It was a coup for the CIA. By the following morning, the airlift to Kadena from Area 51 had begun. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was being deployed for Operation Black Shield. A million pounds of matériel, 260 support crew, six pilots, and three airplanes were en route to the East China Sea. Nine years after Kelly Johnson presented physicist Edward Lovick with his drawing of the first Oxcart, Johnson would write in his log notes: “the bird should leave the nest.”
Kadena Air Base was located on the island of Okinawa just north of the Tropic of Cancer in the East China Sea. It was an island scarred by a violent backstory, haunted by hundreds of thousands of war dead. Okinawa had been home to the single largest land-sea-air battle in the history of the world. This was the same plot of land where, twenty-two years earlier, the Allied Forces fought the Japanese. Okinawa was the last island before mainland Japan. Over the course of eighty-two days in the spring of 1945, the battle for the Pacific reached its zenith. At Okinawa, American casualties would total 38,000 wounded and 12,000 killed or missing. Japan’s losses were inconceivable in today’s wars: 107,000 soldiers dead and as many as 100,000 civilians killed. When Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru finally capitulated, giving the island over to U.S. forces on June 21, 1945, he did so with so much shame in his heart that he committed suicide the following day. Thousands of Okinawans felt the same way and leaped off the island’s high coral walls. After the smoke settled and the blood soaked into the earth, Okinawa belonged to the U.S. military. Two decades later, it still did.
By the time Ken Collins stepped foot on Okinawa, the Kadena Air Base occupied more than 10 percent of the island and accounted for nearly 40 percent of all islanders’ income. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was stationed at a secluded part of the base, the place from where Operation Black Shield would launch. No one was supposed to know the squadron was there. The project pilots were to keep an extremely low profile, living in a simple arrangement of Quonset huts almost identical to those at Area 51. Instead of on the sand-and-sagebrush landscape at Area 51, the facilities on Kadena sat in fields of green grass. Leafy ficus trees grew along little pathways. It was spring when the pilots arrived, which meant tropical flowers were in full bloom. The pilots’ residence was called Morgan Manor. An American cook kept the pilots fed, serving up high-protein diets on request. On days off the pilots drank bottled beer. Sometimes the men ventured out to have a drink or eat a meal at the officers’ club, where a full Filipino orchestra always played American dance tunes.
The Oxcart mission was covert and classified, and there would be “no plausible cover story” as to why an oddly shaped, triple-sonic aircraft would be flying in and out of the air base with regularity for the next year. For this reason, the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that Commander Slater “focus on security, not cover.” One idea was to “create the illusion of some sort of environmental or technical testing involved.” But no one believed that cover story would hold. Within a week of the first Oxcart landing on the tarmac at Kadena, an ominous-looking Russian trawler sailed into port and anchored within viewing distance of the extralong runway. “The Russians knew we were there and we knew they knew we were there,” Colonel Slater recalls.
Impossible as it seemed, the first Oxcart mission over the demilitarized zone in North Vietnam occurred as promised, just fifteen days after Helms made history for the CIA at that Target Tuesday lunch in May. CIA pilot Mele Vojvodich was assigned the first mission. He took off at 11:00 a.m. local time in a torrential downpour—the Oxcart’s first real ride in the rain. In the little more than nine minutes Vojvodich spent over North Vietnam, at a speed of Mach 3.1 and an altitude of 80,000 feet, the Oxcart photographed 70 of the 190 suspected surface-to-air missile sites. The mission went totally undetected by the Chinese and the North Vietnamese.
After the first mission was completed, the film was sent to a special processing center inside the Eastman Kodak plant in Rochester, New York. But by the time the photographic intelligence got back to field commanders in Vietnam, the intelligence was already several days old. The North Vietnamese were moving missile sites and mock-ups of missile sites around faster than anyone could keep track of them. The CIA realized it needed a dramatically faster turn-around time, which resulted in a photo center being quickly set up on the mainland in Japan. Soon, field commanders had intel in their hands just twenty-four hours from the completion of an Oxcart mission over North Vietnam.