Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [142]
The following day, Collins and Sullivan flew to the island of Kadena. An Agency driver picked them up at the airport. As soon as the door shut and the men were alone, the driver turned around and said solemnly, “We lost an airplane.”
“We lost a pilot,” Collins said.
It was former U-2 pilot Tony Bevacqua who was assigned to fly the search mission for Jack Weeks and his missing airplane. After Bevacqua had left Groom Lake, in 1957, he’d spent the next eight years flying dangerous U-2 reconnaissance missions and atomic sampling missions all over the world, from Alaska to Argentina. During the Vietnam War, Bevacqua flew SR-71 reconnaissance missions over Hanoi. (On one mission, on July 26, 1968, the photographs taken from the camera on his Blackbird show two SA-2 missiles being fired up at him.) But no single mission would stay with him into old age like the mission he was asked to fly on June 5, 1968, looking for Jack Weeks.
Bevacqua had arrived on Kadena the month before, having been selected to fly the Air Force version of the Oxcart, the SR-71. “All I had been told that day was that someone was missing,” Bevacqua remembers. “I didn’t have a need to know more. But I think I knew that the pilot was CIA.” The downed pilot, he learned, might be floating somewhere in the South China Sea, approximately 520 miles east of the Philippines and 625 miles south of Okinawa. “As I set out, my heart was pumped up and I was thinking, Maybe I will find this guy. I remember anticipation. Hopeful anticipation of maybe seeing a little yellow life raft floating somewhere in that giant sea.” Instead, Bevacqua saw nothing but hundreds of miles of open water. “It was like looking for a drop of water in the ocean,” Bevacqua remembers. The day after the mission, Bevacqua went to the photo interpreters to ask if they’d found anything on the film. “They said, ‘No, sorry. Not a thing.’ And that was the end of that,” Bevacqua explains.
Jack Weeks was gone. Vanished into the sea. Neither his body nor any part of the airplane was ever recovered. “Fate is a hunter,” Collins muses, recalling the destiny of his friend Jack Weeks. “I was supposed to be flying that aircraft that day but Jack got sick and we switched in the rotation. Jack Weeks went down. I’m still here.”
The 1129th Special Activities Squadron had reached its end. The CIA held a special secret ceremony at Area 51 for the remaining Oxcart pilots and their wives. Some of the pilots had their pictures taken with the aircraft but did not receive copies for their scrapbooks or walls. “The pictures went into a vault,” says Colonel Slater. “We were told we could have copies of them when, or if, the project got declassified.” Roger Andersen recalls how quickly the operation rolled up. “By that time, in 1968, there were a lot of other operations going on at Area 51, none of which I had a need-to-know.” Andersen had the distinction of flying the last Project Oxcart support plane, a T-33, back to Edwards Air Force Base. “Flying out of Area 51, I knew I’d miss it up there,” Andersen says. “Even after all these years, and having lived all over the world, I can say that Area 51 is unlike anywhere else in the world.” For certain, there would be no more barrel rolls with Colonel Slater over Groom Lake.
The men moved on. If you are career Air Force or CIA, you go where you are assigned. Ken Collins was recruited by the Air Force into the SR-71 program. Because the A-12 program was classified, no one in the SR-71 program had any idea Collins had already put in hundreds of hours flying in the Mach 3 airplane. “It left many in the