The Taking of K-129

by Josh Dean

  At the Skunk Works in downtown Burbank, the program was just as tightly controlled. Johnson handpicked twenty-five engineers and told the team that they were all now working for the CIA and must operate as such. No one, not even spouses, could know what they were doing. “This project is so secret that you may have a six-month to one-year hole in your résumé that can never be explained,” he told Ben Rich, one of his top engineers. “You’ll tell no one about what we do—not your wife, your mother, your brother, your girlfriend, your priest, or your CPA.”

  Even the other engineers at the Skunk Works—known officially as Lockheed Advanced Development Programs—had no idea what was happening inside the windowless two-story concrete warehouse that housed the spy plane program, a building filled with cigarette smoke that was always dirty because the CIA was too skittish to clear any secretaries or janitors for work there.

  The CIA plucked pilots in secret from the Air Force and had Lockheed put them on its payroll. As far as the public, and everyone at Lockheed and the Air Force who hadn’t been cleared into the program, knew, these pilots had been selected to participate in a government-contracted “high-altitude weather and performance study,” and their salaries were paid from a special account filled with untraceable government funds.

  As an economist, Bissell understood risk. When the payoff is big enough, significant risk is acceptable. And Eisenhower agreed. Bissell was given basically a blank check to deliver the plane, and fast, but without anyone knowing about it. To maintain absolute secrecy, Bissell set up an independent organization within the CIA that he called the Development Projects Staff. The DPS existed outside of the regular Agency operations, with its own security and communications system.

  Aquatone was, in Agency parlance, compartmentalized—a project that only a few people outside of the director were to be told about—and its creation gave rise to many methods that still make up the basic blueprint for how a black project is designed and run today. That includes careful handling of files, which would be labeled “top secret/special handling,” and the use of code names. When Bissell made frequent visits to the Skunk Works, he came alone (or nearly alone) and walked in the shadows, known, if he was referred to at all, as Mr. B.

  • • •

  Along with secrecy, speed was the primary directive. To prevent delays and allow his staff the ability to learn on the fly, Bissell opened channels to the most important minds in America. Even the least-experienced and lowest-ranking workers on Bissell’s special project staff were introduced and also given access to Land and Killian, as well as other living legends of science and technology. Because the program couldn’t just run rogue—even a black program used money that had to be trackable and explainable to Congress—Bissell built out the back office, clearing security men to vet the contractors, lawyers to draw up contracts, and even a few IRS officials to ensure that all the arrangements met US tax codes.

  The money trail called for creative accounting; to allow Kelly Johnson to begin work before the official financial arrangements were in place, the Agency used a portion of its black funds, funneled through subsidiary accounts attached to front companies, to pay Lockheed using personal checks. More than a million dollars arrived that way, by regular mail at Johnson’s Encino home, and he deposited the checks into a phony corporation he called C&J Engineering. This process, Johnson’s deputy, Ben Rich, remarked, “has to be the wildest government payout in history.”

  Eight months later, the plane was ready. Lockheed needed somewhere to test it in total secrecy, so the CIA selected a small patch of Nevada desert directly abutting an Atomic Energy Commission territory used for nuclear tests. The area was remote and completely off-limits to air traffic.

  Bissell arranged for a presidential action to add Groom Lake, as the test area was called, into the AEC territory, so that on maps it would just look like more land partitioned off for nuclear tests. The new CIA base—later nicknamed Area 51—was built for a total of eight hundred thousand dollars. “I’ll bet this is one of the best deals the government will ever get,” Johnson observed.

  On July 24, 1955, the first Aquatone plane—now known as the U-2—was disassembled in Burbank and delivered to the secret test facility inside the belly of a C-124 cargo plane.

  The U-2 looked bizarre, like no plane on earth. It had a fifty-foot-long fuselage built of “wafer-thin aluminum” and wings that extended eighty feet. This enormous wingspan gave the U-2 tremendous lift—so much lift that the plane went airborne on its first taxi and throttle test and was thirty-five feet off the ground before its test pilot even noticed.

