The Oxcart

It flew at 3,529 km/h and 90,000 feet, effortlessly evaded six surface-to-air missiles once, and could photograph an entire country in 12 minutes and 30 seconds

Strategic aerial reconnaissance was a significant plot point in the second spy novel I wrote: Let Bhutto Eat Grass: Part Two (if you haven’t read the two novels, fair warning that the story in Part Two continues from Let Bhutto Eat Grass). The reading and research from secondary sources that I did for it led me to the stories of the U-2 and its successors, the Oxcart and the Blackbird, as well as their peers. Recalling some of the amazing stories from back then, I’m writing a three-part series of articles on these magnificent aircraft. The first article on Capt. Gary Powers and the U-2 is linked to below.

Detected & tracked

After Capt. Gary Powers was shot down by an S-75 Surface to Air Missile while his U-2 was 70,500 feet above the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, the United States stopped U-2 flights over the USSR. But the Soviets detecting and downing a U-2 wasn’t a complete surprise, at least not to parts of the US security establishment given its speed and altitude limitations. A CIA study published in 1956, just a few weeks before the first two U-2 flight over the USSR on 4 & 5 July, assessed that the Soviets would be able to detect the aircraft at a range of between 20 to 150 miles when it was flying above 55,000 feet.

U-2 flights over USSR on 4 July 1956 & 5 July 1956

Eisenhower had allowed the CIA to fly U-2s over USSR but was emphatic that flights over should be suspended at the first hint of the Soviets discovering or tracking the aircraft. But flights over Eastern Europe in June had already indicated that evading discovery wasn’t feasible. Even the flight on 4 July had been detected, but CIA reports suggested that the Soviets hadn’t been able to consistently track the aircraft.

As I mentioned in 70,500 feet, photographs taken by the U-2 themselves showed MiG-15s and MiG-17s in pursuit, climbing, flipping over, and falling back towards the earth. Analysts were even able to determine their approximate altitudes. This was proof that the Soviets were able to track the U-2s. But since their fighter aircraft were proving incapable of interception, these photos strengthened the belief that the Soviets couldn’t bring down a U-2 at operational altitude.

On 10 July 1956, the Soviet Union delivered a strong protest to the US Embassy in Moscow. They had detected and tracked the 4 & 5 July flights by a “twin-engine medium bomber of the United States Air Force”. This was followed by strong protests from the Polish Ambassador to the US, and then from the Czechoslovak government. The detailed flight paths mentioned in the protest notes made it clear that not only could the U-2s be detected, they could also be tracked for extended periods.

Eisenhower was unhappy and ordered overflights to be stopped. Though this decision was later reversed after the Soviet response to the Hungarian Revolution in October & November 1956, Richard Bissel — the CIA officer responsible for the U-2 project since its conception — anticipated a declining political willingness to use the aircraft, and set up a project to look into making the U-2 less vulnerable to radar. It became clear within a year, however, that the project would not succeed.

The first crash…almost

On 10 December 1956, Carmine Vito was flying the U-2 over Bulgaria. He was known among his colleagues as Lemon-Drop Kid because of his habit of sucking on lemon drop candies, which he carried in the knee pocket of his flight suit, during missions. On this particular day during the preflight regimen, an airman had placed an L-pill in that pocket unaware that Vito kept candies in it.

Somewhere over Bulgaria, Vito opened his faceplate, popped a candy in his mouth, and began sucking on it. The texture was different. And there was no flavour at all. When he reopened his faceplate and took the candy out to examine what was wrong with it, he realised he had escaped death by a thin layer of glass. The L-pill was a glass vial containing potassium cyanide. A bite would have killed him in seconds and crashed his plane.

Need for a new aircraft

It was against this backdrop that in 1957 the CIA enunciated the need for a strategic reconnaissance aircraft that could not be detected, tracked, or engaged by the USSR. The CIA commissioned an analysis of the impact of an aircraft’s speed, altitude, and radar cross-section on the probability of it being shot down. Supersonic speed greatly reduced the probability, and towards the end of that year, the CIA asked Lockheed and Convair submit definite proposals to build them a low radar cross-section aircraft that could fly extremely fast and extremely high. Lockheed’s proposed aircraft was longer, heavier, had slightly longer range, and could fly 3,600 feet higher.

Work began in 1958 at Lockheed’s Skunk Works unit in California under Kelly Johnson’s leadership. They prepared 11 designs — A-1 to A-11 — out of which one was chosen, with substantial modifications to reduce its radar cross-section. On 11 February 1960 — two and a half months before Gary Powers was shot down — the CIA awarded Skunk Works a $96 million contract to manufacture 12 aircraft that would fly faster than 2,000 miles per hour at an altitude greater than 90,000 feet.

An aircraft flying at 2,000 mph generates a lot of friction and heat, even at high altitudes. Lockheed figured out that the heat generated would cause structural failure if the aircraft was manufactured from aluminium. They needed something like steel, but lighter, and zeroed in on titanium. This presented several challenges, one of which was that the US did not have sufficient quantities of rutile ore, a mineral composed primarily of titanium dioxide (TiO2). The largest producer at that point of time was the Soviet Union. The CIA established multiple shell companies in Third World countries like Indonesia and sourced rutile ore from the Soviet Union through them.

