Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

1 A PROMISING START

It’s August 1979 on the scorching Nevada desert, where Marines armed with ground-to-air Hawk missiles are trying to score a “kill” against my new airplane, an experimental prototype code-named Have Blue. We in the Skunk Works have built the world’s first pure stealth fighter, which is designed to evade the Hawk’s powerful radar tracking. The Marines hope to find Have Blue from at least fifty miles away and push all the right buttons so that the deadly Hawks will lock on. To help them, I’ve actually provided Have Blue’s flight plan to the missile crew, which is like pointing my finger at a spot in the empty sky and saying, “Aim right here.” All they’ve got to do is acquire the airplane on radar, and the homing system inside the Hawk missile will do the rest. Under combat conditions, that airplane would be blasted to pieces. If that defensive system locks on during this test, our experimental airplane flunks the course.

But I’m confident that our stealth technology will prove too elusive for even this Hawk missile’s powerful tracking system (capable of detecting a live hawk riding on the thermals from thirty miles away). What makes this stealth airplane so revolutionary is that it will deflect radar beams like a bulletproof shield, and the missile battery will never electronically “see” it coming. On the Hawk’s tracking system, our fighter’s radar profile would show up as smaller than a hummingbird’s. At least, that’s what I’m betting. If I’m wrong, I’m in a hell of a bind.

Half the Pentagon’s radar experts think we at the Skunk Works have achieved a stealth technology breakthrough that will revolutionize military aviation as profoundly as the first jets did. The other half thinks we are deluding ourselves and everyone else with our radar test claims. Those cynics insist that we are trying to pull a fast one — that we’ll never be able to duplicate on a real airplane the spectacular low visibility we achieved on a forty-foot wooden model of Have Blue, sitting atop a pole on a radar test range. Those results blew away most of the Air Force command staff. So this demonstration against the Hawk missile is the best way I know to shut up the nay-sayers definitively. This test is “In your face, buddy,” to those bad-mouthing our technology and our integrity. My test pilot teased me that Vegas was giving three to two odds on the Hawk over Have Blue. “But what do those damned bookies know?” he added with a smirk, patting my back reassuringly.

Because our stealth test airplane has been under the tightest security, we’ve had to deceive the Marines into thinking that the only thing secret about our airplane is a black box it’s supposed to be carrying in its nose that emits powerful beams to deflect incoming radar. Of course, that’s all bogus. No such black box aboard, no beams involved. The invisibility comes entirely from the airplane’s shape and its radar-absorbing composite materials.

The missile crew will monitor the test on their radar scope inside their windowless command van, but a young sergeant standing beside me will be able to verify that, despite the blank screen, an airplane indeed flew overhead. God knows what he will think seeing our airplane in the sky, a weird diamond-shaped UFO, looking as if it escaped from a trailer for a new George Lucas Star Wars epic.

I check my watch. Eight in the morning. The temperature already in the nineties, heading toward a predicted high of one-twenty F. Have Blue should be well inside the missile’s radar track, heading for us. And in a few moments I spot a distant speck growing ever larger in the milky blue sky. I watch Have Blue through my binoculars as it flies at eight thousand feet. The T-38 chase plane, which usually flies on its wing in case Have Blue develops problems and needs talking down to a safe landing, is purposely following miles behind for this test. The radar dish atop the van hasn’t moved, as if the power has been turned off. The cluster of missiles, which normally would be swiveling in the launcher, locked on by radar to the approaching target, are instead pointing aimlessly (and blindly) toward distant mountains. The young sergeant stares in disbelief at the sightless missiles, then gapes as the diamond-shaped aircraft zips by directly above us. “God almighty,” he exclaims, “whatever that thing was, sir, it sure is carrying one hell of a powerful black box. You jammed us dead.”

“Looks that way.” I say and grin.

I head to the command van, and a cold blast of the air-conditioning greets me as I step inside. The Marine crew is still seated around their electronic gear with stolid determination. Their scope screen is empty. They’re waiting. As far as they know, nothing has yet flown into their radar net. Suddenly a blip appears. It’s moving quickly west to east in the exact coordinates of Have Blue.

“Bogie acquired, sir,” the radar operator tells the young captain in charge.

For a moment I’m startled, watching a moving blip that should not be. And it is big, unmistakable.

“Looks like a T-38, sir,” says the operator.

I exhale. The T-38 chase plane is being acquired by their radar detection. The radar operator has no idea that two airplanes should be on his scope — not one — and that he never did pick up Have Blue as it flew overhead.

