Skunk Works

Other Voices

James Cherbonneaux

In July 1957, a cargo plane brought the first so-called dirty bird to our base in Turkey. It was covered with a plastic material and had two sets of piano wire strung from either side of its nose to a set of poles sticking out of the wings. The wires were to scatter radar beams while the paint was to absorb other frequencies. But I wasn’t thrilled. Part of my big paycheck was compensation for high-risk missions in a semi-experimental airplane, but I had never before risked flying an airplane wired like a guitar.

The Skunk Works engineer who flew out with the dirty bird admitted that its extra weight would cost us altitude and three thousand miles in diminished range. On July 7, 1956, I flew the dirty bird on an operational test of the whole Soviet defense net along the Black Sea, flying inside twelve miles of the coastline. The flight lasted eight hours, and I carried an array of special recording devices while deliberately trying to provoke responses from Soviet air defense along its entire southern flank. The plan was to see if they could detect our dirty bird. All in all, the coatings and wire worked well, but analysis of my recordings indicated that the bad guys were homing in on my cockpit and tailpipe, neither of which had been treated.

As it turned out, my most incredible overflight occurred only two weeks later in a mission specially cleared by President Eisenhower and involving a dirty bird. I took off in total secrecy from a field in Pakistan, flying a dirty bird for a flight deep inside Russia to photograph a missile site believed to be readying intercontinental missile tests. Because of the added “dirty” weight I could top out at only fifty-eight thousand feet. The missile site was a three-hour trip, but about seventy-five minutes into the mission I looked through my drift sight and saw a startling sight: the familiar circular graded contours that I had seen marking our own nuclear test site at Yucca Flats. My heart jumped! Could it really be? We had no idea that this test site even existed. I brought my drift sight up to its maximum four power magnification and focused on a large tower. I felt a chilling terror. That tower held a large object at the top, and there were signs of activity around a huge blockhouse about two miles away. And then a paralyzing thought slammed me: what if those bastards were getting set to let that nuclear weapon blow just as I was directly overhead? And in fact, that crazy thought took hold and I began to sweat and hyperventilate in panic. “Wait, goddam it. Wait, will you! Let me pass and then light your fire.” I was shouting into my faceplate.

I carried a three-camera system, one pointing straight down and the other two out at forty-five-degree angles so that each picture would overlap and provide a stereographic photo interpretation. I threw a switch and the cameras began to whir in sequence. It seemed to take an eternity for my airplane to cross directly over that tower. My heart was pounding in my throat. I just knew I was going to be evaporated in the next seconds.

Five minutes later I was clear of the nuclear test site, laughing at myself for being so chicken. Three hours later I was over the city of Omsk, in central Russia, photographing a military-industrial complex of interest to SAC as a potential target; then I turned east to head for the missile test site—my principal target for the mission. I photographed the site, which bore evidence of a very recent test firing, then headed back to Pakistan.

I looked through the drift sight at the vastness of central Russia, a vastness almost unimaginable that made me feel achingly lost and alone. There were no telltale contrails of MiGs trying to get me, so I had to conclude that the Skunk Works had worked its magic and kept me hidden from the bad guy’s radar. If true, that meant that no one on earth knew where I was at that particular moment because I was also out of range of U.S. listening posts. Suddenly I became alert. My engine started making rough noises, but I knew from long experience that the roughness of an engine is in direct proportion to how far a pilot still has to go before he makes it safely across a hostile border.

Twenty minutes later I saw the shimmering snowy peak of the awesome mountain called K-2 illuminated against a dark blue sky. K-2 was my beacon back to Pakistan and a hot shower and sleep, and I calculated it was an hour away, about 450 miles, before I crossed the border. I was now eight hours plus into the mission and I became aware of the need to urinate. I cursed myself for forgetting to avoid any liquids the night before the flight, something I tried always to do because I was never able to pee out of my pressure suit. To do so, I had to unwork three layers and then pee uphill into a nozzle arrangement. I just couldn’t. But I began to ache. Real pain. Like knife thrusts down there. I was exhausted and in agony. I tried to pee into the nozzle, I tried to wet my pants, but I was having spasms and nothing came out. It was so bad I could barely focus my eyes, and K-2’s magnificent granite towers slipped by directly below and I barely noticed. Or cared a damn. By the time I made my landing approach the pain was searing to the point where I almost landed short of the field and crashed into a forest. I barely remember the mechanic opening my canopy at the top of his ladder and me pushing him aside like a maniac and vaulting down that ladder in a flash. Moments later, not heeding privacy, I set a new world record on that tarmac.

I expected to be received as a hero for having uncovered a Soviet nuclear test site with a bomb in the tower. Instead the team who debriefed me scoffed incredulously. “There is no atomic test facility in that part of central Russia,” one debriefer told me. But they passed on my observation by special wire to Washington, while another team began processing my film. CIA headquarters responded by coded cable in less than an hour. Their communication was stern, halfway between a personal rebuke and an official reprimand. My credibility was zero back home. But the next day over lunch, John Parangosky, the senior CIA agent in charge of our operation, took me aside with a sheepish grin. “Apologies, Jim. Collateral intelligence sources just reported that a nuclear bomb was detonated from that tower less than two hours after you flew over it.”