Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [128]
Collins followed Slater in a run toward the hangar where the Oxcart lived. There he was quickly briefed on the situation: the Pentagon had called to say that a Russian reconnaissance balloon was flying across the United States, floating with the prevailing winds in a westerly direction. Collins was to find the Soviet balloon—fast. Normally, the flight surgeon would have spent two hours just getting Collins into his pressure suit. That morning Collins was suited up and sitting in the cockpit of the Oxcart in a little over thirty minutes. Up he went, blasting off the tarmac, north then east, on direct orders by the Pentagon to “hunt and find” the Soviet weather balloon visually and using radar.
Up in the air it dawned on Collins what a wild-goose chase he was on. What would a Russian reconnaissance balloon look like? What were the chances of making visual contact with such a thing? At speeds of more than 2,200 mph, he was traveling more than half a mile each second. Even if he saw the balloon, in just a fraction of a second it would be behind him. Even worse, what if he actually did get that close to the flying object? If the Oxcart hit anything while moving at Mach 3, the plane would break apart instantly and he’d be toast.
Flying somewhere over the middle of the continent, Collins briefly identified an object on radar about 350 miles away. As instructed, he flew around the object in the tightest circle he could perform at Mach 3, which meant his circle had a radius of about 400 miles. He never saw the balloon with his own eyes.
After Collins returned to base, engineers scrambled to read the information on the data recorder. The incident has never been declassified. Admitting that the Soviets invaded U.S. airspace—whether in a craft or by balloon—is not something any U.S. official has ever done. Collins never asked any follow-up questions. That’s how it was to be a pilot: the less you knew, the better. He knew too many fellow pilots from Korea who had come home from POW camps missing fingernails—if they came home at all. Now, ten years later, pilots shot down over North Vietnam were experiencing the same kinds of torture, maybe worse. The less you knew, the better. That was the pilots’ creed.
As deputy director of the CIA, Richard Helms was a huge fan of Oxcart. He worked closely on the program with Bud Wheelon, whose efforts earned him the title of first director of science and technology for the CIA. Now that Richard Bissell was gone, there were few men in the Agency as devoted to the Area 51 spy plane program as Wheelon and Helms. Whereas Wheelon saw his position at the CIA as a temporary one—he signed on for a four-year contract, fulfilled it, and left the CIA—Helms was a career Agency man. He’d worked closely with Bissell on the U-2 from its inception and he knew what important intelligence could come from overhead photographs. The United States learned more about the Soviets’ weapons capabilities from its first U-2 overflight than it had in the previous ten years from its spies on the ground. Off McNamara’s inquiry about possibly using the Oxcart on spy missions over North Vietnam, Helms made a personal trip out to Area 51 to sign off on Oxcart design specifications himself. Helms was also acutely aware of the Air Force’s plans to push Oxcart out of the way in favor of their own reconnaissance spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird. If Helms could get a