“Sorry, sir,” the young captain says to me with a smug sneer. “Looks like your gizmo isn’t working too good.” Had this been a combat situation, the stealth fighter could have used high-precision, laser-guided bombs against the van and that smug captain would never have known what hit him. Might have taught him a lesson in good grammar too.

The van door opens and the young sergeant steps into the dark coolness, still looking as if he had hallucinated in the desert heat — seeing with his own eyes a strange diamond apparition that his missiles failed to lock onto.

“Captain,” he began, “you won’t believe this…”

Three and a half years earlier, on January 17, 1975, I drove to work in downtown Burbank, California, as I had for the past twenty-five years, only now I parked for the first time in the boss’s slot directly in front of an unmarked two-story windowless building that resembled a concrete blockhouse, in plain view of the main runway at Burbank’s busy Municipal Airport. This was Lockheed’s “Skunk Works,” which, throughout the long, tense years of the cold war, was one of the most secret facilities in North America and high on the targeting list of the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war. Russian satellites regularly overflew our parking lot in the midst of Lockheed’s sprawling five-square-mile production complex, probably counting our cars and analyzing how busy we were. Russian trawlers, just outside territorial limits off the southern California coastline, trained powerful eavesdropping dishes in our direction to monitor our phone calls. We believed the KGB knew our key phone numbers, and computerized recording devices aboard those trawlers probably switched on when those phones rang. U.S. intelligence intercepted references to “the Skunk Works” regularly from Soviet satellite communications simply because there was no Russian translation for our colorful nickname. Our formal name was Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects.

Even our rivals would acknowledge that whoever ran the Skunk Works had the most prestigious job in aerospace. Beginning with this mild day in January, that guy was me. I was fifty years old and in the pink.

Most Skunk Workers were handpicked by our just retired leader, Kelly Johnson, one of the reigning barons of American aviation, who first joined Lockheed in 1933 as a twenty-three-year-old fledgling engineer to help design and build the Electra twin-engine transport that helped put the young company and commercial aviation on the map. By the time he retired forty-two years later, Kelly Johnson was recognized as the preeminent aerodynamicist of his time, who had created the fastest and highest-flying military airplanes in history. Inside the Skunk Works, we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers. Our forte was building a small number of very technologically advanced airplanes for highly secret missions. What came off our drawing boards provided key strategic and technological advantages for the United States, since our enemies had no way to stop our overflights. Principal customers were the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Air Force; for years we functioned as the CIA’s unofficial “toy-makers,” building for it fabulously successful spy planes, while developing an intimate working partnership with the agency that was unique between government and private industry. Our relations with the Air Force blue-suiters were love-hate — depending on whose heads Kelly was knocking together at any given time to keep the Skunk Works as free as possible from bureaucratic interlopers or the imperious wills of overbearing generals. To his credit Kelly never wavered in his battle for our independence from outside interference, and although more than one Air Force chief of staff over the years had to act as peacemaker between Kelly and some generals on the Air Staff, the proof of our success was that the airplanes we built operated under tight secrecy for eight to ten years before the government even acknowledged their existence. Time and again, our marching orders from Washington were to produce airplanes or weapons systems that were so advanced that the Soviet bloc would be impotent to stop their missions. Which was why most of the airplanes we built remained shrouded in the deepest operational secrecy. If the other side didn’t know these aircraft existed until we introduced them in action, they would be that much farther behind in building defenses to bring them down. So inside the Skunk Works we operated on a tight-lipped need-to-know basis. I figured that an analyst for Soviet intelligence in Moscow probably knew more about my Skunk Works projects than my own wife and children.

Even though we were the preeminent research and development operation in the free world, few Americans heard of the Skunk Works, although their eyes would light with recognition at some of our inventions: the P-80, America’s first jet fighter; the F-104 Starfighter, our first supersonic jet attack plane; the U-2 spy plane; the incredible SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s first three-times-the-speed-of-sound surveillance airplane; and the F-117A stealth tactical fighter that many Americans saw on CNN scoring precision bomb strikes over Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm.

These airplanes, and other Skunk Works projects that were unpublicized, shared a common thread: each was initiated at the highest levels of the government out of an imperative need to tip the cold war balance of power in our direction. For instance, the F-104, nicknamed “The Missile With the Man In It,” was an incredibly maneuverable high-performance Mach 2 interceptor built to win the skies over Korea in dogfights against the latest high-performance Soviet MiGs that had been giving our combat pilots fits. The U-2 spy plane overflew the Soviet Union for four tense years until luck ran out and Francis Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. The U-2 was built on direct orders from President Eisenhower, who was desperate to breach the Iron Curtain and discover the Russians’ potential for launching a surprise, Pearl Harbor — style nuclear attack, which the Joint Chiefs warned could be imminent.

