Skunk Works

In the jargon of the trade, a silver bullet was a deadly secret weapon kept under tight wraps until it was ready to be used to take out an enemy in a Delta Force covert surgical strike. The Israeli air force hit against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb facility in Baghdad was the perfect example of a Delta Force–style surgical strike operation. The silver bullet would be used to quick-hit the highest-priority, heavily defended targets in the dead of night.

Actually, it was an ideal Skunk Works project: tightly secret, building small numbers of hand-made airplanes rather quickly and efficiently. But I knew we also faced a steep learning curve leaping from building the small Have Blue demonstrator, with its off-the-shelf avionics, to a truly sophisticated larger fighter with novel and complex avionics and weapons systems.

Not long after General Dixon’s visit, the chief of staff himself detoured from some business he had in San Diego, to drop by before going back to Washington. Among the services, the Navy was the most active in running “deep black” programs, especially in Navy SEAL penetrations of Soviet harbor and naval installations. But as General Jones reminded me over sandwiches in my office, “Your stealth fighter is the first black program the Air Force has ever run. Security is paramount. I doubt there are ten people in Washington aware of this project. Maintaining secrecy must be your number one priority, even ahead of keeping to the schedules and so forth. A leak in the papers would be disastrous. Be prepared to sacrifice efficiency or anything else to maintain the tight lid. Do that, Ben, and you’ll keep out of trouble. The payoff for this airplane will be total surprise on the enemy the first time it is used.” The president wanted Jones to personally brief Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Defense Secretary Harold Brown on Have Blue and the other stealth projects. I had a briefing book prepared, which he took with him back to Washington. Before he left, the general told me that Admiral Bobby Inman, head of the supersecret National Security Agency, which operated all U.S. satellite and communications monitoring activities, was being brought into our stealth project to take direct charge of communications security between the Skunk Works, the test site, and the Pentagon. We would be receiving special cryptographic gear and scrambler fax and telephone systems.

I made a mental note that General Jones was not the one to complain to when Air Force security began driving me up a wall.

By my third anniversary since taking over from Kelly Johnson in 1975, the Skunk Works had added one thousand new workers and by 1981 would employ seventy-five hundred. Our drafting rooms and workshops were operating on overtime; our assembly hangars hummed around the clock, on three shifts. In addition to stealth, we were updating squadrons of older Blackbird spy planes, now twenty-five years old, with new wiring and avionics. We were also building six brand-new TR-1 spy planes a year, for a total of thirty-five, the deal I had closed with General Jones the first year of my regime. I was happily putting in twelve- to fourteen-hour workdays and so was nearly everyone else. Still, as a businessman I believed in the adage of “strike while you’re still hammering”—and I pitched the Pentagon for seed money to develop stealthy helicopter rotor blades and anything else we could think up. Some wags in my employ presented me with a bowling ball stamped TOP SECRET. The attached card explained it was the equivalent of the radar cross section of the Pentagon, once we diamond-shaped it. The instructions said to roll it across the desk of the secretary of defense.

I should have been in high clover instead of up to my lower lip in deep doo-doo, but General Al Slay did get the last word and a measure of revenge for the loss of his beloved B-1: he forced on us a contract that was almost punitive. Because the Air Force had gone the unusual route of contracting for an airplane before the technology was proven in flight test, I was being socked with a contract worth $350 million to deliver the first five stealth fighters under draconian terms that could absolutely ruin us. Ultimately I had to guarantee that the stealth fighters would meet the identical radar cross section numbers achieved by our thirty-eight-foot wooden model at the White Sands radar range in 1975. I had also to guarantee performance, range, structural capability, bombing accuracy, and maneuverability.