Gardening helped CIA pilot Kenneth Collins relax. He had over a hundred rosebushes in his garden, which he and his wife, Jane, pruned together on weekends after Collins returned home from a long, mysterious week at the Ranch. At Area 51, where he worked as a project pilot, Collins went by the code name Ken Colmar. “Same first name because you will instantly respond to it when called,” Collins explains. “Colmar for the C, in case you had something monogrammed.” His call sign was Dutch 21 but most men on base called him the Iceman. The pressure-suit officers came up with the nickname. “I was known to show no emotion or irritation even after a particularly dangerous flight,” Collins recalls. The pressure-suit officers could gauge how tough a flight was by how sweaty a pilot’s underwear was when they helped pilots undress. Collins’s underwear was always remarkably dry.
Flying Oxcart was, to an Air Force pilot, the single most elite job in the nation at the time. Ken Collins “commuted” to Area 51 each week, flying in from sunny Southern California, where he and other pilots who now worked for the CIA pretended to live normal lives with their pretty wives and, ideally, a few children. Having a stable marriage and family had become a CIA-pilot mandate during Oxcart, something that was not in place during the U-2. It was Gary Powers’s alcoholic wife who’d triggered the change. Some in the Agency believed she put the secrecy of the entire U-2 program at risk with behavior that even they could not control. Once, Barbara Powers got it into her head to visit her husband at his clandestine post in Turkey. She made it as far as Athens before the officer assigned to watch her notified Powers that he would be out of a job if he couldn’t keep his impetuous wife in line. Ken Collins was told this story during his first interview at the Pentagon. Loose lips didn’t just sink ships, he was reminded; loose lips could trigger nuclear war. Collins also learned that his wife, Jane, would be subject to psychological screening were he to be accepted into a top secret program rumored to involve “space travel.”
Collins and his family were moved from their home in South Carolina to a Los Angeles suburb called Northridge and into a four-bedroom raised ranch with a two-car garage and an avocado tree out front. He was thirty-six years old. Jane attended church and collected antique china. All four of Jane and Ken Collins’s children, two boys and two girls, maintained good grades in school. The neighbors were told Mr. Collins worked for Hughes Aircraft Company. Collins was told to report nosy neighbors to the CIA, and if any foreign-borns tried to befriend the Collinses, they were to notify the Agency, who would look into the matter.
Each Monday morning, Collins left his home and drove to Burbank Airport, nine miles to the southwest. There, he and the other Oxcart pilots climbed aboard Constellation propeller planes and headed to Area 51, never with more than two pilots per airplane—a guideline put into place after the Mount Charleston crash eight years earlier. The deaths of those top Agency and Air Force managers and scientists had set progress on the U-2 program back several months. Now, in 1963, Oxcart was already more than a year behind schedule. The Agency could not afford to lose any pilots. The vetting process alone took eighteen months and getting familiar with the aircraft took another year.