And it is only now, when the cold war is history, that many of our accomplishments can finally be revealed, and I can stop playing mute, much like the star-crossed rabbi who hit a hole in one on the Sabbath.

I had been Kelly Johnson’s vice president for advanced projects and his personal choice to succeed him when he was forced to step down at mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. Kelly started the Skunk Works during World War II, had been Lockheed’s chief engineer since 1952, and was the only airplane builder ever to win two Collier Trophies, which was the aerospace equivalent of the Hollywood Oscar, and the presidential Medal of Freedom. He had designed more than forty airplanes over his long life, many of them almost as famous in aviation as he was, and he damned well only built airplanes he believed in. He was the toughest boss west of the Mississippi, or east of it too, suffered fools for less than seven seconds, and accumulated as many detractors as admirers at the Pentagon and among Air Force commanders. But even those who would never forgive Johnson for his bullying stubbornness and hair-trigger temper were forced to salute his matchless integrity. On several occasions, Kelly actually gave back money to the government, either because we had brought in a project under budget or because he saw that what we were struggling to design or build was just not going to work.

Kelly’s motto was “Be quick, be quiet, be on time.” For many of us, he was the only boss we had ever known, and my first day seated behind his huge desk in the big three-hundred-square-foot corner office where Kelly had commanded every aspect of our daily operations, I felt like a three-and-half-foot-tall impostor, even though my kingdom was a windowless two-story headquarters building housing three hundred engineers, supervisors, and administrators, who operated behind thick, eavesdrop-proof walls under guard and severe security restrictions in an atmosphere about as cheery as a bomb shelter. The unmarked building was adjacent to a pair of enormous production hangars, with a combined 300,000 square feet of production and assembly space. During World War II, those hangars were used to build P-38 fighters, and later on, the fleet of Lockheed Constellations that dominated postwar commercial aviation. My challenge was to keep those six football fields’ worth of floor space humming with new airplane production and development. The twin giant hangars were three stories high and dwarfed four or five nearby buildings that housed our machine shops and parts factories. Aside from a guard booth that closely screened and monitored all visitors driving into our area, there were no visible signs of the restricted Skunk Works operation. Only those with a real need to know were directed to the location of our headquarters building, which had been built for Kelly in 1962. As austere as the concrete-and-steel facility was, it seemed like a palace to those fifty of us who, back in the early 1950s, had been crammed into the small drafty offices of the original Skunk Works in Building 82, less than three hundred yards away, which was an old bomber production hangar left over from World War II and still used on some of our most sensitive projects.

I enjoyed the goodwill of my colleagues because most of us had worked together intimately under tremendous pressures for more than a quarter century. Working isolated, under rules of tight security, instilled a camaraderie probably unique in the American workplace. I was Kelly’s right-hand man before succeeding him, and that carried heavy freight with most of my Skunk Works colleagues, who seemed more than willing to give me the benefit of the doubt as their new boss — and keep those second guesses to a minimum for at least the first week or so. But all of us, from department heads to the janitorial brigade, had the jitters that followed the loss of a strong father figure like Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, who had taken care of us over the years and made us among the highest-paid group in aerospace, as well as the most productive and respected. Daddy, come back home!

I began by loosening the leash on all my department heads. I told them what they already knew: I was not a genius like Kelly, who knew by experience and instinct how to solve the most complex technical problems. I said, “I have no intention of trying to make all the decisions around here the way that Kelly always did. From now on, you’ll have to make most of the tough calls on your own. I’ll be decisive in telling you what I want, then I’ll step out of your way and let you do it. I’ll take the crap from the big wheels, but if you screw up I want to hear it first.”

I left unspoken the obvious fact that I could not be taking over at a worse time, in the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War, when defense spending was about as low as military morale, and we were down to fifteen hundred workers from a high of six thousand five years earlier. The Ford administration still had two years to run, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was acting like a guy with battery problems on his hearing aid when it came to listening to any pitches for new airplanes. And to add anxiety to a less than promising business climate, Lockheed was then teetering on the edge of corporate and moral bankruptcy in the wake of a bribery scandal, which first surfaced the year before I took over and threatened to bring down nearly half a dozen governments around the world.

Lockheed executives admitted paying millions in bribes over more than a decade to the Dutch (Crown Prince Bernhard, husband of Queen Juliana, in particular), to key Japanese and West German politicians, to Italian officials and generals, and to other highly placed figures from Hong Kong to Saudi Arabia, in order to get them to buy our airplanes. Kelly was so sickened by these revelations that he had almost quit, even though the top Lockheed management implicated in the scandal resigned in disgrace.

