Some performance benchmarks came surprisingly quickly. In July of 1963, Lou Schalk flew briefly at Mach 3, much to the Agency’s delight. But sustaining flight for ten minutes at Mach 3 took another seven months to achieve. Every flight was like an operational mission, with navigators plotting a course and making maps days before as they worked to test the Oxcart’s internal navigation system, or INS. “When you’re flying at that altitude and that speed, you need big checkpoints to validate information from the INS,” recalls navigator Sam Pizzo. “Any old geographical landmark, like a mountain or a river, would not do. The Oxcart traveled too fast. Pilots would have to look for landmarks on the scale of the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes,” says the veteran navigator. “You can’t imagine what new territory this was for a navigator. No amount of experience can prepare you when you work on an airplane that goes two or three times as fast as anything you navigated for before.”
The essence of Area 51 was that everything that happened there happened big. Because all efforts were being made on orders of the president, and given the colossal scale of secrecy surrounding the project, there was a deeply patriotic sense that the free world depended on the work being performed at Area 51. The men worked tirelessly and with phenomenal ingenuity to overcome challenges that would have stymied countless others. And yet the strange paradox underlying all efforts at the Ranch was that Project Oxcart was also subject to unforeseeable world events. It could be given the ax at a moment’s notice—which is what almost happened on November 22, 1963.
It was late in the day after a rainstorm and Captain Donald Donohue was working with a crew out on the dry lake bed. An F-101 chase plane had run off the airstrip and sunk into a layer of gypsum that was several inches deep. Working with a group of engineers and mechanics, Donohue led the efforts to lay down several long planks of steel that could then be used to tow the airplane out of where it had become stuck in the soggy lake bed.
“Pizzo came out,” Donohue remembers. “He looked kinda pale. Then he said, ‘Clean up and go home.’ Well, something was not right. Sam Pizzo was a lot more talkative than that. Then he said something to the effect of ‘We’ll call you if we need you to come back.’”
“What the hell is going on?” Donohue remembers asking.
“President Kennedy has just been assassinated, in Dallas,” Pizzo said solemnly.
It was a terrible shock, Donohue remembers. “Our commander in chief. Dead? I recall it like it was yesterday. Pizzo was right. We had to go home and wait this thing out. When [Lyndon] Johnson was vice president, he was entirely unaware about the existence of the A-12 program. And he didn’t have a clue about Area 51.” The future of Oxcart was contingent on the new president’s call.
With President Kennedy dead, Lyndon Johnson would be briefed on the CIA’s secret domestic base by CIA director John McCone on his eighth day as commander in chief. Until then, what Johnson would decide about the CIA’s supersonic spy plane program was anybody’s guess. The relationship between a new president and the CIA is always tenuous starting out. What happened to President Kennedy with the CIA and the Bay of Pigs raised the bar in terms of jeopardy for all future presidents of the United States. Only time would tell if Lyndon Johnson would authorize the completion of the Agency’s Mach 3 spy plane out at Area 51.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Covering Up the Cover-Up