they were not staying around Wendover for long,” Collins recalls.

The ranchers drove Collins to the nearest highway patrol office. There, he jumped out, took his airplane canopy from the back of the truck, and watched the men speed off. Collins reached into the pocket of his flight suit. Inside, he found the note that read call this number, followed by a telephone number. Also in his pocket was a dime. Inside the highway patrol office, Collins asked the officer on duty where he could find the nearest pay phone. The man pointed around to the side of the building, and using the Agency’s dime, Collins made the phone call that no Agency pilot ever wants to make. A little less than an hour later, Kelly Johnson’s private airplane landed in Wendover, Utah, along with several men from the CIA. After a brief exchange of words so Kelly Johnson could confirm that Collins was physically okay, Collins boarded the airplane. During the two-hour flight to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, no one said a word. “There would be plenty of talking to do during the debriefing,” Collins says, “and with the Agency’s tape recorders taking everything down.” A crash of a CIA spy plane meant someone had some explaining to do.

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“Maintenance guys, security guys, navigators, we all took off in trucks and airplanes and headed to Utah,” Pizzo explains. With Collins confirmed alive, the goal now was to locate every single piece of the wrecked airplane, “every nut, bolt, and sliver of fuselage.”

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Once they found the site, the work crew had a lot of digging to do. The aircraft, Article #123, hadn’t broken apart in flight, but given the speed at which it had hit the earth, huge sections of the airplane had become buried. Critically important was locating every loose piece of the titanium fuselage. The metal was rare and expensive, and the fact that the Agency’s spy plane was hand-forged from titanium was a closely held secret. If a news reporter or a local got a hold of even the smallest piece of the aircraft, its unusual composition would raise questions that might threaten the cover of the entire Oxcart program. Equally critical to national security was making sure the radar-absorbing materials, known as composite and that covered the entire airplane, remained in government control. If a piece of the plane got into the wrong hands, the results could be disastrous: the Russians could learn the secret of stealth.

Along with a crew of more than one hundred men, the Agency brought its own horses to the crash site. Men from Groom Lake took to the desert terrain on horseback and began their search.

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In Air Force culture, when an airplane crashes, someone has to take the blame. Collins explains: “In the SAC [Strategic Air Command] mind-set, if there’s an accident, the wing commander suffers the consequences.” Instead, Collins believes, Holbury tried to get Collins to be the fall guy. “Holbury didn’t want blame; he wanted a star. He wanted to become a general, so he tried to put the blame on me. After the crash, even before the investigation, he requested that I be fired.”

Collins was unwilling to accept that. Fortunately for Collins’s career, Kelly Johnson, the builder of the aircraft, didn’t care about blame as much as he wanted to find out what had gone wrong with his airplane. Listening to Collins describe what had happened during the debriefing, Johnson couldn’t figure out what caused the aircraft to crash. He wondered if there was something Collins had forgotten, or was maybe leaving out. “I was clear in my mind that the crash was a mechanical error and not a pilot error,” Collins explains. “So when Kelly Johnson asked would I try unconventional methods like hypnosis and truth serum, I said yes. I was willing to do anything I could to get to the truth.” While the Pentagon’s accident board conducted a traditional investigation, Collins submitted to a far less conventional way of seeking out the truth of the cause of the crash.

Inside the flight surgeon’s office at Lockheed, Collins sat with a CIA-contracted hypnotist from Boston, “a small, rotund man dressed in a fancy suit,” as Collins recalls. “He tried very hard to put me in a trance, only it didn’t work. I don’t think he realized that hypnotizing a fighter pilot was not as easy as he thought it might be.” Next, Collins was injected with sodium thiopental, also known as truth serum. Collins remembers the day well. “I told my wife, Jane, I was going to work for a few hours, which was unusual to begin with because it was a Sunday. The point of the treatment was to see if I could remember details other than those I relayed in the original debrief with the CIA. But yes, even with the sodium pentothal in my system, everything I said was exactly the same. The treatment takes a lot out of you and after it was over, I was very unsteady on my feet. Three CIA agents brought me home late that Sunday evening. One drove my car, the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was still loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.”

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After a lengthy investigation it was determined that a tiny, pencil-size part called a pitot tube had in fact caused the crash. The pitot tube measured the air coming into the aircraft and thereby controlled the airspeed indicator. Unlike in a car, where the driver can feel relative speed, in a plane, without a proper reading from an airspeed indicator, a pilot has no awareness of how fast he is going, and without correct airspeed information a pilot cannot land. When Collins flew into the cloud, the pitot tube reacted adversely to the moisture inside and froze. The false airspeed indicator caused the aircraft to stall. As a result of the stall, the Oxcart flipped upside down and crashed.

