Skunk Works

Eisenhower finally ordered fighter escorts for these reconnaissance missions, resulting in several fierce dogfights with Soviet MiGs over the Sea of Japan. Ike was normally very cautious, but he was so intent on gaining information on Soviet missile development that he approved a joint CIA-British air force operation in the summer of 1955, in which a stripped-down Canberra bomber flew at fifty-five thousand feet, well above the range of Soviet fighters, and photographed the secret missile test facility called Kapustin Yar, east of Volgograd. The Canberra was hit more than a dozen times by ground fire and barely made it back to base. The crew reported that the Soviets seemed to have been alerted to the mission, and years later the CIA concluded that the operation had indeed been compromised by the notorious Kim Philby, a high-level official in British intelligence, who was a mole for the KGB.

In a final act of desperation before our spy plane could be launched, the blue-suiters began sending up spy balloons over Russia loaded with electronic gathering devices. They were announced as a weather systems survey, but the Soviets weren’t fooled and immediately fired off angry protests to Washington. They also shot down some of the balloons, while the majority floated off into limbo. Only about thirty made it back to our side, and we actually learned a lot of useful information about Russian weather, especially wind patterns and barometric pressures.

This was pathetic, primitive stuff compared to the promise of our U-2. Dr. Edwin Land, who had pushed the idea of a high-flying spy plane in his role as a special technical consultant to the White House, had promised President Eisenhower a tremendous intelligence bonanza: “A single mission in clear weather can photograph in revealing detail a strip of Russia two hundred miles wide and twenty-five hundred miles long and produce four thousand sharp pictures,” he wrote in his proposal. Land predicted the U-2 would obtain a detailed photographic record of Soviet railroads, power grids, industrial facilities, nuclear plants, shipyards, air bases, missile test sites, and any other target of strategic value. “If we are successful, it can be the greatest intelligence coup in history,” Land assured the president.

We had stretched the design of this airplane to the limit to achieve unprecedented range and altitude. It could fly nine hours, travel four thousand miles, and reach heights above seventy thousand feet. The wings extended eighty feet, providing unusual lift capacity, like a giant condor gliding on the thermals, except, of course, that the U-2 did no gliding and flew high above the jet stream. Our long wings stored 1,350 gallons of fuel in four separate tanks.

Each pound adding to the airplane’s overall weight cost us one foot of altitude, so while building the U-2 we were ruthless weight-watchers. Seventy thousand feet was our operational goal. Intelligence experts believed (erroneously as it turned out) that that altitude put our pilots beyond the range limits of Soviet defensive radar. That height was, however, beyond reach of their fighters and missiles.

We designed and built that airplane for lightness. The wings, for example, weighed only four pounds per square foot, one-third the weight of conventional jet aircraft wings. For taxiing and takeoffs, jettisonable twin-wheeled “pogos” were fitted beneath the enormous fuel-loaded wings and kept them from sagging onto the runway while taking off. The pogos dropped away as the U-2 became airborne.

The fuselage was fifty feet long, built of wafer-thin aluminum. One day on the assembly floor, I saw a worker accidentally bang his toolbox against the airplane and cause a four-inch dent! We looked at each other and shared the same unspoken thought: was this airplane too damned fragile to fly? It was a fear widely shared inside the Skunk Works that quickly transferred onto the flight line. Pilots were scared to death flying those big flapping wings into bad weather situations—afraid the wings would snap off. The U-2 had to be handled carefully, but proved to be a much tougher, more resilient bird than, frankly, I would ever have guessed. The landing gear was the lightest ever designed—weighing only two hundred pounds. It was a two-wheel bicycle configuration with a nose wheel and a second wheel in the belly of the airplane. Tandem wheels were used on gliders, but this was the first time ever for a powered airplane, which usually had tricycle landing gears. Ours would cause pilot trepidations about landing the U-2 that never quite evaporated, no matter how many landings a pilot successfully completed. Adding to the sense of the airplane’s fragility was that the razor-thin tail would be attached to the fuselage by just three five-eighth-inch bolts.