Skunk Works

Kelly was his own salesman. He traveled to Washington pitching those in high places at the Pentagon and on the Hill. He was plugged in at the CIA and knew what the top Pentagon brass were worrying most about at any given moment, and in the early months of the Kennedy administration many officials were popping Valium.

There were storm warnings flapping over Red Square. The Russians seemed eager to severely test our new young president and backed up that belligerency with worrisome crash weapons projects. The CIA had intercepted Russian telemetry data on what they thought was a missile test in Soviet Siberia in the spring of 1961. They sent this data to the Skunk Works for our analysis and verification. Our telemetry experts reported back a chilling contradiction: that was no missile being tested but a prototype supersonic bomber, the so-called Backfire, rumored to have been in the works for several years. We were likely looking at an aircraft capable of sustained Mach 2 speeds, flying at sixty thousand feet and with an impressive range of three thousand miles. If we were right, this was a major upset of the then current military balances of power: the Soviets were building a bomber that could come and get us, and the brass at the Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs could only look up and shake a fist because we had nothing flying that could intercept it, or any missile to shoot it down.

But fitted on the jigs of Assembly Building 82 was the frame of our Mach 3 Blackbird, being built as a CIA spy plane, which could be adapted as a high-performance interceptor that would stop the Russian bombers long before they could reach any American targets. Once the U.S. early-warning radar net (so powerful, it could track a baseball-size object from five thousand miles away) picked up a Soviet bomber force streaking toward North America, our Blackbirds could race to meet and intercept them over the Arctic Circle, beyond range of their nuclear-tipped missiles targeted against U.S. cities.

That was Kelly Johnson’s Pentagon sales pitch in the dawning of the Kennedy years: the Blackbird was exactly what the brass of the fighter command should have been looking for, but, unfortunately, our airplane was so secret and knowledge of this project so limited that very few Air Force commanders knew of its existence and Kelly could not pitch anyone who wasn’t on a very select list of those cleared to know about this top secret airplane. He was so constrained by security that he was practically talking to himself.

Among a few, highly placed Air Force brass who did know about our airplane there were mixed feelings about Blackbird’s $23 million cost (the technology was not bargain bin) because a general would always prefer commanding a large fleet of conventional fighters or bombers that provides high visibility and glory. By contrast, buying into Blackbird would mean deep secrecy, small numbers, and no limelight. In the military, less was definitely not more. Most military officers were assigned commands or Pentagon desk jobs for three to five years, before moving on. The future uses of a revolutionary airplane like the Blackbird as a fighter or bomber was a question they would gladly leave for their successors to mull over; they aimed to make their mark quickly by putting as much new rubber at the ramp as soon as possible and earn commendations and promotion up the chain of command. Kelly Johnson’s technological triumphs were thrilling to hear about but not immediately advantageous to an ambitious colonel lusting for his first star.

Kelly knew what he was up against, but he tried to improve the odds by producing the kinds of “add-ons” that no blue-suit customer could resist. For example, he put me in charge of a feasibility study for using the Blackbird as a platform for launching ICBM missiles. Launched from, say, sixty thousand feet, a missile could travel six to eight thousand miles by eliminating the tremendous fuel consumption of a ground-based launch. We even dreamed up the creation of an energy bomb that used no explosive device. Flying at Mach 3 and eighty-five thousand feet, we’d drop a two-thousand-pound weight of high-penetrating steel that would hit the ground with the force of a meteor—at about one million foot-pounds of energy and blast a hole 130 feet deep. The Air Force was interested, but fretted about the absence of a guidance system to assure pinpoint accuracy and resisted our suggestions to try to develop such a system. To the new secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, an energy bomb was futuristic drivel. McNamara had enough to worry about in the present tense.