The aircraft featured a navigation system that used inertial navigation, but also took its bearings from the position of star constellations in the sky. The camera system was significantly superior to the A-2 system on the U-2 (which had a resolution of 2.5 feet from an altitude 70,000 feet).

The Oxcart

The first flight took place on 25 April 1962, and the sound barrier was broken on 4 May, with the aircraft reaching Mach 1.1. The first crash happened on 24 May 1963 when Kenneth S. Collins, upon noticing erroneous and confusing airspeed readings from the A-12 he was piloting, ejected from the aircraft which then crashed in Utah. Collins hitched a ride on a truck and was later taken back to the base after stopping at a payphone to inform the team about the crash. Apparently, farmers near the crash site were told the aircraft had contained atomic weapons in order to dissuade them from going near the aircraft. Law enforcement and random passers-by who happened to witness the site were also given $25,000 of hush money. The A-12, or Oxcart as it came to be known, underwent 2,850 test flights.

Mach 2 was reached after six months of flying; Mach 3 after 15 months.

The secrecy associated with the programme was eroding. Commercial Airline pilots had reported seeing the Oxcart, and rumours were flying fast and thick. On 24 February 1964, the Oxcart was introduced to the world by Lyndon Johnson as the A-11, a deliberate subterfuge on the part of the CIA. The A-11 had been a different design first proposed by Lockheed.

Lockheed A-12

The Oxcart was ready for operational deployment in November 1965. Although it was designed for overflights over the Soviet Union, it was never deployed in that role. It did serve in Asia in Operation Black Shield from 31 May 1967.

Operation Black Shield

With the deployment of the S-75 Dvina and the MiG-21 in China and Vietnam, U-2s were denied access to many target areas. The US needed a quick reaction capability, something that was not achievable with reconnaissance satellites. But the proposal to deploy Oxcarts to Japan was held up for more than a year as the committee formed to evaluate the proposal and authorise it — the 303 Committee — was cleaved into two camps:

The proponents urged the necessity of better intelligence, especially on a possible Chinese Communist build-up preparatory to intervention in Vietnam. The opponents felt that better intelligence was not so urgently needed as to justify the political risks of basing the aircraft in Okinawa and thus almost certainly disclosing it to Japanese and other propagandists. They also believed it undesirable to use OXCART and reveal something of its capability until a more pressing requirement appeared.

When this deadlock was taken to the President, he sided with the majority which opposed deployment. This reticence was overcome by the fear of Soviets deploying Surface to Surface missiles in North Vietnam. Three A-12s were deployed to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan for photographic coverage of critical sites in China, North Korea, and Vietnam. The first flight under Operation Black Shield took place on 31 May 1967. It lasted 39 minutes, and 70 of the 190 known surface to air missile sites were photographed in addition to other targets. No radar was detected; the element of surprise had been complete.

A total of fifteen missions were flown by August that year, and it was determined that surface to surface missiles had not been deployed to North Vietnam yet. The typical mission would involve the Oxcart taking off from Kadena, refuelling shortly afterwards south of Okinawa, the photographic pass(es) over Vietnam, another refuelling over Thailand, followed by the aircraft returning the base. A single photographic pass over Vietnam would take just 12 minutes 30 seconds.

Approximate track of the typical mission

While film from the missions was initially shipped to the US for processing, soon a suitable facility was built in Japan to be able to deliver photographs & analysis to theatre commanders within 24 hours of the flight.

Extract from Mission Report for Black Shield Mission BX 6723 on 17 September 1967

The first time an Oxcart was tracked by radar in Operation Black Shield was on 17 September that year when the acquisition radar of an S-75 tracked it over North Vietnam. The SNR-75 guidance radar, however, could not lock on. That happened on 28 October when an S-75 was fired. The Oxcart’s electronic countermeasures worked. Photographs taken by the Oxcart later showed smoke at the missile site, as well as the missile in flight and its contrail. Two days later, on his first photographic pass across Vietnam, Dennis Sullivan’s Oxcart detected two radar locks. No missiles were fired. Photographs later showed that on his second pass at least six S-75 missiles were fired at his aircraft. He saw their vapour trails and noticed three detonations. A piece of shrapnel was recovered from the right lower wing of his aircraft during the post-flight inspection.

Into storage

Even before the Oxcarts would be deployed to Kadena, however, events were in motion that would result in the termination of the Oxcart program. The USAF was beginning to procure SR-71s, two-seat variants of the A-12. With a significant USAF fleet of SR-71s projected, the rationale for maintaining a separate Oxcart fleet with the CIA came under budgetary scrutiny, and on the President directed the termination of the Oxcart programme by 1 January 1968.

Efforts were made to salvage the programme, but they only managed to delay the inevitable. By March 1968 USAF SR-71s began arriving at Kadena, and the last operational mission of the Oxcart was flown on 8 May 1968. On 4 June Jack Weeks took off from Kadena for a check flight after an engine had been replaced in his Oxcart. His last radio transmission was from the South China Sea, 520 miles east of Manila. Search and rescue operations found nothing.

Approximate location in the South China Sea where Jack Weeks was lost

Shortly after, the two remaining Oxcarts were flown back to the US and placed in storage with the others.

Sources

CIA archives, Roadrunners International, Lockheed Martin

Shaunak Agarkhedkar writes spy novels. His first two - Let Bhutto Eat Grass & Let Bhutto Eat Grass: Part 2 - deal with nuclear weapons espionage in 1970s India, Pakistan, and Europe.