Richard Helms Interviewed by R. Jack Smith, 21 April 1982

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and putting the worse case on it, a lot of people shared in these things, they were not solely things that I
was responsible for.
(U/F$O) So I think that when you look down the list of complaints, most of them start on somebody
else’s watch. Now, it will be said that John McCone, when he testified in 1975, denied that he knew of
these things. But as a Republican staff man pointed out to me one day, privately he said, “Don’t you
realize what’s going on up here?” This is about my third trip back fiom Tehran [where he was serving
Let’s go on now to the first item I have on this list of “Oxcart Operational.” The follow-on to
the U-2,3w ich came known to the Agency as Oxcart, was started I believe - I don’t know whether it was
at the end of Dulles’ administration or at the beginning of McCone’s, but sometime during that period -
it was certainly after the U-2 had been exposed on the shoot down of May 1,1960. And a lot of work
was being done on the so-called follow-up aircraft. Well, it did finally come on-stream in the middle
sixties, and it had its first operational use over North Vietnam during the period that I was Director.
Now, one of the things that gets forgotten, I truly believe, is that the Oxcart aircraft was different fiom
the Air Force version, i.e., the SR71. In other words, the Oxcart had only one crewman, i.e., the pilot. It
had a much larger swath for taking photographs and it carried a lot more film. In short, it was not only a
slightly higher performance aircraft but also much more effective for the job for which it was designed.
It was Lyndon Johnson who finally decided that the United States Government could not afford two
different organizations running essentially the same aircraft and therefore opted in favor of the SR71
since the Air Force would bear the expense for that. And [to] mothball the Oxcart. But it wouId be too
bad to have the Oxcart vaporize into history without being due credit for being one hell of a technical
performance.
( U / F W ) JS: Incidentally, at one point later, and I forgot exactly when it was, you offered the use of
Oxcart. There were some of those aircraft sitting in the hangers. I can get the dates.for that if you are
interested in knowing; you offered it over to [Secretary of Defense Melvin] Laird, I think it was.
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