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spy plane program ever undertaken in order to win a competition with the Russians did not make the best national security sense. Surfacing Oxcart would compromise the Agency’s technological pole position in the overhead espionage field. Oxcart was singularly capable of flying “any place in the world,” McCone explained. It was almost “invisible” to Soviet radar, with a “radar cross section in the order of 1/1000 of [a] normal aircraft.” If McCone had had a crystal ball, he could have told the president that the Oxcart was so far ahead of its time, it would hold aviation records for sustained height and speed through the end of the century. Also in the room were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, the administration’s most powerful trio. Conveniently for the Pentagon, all three men agreed with President Johnson that outing the Oxcart was a terrific idea.

The reason for the trio’s desire for transparency was that the Air Force had clear designs on cutting the CIA loose from the business of spy planes once and for all. Outing a program made the need for cover obsolete. Before Kennedy’s assassination, the Air Force high command had been writing secret proposals arguing for ways in which they could take over Oxcart. Four months earlier, Air Force commander General Schriever wrote a memo to Eugene Zuckert, secretary of the Air Force, suggesting that “an incident during the flight test program could force a disclosure.” The CIA had gotten lucky with Ken Collins’s Oxcart crash, General Schriever said, but if another one of the Agency’s secret spy planes were to crash “it would be extremely difficult to avoid some public release.” The subtext being that maybe there was a way that the Air Force could help facilitate this public disclosure. There was a final option, one that involved getting “the President on board.” A few weeks before Kennedy’s death, the Air Force had gone to him with a proposal to make Oxcart public; Kennedy had said to sit tight. Now it appeared that President Johnson was going to be much easier to manipulate.

To counter Air Force demands McCone tried a different approach, one that involved money. He told the president that more than half of Oxcart’s budget had already been spent producing fifteen airplanes. To expose Oxcart now was a terrible idea, McCone said, not just in terms of national security but because it would be a colossal waste of money. Johnson agreed. But the president still wanted to one-up the Russians, so he settled on a slightly different plan. Through a veil of half-truths, he would out the Air Force’s attack version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, as the speed-breaker. The YF-12 would be given a false cover, the fictitious name A-11. Respecting McCone’s national security concerns, the actual A-12 Oxcart program—its true speed, operational ceiling, and near invisibility to radar—would remain classified top secret until the CIA declassified the Oxcart program, in 2007.

Three months later, on February 29, 1964, Johnson held a press conference in the International Treaty Room at the State Department. “The world record for aircraft speed, currently held by the Soviets, has been repeatedly broken in secrecy by the… A-11,” President Johnson declared from the podium, thrilled to give the Russians a poke in the ribs. At Area 51, caught off guard by the requirement to do a presidential dog-and-pony show, the 1129th Special Activities Squadron scrambled to get an airplane to Edwards Air Force Base in California for a press junket, which was called for immediately after the president’s grand announcement. Two YF-12s belonging to the Air Force but being tested at Area 51 were quickly flown in from Groom Lake and driven into a special hangar at Edwards. The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they set off the hangar’s sprinkler system, which mistook the high-temperature metal for a fire. When the press junket began, the aircraft were still dripping wet. Never mind; no one noticed. Like the president, the reporters were enamored