Richard Helms was furious. In an eight-page letter to the president, he told Johnson that to mothball the Oxcart would be a scandalous waste of an asset. The CIA had successfully and meticulously managed 435 spy plane overflights by the U-2 in thirty hostile countries, and only one, the Gary Powers crash, had produced an international incident, Helms said. But the Gary Powers incident had actually strengthened the argument as to why the CIA, not the Air Force, should run the spy plane program, Helms explained. It was because Powers was an intelligence officer, and not a military man, that the Soviets hadn’t taken retaliatory action against the United States. Ultimately Powers had been released in a Soviet spy exchange. Helms further strengthened his argument by stating that, unlike the military, the CIA “controls no nuclear weapons, which rules out any propaganda suggestion that an irrational act by some subordinate commander might precipitate a nuclear war.” Helms had a point. But would the president see things his way?
The following month, in February of 1967, Colonel Slater was again summoned to Washington. It was his fifth trip in six months. In a roomful of 303 Committee members, Slater was told the Oxcart would be terminated effective January 1, 1968. There was no room for debate. The Oxcart’s fate had been decided. The case was closed. Slater was instructed to return to Area 51 and keep his squadron operations ready while the Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird passed its final flight tests. Even though Colonel Slater was Air Force to his core he was very much for the CIA’s Oxcart program. Slater was the program’s commander, and at that moment, the Oxcart was undeniably the most remarkable aircraft in the world.
Colonel Slater had flown himself to Washington in an F-101 and now he had to fly himself home. He was uncharacteristically disheartened by it all. Stopping at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to refuel, Slater showed his identification documents, which pushed him to the front of the refueling line, ahead of a two-star general who had been waiting there. With everyone staring at him and wondering who this officer was, Slater considered the irony of it all. In justifying why Oxcart was being terminated, the 303 Committee claimed that the Oxcart exemplified CIA black budget excess. From Slater’s perspective, save for a few line-cutting perks, the Oxcart was worth every Agency dime. The scientific barriers broken by the Oxcart program would likely impress scientists and engineers in another thirty years. It was the incredible sense of achievement shared by everyone involved that Slater would miss most. But so it goes, thought Slater. Oxcart would never get a mission, and the American public would probably never know what the CIA had been able to accomplish, in total secrecy, at Groom Lake—at least not for a long time.
Colonel Slater waited for his airplane to be refueled and thought about the journey home, likely his last from DC to Area 51. It was a mistake to cancel Oxcart, Slater thought. But he also knew that his opinion didn’t matter. His skills as a commander were what he was counted on for. He would return to Area 51 and, like all good military men, follow orders.
Three months later, on a balmy spring day in May of 1967, Colonel Slater decided he was going to take the Oxcart for a last ride. Some of the pilots had four hundred hours in the air in the Oxcart. Walt Ray had had 358 when he died. Colonel Slater had only ten. Why not take the world’s most scientifically advanced aircraft out for a ride while he still had the chance? Soon, the Oxcart would disappear into the experimental-test-plane graveyard. There, it would collect dust in some secret military hangar way out in Palmdale, California, where no one would ever fly it again. Slater went to visit Werner Weiss to see if Weiss could arrange for Slater to take one last Mach 3 ride.
“Consider it done,” Werner Weiss said to Colonel Slater’s request.
Up in the air, Slater quickly took the Oxcart to seventy thousand feet. Slater had forgotten how light the Oxcart was. It had an airframe like a butterfly, which allowed pilots to get it up so high. Flying at Mach 2.5 made things hot inside the cockpit. It was like an oven set on warm. If Slater were to take off his glove and touch the window, he’d get a second-degree burn. He moved up to Mach 3 cruising speed at ninety thousand feet, traveling the seven hundred miles to Billings, Montana, in about twenty-three minutes.
The fallacy was that at this height and speed, a pilot could look out the window and take in the view. You couldn’t. Even when you reached cruising height, you had to keep your eyes on every gauge, oscillator, and scope in front of you. There were too many things to pay attention to. Too many things that could go wrong.
Colonel Slater headed toward the Canadian border, where he took a left turn and flew along the U.S. perimeter until he reached Washington State. There, he took another left turn and flew down over Oregon and into California. Finally, he took the aircraft down to twenty-five thousand feet and prepared for a scheduled refuel. Minutes later, Slater met up with the KC-135 that had been dispatched from the Air Force’s 903rd Air Refueling Squadron out of Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, California.