  Within a month, CIA pilots had broken the existing altitude record, reaching 74,500 feet, and flew up to five thousand miles over ten hours on a single tank of gas, causing one early pilot to crack, “I ran out of ass before I ran out of gas.”

  It was a grueling job: “A pilot was jammed inside a cockpit smaller than the front seat of a VW Beetle, laced into a bulky partial-pressure suit, his head encased in a heavy helmet, hooked up to an oxygen breathing tube, a urine tube, and fighting off muscle cramps, hunger, sleepiness, and fatigue,” explained Ben Rich. “If the cabin pressure and oxygen supply cut off, a pilot’s blood would boil off in seconds at more than 13 miles above sea level.” The skill and focus required were also extreme. A U-2 pilot had to maintain speed within a very small and specific range. If he dropped below 98 knots, the plane would stall and fall out of the sky; if he went over 102 knots, it was in danger of breaking apart. So, Ben Rich wrote, “the slowest it could safely go was right next to the fastest it could go.”

  • • •

  Thanks to Walt Lloyd, the young CIA officer Bissell had placed in charge of Aquatone’s security apparatus, the public believed Lockheed’s bizarre new plane was part of a weather research program conducted by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)—the precursor to NASA. Lloyd, a rising star within the Agency’s security wing, cleared only two people—NACA Director Hugh Dryden and his public relations man, Walt Bonney—and the cover story was so plausible that everyone else at NACA really believed this was an experimental plane.

  Six weeks later, the U-2 was operational. It flew its first official mission over Germany and Poland on June 20 under the guise of weather reconnaissance, assigned to a fictional Air Force detachment known as the First Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Provisional.

  On July 4, the first U-2 overflew the Soviet Union, photographing naval bases where submarines were built, as well as several airfields. A day later, another pilot took the plane over the plant where Soviet Bison bombers were being built, a bomber test facility, and important missile and rocket plants.

  The Agency was surprised to see that the flights weren’t as stealthy as they’d hoped; the Russians picked the planes up on radar and scrambled fighters to intercept them; fortunately, neither those fighters, nor the ground-based antiaircraft defenses, could reach a U-2 cruising at seventy thousand feet. Still, it gave Eisenhower pause, and the Air Force urged him to stop the flights, which he did only temporarily, until the CIA told him what had been accomplished in only a few weeks. “For the first time we are really able to say that we have an understanding of much that was going on in the Soviet Union. . . . Five operational missions have already proven that many of our guesses on important subjects can be seriously wrong.”

  One of the big ones: The US military was using bad maps. Photo interpreters noticed that the geodetic data used to make the Air Force’s nuclear target maps were wrong. The U-2 showed the earth to be slightly oblong and not a perfect sphere, meaning that the targets assigned to all of the US ICBMs were each about twenty miles off. Had war broken out, every missile would have missed.

  Eisenhower had told CIA director Allen Dulles that locating and counting the Soviet Bison bomber fleet was the single most important item on his national security agenda. And four days after the first U-2 flight, the film was delivered to CIA headquar
ters, where Dulles and Bissell saw it for the first time together. “From 70,000 feet you could not only count the airplanes lined up at ramps, but tell what they were without a magnifying glass,” Bissell later said. “We had finally pried open the oyster shell of Russian secrecy and discovered a giant pearl. . . . The accumulated weight of evidence from these flights caused the President to . . . relax a bit. I was able to assure him that the so-called bomber gap seemed to be nonexistent.”

  The Soviets, meanwhile, tried everything possible to disrupt the flights. They scrambled fifty-seven fighter jets against a single U-2, but not one of them could get close enough to fire. When the Soviets accepted that no plane was going to reach a U-2, they adopted a new tactic. Entire squadrons of jets flew in tight formation fifteen thousand feet under the spy planes to try to obscure their view of the ground—a tactic the CIA jokingly called “aluminum clouds.”

  The Soviets worked frantically to raise the target altitude on their SA-2 missile systems and began training MiG fighter pilots to make very brief flights straight up into the upper altitudes in order to get in firing range. According to one early pilot, the Soviets even tried to ram the plane with MiG-21s stripped down to become, in essence, piloted missiles. “They flew straight up at top speed, arcing up to 68,000 feet before flaming out and falling back to Earth,” he recalled. “It was crazy, but it showed how angry and desperate they were becoming.”

