The facts: On October 30, 1967, a CIA A-12 “Oxcart” spy plane flew over Hanoi at 82,000 feet and Mach 3.2, gathering intelligence on Soviet missile sites. Piloted by Dennis Sullivan, the mission became dangerous when North Vietnamese missiles narrowly missed the plane.

Simply unbelievable: The A-12, a predecessor to the SR-71 Blackbird, was part of the CIA’s brief but crucial Operation Black Shield, which conducted high-risk reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War.

Russia hated it: Despite its high speed and altitude, the A-12 faced an increasing threat from Soviet-designed radars and missiles, which eventually led to its retirement in favor of satellite and drone technology.

The CIA’s A-12 spy plane: The risky mission over Hanoi in 1967″

On October 30, 1967, a CIA spy plane hovered at 80,000 feet above Hanoi in northern Vietnam, traveling faster than a bullet – three times the speed of sound. A high-resolution camera in the belly of the squarish black jet captured more than a mile of footage of the terrain below – including the more than 190 sites of Soviet S-75 surface-to-air missiles.

The aircraft was an A-12 “Oxcart”, a smaller, faster single-seat predecessor of the Air Force’s legendary SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The jet’s pilot, Dennis Sullivan, had previously flown a hundred combat missions in an F-80 Starfighter over Korea for the US Air Force. But Sullivan was no longer technically a military pilot – he had been temporarily decommissioned to fly the high-tech jet on behalf of the CIA. He now sat in a cooled spacesuit in the cramped cockpit, while the friction caused by his plane’s Mach 3 speed heated the cockpit to over 250 degrees Celsius.

Sullivan noticed warning signals flashing on his instrument panel as the Vietnamese Fan Song’s radars locked on to him. But they didn’t fire missiles. After 12 and a half minutes, he was ready and flew a loop over Thailand, where he was refueled in the air. Then he made a second approach.

But the North Vietnamese were waiting for him. A missile launch alert warned him that a 10.5 meter long missile was heading toward him.

Decades later, Sullivan described in a speech how he saw one of the missiles whizz past him at a distance of two hundred meters.

“There’s a big phone flying right past the cockpit – straight up. That’s interesting… So I kept driving down the track and didn’t see anything – until I got down the road, and then I could see at least four rocket contrails behind me in the rearview mirror, all scattered. These four contrails rose about 90,000 to 95,000 feet and they all turned around, all bunched up in a line, toward my tail.”

The A-12 officially had a top speed of Mach 3.2, but the missiles that followed Sullivan could reach Mach 3.5.

“I said, ‘My goodness – those things fly pretty well up there for something that doesn’t have many wings.’ So I watched them. … They came up right behind me, really close, and suddenly there was a big red fireball – a big white cloud of smoke – and you immediately took off. You were going 30 miles per minute. (Note: actually 41 miles per minute!) Every one of those SAMs controlled absolutely perfectly and did the same damn thing.”

The 440-pound proximity-fuzed warhead was designed to knock out aircraft within 65 meters of the detonation point, but in the thinner air of the upper atmosphere, its fragments could travel up to four times that distance.

Sullivan managed to escape and landed his A-12 at Kadena Air Force Base, where it had to cool down on the tarmac for several minutes before mechanics could even touch its friction-heated outer skin. The stress of heat and high speed took a heavy physical toll on the jet’s pilots, who lost an average of five pounds of body weight after completing their three- to four-hour missions.

He was sitting in on the debriefing when mechanics stormed into the room and showed him two metal fragments from the tip of a missile they had found buried under his lower left wing, just next to his jet’s fuel tank.

It was later discovered that Sullivan’s camera footage showed the ghostly white contrails of six surface-to-air missiles coming toward him from the ground.

Operation Black Shield

The CIA’s twelve ultra-fast A-12 jets were doomed to a short service life after their first flight in 1962. After several U-2 spy planes were shot down, Washington was no longer willing to authorize overflights over Soviet territory, for which the A-12 had been designed. In the meantime, the Air Force ordered a larger SR-71 variant of the A-12, which proved superior in a “fly-off” in November 1967. Unwilling to finance the two very similar aircraft, the CIA’s A-12 fleet was promptly retired.

For ten months, however, the A-12 briefly filled an important niche by providing fast, high-quality photo-reconnaissance flights over Asia where the political and military risks were considered acceptable. Between May 31, 1967, and March 8, 1968, CIA pilots flew the A-12 on 29 spy missions over Cambodia, North Korea, and Vietnam in an operation code-named “Black Shield.” The jets flew from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, supported by over 250 support personnel.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was initially concerned about reports that North Vietnam had acquired surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) for attacks on South Vietnam. On May 31, 1967, CIA driver Mele Vojvodich took off in a rainstorm and shot a mile-long roll of film covering most of North Vietnam. The roll was then transported by plane for development by Kodak in Rochester, NY. The verdict, confirmed by subsequent overflights, was that Hanoi did not have SSMs after all.

Intelligence on A-12s often directly influenced LBJ’s decisions to conduct air strikes during the Vietnam War. However, the Oxcart’s stealth capabilities never proved sufficient to evade detection by Soviet radars.

On October 28, 1967, an S-75 fired a missile at an A-12 flown by Miller, but did not come particularly close. However, after Miller’s near-miss two days later on October 30, Black Shield flights were temporarily suspended. A later sortie on January 4 on the same route over Hanoi also triggered a missile launch, but it was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, on January 23, 1968, North Korean patrol boats seized the USS Pueblo, an American spy ship operating in international waters, and took its crew prisoner. Concerned that the incident and a failed commando raid on the South Korean presidential palace could spark a second Korean War, Johnson was persuaded to send an A-12, flown by Jack Weeks, over North Korea on January 26.

Analysis of Weeks’ photos revealed that the USS Pueblo was anchored near Wonsan alongside two patrol boats and that Pyongyang had not mobilized its troops for war. Johnson therefore ruled out plans for a preemptive or punitive strike in favor of diplomatic measures that eventually led to the release of the ship’s battered crew almost a year later.

A-12s flew two more missions over North Korea to keep an eye on the ship, which was eventually transferred to Pyongyang. Tragically, Weeks died six months later on June 5, when a malfunction in his A-12’s starboard turbojet engine caused it to overheat and his aircraft to break up over the South China Sea. Sixteen days later, a CIA A-12 made its last flight before the type was retired from service.

Sullivan’s narrow escape over Vietnam suggests that it was fortunate that A-12s were not authorized to fly over the Soviet Union, where they would have faced even greater danger from high-speed interceptors and more modern SAMs such as the S-200 (SA-5). Today, such high-risk photo-intelligence data is largely obtained by satellite or expendable drones.

About the author

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university lecturer for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes about security and military history for War Is Boring.

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