When the CIA first briefed President Kennedy on how high and how fast the A-12 Oxcart would fly, the president was astonished. His first question, according to CIA officer Norman Nelson, was “Could it be converted into a long-range bomber to replace the B-70?” LeMay was in the room when Kennedy asked the question. The thought of losing his pet program to the Agency drove General LeMay wild. He lobbied the Pentagon to move forward with the B-70, and he stepped up his public relations campaign, personally promoting the B-70 bomber program in magazine interviews from Aviation Week to Reader’s Digest. He was committed to appealing to as many Americans as possible, from aviation buffs to housewives. But by 1963, Kennedy was leaning toward canceling the B-70. In a budget message, he called it “unnecessary and economically unjustifiable.” Congress cut back its B-70 order even further. The original order for eighty-five had already been cut down to ten, and now Congress cut that to four.
LeMay was furious. He flew from Washington, DC, to Burbank, California, to see Kelly Johnson at the Skunk Works. Longtime rivals, Kelly Johnson greeted LeMay with skepticism when LeMay asked for a briefing about the A-12. After Johnson was finished, LeMay gave Johnson a quid pro quo. “Johnson, I want a promise out of you that you won’t lobby anymore against the B-70,” LeMay said. Provided Kelly Johnson complied, LeMay promised to send Lockheed an Air Force purchase order for an interceptor version of Lockheed’s A-12 Oxcart, in addition to the preexisting order. For Lockheed, this would mean a big new invoice to send to the Air Force. At first, Kelly Johnson was suspicious of LeMay’s sincerity. That changed just a few weeks later when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed up at the Skunk Works with the secretary of the Air Force and the assistant secretary of defense in tow. Now McNamara asked for a briefing on the A-12, during which he took “copious notes.” Within a matter of months, the Pentagon ordered twenty-five more A-12 variants. The Pentagon already had a catchy name for its versions of the Oxcart. They would call them Blackbirds. Black because they had been developed in the dark by the CIA, and birds because they could fly. The meeting touched off the long-running battle between the two agencies over control of Area 51 and control of any U.S. government asset with wings. But this is exactly what had happened with the U-2. The CIA did all of the heavy lifting to get the aircraft aloft, only to have the program eventually taken over by the Pentagon for the Air Force.
At the Ranch, it was business as usual. No one but the generals had any idea that the CIA’s spy plane program now officially had in the Pentagon a formidable rival that threatened its very existence. Instead, pilots, engineers, operators, scientists, and Air Force enlisted men worked triple shifts, around the clock, to get the A-12 Oxcart mission ready. These were the men who made up and supported the 1129th Special Activities Squadron at Groom Lake.
The J-58 jet engines built by Pratt and Whitney had taken forever to finish but now they were ready to fly. In January of 1963 they were finally delivered to the Ranch. A host of new problems occurred when the engines were first powered up. In one instance, engineers suspected a foreign object was stuck in an engine’s heart, called the power plant, and was damaging internal parts. An X-ray showed the outline of a pen that had fallen into the engine’s cover, called a nacelle, during final assembly in Burbank. From then on, Lockheed workers got coveralls without breast pockets. There were other problems. The engines worked like giant vacuums. Once powered up on the tarmac, they sucked in every loose object lying around, including rocks and metal screws. As a solution, Area 51 workers took to sweeping and then vacuuming the runway before each flight. It was a tedious but necessary job.
The next goal was to get the airplane to cruise at Mach 3. Nearly five times as fast as any commercial airplane, this was an aerodynamic feat that had never been accomplished before. Pushing through the lower Mach numbers was a laborious and dangerous task. Performance margins were met gradually, with a new set of challenges cropping up each day. As the airplane reached higher speeds, the 500-plus-degree temperatures began melting electrical components, many of which had to be redesigned and rewired. Chuck Yeager is credited with breaking the sound barrier in 1947, but every time a new aircraft moves through the speed of sound, which is 768 miles per hour, complications can arise. In the case of the Oxcart, the sonic shock unexpectedly caused the fuselage to flex in such a way that many structural parts became dangerously compromised. These parts had to be redesigned and replaced.