Lockheed was convulsed by some of the worst troubles to simultaneously confront an American corporation. We were also nearly bankrupt from an ill-conceived attempt to reenter the commercial airliner sweepstakes in 1969 with our own Tristar L-1011 in competition against the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. They used American engines, while we teamed up with Rolls-Royce, thinking that the Anglo-American partnership gave us an advantage in the European market. We had built a dozen airliners when Rolls-Royce unexpectedly declared bankruptcy, leaving us with twelve hugely expensive, engineless “gliders” that nobody wanted. The British government bailed out Rolls-Royce in 1971, and the following year Congress very reluctantly came to our rescue by voting us $250 million in loan guarantees; but our losses ultimately reached a staggering $2 billion, and in late 1974, Textron Corporation almost acquired all of Lockheed at a “fire sale” price of $85 million. The Skunk Works would have been sold off with the corporation’s other assets and then tossed into limbo as a tax write-off.

I had to get new business fast or face mounting pressure from the corporate bean counters to unload my higher-salaried people. Kelly was known far and wide as “Mr. Lockheed.” No one upstairs had dared to cross him. But I was just plain Ben Rich. I was respected by the corporate types, but I had no political clout whatsoever. They demanded that I be a hell of a lot more “client friendly” than Kelly had been. It was an open secret in the industry that Kelly had often been his own worst enemy in his unbending and stubborn dealings with the blue-suiters. Until they had run afoul of our leader, not too many two- or three-star generals had been told to their faces that they didn’t know shit from Shinola. But smoothing relations with Pentagon brass would only serve to push me away from the dock — I had a long hard row ahead to reach the promised land. If the Skunk Works hoped to survive as a viable entity, we somehow would have to refashion the glory years last enjoyed in the 1960s when we had forty-two separate projects going and helped Lockheed become the aerospace industry leader in defense contracts.

I knew there were several powerful enemies of the Skunk Works on Lockheed’s board who would close us down in a flash. They resented our independence and occasional arrogance, and suspected us of being profligate spenders hiding our excesses behind screens of secrecy imposed by our highly classified work. These suspicions were fueled by the fact that Kelly usually got whatever he wanted from Lockheed’s board — whether it was costly new machinery or raises for his top people. Nevertheless, Kelly actually was as tightfisted as any beady-eyed New England banker and would raise hell the moment we began dropping behind schedule or going over budget.

Knowing that I didn’t have much time to find new business, I flew to Washington, hat in hand, with a fresh shoeshine and a brave smile. My objective was to convince General David Jones, the Air Force chief of staff, of the need to restart the production line of the U-2 spy plane. It was a long-shot attempt, to say the least, because never before in history had the blue-suiters ever reopened a production line for any airplane in the Air Force’s inventory. But this airplane was special. I have no doubt that fifty years from now the U-2 will still be in service to the nation. The aircraft was then more than twenty-five years old and remained the mainstay of our airborne reconnaissance activities. It needed to be updated with a more powerful engine and fitted with advanced avionics to become even more effective flying its tactical missions around the world. That meant adding a capability to perform reconnaissance coverage via optical systems that used radar camera images from half a world away.

But airplanes are like people. They tend to gain weight as they get older. The first time the U-2 took off to overfly Russia back in 1955, it was a svelte youngster at 17,000 pounds. Now it had ballooned in middle age to 40 percent over the original model and bent the scales at 40,000 pounds. I had been trying for years to get the Pentagon to update the U-2. In the 1960s, I had a meeting with Alain Enthoven, who was head of Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara’s vaunted systems analysis group — the so-called Whiz Kids, many brought with him from Ford to work their competitive cold-bloodedness on the Department of Defense. Enthoven asked, “Why should we buy more U-2s when we haven’t lost any?” I explained that it was cheaper to buy and update the airplane now rather than wait for crashes or losses, because in ten years costs rise by a factor of ten. He just couldn’t see the logic. So I told him the story of the kid who proudly tells his father that he saved a quarter by running alongside a bus rather than taking it. The father slapped the kid on the head for not running next to a taxi and saving a buck fifty. Alain didn’t get it.

During his reign, Kelly insisted on dealing with all of the top Pentagon brass himself, so by necessity I nibbled around the edges for years, cultivating bright young majors and colonels on the way up who were now taking command as generals. I had gone to the Pentagon many times as Kelly’s chart holder while he briefed the brass. Once we briefed McNamara, seated behind the big desk that had belonged to General “Black Jack” Pershing, the World War I Army general, on our Mach 3 Blackbird spy plane, which we wanted to convert into an interceptor. It was a great idea, but we were fighting an uphill battle. McNamara was intent on buying a costly new bomber, the B-70, and was deaf to any other new airplane projects. I set up the charts while Kelly made the pitch during McNamara’s lunch hour. “Mac the Knife” sat concentrating intently on his soup and salad, while skimming a report of some sort, and never once looked up until we were finished. Then he wiped his lips with a napkin and bid us good day. On the way out I teased Kelly, “Never try to pitch a guy while he’s eating and reading at the same time.”

