Skunk Works

Kelly promised to deliver the world’s first Mach 3 airplane to the CIA only twenty months after we signed a contract. That also seemed to me, in my pathetic innocence, a reasonable deadline. After all, it had taken us only eight quick months to deliver the first U-2. Had I really thought about it, in complexity the U-2 was to the Blackbird as a covered wagon was to an Indy 500 race car.

To action-oriented guys like Bissell and Kelly, President Eisenhower often moved too cautiously. In pique, they referred to him as “Speedy Gonzales,” while being forced to cool their heels for weeks or months awaiting Oval Office decisions, whether for approving a particular U-2 mission over Russia or signing off on a new spy plane project. Kelly’s airplane was bound to cost millions, and would be a tough sell. The president was already spending a billion dollars in covert funds on the Agena rocket that would boost our first spy satellite into orbit. Bissell was in charge of that program, too, and the first twelve test firings had all been failures. Lockheed’s Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, had that contract, and Bissell asked Kelly to evaluate and reorganize their operation. Kelly set up a mini Skunk Works and, coincidentally or not, the thirteenth test shot was a success. But spy satellites had distinct limitations: their pictures in those days were not very sharp, and their orbits were fixed, so the Russians would learn to hide secrets before each scheduled overflight. By contrast, a spy plane operated on no fixed schedules, could loiter in areas of interest, and could overfly tension spots within hours. Our photography was vastly superior to a satellite’s.

Ike tremendously valued the U-2 photo takes but continually worried about the consequences of a shoot-down. He was attracted to the satellite alternative because he felt it was a less aggressive and threatening way to obtain overhead intelligence. Nations would learn to live in the age of satellites, but a spy plane flight would always be regarded as a provocative and aggressive violation of a country’s territory. So Bissell wisely decided to seek the backing of Ike’s two most influential technology advisers—Dr. James Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Edwin Land of Polaroid, who chaired the presidential advisory panel on aerial espionage and was the godfather of the U-2 program. In May 1958, Kelly flew to Cambridge to meet with Dr. Land and his associates. At that first meeting he was amazed to learn that the Navy had its own Rube Goldberg blueprint for a high-flying spy plane. Theirs would be a ramjet, lifted high into the stratosphere by a balloon. At 100,000 feet, the pilot would release the balloon, light booster rockets to get his ramjet started, then roar up to 155,000 feet. A Navy commander presented this unique idea to the panel while Kelly sat scribbling figures on a pad. “By my calculations,” Kelly told the group, “in order to lift that ramjet, the Navy’s balloon would have to be over one mile in diameter. Gentlemen, that’s one hell of a lot of hot air.”

A more serious proposal came from Convair, which had also been solicited by Bissell for ideas on a high-flying, high-speed spy plane. They had built the B-58 Hustler bomber, a highly regarded Mach 2 tactical strike airplane, which they presented as a “mothership” that would launch a piloted rocket plane that supposedly could reach 125,000 feet at Mach 4. The piggyback launch concept interested Land, but as months passed and the idea was further refined and tested, it became increasingly obvious that the B-58 could not go supersonic while carrying a smaller bird under its belly. Kelly was also skeptical about whether Convair’s plan could produce a reliable photo platform, and he wasn’t shy in passing along his doubts to his CIA friends.

Over the next year Kelly shuttled back and forth to Washington, meeting with Bissell, Land, and other panel members, offering them our latest designs and radar test data, often returning dejected by rumors that Convair’s proposals promised better performance and radar-cross-section data than ours, even though our first preliminary design drawing looked terrific. It was designated A-1, and showed a striking single-seat, two-engine airplane—a long, sleek, bullet-shaped fuselage with rounded inlets on big engines mounted on the tip of small delta wings that were two-thirds of the way back on the fuselage. One look and even a schoolboy would realize that this bird was designed for blazing speed. But the president was less interested in performance and more intent on pushing for the lowest radar cross section possible. It wasn’t that he just didn’t want to get us shot down—he didn’t want the Russians to know we were even up there.