Skunk Works

I had asked Kelly to estimate the cost of building these two experimental Have Blue airplanes. He came back with the figure of $28 million, which turned out to be almost exactly right. I asked the Air Force for $30 million, but they had only $20 million to spend in discretionary funds for secret projects by which they bypassed congressional appropriations procedures. So, in the late spring of 1976, I was forced to go begging for the missing $10 million to our CEO, Bob Haack, who was sympathetic but not particularly enthusiastic. He said, “Look, Ben, we’re in tough straits right now. I don’t think we can really afford this.” I pushed a little harder and got him to agree to let me present the proposal to the full board of directors. Bob set up the meeting, and I just laid it all out. Larry Kitchen, Lockheed’s president, and Roy Anderson, the vice chairman, spoke up enthusiastically in support. I told the board I thought we were dealing with a project that had the potential for $2 to $3 billion in future sales. I predicted we would be building stealth fighters, stealth missiles, stealth ships, the works. I was accused of hyperbole by one or two directors, but in the end I got my funding, and as time went on my sales predictions proved to be conservatively low.

Even worse, I began picking up rumors that certain officials at the Pentagon were accusing me of rigging the test results of the radar range competition against Northrop. An Air Force general called me, snarling like a pit bull. “Rich, I’m told you guys are pulling a fast one on us with phony data.” I was so enraged that I hung up on that son of a bitch. No one would have ever dared to accuse Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works of rigging any data, and by God, no one was going to make that accusation against Ben Rich’s operation either. Our integrity was as important to all of us as our inventiveness. The accusation, I discovered, was made by a civilian radar expert advising the Air Force, who had close ties to leading manufacturers of electronic jamming devices installed in all Air Force planes to fool or thwart enemy radar and missiles. If stealth was as good as we claimed, those companies might be looking for new work.

His motivation for bad-mouthing us was obvious; but it was equally apparent that we were unfairly being attacked without any effective way for me to defend the Skunk Works’ integrity from three thousand miles away. So I invited one of the nation’s most respected radar experts to Burbank to personally test and evaluate our stealth data. MIT’s Lindsay Anderson accepted my invitation in the late summer of 1976 and arrived at my doorstep carrying a bag of ball bearings in his briefcase. The ball bearings ranged in size from a golf ball to an eighth of an inch in diameter. Professor Anderson requested that we glue each of these balls onto the nose of the Hopeless Diamond and then zap them with radar. This way he could determine whether our diamond had a lower cross section than the ball bearings. If the diamond in the background proved to be brighter than the ball in the foreground, then the ball could not be measured at all. That got me a little nervous because nothing should measure less than an eighth-of-an-inch ball bearing, but we went ahead anyway. As it turned out, we measured all the balls easily—even the eighth-of-an-inch one—and when Professor Anderson saw that the data matched the theoretical calculated value of the ball bearings, he was satisfied that all our claims were true.

That was the turning point for the entire stealth adventure, which could have ended right there if Lindsay Anderson had reinforced the accusation that we were being unscrupulous and presenting bogus data. But once he corroborated our achievement back in Washington, I was informed by a telegram from the Air Force chief of staff that Have Blue was now classified “Top Secret—Special Access Required.” That security classification was rare—clamped only on such sensitive programs as the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb during World War II. My first reaction was “Hooray, they finally realize how significant this technology really is,” but Kelly set me straight and with a scowl urged me to cancel the whole damned project right then and there.

“Ben,” Kelly warned me, “the security they’re sticking onto this thing will kill you. It will increase your costs twenty-five percent and lower your efficiency to the point where you won’t get any work done. The restrictions will eat you alive. Make them reclassify this thing or drop it.” On matters like that, Kelly was seldom wrong.