Now the situation was more propitious for eating and pitching at the same time. General Jones invited me in for lunch and was very favorably disposed to my idea for a new fleet of spiffy U-2s. I told him I’d give him a good price, but that he had to buy the entire production line of forty-five airplanes. Jones thought thirty-five would be more like it and said he’d study our proposal. “By the way,” he said, “I’d want the U-2 designation changed. No spy plane connotation that would make our allies shy about letting us use their bases.”

I said, “General, I believe in the well-known golden rule. If you’ve got the gold, you make the rules. Call it whatever you want.”

The Pentagon ultimately renamed the U-2 the TR-1. T for tactical, R for reconnaissance. The press immediately called it the TR-1 spy plane.

I left the Pentagon thinking we had a deal, but the study General Jones ordered took months to wend its way through the blue-suit bureaucracy, and we didn’t sign the contract for two more years. Updating our old airplanes would help to keep our corporate accountants at bay for a while. With the TR-1, I was merely buying time. To survive, the Skunk Works needed substantial new projects involving revolutionary new technology that our customer could not wait to get his hands on. Tightrope walking on the cutting edge was our stock-in-trade.

“Don’t try to ape me,” Kelly had advised me. “Don’t try to take credit for the airplanes I built. Go build your own. And don’t build an airplane you don’t really believe in. Don’t prostitute yourself or the reputation of the Skunk Works. Do what’s right by sticking to your convictions and you’ll do okay.”

As it happened, I was damned lucky. Stealth technology landed in my lap — a gift from the gods assigned to take care of beleaguered executives, I guess. I take credit for immediately recognizing the value of the gift I was handed before it became apparent to everyone else, and for taking major risks in expending development costs before we had any real government interest or commitment. The result was that we produced the most significant advance in military aviation since jet engines, while rendering null and void the enormous 300-billion-ruble investment the Soviets had made in missile and radar defenses over the years. No matter how potent their missiles or powerful their radar, they could not shoot down what they could not see. The only limits on a stealth attack airplane were its own fuel capacity and range. Otherwise, the means to counter stealth were beyond current technology, demanding unreasonably costly funding and the creation of new generations of supercomputers at least twenty-five years off. I felt certain that stealth airplanes would rule the skies for the remainder of my lifetime. And I came from a family of long livers.

The stealth story actually began in July 1975, about six months after I took over the Skunk Works. I attended one of those periodic secret Pentagon briefings held to update those with a need to know on the latest Soviet technical advances in weapons and electronics. The U.S. had only two defensive ground-to-air missile systems deployed to protect bases — the Patriot and the Hawk, both only so-so in comparison to the Soviet weapons.

By contrast, the Russians deployed fifteen different missile systems to defend their cities and vital strategic interests. Those of us in the business of furnishing attack systems had to be updated on the latest defensive threat. Then we would go back to the drawing board to find new ways to defeat those defenses, while the other side was equally busy devising fresh obstacles to our plans. It was point counterpoint, played without end. Their early-warning radar systems, with 200-foot-long antennas, could pick up an intruding aircraft from hundreds of miles away. Those long-range systems couldn’t tell altitude or the type of airplane invading their airspace, but passed along the intruder to systems that could.

Their SAM ground-to-air missile batteries were able to engage both low-flying attack fighters and cruise missiles at the same time. Their fighters were armed with warning radars and air-to-air missiles capable of distinguishing between low-flying aircraft and ground clutter with disarming effectiveness. The Soviet SAM-5, a defensive surface-to-air missile of tremendous thrust, could reach heights of 125,000 feet and could be tipped with small nuclear warheads. At that height, the Soviets didn’t worry about impacting the ground below with the heat or shock wave from a very small megaton atomic blast and estimated that upper stratospheric winds would carry the radiation fallout over Finland or Sweden. An atomic explosion by an air defense missile could bring down any high-flying enemy bomber within a vicinity of probably a hundred miles with its shock wave and explosive power. Our Air Force crews undertaking reconnaissance intelligence-gathering missions over territory protected by SAM-5 sites all wore special glasses that would keep them from going blind from atomic flash. So these weapons system advances posed a damned serious threat.