  • • •

  On May 1, 1960—May Day in the USSR—thirty-four-year-old pilot Francis Gary Powers was flying at about seventy thousand feet over Sverdlovsk in Russia when ground-to-air positions fired multiple newly redesigned SA-2 missiles at the plane. None of them were direct hits, but one exploded in close proximity, behind and below Powers’ plane, and the resulting shock wave tilted the U-2’s nose upward, upsetting the delicate balance that kept the plane aloft. Powers fought to regain control, but he couldn’t. The plane stalled and began to maple leaf out of the sky—falling and spinning at once.

  All U-2 pilots had orders to destroy a disabled plane before ejecting. The planes had a built-in lever out on the wing that would blow up the aircraft, the camera, and the film, and once it was pulled, the pilot had a short time to eject away from the explosion. In Powers’ case, the centrifugal force of the spinning prevented him from reaching the lever and he could only save himself. He pushed away from the plane and free fell until a preset change in barometric pressure opened his parachute. As he drifted slowly down to earth and his imminent capture, Powers looked around at a rare sight in the Russian spring—a clear, sunny day that, he thought, would be just perfect for taking pictures.

  Kelly Johnson learned of Powers’ fate late at night from Bissell and trudged into the Skunk Works the next morning to share the grim news: “We got nailed over Sverdlovsk,” Johnson told his team. “That’s that. We’re dead.”

  Which didn’t mean the program was a failure—far from it. The U-2 program made thirty flights over four years, gathering 1.2 million feet of film that covered more than a million square miles of Soviet territory. The planes photographed bomber fleets, atomic energy facilities, weapons-testing sites, air defense systems, submarine fleets, and missile bases.

  As CIA director Richard Helms later wrote, “For the first time, American policymakers had accurate, credible information on the Soviet strategic assets. . . . Those overflights eliminated almost entirely the ability of the Kremlin ever to launch a surprise preemptive strike against the West. . . . It was the greatest bargain and the greatest triumph of the Cold War.”

  • • •

  The Powers incident forced Eisenhower to shut down overflights of Russia, and while the U-2 continued to conduct missions elsewhere for decades after its creation, a new program was already under way to design a successor plane that could evade Soviet radar.

  Kelly Johnson didn’t want an incremental improvement on the U-2. That, he told his team, would buy only “a couple years before the Russians would be able to nail us again. I want us to come up with an airplane that can rule the skies for a decade or more.”

  He told his engineers that he wanted to fly at ninety thousand feet in a plane that could reach Mach 3 with a range of four thousand miles. It was, to say the least, a ridiculous goal.

  When Johnson brought his sleek, futuristic design to the CIA, he claimed that he could build it in twenty months, although the world’s first Mach 2 airplane at the time, the F-104 Starfighter (also a Lockheed design), could reach that speed only on takeoffs or for short periods in what was called “dash mode.” As Ben Rich later observed, Johnson was asking for a plane that could cruise at “twice the fastest fighter’s dash speed.” The U-2 “was to the A-12 [its successor] as a covered wagon was to an Indy 500 race car,” Rich wrote. But to Johnson, he said, “the word ‘impossible’ was a gross insult.”

  7

  Faster and More Furious

  In January of 1960, Dick Bissell handed the task of developing the most technologically advanced aircraft in history—in total secrecy—to his favorite program manager, John Parangosky.

  Parangosky, then forty, had been one of Bissell’s key officers on Aquatone. In Turkey, he was known as “Big John,” for his sizable, sometimes volatile personality and for the fact that he was, physically, a large man. Not tall, so much; Parangosky was five foot ten at best, but he had broad shoulders and amply filled out his shirts, with a rounded midsection that revealed his love of fine dining, especially French food.

