Skunk Works

The operational plan for deploying our highly secret airplane was approved personally by President Eisenhower. Under this plan, the CIA was responsible for overseeing production of the airplane and its cameras, for choosing the bases and providing security, and for processing the film, no mean feat since the special, tightly wound film developed by Eastman Kodak would stretch from Washington halfway to Baltimore on each mission. The Air Force would recruit the pilots, provide mission and weather planning, and run the daily base operations. Lockheed would design and build the airplane and provide ground crews for the bases and a cover for the pilots, who would carry Lockheed IDs and be officially logged on the company books as pilots for a government-contracted weather investigation program.

The reason why Kelly could move so quickly building the U-2 was that he could use the same tools from the prototype of the XF-104 fighter. The U-2, from nose to cockpit, was basically the front half of the F-104, but with an extended body from cockpit to tail. Using that tooling would save many months and a lot of money. Our goal was to put four birds in flight by the end of the first year. Each airplane would cost the American taxpayers $1 million, including all development costs, making it the greatest procurement bargain ever.

By April 1955, the first U-2 was being built under tight wraps inside the assembly area of Building 82, and Kelly sent for his chief engineering test pilot, Tony LeVier, who had flight-tested all of Johnson’s airplanes since the days of the P-38. “Close the goddam door,” he said to Tony. “Listen, you want to fly my new airplane?” Tony replied, “What is it?” Kelly shook his head. “I can’t tell you—only if you say yes first. If not, get your ass out of here.” Tony said yes. Kelly reached into his desk and unrolled a large blueprint drawing of the U-2. Tony began to laugh. “For chrissake, Kelly, first you have me flying your goddam F-104, which has the shortest wings ever built, and now you got me flying a big goddam sailplane with the longest wingspan I ever saw—like a goddam bridge.”

Kelly rolled up the drawing. “Tony, this is top secret. What you just saw you must never ever mention to another living soul. Not your wife, your mother, nobody. You understand? Now, listen. I want you to take the company Bonanza and find us a place out on the desert somewhere where we can test this thing in secret. And don’t tell anyone what you’re up to.”

LeVier knew the vast sprawl of desert terrain shared by California and Nevada as well as any mule-packing Forty-Niner; as a test pilot he had mapped in his mind nearly every dry lake bed between Burbank and Las Vegas as a possible emergency landing strip. So he took off on his scouting expedition, after telling fellow pilots he was off to count whales for the Navy—a project Lockheed had actually done from time to time—and headed north toward Death Valley. Two days later, he found the perfect spot. “I gave it a ten plus,” he told me years later. “Just dandy. A dry lake bed about three and a half miles around. I had some sixteen-pound cast-iron shotput balls with me and dropped one out to see if the surface was deep sand. Damned if it wasn’t hard as a tabletop. I landed and took pictures.” A few days later Tony flew Kelly and a tall civilian introduced to him only as “Mr. B.” to the site to take a look. His wife had packed a picnic lunch, but a stiff wind began howling, blowing large stones across the surface of the dry lake. “This will do nicely,” Mr. B. remarked. The area was not only remote but off-limits to all unauthorized air traffic because of its proximity to nuclear testing. As Kelly noted in his private log that day: “Flew out and located runway at south end of lake, then flew back (very illegally) over the atomic bomb sitting on its tower about nine hours before it was set to go off. Mr. Bissell pleased. He enjoyed my proposed name for the site as ‘Paradise Ranch.’ ”

From mid-May to mid-July the pressure on the workers building the first U-2 grew in intensity to a point where three shifts were working eighty hours weekly. To put an airplane in the sky in only eight months was a tremendous achievement. On June 20, 1955, Kelly noted in his log: “A very busy time in that we have only 650 hours to airplane completion point. Having terrific struggle with the wing.”