Most troublesome, the Russians were exporting their advanced nonnuclear defensive systems to clients and customers around the world, making our airplanes and crews increasingly vulnerable. The Syrians now had nonnuclear SAM-5s. And during our Pentagon briefing we were subjected to a chilling analysis of the 1973 Yom Kippur War involving Israel, Syria, and Egypt. What we heard was extremely upsetting. Although the Israelis flew our latest and most advanced jet attack aircraft and their combat pilots were equal to our own, they suffered tremendous losses against an estimated arsenal of 30,000 Soviet-supplied missiles to the Arab forces. The Israelis lost 109 airplanes in 18 days, mostly to radar-guided ground-to-air missiles and antiaircraft batteries, manned by undertrained and often undisciplined Egyptian and Syrian personnel. What really rattled our Air Force planners was that the evasive maneuvering by Israeli pilots to avoid missiles — the same tactics used by our own pilots — proved to be a disaster. All the turning and twisting calculated to slow down an incoming missile made the Israeli aircraft vulnerable to conventional ground fire. If the Israeli loss ratio were extrapolated into a war between the U.S. and the highly trained Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe, a war fought using similar airplanes, pilot training, and ground defenses, our air force could expect to be decimated in only seventeen days.

I was not too surprised. The Skunk Works had firsthand experience with the latest Soviet equipment because the CIA had scored spectacular covert successes in acquiring their hardware by one means or another. We could not only test their latest fighters or new radars or missile systems, but actually fly against them. Skunk Works technicians pulled these systems apart, then put them back together, and made tools and spare parts to keep the Russian equipment serviced during testing, so we had a sound notion of what we were up against.

Still, the Air Force had no real interest in using the stealth option to neutralize Soviet defenses. The reason was that while we had learned over the years how to make an airplane less observable to enemy radar, the conventional Pentagon view was that the effectiveness of enemy radar had leaped far ahead of our ability to thwart it. The smart money in aerospace was betting scarce development funds on building airplanes that could avoid the Soviet radar net by coming in just over the treetops, like the new B-1 bomber ordered from Rockwell by the Strategic Air Command, whose purpose was to sneak past ground defenses and deliver a nuclear weapon deep inside the Soviet motherland.

That Pentagon briefing was particularly sobering because it was one of those rare times when our side admitted to a potentially serious gap that tipped the balances against us. I had our advanced planning people noodling all kinds of fantasies — pilotless, remote-controlled drone tactical bombers and hypersonic aircraft that would blister past Soviet radar defenses at better than five times the speed of sound once we solved awesomely difficult technologies. I wish I could claim to have had a sudden two a.m. revelation that made me bolt upright in bed and shout “Eureka!” But most of my dreams involved being chased through a maze of blind alleys by a horde of hostile accountants wielding axes and pitchforks.

The truth is that an exceptional thirty-six-year-old Skunk Works mathematician and radar specialist named Denys Overholser decided to drop by my office one April afternoon and presented me with the Rosetta Stone breakthrough for stealth technology.

The gift he handed to me over a cup of decaf instant coffee would make an attack airplane so difficult to detect that it would be invulnerable against the most advanced radar systems yet invented, and survivable even against the most heavily defended targets in the world.

Denys had discovered this nugget deep inside a long, dense technical paper on radar written by one of Russia’s leading experts and published in Moscow nine years earlier. That paper was a sleeper in more ways than one: called “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” it had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division from the original Russian language. The author was Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief scientist at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering. As Denys admitted, the paper was so obtuse and impenetrable that only a nerd’s nerd would have waded through it all—underlining yet! The nuggets Denys unearthed were found near the end of its forty pages. As he explained it, Ufimtsev had revisited a century-old set of formulas derived by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and later refined by the German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johannes Sommerfeld. These calculations predicted the manner in which a given geometric configuration would reflect electromagnetic radiation. Ufimtsev had taken this early work a step further.

“Ben, this guy has shown us how to accurately calculate radar cross sections across the surface of the wing and at the edge of the wing and put together these two calculations for an accurate total.”

Denys saw my blank stare. Radar cross section calculations were a branch of medieval alchemy as far as the non-initiated were concerned. Making big objects appear tiny on a radar screen was probably the most complicated, frustrating, and difficult part of modern warplane designing. A radar beam is an electromagnetic field, and the amount of energy reflected back from the target determines its visibility on radar. For example, our B-52, the mainstay long-range bomber of the Strategic Air Command for more than a generation, was the equivalent of a flying dairy barn when viewed from the side on radar. Our F-15 tactical fighter was as big as a two-story Cape Cod house with a carport. It was questionable whether the F-15 or the newer B-70 bomber would be able to survive the ever-improving Soviet defensive net. The F-111 tactical fighter-bomber, using terrain-following radar to fly close to the deck and “hide” in ground clutter, wouldn’t survive either. Operating mostly at night, the airplane’s radar kept it from hitting mountains, but as we discovered in Vietnam, it also acted like a four-alarm siren to enemy defenses that picked up the F-111 radar from two hundred miles away. We desperately needed new answers, and Ufimtsev had provided us with an “industrial-strength” theory that now made it possible to accurately calculate the lowest possible radar cross section and achieve levels of stealthiness never before imagined.