After surviving the Korean War, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins returned with a fatalistic attitude:

“Fate is a hunter,” Collins believes. “When it comes for you, it comes,” and for whatever reason it was not time for death to come to him yet. This was a notion Collins formulated during the Korean War while flying reconnaissance missions and watching so many talented and brave fellow pilots die. How else but by fate did he survive all 113 combat missions he had flown? On those classified missions, the young Collins was armed with only a camera in the nose of his airplane as he flew deep into North Korea, sometimes all the way over the Yalu River, being fired at by MiG fighter jets. During the war, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and also the coveted Silver Star for valor, the third-highest military decoration a member of the armed services can receive. Both medals were pinned on Collins’s chest before he turned twenty-four.

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Accepting fate as the hunter made things easier for Collins, which is how he dealt with the memory of his closest friend and former wingman from the Fifteenth Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Charles R. “Chuck” Parkerson. The two men had flown on many missions together, but there was one from which Parkerson never came home. “We had flown into North Korea and back out side by side,” Collins recalls. “We were almost home when Parkerson radioed me. He said the engine on his RF-80 had flamed out and he was unable to restart it. I saw he was losing altitude quickly and he knew that soon he would crash.” Parachuting into enemy territory meant certain death. “Over the radio, Parkerson asked me, ‘What should I do?’” Collins explains. “I said, ‘Fly out over the Yellow Sea and I’ll fly with you.’ I told him to bail out in the water and I’d send his coordinates back to base for a rescue team.” It seemed like a good idea, and Collins flew alongside his wingman as they headed toward the Yellow Sea. Parkerson prepared for a bailout. “But there was a problem,” Collins recalls. “The canopy on Parkerson’s RF-80 was stuck. Jammed. It wouldn’t open, which meant he was trapped inside the airplane. There was nothing I could do for my friend except to fly alongside him all the way until the end.” Collins watched Parkerson land his airplane on the sea. With Parkerson unable to get out of the sinking aircraft, Collins waited, watching from the air as his friend drowned. “When your time is up, it is up,” Collins recalls.

At Area 51, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins went by the code name Ken Colmar:

“Same first name because you will instantly respond to it when called,” Collins explains. “Colmar for the C, in case you had something monogrammed.” His call sign was Dutch 21 but most men on base called him the Iceman. The pressure-suit officers came up with the nickname. “I was known to show no emotion or irritation even after a particularly dangerous flight,” Collins recalls. The pressure-suit officers could gauge how tough a flight was by how sweaty a pilot’s underwear was when they helped pilots undress. Collins’s underwear was always remarkably dry.

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Having a stable marriage and family had become a CIA-pilot mandate during Oxcart, something that was not in place during the U-2. It was Gary Powers’s alcoholic wife who’d triggered the change. Some in the Agency believed she put the secrecy of the entire U-2 program at risk with behavior that even they could not control. Once, Barbara Powers got it into her head to visit her husband at his clandestine post in Turkey. She made it as far as Athens before the officer assigned to watch her notified Powers that he would be out of a job if he couldn’t keep his impetuous wife in line. Ken Collins was told this story during his first interview at the Pentagon. Loose lips didn’t just sink ships, he was reminded; loose lips could trigger nuclear war.

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Each Monday morning, Collins left his home and drove to Burbank Airport, nine miles to the southwest. There, he and the other Oxcart pilots climbed aboard Constellation propeller planes and headed to Area 51, never with more than two pilots per airplane—a guideline put into place after the Mount Charleston crash eight years earlier. The deaths of those top Agency and Air Force managers and scientists had set progress on the U-2 program back several months.

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The appearance of a new, moonlike subsidence crater was often a weekly occurrence now that nuclear testing had moved underground. When seen from above, the landscape at the Nevada Test Site looked like a battlefield after the apocalypse.

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During training missions, the papers in Collins’s flight pouch identified him only as a NASA weather pilot. His space-age-looking aircraft was registered to an airfield called Watertown Strip, Nevada. He was never to carry any personal effects with him in the airplane. When the Lockheed Constellation landed on the tarmac at Area 51, security guards took his ID and papers and locked them away in a metal box. Each Friday, before the afternoon flight home, Collins’s identity was returned to him.

Axios recently interviewed Palantir’s CTO and asked, “What are you currently reading, or what’s a book you’d recommend?”

I’m in the midst of “This Kind of War,” a classic about the Korean War. The book I read right before that, which I would highly recommend, is Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War.”

I suppose I’ll get around to sharing my thoughts on Nuclear War, but loyal readers of the blog will know that This Kind of War earned a lot of attention here.