Skunk Works

In August 1970, Henry Kissinger arranged for two U-2s to monitor the unsettled Middle East buffer zone between Israel and Egypt. And in April 1974, after twenty years, the CIA ended its aviation activities and turned over all its twenty remaining U-2 aircraft to the Air Force. In more recent years the airplane has seen service monitoring the oil leak in the Santa Barbara channel, the Mount St. Helens eruption, floods, topography, earthquake and hurricane damage assessments, and by drug enforcement agencies to monitor poppy fields around the globe. The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) was involved in a test project on the U.S.–Mexican border in the late 1970s to test infrared film filter combinations on poppy fields photographed from high altitudes. Every growing thing has its own infrared signature, and the agents wanted to discover how poppies photographed at various stages in their growth cycle; photo interpreters could tell how close to harvesting a particular field was. The field in question was in Yuma, Arizona, specially cultivated under the DEA’s supervision, using fugitive Mexican poppy planters. A U-2 would overfly the field at various stages in the growth cycle and photograph it. Finally, the agency, after conferring with the Mexican planters, ordered a last flight for photos showing poppies ready to harvest. The U-2 flew over the field, as scheduled, only to discover the poppy field had been swept clean: the workers had harvested the crop the night before and slipped back into Mexico. The first U.S. government–subsidized and grown heroin was probably on the streets a few weeks later.

When we in the Skunk Works first built the U-2, we thought it would be in production for about eighteen months, but it is still in service. During Operation Desert Storm, the U-2 overflights monitored Iraqi tank movements, and its side-band radar proved effective in revealing the presence and configuration of enemy mine fields. In January 1993, when the outgoing Bush administration decided to bomb Saddam Hussein’s missile batteries in the southern “no-fly” zone, the U-2 was once again providing the vital intelligence data preliminary to the bombing. On the day before the bombing raid, I received a call at home from an official of the CIA. “Ben,” he said, “we just got a call from President-elect Clinton. He wants to know the altitude of the U-2. No one at this end is sure, so I thought I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth.”

“Tell the president-elect that our bird flies at seventy thousand feet.” And I said it with pride.

9 FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET

The Blackbird, which dominated our work in the sixties, was the greatest high-performance airplane of the twentieth century. Everything about this airplane’s creation was gigantic: the technical problems that had to be overcome, the political complexities surrounding its funding, even the ability of the Air Force’s most skilled pilots to master this incredible wild horse of the stratosphere. Kelly Johnson rightly regarded the Blackbird as the crowning triumph of his years at the Skunk Works’ helm. All of us who shared in its creation wear a badge of special pride. Nothing designed and built by any other aerospace operation in the world, before or since the Blackbird, can begin to rival its speed, height, effectiveness, and impact. Had we built Blackbird in the year 2010, the world would still have been awed by such an achievement. But the first model, designed and built for the CIA as the successor to the U-2, was being test-flown as early as 1962. Even today, that feat seems nothing less than miraculous.