“Ufimtsev has shown us how to create computer software to accurately calculate the radar cross section of a given configuration, as long as it’s in two dimensions,” Denys told me. “We can break down an airplane into thousands of flat triangular shapes, add up their individual radar signatures, and get a precise total of the radar cross section.”

Why only two dimensions and why only flat plates? Simply because, as Denys later noted, it was 1975 and computers weren’t yet sufficiently powerful in storage and memory capacity to allow for three-dimensional designs, or rounded shapes, which demanded enormous numbers of additional calculations. The new generation of supercomputers, which can compute a billion bits of information in a second, is the reason why the B-2 bomber, with its rounded surfaces, was designed entirely by computer computations.

Denys’s idea was to compute the radar cross section of an airplane by dividing it into a series of flat triangles. Each triangle had three separate points and required individual calculations for each point by utilizing Ufimtsev’s calculations. The result we called “faceting”—creating a three-dimensional airplane design out of a collection of flat sheets or panels, similar to cutting a diamond into sharp-edged slices.

As his boss, I had to show Denys Overholser that I was at least as intellectual and theoretical as Ufimtsev,[1] so I strummed on my desk importantly and said, “If I understand you, the shape of the airplane would not be too different from the airplane gliders we folded from looseleaf paper and sailed around the classroom behind the teacher’s back.”

Denys awarded me a “C+” for that try.

The Skunk Works would be the first to try to design an airplane composed entirely of flat, angular surfaces. I tried not to anticipate what some of our crusty old aerodynamicists might say. Denys thought he would need six months to create his computer software based on Ufimtsev’s formula. I gave him three months. We code-named the program Echo I. Denys and his old mentor, Bill Schroeder, who had come out of retirement in his eighties to help him after serving as our peerless mathematician and radar specialist for many years, delivered the goods in only five weeks. The game plan was for Denys to design the optimum low observable shape on his computer, then we’d build the model he designed and test his calculations on a radar range.

In those early days of my tenure at the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson was still coming in twice a week as my consultant as part of his retirement deal. I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, Kelly was my mentor and close friend, but it pained me to see so many colleagues crowding into his small office down the hall from mine, taking their work problems to him instead of to me. Of course, I really could not blame them. No one in our shop came close to possessing Kelly’s across-the-board technical knowledge, but he didn’t just limit himself to providing aerodynamic solutions for stumped engineers; he damned well wanted to know what I was up to, and he wasn’t exactly shy about firing off opinions, solicited or not. After a quarter century of working at his side, I knew Kelly’s views nearly as well as my own, and I also knew that he would not be thrilled about stealth because he thought the days of manned attack airplanes were definitely numbered. “Goddam it, Ben, the future belongs to missiles. Bombers are as obsolete as the damned stagecoach.”

I argued back, “Kelly, the reason they call them missiles, instead of hittles, is that they miss much more than they hit.” But Kelly just shook his head.

Several years earlier, we had built a pilotless drone, the D-21, a forty-four-foot manta ray — shaped ramjet that was launched from B-52 bombers to streak high across Communist China and photograph its nuclear missile test facilities. That drone achieved the lowest radar cross section of anything we had ever built in the Skunk Works, and Kelly suggested that we offer our D-21 to the Air Force as a radar-penetrating attack vehicle, with or without a pilot. I put together a small team to begin a modification design, but I couldn’t stop thinking about stealth.

That first summer of my takeover, our in-house expert on Soviet weapons systems, Warren Gilmour, attended a meeting at Wright Field, in Ohio, and came back in a dark mood. He marched into my office and closed the door. “Ben, we are getting the shaft in spades,” he declared. “One of my friends in the Tactical Air Command spilled the beans. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency has invited Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, and three other companies to compete on building a stealthy airplane. They’re getting a million bucks each to come up with a proof of concept design, trying to achieve the lowest radar signatures across all the frequencies. If one works, the winner builds two demonstration airplanes. This is right up our alley and we are being locked out in the goddam cold.”

This was exactly the kind of project I was looking for. But we had been overlooked by the Pentagon because we hadn’t built a fighter aircraft since the Korean War and our track record as builders of low-radar-observable spy planes and drones was so secret that few in the Air Force or in upper-management positions at the Pentagon knew anything about them.

