Still, that did not stop the North Vietnamese from moving their missiles around and avoiding bombing raids. They had help from the Soviet Union. “That was the reason for the Russian trawler parked at the end of the Kadena runway. Someone was watching and taking notes every time we flew,” recalls Roger Andersen, who was stationed in the command post on Kadena, which he’d been in charge of setting up. “It was almost identical to the command post at Area 51, except it was smaller,” Andersen says.
On Kadena, the operations officers tried to trick the Russian spies in the trawler by flying at night, and yet of the first seven Black Shield missions flown, four were “detected and tracked.” The North Vietnamese were able to predict Oxcart’s overhead pass based on the time the aircraft left the base. With this information relayed by the Russians, the Communists’ Fan Song guidance radar was able to lock on the A-12’s beacon. The first attempted shoot-down happened during Operation Black Shield’s sixteenth mission. In photographs taken by the Oxcart, contrails of surface-to-air missiles can be seen below. Fortunately for the pilots, the missiles could not get up as high as the Oxcart. In this newest round of cat and mouse, Oxcart was resulting in a draw. Oxcart was fast, high, and stealthy. The aircraft could not be shot down. But the enemy knew the plane was there, meaning it was a long way from being invisible as Richard Bissell and President Eisenhower had originally planned.
For American pilots flying over North Vietnam, the real danger remained down low, halfway between Oxcart and the earth, at around forty-five thousand feet. That was where the surface-to-air missiles and the MiG fighter jets were shooting down U.S. pilots at the horrifying nine-to-one rate. Ken Collins recalled what this felt like at the time: “During Black Shield, we, as pilots, were relatively safe at eighty-five thousand feet. It was the pilots who were flying lower than us who were really the ones in harm’s way. These were guys most of us had been in the Air Force with, before we got sheep-dipped and began flying for the CIA.”
Extraordinary pilots like Hervey Stockman. Stockman had been the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2, on July 4, 1956. Eleven years later, on June 11, 1967, Stockman was flying over North Vietnam, searching for information about North Vietnam weapons depots, when he was involved in a midair crash. A pilot of exceptional skill and remarkable courage, Stockman was on his 310th mission in a career that had covered three wars when his F-4 C Phantom fighter jet collided with another airplane in his wing. He and Ronald Webb both survived the bailout. Upon landing, they were captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, beaten, and taken prisoner. Stockman would spend the next five years and 268 days as a prisoner of war in a seven-by-seven-foot cell. First he was housed in the notoriously brutal Hanoi Hilton. Later, he was moved to other, equally grim prisons over the course of his incarceration. During Black Shield, the CIA tasked Oxcart pilots with search missions to find U.S. airmen who’d gone down over North Vietnam. The cameras on the Oxcarts took miles of photographs, seeking information on the prison complexes where American heroes like Hervey Stockman and hundreds of other POWs were being held, but to no avail. The North Vietnamese moved captured POWs around almost as often as they moved missile sites around.
The captured pilots became a purposeful part of Communist propaganda campaigns against the West. The POWs were beaten, tortured, chained, and dragged out in front of cameras, often forced to denounce the United States. If the Communists wanted to create unrest at home, which they did, they succeeded by using captured pilots for their own propaganda gains. All across America, opposition to the war was on the rise. The White House and the Pentagon fought back with propaganda and erroneous facts. “We are beginning to win this struggle,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey boasted on NBC’s Today show in November of 1967. While closed-door hearings for the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed that U.S. bombing campaigns were having little to no effect on winning the war, Humphrey told America that more Communists were laying down arms than picking them up. That our anti-Communist “purification” programs in Vietnam were going well. Later that same month, America’s top commander, General Westmoreland, dug his own grave. He told the National Press Club that the Communists were “unable to mount a major offensive.” That America might have been losing the war in 1965, but now America was winning in Vietnam. In an interview with Time magazine, Westmoreland taunted the Communists by calling them weak. “I hope they try something because we are looking for a fight,” he declared. Which is exactly what he got. At the end of January, the Communists pretended to agree to a three-day cease-fire to celebrate the new year, which in Vietnamese is called Tet Nguyen Dan. Instead, it was a double-cross. On January 31, 1968, the Communists launched a surprise attack on the U.S. military and the forces of South Vietnam. The notorious Tet Offensive stunned the Pentagon. It also resulted in violent antiwar protests. The Tet Offensive was a major turning point in America’s losing the Vietnam War.