Skunk Works

Very quickly I felt part of his team but far from being a key player. Some days he remembered my name and other times he clearly fudged it. But for whatever reason, I discovered that I really was not afraid of him. If I screwed up, I quickly admitted it and corrected my mistake. For example, one day I suggested something that would have added a hydraulic damper into the design and that meant decreasing altitude by increasing weight. I saw Kelly’s face cloud over before I even finished speaking, and I immediately slapped my forehead and said, “Wait a minute. I’m a dumb shit. You’re trying to take off pounds…. Back to the drawing board.” The guys who tried to finesse mistakes and hoped that Kelly would not notice usually wished they had never been born. Nothing got by the boss. Nothing. And that was my sharpest impression of him, one that never changed over the years: I had never known anyone so expert at every aspect of airplane design and building. He was a great structures man, a great designer, a great aerodynamicist, a great weights man. He was so sharp and instinctive that he often took my breath away. I’d say to him, “Kelly, the shock wave coming off this spike will hit the tail.” He would nod. “Yeah, the temperature there will be six hundred degrees.” I’d go back to my desk and spend two hours with a calculator and come up with a figure of 614 degrees. Truly amazing. Or, I’d remark, “Kelly, the structure load here will be…” And he would interrupt and say, “About six point two p.s.i.” And I’d go back and do some complicated drudge work and half an hour later reach a figure of 6.3.

Kelly just assumed that anyone he selected to work for him would be more than merely competent. I assume he felt that way about me. But during those feverish days of getting that first U-2 prototype built, I was just another worker bee in his swarming hive. And I actually learned to love our slumlike working conditions. Everyone smoked in those days and the smoke clouds resembled a thick London fog. Since no outsiders, including secretaries or janitors, were allowed near us, we did our own sweeping up and took turns making our own coffee. Working to giddiness, we acted like college sophomores a shocking amount of the time. We hung “daring” pictures of Petty girls in scanty swimsuits which could be flipped around to reveal on the opposite side a reproduction of waterfowl. On rare occasions, when Kelly brought in visitors, someone would shout, “Present ducks,” and we’d flip our three framed pictures of full-breasted beauties. Once we had a contest to measure our asses with calipers. Leave it to me, I had never won a contest before in my life and I won that one. I was presented with a certificate proclaiming me “Broad Butt of the Year.” From then on, “Broad Butt” was my nickname. It was still better than Dick Fuller’s, though. Everyone called him “Fulla Dick.” And we were supposedly an elite group doing momentous work.

The CIA was not at all in evidence unless I knew who I was looking for. Every few weeks I would catch a glimpse of a tall, patrician gentleman dressed improbably in tennis shoes, freshly pressed gray trousers, and a garish big-checked sport jacket that any racetrack bookmaker would have been proud of. I once asked Dick Boehme who that guy was, and he replied with a stern “What guy? I don’t see a soul.” Kelly made sure that few of us had any dealings with the visitor who appeared every few weeks or so. Many months went by before I heard someone refer to him as “Mr. B.” No one besides Kelly knew his name. “Mr. B” was Richard Bissell, former Yale economics professor and Allen Dulles’s special assistant, put in charge of running the CIA’s spy plane project, who became the unofficial godfather of the Skunk Works, the government official who really put us on the map. He became one of Kelly’s closest confidants and our most ardent champion. Ultimately, he ran all the spy plane and satellite operations for the agency until the last months of the Eisenhower administration in late 1959, when Allen Dulles put him in charge of organizing a group of Cuban émigrés into a rag-tag battle brigade that would attempt to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs. But in the early days of the U-2, he was a mysterious figure to most of us, part of a complicated working arrangement involving the agency, Lockheed, and the Air Force that was unprecedented in the annals of the military-industrial complex.