Skunk Works

I sighed. “From now on I’ll be home closer to midnight than dinnertime and I have to work Saturdays. It’s so secret we don’t even have secretaries or janitors.”

“Oh, my God,” Faye exclaimed, “don’t tell me you’re involved with The Bomb!”

Five years later, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, and the U-2 spy plane was revealed in headlines around the world, I was finally able to tell my wife that I helped build that airplane. “I figured as much,” she insisted.

I erroneously assumed that we were building this U-2 for the U.S. Air Force. This assumption was based on the fact that the spy plane in question had wings and flew, and therefore would be in the province of blue-suiters. But Ed Baldwin set me straight. “Baldy” was Kelly’s structural designer, as crusty as a pumpernickel, who would remain unmellowed more than twenty years later while working for me on the stealth fighter. Over lunch, I remarked at the absence of a single Air Force project officer on hand to monitor progress or kibitz as we built their airplane.

“Friend, this project is Central Intelligence Agency all the way,” Baldwin remarked. “Everything about it is under the spook’s direction.”

“You mean the CIA will have its own air force?”

“You said it,” Baldy grinned. “The rumor is that Kelly will give them all Lockheed test pilots to fly this thing. We’re also going to furnish all their mechanics and ground crew and build them a training base somewhere out in the boonies.”

As it turned out, Baldy’s rumors were two-thirds accurate. The agency hired its own pilots from the ranks of the Air Force, but we put them on the books as Lockheed employees so that their payment came out of a special Lockheed account of laundered CIA money rather than straight government checks. The subterfuge was that the pilots were Lockheed employees involved in a government-contracted high-altitude weather and performance study.

Everything about this project was dark alley, cloak and dagger. Even the way they financed the operation was highly unconventional: using secret contingency funds, they back-doored payment to Lockheed by writing personal checks to Kelly for more than a million bucks as start-up costs. The checks arrived by regular mail at his Encino home, which had to be the wildest government payout in history. Johnson could have absconded with the dough and taken off on a one-way ticket to Tahiti. He banked the funds through a phony company called “C & J Engineering,” the “C & J” standing for Clarence Johnson. Even our drawings bore the logo “C & J”—the word “Lockheed” never appeared. We used a mail drop out at Sunland, a remote locale in the San Fernando Valley, for suppliers to send us parts. The local postmaster got curious about all the crates and boxes piling up in his bins and looked up “C & J” in the phone book and, of course, found nothing. So he decided to have one of his inspectors follow our unmarked van as it traveled back to Burbank. Our security people nabbed him just outside the plant and had him signing national security secrecy forms until he pleaded writer’s cramp.

Clearly, building this airplane was deadly serious business. Inside the Skunk Works our irreverent group privately scoffed at the “secret agent” mentality of the agency security guys who made us take aliases if we had to travel on business in connection with the project. I chose the name “Ben Dover,” as in “bend over,” the name of a British music hall variety star of my father’s misspent youth. Still, all of us involved in building this particular airplane felt the weightiness of our mission. Kelly was regularly briefed at the agency on the real state of the world, which, he assured us, was 70 percent worse than anything we read in our morning papers. He didn’t hide from us his view that the success of U-2 operations might make the difference between our country’s survival or not.

The Russians were crashing development of an intercontinental ballistic missile with powerful liquid-fuel engines, and East-West tensions were strained to the breaking point. Both the United States and Soviet Union had already successfully tested H-bombs within the past year and seemed poised to use them. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, warned that we would go to the brink of war to combat Communist expansion, coining the term “brinkmanship” for his eye-to-eye confrontation technique. He acknowledged the Russians’ incredible conventional might: they out-divisioned us by a factor of ten, out-tanked us by a factor of eight, out-airplaned us by a factor of four. But Dulles drew lines in the sand around the world and served notice that if the Communists crossed any one of them it would mean instant nuclear retaliation on a massive scale. “Going to the verge of war without actually getting into war is the necessary art,” Dulles claimed. But that Russian bear seemed fifteen feet tall.