  He lived alone in a small, tidy apartment not far from the original CIA headquarters on E Street in downtown Washington and took cabs to and from work. When the office moved to Langley in 1961, Parangosky kept taking cabs, but security protocols at the new headquarters prohibited taxis from passing beyond the compound’s outer gate, so he had to walk a half mile from the taxi drop to his office every morning, and then make the same walk in reverse at day’s end. This was uncomfortable for a heavy guy in any weather, and downright insufferable in the heat and humidity, which in Washington starts in May and lasts well into September.

  Parangosky’s aversion to driving was a common topic of conversation around the office. Various friends offered to help him find a car, but Parangosky, who’d never even been to a car dealer, refused all assistance and went himself one night after work to a Renault dealer he’d heard about. He bought the cheapest car on the lot, writing a check on the spot for the precise amount on the sticker, and then drove off in a tiny car that was terribly uncomfortable for a man his size. There was barely even room for a passenger.

  So he took the car back and tried again. This time, Parangosky bought a Ford Mustang—a huge, loud, green eight-cylinder version with two doors. And he loved it so much that he drove that car for the next fifteen years, even after it started breaking down regularly and spent much of its time at a gas station near the apartment he eventually bought in Fairfax.

  Parangosky was meticulous in many ways, finding comfort in routine. He had a uniform: dark suit, typically black but sometimes navy, solid tie, black socks, pointy black patent leather shoes, and white shirt—which he washed and ironed himself. His only jewelry was a simple watch with a leather band. He didn’t take vacations. On a day off, he’d go to the library and read, or maybe, occasionally, see an opera across the Potomac in Washington. He was an aficionado of fine dining and liked to cook, but he rarely did so because he loved eating out in restaurants so much. He especially liked French cuisine, and that, along with a notable lack of physical activity, helped explain his shape.

  His days had a consistent rhythm, when possible, to make up for the wild unpredictability of life in the field. He liked a simple breakfast at home, then lunch out with one or more of his senior officers, where, at a table in the darkest, quietest corner of one of several continental cuisine restaurants near Langley, Parangosky would conduct informal debrief sessions, typically with a single black martini close at hand. The designated company was never gi
ven much warning; rather, the boss would stop by late in the morning and say, “Let’s go to lunch.” Saying no was never a good idea.

  Parangosky used these lunches to get more intimate exposure to key officers who might have things to say that they wouldn’t otherwise bring up in the group. And the restaurant was always selected that day, from a rotation of about five, so that he was never seen to be developing a pattern that could be predicted. This was basic tradecraft—as spies call the methods and practices of espionage—and Parangosky was obsessive about the pursuit of secrecy, to the point that it seemed almost silly at times to members of his staff.

  He wasn’t a scientist or an engineer. As one of his favorite engineers often said, “John P wouldn’t know a motorcycle from a megacycle.” He was, at heart, a manager, but also a keen observer and voracious consumer of information. He knew how to identify and empower talented individuals while also keeping them under close watch. His MO was trust but validate. Parangosky could approach a complicated subject and do a quick study to become conversant enough to help actual engineers see the strengths and weaknesses of the matter at hand. If he didn’t understand something technical that came up in a meeting—a regular occurrence in this line of work—he’d ask his people what he needed to read about the subject, and by the next meeting he’d be versed enough to ask tough questions.

  Men loved to work for Parangosky, too. He listened well and remembered everything, supplementing his impressive memory with three-by-five-inch note cards that he carried in his jacket pocket and wrote on in tiny, careful script during meetings. He could be funny but was usually extremely polite, which often came off as formal, especially to those who didn’t know him well. You were free to argue with him so long as you recognized the point at which he was done hearing your side. If you missed that point, he would certainly let you know. Parangosky could be volatile when pushed, and he wielded that temper strategically, to keep order and maintain respect within the hierarchy. The best way to set him off was to challenge his authority in front of a group, and nearly everyone inside the CIA’s technical branch had some story of a naive junior officer questioning an idea and getting fired on the spot. Often, Parangosky would rescind that firing later, particularly if it turned out he’d been wrong, and to see a man who loathed apologies swallow his pride and forgive an underling was as powerful as watching him lose his temper in the first place.