Despite playing a key role in planning and executing covert operations in Vietnam, Richard Helms did not believe the United States could win the war there. This posture kept him out of step with Pentagon brass. Helms believed Vietnam was fracturing consensus about America’s need to win the Cold War, which he saw as the more important battle at hand. He was an advocate of using technology to beat the Russians by way of overhead reconnaissance from satellites and spy planes, which was why he liked Oxcart so much. And unlike Pentagon and State Department officials, who, for the most part, cautioned the president against ever sending spy planes over the Soviet Union again, Helms, like McCone, felt the president should do just that. “The only sin in espionage is getting caught,” Helms once said. He believed the best intelligence was “objective intelligence.” Photographs didn’t have an opinion and couldn’t lie. Helms attributed his respect for objectivity to his working as a journalist for the wire service United Press International. In 1936, a then twenty-four-year-old Richard Helms got his first big scoop: covering the Berlin Olympics as a reporter, he was invited to interview Adolf Hitler. Six years later, Helms would be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor organization to the CIA, to spy on Hitler’s men.
With Richard Helms at Area 51 in December of 1965, the Oxcart was finally declared operational. Celebrations were in order. One of the pilots offered to fly a C-130 Hercules on a seafood run to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where Werner Weiss had coolers full of lobsters, oysters, and crab legs ready to be taken to Area 51. Big-budget black operations had stomach-size perks too. After such feasts, the kitchen staff buried the shells in compost piles along the base perimeter, and the joke among Air Force support staff was that future archaeologists digging in the area would think Groom Lake had been an ocean as late as the 1960s.
As secret and compartmentalized as the base was, the mess hall was the one place where the men gathered together to break bread. Technical assistants would rub elbows with three-and four-star generals visiting there. Ernie Williams, who had helped find Area 51’s first well in 1955 and now helped coordinate meals, loved it when Werner Weiss invited him into the mess hall to eat steaks with generals who wore stars on their chests. And after the meal was over, the men would again go their separate ways. The Special Projects program managers and the engineering nerds usually retired to their quarters to play poker and drink bottled beer. The scientists were known to return to their respective hangars, where they’d stay up until all hours of the night engrossed in various problems they needed to solve. The Air Force guys went to the House-Six bar to roll dice, have a drink, and share war stories.
When on base, Richard Helms was known to stop in for a drink. He was a great conversationalist but almost always refrained from telling stories about himself. And as far as World War II was concerned, Helms rarely discussed the subject. In 1945, as a young OSS officer, Helms had worked in postwar Berlin. He was one of the key players in Operation Paperclip; Helms had been tasked with finding a group of Hitler’s former scientists and offering them positions on classified programs back in the United States. Jobs involving biological weapons, rockets, and stealth. Years later, Helms justified his recruitment of former Nazis by saying that if the scientists hadn’t come to work for us, they’d have gone to work for “them.” Helms knew things other men did not know. At the Agency he was the man who kept the secrets.
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.