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It was an exciting time for Frank Murray. He couldn’t have imagined living this life. Only a few years earlier, he’d been flying Voodoos at Otis Air Force Base as part of the Air Defense Command when he had seen an interesting sign tacked on a bulletin board that read NASA is looking for F-101 chase pilots. He thought working for NASA sounded like fun. He had no idea that was just a cover story and that the Air Force, not NASA, was really looking for chase pilots for the Oxcart program at Area 51. Murray applied and got in. He moved the family to Nevada and swore an oath not to tell anyone what he did, not even Stella, his wife. But he knew his family would be super proud of him. For a farm boy from San Diego, he was at the top of his game.

While Project Oxcart worked to get mission-ready, back in Washington the widening of the conflict in Vietnam by the Communists in the north was becoming a nightmare for President Johnson. He had won the favor of the people back in 1957 by declaring Communism to be the world’s greatest threat. In comparison to the thermonuclear-armed Soviet Union, Vietnam was to Johnson a sideshow. But it was also a piece in the widely held domino theory: if Vietnam fell to Communism, the whole region would ultimately fall. President Johnson had inherited Vietnam from President Kennedy when it was a political crisis and not yet a war. That changed in the second summer Johnson held office, in August of 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin. The Pentagon declared that the U.S. Navy had suffered an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam against the USS Maddox, and the National Security Agency had evidence, McNamara said. This event allowed Johnson to push the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress, which authorized war. (In 2005 NSA released a detailed confession admitting that its intelligence had been “deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack.”) To avenge the USS Maddox attack, Johnson ordered air attacks against the North Vietnamese, sending Navy pilots on bombing missions over North Vietnam. When a number of U.S. pilots were shot down, the North Vietnamese took them as prisoners of war.

The war’s escalation led Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to perform an about-face regarding Oxcart. The Agency’s spy plane could be vitally useful after all, McNamara now said, certainly when it came to gathering intelligence in North Vietnam. The Agency knew the Russians had begun supplying surface-to-air missile systems to the Communists in North Vietnam, and now they were shooting down American boys. Both the Air Force and the Agency sent U-2s on reconnaissance missions, and these overflights revealed that missile sites were being set up around Hanoi. But the Pentagon needed far more specific target information. In June, McNamara sat down with the CIA and began drawing up plans to get the Oxcart ready for its first mission at last.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Ultimate Boys’ Club

At Groom Lake throughout the 1960s, at least once a month and always before dawn, base personnel would be shaken from their beds by a violent explosion. When the rumbling first started happening, Ken Collins would leap from bed as a sensation that felt like a massive earthquake rolled by. A nuclear bomb was being exploded next door, underground, just a few miles west of Oxcart pilots’ quarters. Next, the blast wave would hit Collins’s Quonset hut and then roll on, heading across the Emigrant Mountain Range with a surreal and unnatural force that made the coyotes wail.

In the years that Collins had been test-flying the Oxcart at Area 51, the Department of Defense had been testing nuclear bombs with bravado. After a while, being awoken before dawn meant little to Collins, and he’d roll over and go back to sleep. But on this one particular morning something felt different. It was a banging he was hearing, not a boom. Collins opened his eyes. Someone was indeed banging on his Quonset hut door. Next came a loud voice that sounded