Like all the pilots at Area 51, Slater flew every chance he got. Now, as commander of the base, he began each day by making the first run. Around five thirty each morning, coffee mug in hand, Slater was driven by one of the enlisted men to the end of a runway, where he’d jump in an F-101 and fly around the Box on what he called “the weather run.” Because Area 51 had a large box of restricted airspace, Slater could fly in a manner not seen at other Air Force bases. Colonel Roger Andersen, who had been recruited to Area 51 to work in the command post, remembers the first time he flew with Slater in a two-seater T-33 to Groom Lake. “We were doing proficiency flying. I’d been getting teased by the other pilots because my background was flying tankers for the Air Force, not jets,” Andersen explains. “Up in the air, Slater says to me, ‘You need to loosen up, Andersen, Let’s rack it around.’ At which point Slater does a loop, a roll, and a spin… in a row. You could do that kind of thing up at Area 51.”
Everyone knew stories about Slater’s flying career: flying against the Germans in World War II, flying as the detachment commander for the Black Cats, and of course the remarkable story of his flying an airplane with a dead engine for a hundred miles on a glide—through a hurricane—in 1946. As a young hero just back from the war, Slater had been chosen by the Army Air Forces to fly a brand-new P-80 Shooting Star on a training mission from March Air Force Base to Jamaica. The P-80 was the first jet fighter used by the Army Air Forces at a time when jets in America were relatively new. As Slater remembers it, he was “one hundred miles out at sea off of Key West when the engine quit. I was just north of Cuba, which was under hurricane. There was turbine failure and a flameout so I turned around and glided back to the Keys.” Jet airplanes do not normally glide without engine thrust, at least not without a skilled pilot at the controls. When a jet engine loses all power, it usually crashes. Slater rode the jet stream for a hundred miles over the Atlantic Ocean until he found an abandoned airstrip at Marathon Key, in Florida, on which to land. The amazing story made its way to the pages of the New York Times.
Richard Helms was a fan of Slater, and before leaving Area 51 to get back to Washington, Helms made sure to congratulate Colonel Slater on all the fine work that had been achieved to get Oxcart operational. Now Slater had to be prepared to fly himself to Washington on a moment’s notice on Oxcart’s behalf. Over the next several months, Slater and General Ledford would be asked to participate in the top secret covert-action review board the 303 Committee, which would be assigning Oxcart its mission. (The 303 Committee was a successor to the Special Operations Group, which Bissell had been in charge of during his tenure at the CIA.)
Slater flew himself to Washington in an F-101 more times than he could count. There, however eloquently the Agency advocated on the Oxcart squadron’s behalf, the Pentagon put up roadblocks. Slater’s input had little effect on the naysayers. He was looked upon as the man in charge of a billion-dollar black operations program, a golden goose that the Air Force desperately wanted to wrest from the CIA. Every time the Agency proposed a mission, the review board denied the CIA’s request.
That the groundbreaking spy plane was trapped in a stalemate between the CIA and the Air Force was, at first, unbelievable to Colonel Slater. Throughout his career, Slater had moved effortlessly between different armed services and intelligence worlds, applying his talents wherever they were needed most. As a twenty-two-year-old fighter pilot, Slater flew eighty-four missions over France and Germany in a P-47 Thunderbolt. When the Army desperately needed support from airmen during the Battle of the Bulge, Slater fought side by side with soldiers on the ground at the bloody Siege of Bastogne. Later, as commander of the Black Cat Squadron flying dangerous missions over mainland China, Slater wore both CIA and Air Force hats with ease. The common goal was gathering intelligence. Colonel Slater saw no rivalry among the men.
During that winter of 1966, flying back and forth between Area 51 and the Pentagon, Slater had a front-row seat for the power struggle between the Air Force and the CIA. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had changed his mind again on the usefulness of Oxcart in Vietnam. He decided to wait until the Air Force SR-71 program came online. Bud Wheelon believes that “McNamara was delaying finding a mission for the Oxcart on purpose. He was an empire builder. Oxcart did not fit into his empire because it was never his.” With each month that passed, the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird was that much closer to being operations-ready, and the men in charge of Blackbird were in McNamara’s chain of command. As soon as the Air Force’s spy plane was ready, the CIA’s almost identical spy plane would be out of a job.