Ken Collins’s crash in Utah caused the CIA to redouble its secrecy efforts regarding operations at Area 51. The press was told an F-105 crashed, and as of 2011, the Air Force still has it listed that way. Worried its cover was about to be blown, the Agency decided to shore up an accounting of who knew what about Oxcart. An analyst was assigned the task of combing through all the files the CIA had been keeping on journalists, civilians, and even retired Air Force personnel—anyone who showed a curiosity about what might be going on at Area 51. Beginning in the spring of 1963, the noted instances of what the CIA called “Project Oxcart Awareness Outside Cleared Community” drastically increased. Declassified in 2007 and never before made public, the CIA had been monitoring phone conversations of journalists who seemed interested in the Oxcart program. “Mr. Marvin Miles, Aviation Editor, Los Angeles Times, telephonically contacted Westinghouse Corp., Pittsburgh, attempting to confirm if employees of that firm were traveling covertly to ‘the desert’ each week in connection with top secret Project which he suspects may have ‘CIA’ association,” read one memo. Another stated that “Mr. Robert Hotz, Editor Aviation Week, indicated his awareness of developments at Burbank.” Of particular concern to the Agency was an article in the Hartford Courant that referred to the “secret development” of the J-58 engine. Another article in the Fontana, California, paper the Herald News speculated about the existence of Area 51, calling it a “super secret Project site.” An increasingly suspicious CIA worked overtime to monitor journalists, and they also monitored regular citizens, including a Los Angeles–based taxi driver who was described in a memo marked “classified” as once having asked a Pratt and Whitney employee if he was “en route to Nevada.”
With the Air Force steadily gaining a foothold in day-to-day operations at Area 51, it was the Air Force that the CIA should have been watching more closely in terms of the future of the spy plane program as a whole. It was not as if there weren’t writing on the wall. In the year before Collins’s crash, the Air Force had decided it wanted a Mach 3 Oxcart-type program of its own. Just as it had with the U-2, the Pentagon moved in on the CIA’s spy plane territory. Only with the Oxcart, the Air Force ordered not one but three Air Force variants for its stable. One version, the YF-12A, would be used as an attack aircraft, its camera bay retrofitted to hold two 250-kiloton nuclear bombs. The second Oxcart variant the Air Force ordered could carry a drone on its back. The third was a two-seater version of the CIA’s stealth spy plane, only instead of being designed to conduct high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance missions over enemy territory during peacetime, the Air Force supersonic spy plane was meant to go in and take pictures of enemy territory immediately after a nuclear strike by U.S. bomber planes—to see if any strategic targets had been missed. Designated the RS-71 Blackbird, this now-famous aircraft had its letter designation accidentally inverted by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a public speech. Since the president is rarely ever “corrected,” the Air Force changed its letter designation, which is how the SR-71 Blackbird got its name. (Originally, the letters stood for “Reconnaissance/Strike.”)
There was no end to the irony in all of this. The Air Force’s Mach 3 airplanes were a far cry from President Eisenhower’s original idea to let the CIA create a spy plane with which to conduct espionage missions designed to prevent nuclear war. This new Air Force direction underscored the difference in the two services: the CIA was in the business of spying, and the Air Force was in the business of war.
There were other motives in play, including the ego of General Curtis LeMay. The Air Force had already spent eight hundred million dollars developing the B-70 bomber airplane—a massive, triangle-shaped, Mach 3, eight-engined bomber that had been General LeMay’s passion project since its inception in 1959. When a fleet of eighty-five of these giant supersonic bombers was first proposed to Congress, LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Command, had his proposition met with cheers. But the Gary Powers shoot-down in May of 1960 had exposed the vulnerability of LeMay’s B-70 bombers, which would fly at the same height as the U-2. In 1963 LeMay was no longer head of the Strategic Air Command—instead, he was President Kennedy’s Air Force chief of staff. Despite evidence showing the B-70 bomber was not a practical airplane, LeMay was not about to give up his beloved bomber without a fight.