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.