The process of taking on fuel was one of the more dangerous things an Oxcart pilot could do. In order to connect its fuel line to the tanker, the aircraft had to slow down to between 350 and 450 mph, so slow it could barely keep its grip on the sky. The issue of speed was equally taxing on the flying fuel tank. The KC-135 tanker had to travel at its top speed just to keep up with the slowed-down triple-sonic airplane. This was always a slightly nerve-racking process, complicated for Colonel Slater by the fact that a call came in over the emergency radio at exactly that time. Whatever was going on back at Area 51 that merited this emergency call was most likely not a welcome event.
Slater answered. It was Colonel Paul Bacalis, the man who’d taken over Ledford’s job as director of the Office of Special Activities for the CIA. Bacalis told Slater that an urgent call had come in for him from the Pentagon and he should get back to Area 51 immediately.
“I’m refueling,” Colonel Slater said.
“Finish and dump it,” Bacalis said.
“Can’t it wait?” Colonel Slater asked.
“No,” Bacalis said. “Where are you?”
“I’m over California,” Colonel Slater said.
“Head out to sea, dump the fuel, and come home” was Colonel Bacalis’s command.
Slater let loose forty thousand pounds of fuel and watched it evaporate into the atmosphere. It was critical that he save ten thousand gallons of fuel to get home, not much more and definitely not less. Too little fuel and you wound up like Walt Ray. Too much fuel meant the aircraft could blow out its brakes on landing and overshoot the runway. Now, Slater needed to make a quick U-turn to head home. When traveling three times the speed of sound, the Oxcart needed 186 miles of space just to make the hook. This meant Slater’s U-turn took him from off the coast of Big Sur to high above Santa Barbara on a tight curve.
When Slater got back to base, Werner Weiss and Colonel Bacalis were waiting in his office. Both men wore grins. Colonel Bacalis dialed the Pentagon and handed Slater the telephone. As the phone rang, Bacalis told Slater what was happening so as to prepare him for the call.
Colonel Slater couldn’t believe his ears.
“‘The president has given Oxcart a go,’” Slater recalls Bacalis saying, and that “orders are en route.” Then came the ultimate challenge—one for which he was prepared. Bacalis asked Slater if he could deploy his men for Oxcart missions starting in fifteen days.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS Pueblo
The new director of the CIA, Richard M. Helms, had to work hard to become a member of President Johnson’s inner coterie. The president had once told his CIA director that he “never found much use for intelligence.” But eventually Helms managed to acquire a coveted seat at the president’s Tuesday lunch table. There, President Johnson and his closest advisers discussed foreign policy each week. Outsiders called the luncheons Target Tuesdays because so much of what was discussed involved which North Vietnamese city to bomb. In 1967, air battles were raging in the skies over Hanoi and Haiphong with so many more American pilots getting shot down than enemy pilots that the ratio became nine to one. The Pentagon had been unable to locate the surface-to-air missile sites in North Vietnam responsible for so many of the shoot-downs although they’d been looking for them all year. Thirty-seven U-2 missions had been flown since January, as had hundreds of low-flying Air Force drones. Still, the Pentagon had no clear sense of where exactly the Communist missile sites were located. There were other fears. The Russians were rumored to be supplying the North Vietnamese with surface-to-surface missiles, ones with enough range to reach American troops stationed in the south.
Which is how the Oxcart, already scheduled for cancellation, serendipitously got its mission—during a Target Tuesday lunch. On May 16, 1967, Helms made one last play on behalf of the CIA’s beloved spy plane, nine years in the making but just a few days away from being mothballed for good. Helms told the president that by deploying the Oxcart on missions over North Vietnam, war planners could get those high-resolution photographs of the missile sites they had been looking for. “Sharp point photographs, not smudged circles,” Helms promised the president. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, angling hard for Air Force control of aerial reconnaissance, had promised the president that the SR-71 Blackbird, the Air Force version of the Oxcart, was almost operations-ready. But the mission had to happen now, CIA director Helms told the president. It was already May. Come June, Southeast Asia would be inundated with monsoons. Weather was critical for good photographs, Helms said. Cameras can’t photograph through clouds. President Johnson was convinced. Before the dessert arrived, Johnson authorized the CIA’s Oxcart to deploy to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan.