by Ben R Rich
Around the time Kelly’s crew raised their circus tent, cartoonist Al Capp introduced Injun Joe and his backwoods still into his “L’il Abner” comic strip. Ol’ Joe tossed worn shoes and dead skunk into his smoldering vat to make “kickapoo joy juice.” Capp named the outdoor still “the skonk works.” The connection was apparent to those inside Kelly’s circus tent forced to suffer the plastic factory’s stink. One day, one of the engineers showed up for work wearing a civil defense gas mask as a gag, and a designer named Irv Culver picked up a ringing phone and announced, “Skonk Works.” Kelly overheard him and chewed out Irv for ridicule: “Culver, you’re fired,” Kelly roared. “Get your ass out of my tent.” Kelly fired guys all the time without meaning it. Irv Culver showed up for work the next day and Kelly never said a word.
Behind his back, all of Kelly’s workers began referring to the operation as “the skonk works,” and soon everyone at the main plant was calling it that too. When the wind was right, they could smell that “skonk.”*
And who knows—maybe it was that smell that spurred Kelly’s guys to build Lulu Belle, their nickname for the cigar-shaped prototype of the P-80 Shooting Star, in only 143 days—37 days ahead of schedule. The war ended in Europe before the P-80 could prove itself there. But Lockheed built nearly nine thousand over the next five years, and during the Korean War the P-80 won the first all-jet dogfight, shooting down a Soviet MiG-15 in the skies above North Korea.
That primitive Skunk Works operation set the standards for what followed. The project was highly secret, very high priority, and time was of the essence. The Air Corps had cooperated to meet all of Kelly’s needs and then got out of his way. Only two officers were authorized to peek inside Kelly’s tent flaps. Lockheed’s management agreed that Kelly could keep his tiny research and development operation running—the first in the aviation industry—as long as it was kept on a shoestring budget and didn’t distract the chief engineer from his principal duties. So Kelly and a handful of bright young designers he selected took over some empty space in Building 82; Kelly dropped by for an hour or two every day before going home. Those guys brainstormed what-if questions about the future needs of commercial and military aircraft, and if one of their ideas resulted in a contract to build an experimental prototype, Kelly would borrow the best people he could find in the main plant to get the job done. That way the overhead was kept low and the financial risks to the company stayed small.
Fortunately for Kelly, the risks stayed small because his first two development projects following the P-80 were absolute clunkers. He designed and built a prototype for a small, low-cost-per-mile transport airplane called the Saturn that was really a sixth toe on commercial aviation’s foot because the airlines were buying the cheap war-surplus C-47 cargo plane to haul their customers and were calling it the DC-3. Then Kelly and his little band of brainstormers designed the damnedest airplane ever seen—the XFV-1, a vertical riser to test the feasibility of vertical takeoff and landing from the deck of a ship. The big trouble, impossible to overcome, was that the pilot was forced to look straight up at the sky at the crucial moment when his airplane was landing on deck. Even Kelly had to concede the unsolvability of that one.
But the open secret in our company was that the chief engineer walked on water in the adoring eyes of CEO Robert Gross. Back in 1932, Gross had purchased Lockheed out of bankruptcy for forty grand and staked the company’s survival on the development of a twin-engine commercial transport. Models of the design were sent to the wind tunnel labs at the University of Michigan, where a young engineering student named Clarence Johnson contradicted the positive findings of his faculty advisers, who praised the design to Lockheed’s engineering team. Johnson, all of twenty-three, warned Lockheed’s chief engineer at the time that the design was inherently directionally unstable, especially with one engine out.
Lockheed was sufficiently impressed to hire the presumptuous young engineer, and learned quickly why this son of Swedish immigrants was nicknamed “Kelly” by his school chums years earlier. He might be stubborn as a Swede, but his temper was definitely Old Sod.
Kelly solved the Electra instability problem with an unconventional twin-tail arrangement that soon became his and Lockheed’s trademark. The Electra revolutionized commercial aviation in the 1930s. Meanwhile Kelly was the shining light in the company’s six-man aviation department—the expert aerodynamicist, stress analyst, weight expert, wind tunnel and flight test engineer—and he did some test flying himself. He once said that unless he had the hell scared out of him once a year in a cockpit he wouldn’t have the proper perspective to design airplanes. Once that guy made up his mind to do something he was as relentless as a bowling ball heading toward a ten-pin strike. With his chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders. Hall Hibbard, who was Kelly’s first boss at Lockheed, watched Kelly work for three days during the war to transform Lockheed’s Electra into a bomber for the British called the Hudson. The transformation was so successful that the RAF ordered three thousand airplanes, and Hibbard was so awestruck by Johnson’s design skills, he claimed “that damned Swede can actually see air.” Kelly later told me that Hibbard’s remark was the greatest compliment he had ever received.
The Skunk Works was always strictly off-limits to any outsider. I had no idea who even worked there when I reported in that first day, just before Christmas, 1954, to Building 82, which was an old bomber production hangar left over from World War II days. The office space allocated to Kelly’s Skunk Works operation was a narrow hallway off the main production floor, crowded with drilling machines and presses, small parts assemblies, and the large assembly area which served as the production line. There were two floors of surprisingly primitive and overcrowded offices where about fifty designers and engineers were jammed together behind as many desks as a moderate-size room could unreasonably hold. Space was at a premium, so much so that Kelly’s ten-person procurement department operated from a small balcony looking down on the production floor. The place was airless and gloomy and had the look of a temporary campaign headquarters where all the chairs and desks were rented and disappeared the day after the vote. But there was no sense of imminent eviction apparent inside Kelly’s Skunk Works. His small group were all young and high-spirited, who thought nothing of working out of a phone booth, if necessary, as long as they were designing and building airplanes. Added to the eccentric flavor of the place was the fact that when the hangar doors were opened, birds would fly up the stairwell and swoop around drawing boards and dive-bomb our heads, after knocking themselves silly against the permanently sealed and blacked-out windows, which Kelly insisted upon for security. Our little feathered friends were a real nuisance, but Kelly couldn’t care less. All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor. A stone’s throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions. All the workers had been personally recruited by Kelly from the main plant and were veterans who had worked with him before on other projects.
The engineers dressed very informally—no suits or ties—because being stashed away, no one in authority except Kelly ever saw them anyway. “We don’t dress up for each other,” Kelly’s assistant, Dick Boehme, told me with a laugh. I asked Dick how long I could expect to stay. He shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what Kelly has in mind for you to do, but I’d guess anywhere from six weeks to six months.”
He was slightly off: I stayed for thirty-six years.
Twenty designers were stashed away in choking work rooms up on the second floor. The windows were sealed shut, and in those days nearly everyone smoked. To my delight, I was sharing an office with only six other engineers composing the analytical section, most of whom I discovered I already knew from my previous work on the F-104 Starfighter. Without exception, these were all colleagues whom I had particularly admired at the time, so I gave Kelly a quick
“A” for sharp recruiting, myself excepted of course. We were only two doors removed from the boss’s big corner office.
Before I really got to work, Boehme handed me a piece of paper on which was mimeoed Kelly’s “riot act”—ten basic rules we worked by. A few of them: “There shall be only one object: to get a good airplane built on time.” “Engineers shall always work within a stone’s throw of the airplane being built.” “Any cause for delay shall be immediately reported to C. L. Johnson in writing by the person anticipating the delay.” “Special parts or materials shall be avoided whenever possible. Parts from stock shall be used even at the expense of added weight. Otherwise the chances of delay are too great.” “Everything possible will be done to save time.”
“For as long as you work here, this is your gospel,” Dick said. Then he told me we were working with the folks at Pratt & Whitney to modify a regular jet engine to fly higher by at least fifteen thousand feet than any airplane had ever before flown. There were some inlet problems that I would be addressing. I knew the Russians were mediocre engine builders, at least a generation behind us. I figured we were building a radically new high-flying long-range bomber. But then I was shown a drawing of the airplane and I let out a whistle of surprise. The wings were more than eighty feet long. It looked like a glider.
“What is that thing?” I exclaimed.
“The U-2,” Boehme whispered and put a finger to his lips. “You’ve just had a look at the most secret project in the free world.”
6
PICTURE POSTCARDS FOR IKE
THE FULL WEIGHT of government secrecy fell on me like a sack of cement that first day inside Kelly Johnson’s guarded domain. Learning an absolutely momentous national security secret just took my breath away, and I left work bursting with both pride and energy to be on the inside of a project so special and closely held, but also nervous about the burdens it would impose on my life.
I hadn’t been inside the Skunk Works two minutes before realizing that everything that happened there revolved around one man—Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson. Kelly’s assistant, Dick Boehme, wasn’t about to brief me or tell me my duties. That was up to the boss himself, and Dick dutifully escorted me down the hall to Kelly’s corner office and stood by while Kelly, in shirtsleeves behind a behemoth-size mahogany desk, half hidden by an impressive stack of blueprints, welcomed me with neither a smile nor a handshake, but got to the point immediately: “Rich, this project is so secret that you may have a six-month to one-year hole in your résumé that can never be filled in. Whatever you learn, see, and hear for as long as you work inside this building stays forever inside this building. Is that clear? You’ll tell no one about what we do or what you do—not your wife, your mother, your brother, your girlfriend, your priest, or your CPA. You got that straight?”
“Yes, sure,” I replied.
“Okay, first read over this briefing disclosure form which says what I’ve just said, only in governmentese. Just remember, having a big mouth will cost you twenty years in Leavenworth, minimum. Sign it and then we’ll talk.”
He then continued, “I’m going to tell you what you need to know so that you can do your job. Nothing more, nothing less. We are building a very special airplane that will fly at least fifteen thousand feet higher than any Russian fighter or missile, so it will be able to fly across all of Russia, hopefully undetected, and send back beautiful picture postcards to Ike.”
I gulped.
“That’s its mission. Edwin Land, who designed the Polaroid camera, is also designing our cameras, the highest-resolution camera in the world. He’s got Jim Baker, the Harvard astronomer, doing a thirty-six-inch folded optic lens for us. We’ll be able to read license plates. And we’ve got Eastman Kodak developing a special thin film that comes in thirty-six-hundred-foot rolls, so we won’t run out.”
He handed me a large folder crammed with papers. “I’ve got a guy working on the engine inlets and exit designs. Here’s his work so far. I want you to review it carefully because I don’t think he’s up to speed. I also want you to take over all the calculations on what we’ll need for cabin heating and cooling, hydraulics, and fuel control. I don’t know how long I’ll need you here: maybe six weeks. Maybe six months. I’ve promised to have this prototype flying in six months. That will mean working six-day weeks. At least.”
He dismissed me with the back of his hand, and a few minutes later I was squeezed into an empty desk in a room jampacked with thirty-five growling, snorting designers and engineers, many of whom I had worked with on the F-104 Starfighter. Dick Fuller, an aerodynamicist who had come over from the main plant only the day before, was seated on one side of me, and a stability and control specialist named Don Nelson was on the other side. Our desks touched. We could put our arms around each other without even stretching. In Kelly’s tight little island, there was a yawning chasm between secrecy and privacy.
That first night I got home two hours later than usual, and Faye was not exactly delighted to see me. She had bathed our two-year-old son, Michael, put him to bed, and had eaten alone. Up until now I had always been able to share my day with her, and she enjoyed hearing about office gossip and some of the airplanes I worked on, even though I spared her the eye-glazing technical details of my work. I was one engineer who knew how damned boring other engineers could be when we talked shop at parties.
“Well, how did it go?” Faye asked.
I sighed. “From now on I’ll be home closer to midnight than dinnertime and I have to work Saturdays. It’s so secret we don’t even have secretaries or janitors.”
“Oh, my God,” Faye exclaimed, “don’t tell me you’re involved with The Bomb!”
Five years later, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union, and the U-2 spy plane was revealed in headlines around the world, I was finally able to tell my wife that I helped build that airplane. “I figured as much,” she insisted.
I erroneously assumed that we were building this U-2 for the U.S. Air Force. This assumption was based on the fact that the spy plane in question had wings and flew, and therefore would be in the province of blue-suiters. But Ed Baldwin set me straight. “Baldy” was Kelly’s structural designer, as crusty as a pumpernickel, who would remain unmellowed more than twenty years later while working for me on the stealth fighter. Over lunch, I remarked at the absence of a single Air Force project officer on hand to monitor progress or kibitz as we built their airplane.
“Friend, this project is Central Intelligence Agency all the way,” Baldwin remarked. “Everything about it is under the spook’s direction.”
“You mean the CIA will have its own air force?”
“You said it,” Baldy grinned. “The rumor is that Kelly will give them all Lockheed test pilots to fly this thing. We’re also going to furnish all their mechanics and ground crew and build them a training base somewhere out in the boonies.”
As it turned out, Baldy’s rumors were two-thirds accurate. The agency hired its own pilots from the ranks of the Air Force, but we put them on the books as Lockheed employees so that their payment came out of a special Lockheed account of laundered CIA money rather than straight government checks. The subterfuge was that the pilots were Lockheed employees involved in a government-contracted high-altitude weather and performance study.
Everything about this project was dark alley, cloak and dagger. Even the way they financed the operation was highly unconventional: using secret contingency funds, they back-doored payment to Lockheed by writing personal checks to Kelly for more than a million bucks as start-up costs. The checks arrived by regular mail at his Encino home, which had to be the wildest government payout in history. Johnson could have absconded with the dough and taken off on a one-way ticket to Tahiti. He banked the funds through a phony company called “C & J Engineering,” the “C & J” standing for Clarence Johnson. Even our drawings bore the logo “C & J”—the word “Lockheed” never appeared. We used a mail drop out at Sunland, a remote locale in the
San Fernando Valley, for suppliers to send us parts. The local postmaster got curious about all the crates and boxes piling up in his bins and looked up “C & J” in the phone book and, of course, found nothing. So he decided to have one of his inspectors follow our unmarked van as it traveled back to Burbank. Our security people nabbed him just outside the plant and had him signing national security secrecy forms until he pleaded writer’s cramp.
Clearly, building this airplane was deadly serious business. Inside the Skunk Works our irreverent group privately scoffed at the “secret agent” mentality of the agency security guys who made us take aliases if we had to travel on business in connection with the project. I chose the name “Ben Dover,” as in “bend over,” the name of a British music hall variety star of my father’s misspent youth. Still, all of us involved in building this particular airplane felt the weightiness of our mission. Kelly was regularly briefed at the agency on the real state of the world, which, he assured us, was 70 percent worse than anything we read in our morning papers. He didn’t hide from us his view that the success of U-2 operations might make the difference between our country’s survival or not.
The Russians were crashing development of an intercontinental ballistic missile with powerful liquid-fuel engines, and East-West tensions were strained to the breaking point. Both the United States and Soviet Union had already successfully tested H-bombs within the past year and seemed poised to use them. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, warned that we would go to the brink of war to combat Communist expansion, coining the term “brinkmanship” for his eye-to-eye confrontation technique. He acknowledged the Russians’ incredible conventional might: they out-divisioned us by a factor of ten, out-tanked us by a factor of eight, out-airplaned us by a factor of four. But Dulles drew lines in the sand around the world and served notice that if the Communists crossed any one of them it would mean instant nuclear retaliation on a massive scale. “Going to the verge of war without actually getting into war is the necessary art,” Dulles claimed. But that Russian bear seemed fifteen feet tall.
