Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [136]
Colonel Slater couldn’t believe his ears.
“‘The president has given Oxcart a go,’” Slater recalls Bacalis saying, and that “orders are en route.” Then came the ultimate challenge—one for which he was prepared. Bacalis asked Slater if he could deploy his men for Oxcart missions starting in fifteen days.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Operation Black Shield and the Secret History of the USS Pueblo
The new director of the CIA, Richard M. Helms, had to work hard to become a member of President Johnson’s inner coterie. The president had once told his CIA director that he “never found much use for intelligence.” But eventually Helms managed to acquire a coveted seat at the president’s Tuesday lunch table. There, President Johnson and his closest advisers discussed foreign policy each week. Outsiders called the luncheons Target Tuesdays because so much of what was discussed involved which North Vietnamese city to bomb. In 1967, air battles were raging in the skies over Hanoi and Haiphong with so many more American pilots getting shot down than enemy pilots that the ratio became nine to one. The Pentagon had been unable to locate the surface-to-air missile sites in North Vietnam responsible for so many of the shoot-downs although they’d been looking for them all year. Thirty-seven U-2 missions had been flown since January, as had hundreds of low-flying Air Force drones. Still, the Pentagon had no clear sense of where exactly the Communist missile sites were located. There were other fears. The Russians were rumored to be supplying the North Vietnamese with surface-to-surface missiles, ones with enough range to reach American troops stationed in the south.
Which is how the Oxcart, already scheduled for cancellation, serendipitously got its mission—during a Target Tuesday lunch. On May 16, 1967, Helms made one last play on behalf of the CIA’s beloved spy plane, nine years in the making but just a few days away from being mothballed for good. Helms told the president that by deploying the Oxcart on missions over North Vietnam, war planners could get those high-resolution photographs of the missile sites they had been looking for. “Sharp point photographs, not smudged circles,” Helms promised the president. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, angling hard for Air Force control of aerial reconnaissance, had promised the president that the SR-71 Blackbird, the Air Force version of the Oxcart, was almost operations-ready. But the mission had to happen now, CIA director Helms told the president. It was already May. Come June, Southeast Asia would be inundated with monsoons. Weather was critical for good photographs, Helms said. Cameras can’t photograph through clouds. President Johnson was convinced. Before the dessert arrived, Johnson authorized the CIA’s Oxcart to deploy to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan.
It was a coup for the CIA. By the following morning, the airlift to Kadena from Area 51 had begun. The 1129th Special Activities Squadron was being deployed for Operation Black Shield. A million pounds of matériel, 260 support crew, six pilots, and three airplanes were en route to the East China Sea. Nine years after Kelly Johnson presented physicist Edward Lovick with his drawing of the first Oxcart, Johnson would write in his log notes: “the bird should leave the nest.”
Kadena Air Base was located on the island of Okinawa just north of the Tropic of Cancer in the East China Sea. It was an island scarred by a violent backstory, haunted by hundreds of thousands of war dead. Okinawa had been home to the single largest land-sea-air battle in the history of the world. This was the same plot of land where, twenty-two years earlier, the Allied Forces fought the Japanese. Okinawa was the last island before mainland Japan. Over the course of eighty-two days in the spring of 1945, the battle for the Pacific reached its zenith. At Okinawa, American casualties would total 38,000 wounded and 12,000 killed or missing. Japan’s losses