Skunk Works

God knows, the Skunk Works had gone out of its way to earn the agency’s trust. We had even kept the production line going by putting up our own money when Congress was late appropriating money to the CIA’s secret Contingency Reserve Fund. Eventually, more than $54 million was allocated for the U-2 program. Out of pure patriotism Kelly defied one of his own strictly held commandments—number 11 to be exact—which insisted that a customer’s funding must be timely. We were sticklers for delivering prompt monthly progress reports to customers and keeping a close accounting of our costs. Kelly required incremental customer payouts to keep us from having to carry the government with our own bank loans. But because of the national security urgency, Kelly obtained a $3 million bank loan to cover our U-2 production costs, at a time when interest rates were only about 5 percent. Still, it was a good example of a defense contractor bailing out his government. And at the end of the line we were actually able to refund about 15 percent of the total U-2 production cost back to the CIA and in the bargain build five extra airplanes from spare fuselages and parts we didn’t need because both the Skunk Works and the U-2 had functioned so beautifully. This was probably the only instance of a cost underrun in the history of the military-industrial complex.

The first group of six U-2 pilots recruited from the SAC fighter squadrons showed up at the Skunk Works in the fall of 1955 wearing civilian clothes and carrying phony IDs. They spent three days getting a thorough briefing on the airplane before flying off to the secret base to begin training with our test pilots. I remember talking to one of them, a nice, dark-haired fellow with a soft West Virginia accent who asked me a few technical questions about the air intakes. I would instantly recognize him four years later when his face was plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the world as Francis Gary Powers.

I learned that those pilots were being paid forty grand annually with an additional thousand a month bonus once they became active overseas. The forty grand would be held for them by our payroll department and they’d collect it only after they were mustered out. Which meant they had to survive in order to collect their just rewards.

Those pilots disappeared off my screen on the morning when they flew off to the base in a CIA-operated C-47 that had all its passenger windows blacked out. But since Skunk Works mechanics and ground crews were used exclusively to maintain the airplanes overseas, and several of my colleagues were forced to make periodic quick trips to add some new device or make a fix, we were able to keep up with the U-2 operations in fits and starts. The first contingent became operational, setting up at a base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, only ten months after the first test flight and less than eighteen months since the plane was first designed. Dick Bissell had personally obtained permission from then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to use German soil for this secret spy operation. Simultaneously, in early June 1956, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of the NASA space program, announced in Washington the beginning of a new high-altitude weather research program using a new Lockheed U-2 airplane that was expected to fly above ten miles high. The announcement was a fraud, claiming that the new U-2 would be charting weather patterns in advance of tomorrow’s jet transports. Our U-2 detachment called itself “The First Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional).” They were strange weather birds—hidden away in a remote corner of the Wiesbaden air base, guarded by CIA agents carrying submachine guns. And by the time these guys were setting up operations in Germany, with four U-2s and six pilots, we at the Skunk Works were building ten more airplanes that would supply three operational detachments: Detachment A in Germany, Detachment B in Turkey, and Detachment C in Japan.

Once that first detachment was deployed, the secrecy lid clamped shut. All of us inside the Skunk Works felt in our bones that the overflights of Russia were imminent, but only Kelly was plugged in with the CIA; he would disappear for several days and we all speculated that he was either on the scene in Germany (which was untrue) or being briefed in Washington by Mr. B (which was true) and actually shown the photos taken from the first flights (also true).