Skunk Works

At altitude the pilot flew nose high and wings level, so for him to be able to see down we installed a cockpit device known as a drift sight—basically an upside-down periscope that had four levels of magnification and could be swiveled in a 360-degree arc. The pilots also had to plot their navigation by sextant, plotting precise routes while maintaining total radio silence and photographing particular targets with the pinpoint accuracy of a bombardier. A screwup could mean death by ground fire or fighter attack—and a guaranteed international crisis.

The airplane and the missions were much too demanding to trust to any but the best pilots available. The CIA found that out in the late fall of 1955, when they made a totally off-the-wall decision to try to recruit foreign pilots to fly this top-secret program. The rationale was that it would be less embarrassing if, say, a Turkish national was shot down over Russia than an American. Our government could plausibly deny any involvement. The president had cut out the Air Force from the U-2 program on the basis that the CIA was better at keeping secret a very classified program and that if a plane should be shot down it was not as provocative somehow with a civilian pilot at the controls as with an Air Force fighter pilot. Much to the chagrin of the Air Force and of several high-level CIA officials, the White House ordered the CIA to recruit pilots from NATO countries who could pass themselves off as pilots for an international high-altitude weather survey program, which was the cover story for the U-2 operation. So seven foreign pilots arrived in the late fall of 1955 and began training under the tutelage of Colonel Bill Yancey, of the Strategic Air Command, and a small crew of top-notch blue-suiter flight instructors, who had been thoroughly checked out on the U-2 by our own test pilot corps. But from the first day the undertaking appeared hopeless. The pilots lacked experience to fly such a demanding airplane as the U-2, and several of them freaked out, realizing that they would be forced to land on two tandem wheels. In less than two weeks, they were sent packing, and Kelly noted with a sigh of relief in his journal: “It’s been decided to use only American pilots from now on, thank God.”

Before the year ended, General Curtis LeMay, the tough, cigar-chomping commander of the Strategic Air Command, got into the U-2 act by insisting that SAC recruit the pilots for the U-2 program. LeMay was furious that his own organization was not running the program operationally and thought that Eisenhower had lost his senses by allowing the CIA to start up its own air force. He raised so much hell with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott that he was finally cut into the deal around the edges by being tasked to hire and train the pilots from within SAC, with the additional promise that U-2s would be made available to the blue-suiters at some future time. In those days the Strategic Air Command had its own fighter wings that were used to escort its bomber force into combat. The SAC fighter pilots selected would have to resign their Air Force commissions and come to work for Lockheed as contract employees under assumed names. We would put them on our payroll and so integrate them into the company that, at the end of the line, even the KGB might have a tough time tracing any of those pilots back to the military. The spooks called this kind of total identity change “sheep dipping.” This was about as close as the government and private enterprise were likely to get as teammates in top-secret espionage.

The Skunk Works would also be reimbursed by special government funds for the salaries and use of its mechanics and maintenance people who would service the U-2s at the secret overseas bases for the duration of the overflights. The agency insisted on using our mechanics over the usual Air Force crews simply because we held the monopoly on knowledge and experience on the workings of the U-2, and on these critical missions over Russia there was no margin for any mechanical failure. We needed perfectly functioning airplanes from takeoff to landing. No pancake landings on a Russian beet field, thank you.