In the following month, September, bad weather got in the way of good photographic intelligence. Day after day it rained over Cuba or the island was shrouded in heavy cloud cover. Finally, on September 29, a CIA U-2 mission over the Isle of Pines and the Bay of Pigs revealed yet another previously unknown missile site. President Kennedy’s top advisers were convened. The CIA warned the advisers of more unknown dangers in Cuba and pushed for additional overflights so as to gain better intelligence on military installations there. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were opposed to the idea. Not another Gary Powers incident, they said. But on October 5 and 7, the CIA got presidential approval to run two additional missions of its own. The resultant news was hard to ignore: there were now a total of nineteen surface-to-air missile sites on the island of Cuba, meaning there was something very important that the Soviets were intent on defending there. The Pentagon held firm. There was still no hard data revealing actual missiles, McNamara and Rusk said. Making matters even more complicated, JFK’s Air Force chief of staff, General Curtis LeMay, was pushing for preemptive strikes against Cuba. It was a volatile and incredibly dangerous situation. If the CIA was correct and there already were nuclear missiles in Cuba, then LeMay’s so-called preemptive strikes would actually initiate a nuclear war, not prevent one.
What the Agency needed desperately was a wizard of diplomacy, someone who could help the rival agencies see eye to eye so they could all work together to get the Soviets to back down. The Agency and the Air Force had decidedly different ideas on imminent missions; the CIA wanted to gather more intelligence with the U-2; the Air Force wanted to prepare for war. An individual who could wear both hats with relative objectivity was needed, someone who could see both sides of the debate. In a rare moment of accord, both sides agreed that the man for the job was Brigadier General Jack Ledford. Just a few weeks earlier, Ledford had been asked by McCone to serve as the director of the Office of Special Activities at the Pentagon, meaning he would be the Pentagon liaison to the CIA at Area 51. Ledford had just graduated from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and was looking forward to moving out west when his old World War II commander General LeMay encouraged him to take the new CIA liaison job.
LeMay had known Ledford since the war in the Pacific when Ledford flew under his command. A former Olympic diver, Ledford was tall, charismatic, and handsome. According to Wheelon, “He was someone whose charisma was contagious. Ledford was impossible not to like to be around.” There was, of course, the legendary story of Ledford’s plane crash, involving heroics in the Pacific theater during World War II. As a captain in the Air Force, Ledford was making a bombing run over Kyushu Island, Japan, when he was attacked by Japanese fighter jets, his airplane and his own body hit with fire. Ledford’s flight engineer, Master Sergeant Harry C. Miller, was hit in the head. The medic on board treated Miller and tried to treat Ledford with opiates, who declined so he could keep his head clear. With the aircraft crashing, Ledford and the medic opened a parachute, cut the shroud lines, and attached the chute to the unconscious flight engineer. They dropped the man through the nose of the wheel well; Captain Ledford followed, delaying opening his own parachute so he could be next to Sergeant Miller when he landed. Miller would be unconscious when he hit the earth, and without Ledford’s help he would likely have broken his back. The medic, not far behind, later recounted how amazing it was that Ledford’s daring and dangerous plan had actually worked.
Now, two decades later, at the Cuban missile crisis round table, Ledford showed the same foresight in preempting a potentially deadly situation. The first thing General Ledford did was present the CIA and the Air Force with a shoot-down analysis, detailing the odds for losing a U-2 on another overflight. The chances were one in six, Ledford said. He pushed for the U-2 mission, arguing that it was better to know now if there really were nuclear missiles in Cuba than to wish you knew later on, when it could be too late. Once these cold hard facts were on the table, the heart of the debate became clear. The point of contention was not whether or not to fly the mission. Rather, it was who would fly the mission—the Air Force or the CIA. As it turned out, each organization wanted the job. President Kennedy felt the mission needed to involve a pilot wearing a blue U.S. Air Force pilot suit. Kennedy felt that if a CIA spy plane were to get shot down over Cuba, there would be too much baggage attached to the event, that it would rekindle hostilities over the Gary Powers shoot-down. But General Ledford knew what the president did not: that the CIA had higher-quality U-2 airplanes, ones far less likely to end up getting shot down. Agency U-2s flew five thousand feet higher than their heavier Air Force U-2 counterparts, which were weighed down by additional reconnaissance gear. The CIA airplanes also had better electronic countermeasure packages, meaning they had more sophisticated means of jamming SA-2 missiles coming at them. So Ledford performed diplomatic wizardry by convincing the CIA to actually loan the Air Force its prized U-2 airplanes. With the fate of the free world at stake, the CIA and the Air Force agreed to work together to solve the crisis.
On October 14, an Air Force pilot flying a CIA U-2 brought home film footage of Cuba that the White House needed to see. Photographs showing nuclear missiles supplied by the Soviet Union and set up on missile stands in Cuba. Those eight canisters of film brought back by the CIA’s U-2 set in motion the Cuban missile crisis, bringing the world closer than it had ever come to all-out nuclear war. They would also give the work going on at Area 51 a shot in the arm. The Pentagon told the CIA they wanted the Oxcart operations ready immediately so the aircraft could be used to overfly Cuba. A CIA review of Oxcart, declassified in 2007, said it flatly: “The Oxcart program suddenly assumed greater significance than ever, and its achievement of operational status became one of the highest national priorities.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
What Airplane?