Skunk Works

But then an even more serious problem hit us. A disgruntled employee, bypassed for promotion, contacted a staff member on the House Government Operations subcommittee and accused the Skunk Works of lax security and claimed that we lost secret documents. His accusations were perfectly timed because an airplane model manufacturer named Testors was making a fortune with a model they called the F-19, claiming it was America’s supersecret stealth fighter. They took the front end of our Blackbird, put a couple of engines on it, and advertised it as the stealth fighter. They sold 700,000 of these bogus stealths and Congress was livid. They wanted to know how could we allow the government’s most secret ongoing project to become a best-selling Christmas present. A couple of congressional committees wanted to send for me and sock it to me in executive session, but the Air Force refused to allow my appearance under any circumstances, citing extreme national security concerns. So Congress reached into our board room, and Larry Kitchen was sent to the Hill as the sacrificial lamb instead; he was browbeaten unmercifully before the House Subcommittee on Procedures and Practices. Then the subcommittee’s chairman, John Dingell, a feisty Michigan Democrat, sent a few of his committee sleuths to Burbank to investigate our security procedures. They ordered an audit of all our classified documents from year one—and I almost had a stroke. The first thing I did was drive over to Kelly Johnson’s house and grab back cartons of documents and blueprints and God knows what else, all stored in Kelly’s garage. Kelly operated by his own rules. He said, “Damn it, if they can’t trust Kelly Johnson by now, they can go straight to hell.” For years Kelly made his own security rules, but now the rules had changed drastically and were vigorously enforced and unbending. I was sweating that we’d all wind up making license plates at Leavenworth.

Government auditors discovered some classified documents missing. The documents in question had been properly shredded, but our logging was antiquated and no one recorded the date of the document destruction. It was a bureaucratic foul-up rather than any serious security breach, but tell that to Congress. The government cut my progress payments on the stealth fighter project by 30 percent until I could prove to their satisfaction that I had taken specific steps to eliminate security logging laxness and lost documents. From then on, we were monitored unceasingly. Toward the end of the stealth project I had nearly forty auditors living with me inside our plant, watching every move we made on all security and contract matters. The chief auditor came to me during a plant visit and said, “Mr. Rich, let’s get something straight: I don’t give a damn if you turn out scrap. It’s far more important that you turn out the forms we require.”

Those guys swarmed over us like bees on clover, checking up on our payment schedules, investigating whether we bought the lowest-priced materials and equipment from subcontractors, whether we really negotiated cost, tracked it, worked hard to get the best deal for Uncle Sam with our suppliers. I had to double my administrative staff to keep up with all these audits. For better or worse, we were stuck inside a Kafkaesque bureaucracy demanding accountability for every nut, screw, and bolt.

In between all these distractions and disruptions we were trying to build an airplane. We started assembly the same time as McDonnell Douglas started the F-18 fighter. They took ten years to produce their first operational squadron of twenty airplanes. We took only five years. And theirs was a conventional airplane, while ours was entirely revolutionary technology.

We began by refining our shape on the computer and then constructing a full-scale wooden mock-up so that the exact shape and fit of each critical facet panel and component could be evaluated and any problems associated with new details like the bomb bay could be identified and solved. We knew that this slightly newer and larger shape would be as unstable as the Have Blue aircraft—but would there be differences? To find out, one of our aerodynamicists built a giant slingshot that looked like a rock-hurling catapult right out of an old Robin Hood movie, set it up on the third-floor ramp of a huge assembly building the length of two and a half football fields—and then fired off models of our new stealth shape and took slow-motion film of how they fell to the ground, receiving a painless preview of what would happen if the real airplane spun out of control. Security forced us to do this indoors rather than off a rooftop—but it worked perfectly.