Skunk Works

A year after the stealth fighter became operational, two computer wizards who worked in our threat analysis section came to me with a fascinating proposition: “Ben, why don’t we make the stealth fighter automated from takeoff to attack and return? We can plan the entire mission on computers, transfer it onto a cassette that the pilot loads into his onboard computers, that will route him to the target and back and leave all the driving to us.”

To my amazement they actually developed this automated program in only 120 days and at a cost of only $2.5 million. It was so advanced over any other program that the Air Force bought it for use in all their attack airplanes.

At the heart of the system were two powerful computers that detailed every aspect of a mission, upgraded with the latest satellite-acquired intelligence so that the plan routes a pilot around the most dangerous enemy radar and missile locations. When the cassette was loaded into the airplane’s system, it permitted “hands-off” flying through all turning points, altitude changes, and airspeed adjustments. Incredibly, the computer program actually turned the fighter at certain angles to maximize its stealthiness to the ground at dangerous moments during a mission, when it would be in range of enemy missiles, and got the pilot over his target after a thousand-mile trip with split-second precision. Once over the target, a pilot could override the computers, take control, and guide his two bombs to target by infrared video imagery. Otherwise, our autopiloted computer was programmed even to drop his bombs for him.

It took us about two years to really perfect this system, aided by the nightly training flights at Tonopah. The computerized auto-system was so effective that on a typical training flight pilots were targeting particular apartments in a Cleveland high-rise or a boathouse at the edge of some remote Wisconsin lake and scoring perfect simulated strikes.

The first chance to test the airplane and the system under real combat conditions came in April 1986, when the squadron received top secret orders directly from Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary, to be prepared for a Delta Force–style nighttime strike against Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. The mission was code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon and would involve eight to twelve F-117As. Preparations were immediately made to fly to the east coast, overnight for crew rest, then take off the next day and using air-to-air refueling fly straight to Libya and hit Kaddafi around three in the morning. Senior officers at the Tactical Air Command who had been briefed about the existence of the stealth fighter and were monitoring the training program underway at Tonopah advised Weinberger that the F-117A was the perfect weapons system for this covert surgical strike operation. “This was why the system was built,” one four-star declared. But Cap hesitated, and within an hour of the squadron’s scheduled departure to the east coast he scrubbed us from the mission. He simply did not want to reveal the existence of this top secret revolutionary airplane to the Russians that soon. In my view Weinberger booted it. The raid was carried out using Navy fighter-bombers off carriers, and Kaddafi escaped with his life because Libyan defenses picked up the attackers coming in time to sound the alarm and several bombs aimed directly at Kaddafi’s quarters missed their target because the attacking aircraft were forced to evade incoming missiles and flak. The F-117A would have attacked with surprise and placed that smart bomb right on the guy’s pillow.

The Defense Department reluctantly revealed the stealth fighter’s existence in 1988. The time had come to expand training operations to include other Air Force units, and the Pentagon intelligence analysts concluded that the Soviets already knew the airplane was in the inventory. Although the press had speculated about the existence of a stealth fighter for years, what it actually looked like—its crucial shape and design—remained safely secret. The press even called it the F-19, the wrong designation, and published speculative artist’s renditions that caused our experts like Denys Overholser and Dick Cantrell to laugh in glee. Still, I knew several high-level intelligence officials who were miffed that the Air Force officially unveiled the airplane at all. “The Russians,” they told me, “are worried and puzzled. They don’t have a clue about how to counter the F-117A. We’ve got them burning lights and working weekends. Much better, though, if we kept it under wraps until we hit them with it.”