When the two pilots weren’t at the beach, Collins and Weeks would take the 1129th Special Activities Squadron staff car, “an old clunker of a station wagon,” and head into Kozu, a sprawling little city of cement-block high-rises and crooked telephone poles. “Jack and I had kids who were about the same age. We’d head into Kozu and buy these little plastic airplanes and remote-control tank models which we intended to bring home to our kids. But sometimes we’d get bored back in Morgan Manor and open up the toy packages and end up making the little tank models for ourselves,” Collins recalls. “We had a lot of fun doing that.” Life’s simple pleasures during the Vietnam War.
The Agency’s six Oxcart pilots—Mele Vojvodich Jr., Jack W. Weeks, J. “Frank” Murray, Ronald J. “Jack” Layton, Dennis B. Sullivan, and Kenneth B. Collins—had collectively flown twenty-nine missions: twenty-four over North Vietnam, three over North Korea, and two over Cambodia and Laos. Countless surface-to-air missile sites had been located and destroyed as a result. Despite Pentagon fears, the photographs never located a single surface-to-surface missile able to reach American forces on the ground. “We also flew overhead during Air Force bombing raids, using our jamming systems on the bird to mess with the Communists’ antiaircraft systems,” Murray recalls. But for all the success of the CIA’s Oxcart program, the reality was that the Air Force’s Blackbird, the SR-71, was finally ready to deploy. The CIA could no longer compete with the Pentagon for Mach 3 missions, and the Oxcart program reached its inevitable end. “Even if you didn’t have a ‘need-to-know,’ it was obvious when the SR-71 Blackbirds started showing up,” Collins recalls. The Blackbirds were arriving on Kadena to take Oxcart’s place. The Air Force version of the Oxcart, with its two seats and reconnaissance/strike modifications, had officially won the battle between the CIA and the Air Force over anything with wings.
Back in Washington, behind closed doors, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson he no longer believed the war in Vietnam could be won. This did not sit well with the president, and in February of 1968, Robert McNamara stepped down. In his place came a new secretary of defense named Clark Clifford who “reaffirmed the original decision to end the A-12 program and mothball the aircraft.” The men from the 1129th began packing up to head home to Area 51. The missions were over. The drawdown phase had begun.
Jack Weeks and Denny Sullivan were each given the assignment of flying an A-12 Oxcart back to Area 51; Collins was scheduled to do final engine tests from Kadena. But during the last weeks of the program, Jack Weeks became ill, so Collins stepped in, completing back-to-back rotations in Weeks’s place. With the schedule change, it would now be Collins and Sullivan who would fly the A-12s home, with Weeks doing the final engine check, on June 4, 1968, and not Collins, as originally planned.
Collins and Sullivan returned to Area 51 to keep up on proficiency flying in preparation for their final transcontinental flights. When it was time to return to Kadena, they flew from Groom Lake to Burbank in a Lockheed propeller plane and then took a commercial flight from the West Coast all the way to Tokyo. “That night, we had dinner in the Tokyo Hilton,” Collins remembers. “We finished up dinner and were heading back up to the rooms when we heard on the radio that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles.” Stunned, Collins went downstairs to buy a newspaper, the English-language version of the Tokyo Times. “There, in the lower right-hand corner of the paper, a small article caught my eye. The headline read something like ‘High-Altitude Crash of a U.S. Air Force Airplane.’ Well, that was enough to get my attention. I had a terrible feeling I knew what ‘high-altitude’ meant.”
The following day, Collins and Sullivan flew to the island of Kadena. An Agency driver picked them up at the airport. As soon as the door shut and the men were alone, the driver turned around and said solemnly, “We lost an airplane.”
“We lost a pilot,” Collins said.