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Almost everyone who visited Area 51 became enamored with the desert facility, and Helms was no exception. It was impossible not to be fascinated by the power and prestige the secret facility embodied. It was the quintessential boys’ club, both exotic and elite. Most of all, it gave visitors the sense of being a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of Washington, DC. There were no cars to drive—instead, Agency shuttles moved men around the base. No radio, almost no TV. As a visitor to Area 51, Helms was particularly careful not to step on any powerful Air Force toes. The base was, operations-wise, Air Force turf now. The CIA was in charge of missions, but there were no missions, which only underscored a growing sense of Agency impotence. The Air Force controlled most of the day-to-day operations on the base, including proficiency flights and air-to-air refuelings, which were practiced regularly so everyone in the 1129th Special Activities Squadron stayed in shape.

During his visit, Helms kept a relatively low profile, making sure to spend more of his time in the field—on the airstrip with the pilots and in the aircraft hangars with the engineers—than drinking White Horse Scotch with Air Force brass in the House-Six bar. During test flights, Helms liked to roll up his sleeves and stand on the tarmac when the Oxcart took off. He likened the experience to standing on the epicenter of an 8.0 earthquake and described the great orange fireballs that spewed out of the Oxcart’s engines as “hammers from hell.” Helms, an upper-middle-class intellectual from Philadelphia, loved colorful language. He’d once told a room of military men that the Vietnam War was “like an incubus,” a nightmarish male demon that creeps up on sleeping women and has intercourse with them. Helms’s grandiose language, most likely intentional, separated him from straight-talking military men.

Despite playing a key role in planning and executing covert operations in Vietnam, Richard Helms did not believe the United States could win the war there. This posture kept him out of step with Pentagon brass. Helms believed Vietnam was fracturing consensus about America’s need to win the Cold War, which he saw as the more important battle at hand. He was an advocate of using technology to beat the Russians by way of overhead reconnaissance from satellites and spy planes, which was why he liked Oxcart so much. And unlike Pentagon and State Department officials, who, for the most part, cautioned the president against ever sending spy planes over the Soviet Union again, Helms, like McCone, felt the president should do just that. “The only sin in espionage is getting caught,” Helms once said. He believed the best intelligence was “objective intelligence.” Photographs didn’t have an opinion and couldn’t lie. Helms attributed his respect for objectivity to his working as a journalist for the wire service United Press International. In 1936, a then twenty-four-year-old Richard Helms got his first big scoop: covering the Berlin Olympics as a reporter, he was invited to interview Adolf Hitler. Six years later, Helms would be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor organization to the CIA, to spy on Hitler’s men.

With Richard Helms at Area 51 in December of 1965, the Oxcart was finally declared operational. Celebrations were in order. One of the pilots offered to fly a C-130 Hercules on a seafood run to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where Werner Weiss had coolers full of lobsters, oysters, and crab legs ready to be taken to Area 51. Big-budget black operations had stomach-size perks too. After such feasts, the kitchen staff buried the shells in compost piles along the base perimeter, and the joke among Air Force support staff was that future archaeologists digging in the area would think Groom Lake had been an ocean as late as the 1960s.

As secret and compartmentalized as the base was, the mess hall was the one place where the men