Warren read my mind. “Face it, Ben, those advanced project guys don’t have a clue about our spy plane work in the fifties and sixties. I mean, Jesus, if you think racing cars, you think Ferrari. If you think low observables, you must think Skunk Works.”

Warren was absolutely right. The trouble was getting permission from our spy plane customer, that legendary sphinx known as the Central Intelligence Agency, to reveal to the Pentagon’s competition officials the low observable results we achieved in the 1960s building the Blackbird, which was actually the world’s first operational stealth aircraft. It was 140,000 pounds and 108 feet long, about the size of a tactical bomber called the B-58 Hustler, but with the incredibly small radar cross section of a single-engine Piper Cub. In other words, that is what a radar operator would think he was tracking. Its peculiar cobra shape was only part of the stealthy characteristics of this amazing airplane that flew faster than Mach 3 and higher than 80,000 feet. No one knew that its wings, tail, and fuselage were loaded with special composite materials, mostly iron ferrites, that absorbed radar energy rather than returning it to the sender. Basically 65 percent of low radar cross section comes from shaping an airplane; 35 percent from radar-absorbent coatings. The SR-71 was about one hundred times stealthier than the Navy’s F-14 Tomcat fighter, built ten years later. But if I knew the CIA, they wouldn’t admit that the Blackbird even existed.

Kelly Johnson was regarded almost as a deity at the CIA, and I had him carry our request for disclosure to the director’s office. To my amazement, the agency cooperated immediately by supplying all our previously highly classified radar-cross-section test results, which I sent on to Dr. George Heilmeier, the head of DARPA (the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency), together with a formal request to enter the stealth competition. But Dr. Heilmeier called me, expressing regrets. “Ben, I only wish I had known about this sooner. You’re way too late. We’ve given out all the money to the five competitors.” The only possibility, he thought, would be to allow us to enter if we would agree to a one dollar pro forma government contract. As it turned out, if I had done nothing more that first year than refuse that one dollar offer, I had more than earned my salary. I was sitting on a major technological breakthrough, and if I took that government buck, the Feds would own the rights to all our equations, shapes, composites — the works. Lockheed was taking the risks, we deserved the future profits.

It took a lot of arguing at my end, but Dr. Heilmeier finally agreed to let us into the stealth competition with no strings attached, and it was the only time I actually felt good about not receiving a government contract. But not Kelly. “You’re wasting your time,” he told me. “This is like chasing a butterfly in a rain forest because in the end the government won’t invest big dollars in stealth, when for the same money they can invest in new missiles.”

In part, I think, Kelly was trying to be protective. He didn’t want me to risk an embarrassing failure my first turn at bat, pursuing a high-risk project with little apparent long-range potential. I would be spending close to a million dollars of our own development money on this project, and if Kelly was right, I’d wind up with nothing to show for it. Still, I never waivered from believing that stealth could create the biggest Skunk Works bonanza ever. It was a risk well worth taking, proving a technology that could dominate military aviation in the 1980s even more than the U-2 spy plane had impacted the 1950s. At that point the Russians had no satellites or long-range airplanes that could match our missions and overfly us. Stealth would land the Russians on their ear. They had no technology in development that could cope with it. So I resolved to see this project through, even if it meant an early fall from grace. My department heads would go along because they loved high-stakes challenges, with most of the risks falling on the boss. I confided my stealth ambitions to Lockheed’s new president, Larry Kitchen, who was himself dancing barefoot on live coals while trying to pull our corporation up to a standing position after the pulverizing year and a half of scandals and bankruptcy. Larry cautioned me: “We need real projects, not pipedreams, Ben. If you’ve got to take risks, at least make sure you keep it cheap, so I can back you without getting my own head handed to me. And if something goes sour, I want to be the first to know. My blessings.” Good man, Larry Kitchen. After all, he had also approved hiring me as Kelly’s successor.

Denys Overholser reported back to me on May 5, 1975, on his attempts to design the stealthiest shape for the competition. He was wearing a confident smile as he sat down on the couch in my office with a preliminary designer named Dick Scherrer, who had helped him sketch out the ultimate stealth shape that would result in the lowest radar observability from every angle. What emerged was a diamond beveled in four directions, creating in essence four triangles. Viewed from above the design closely resembled an Indian arrowhead.

Denys was a hearty outdoorsman, a cross-country ski addict and avid mountain biker, a terrific fellow generally, but inexplicably fascinated by radomes and radar. That was his specialty, designing radomes — the jet’s nose cone made out of noninterfering composites, housing its radar tracking system. It was an obscure, arcane specialty, and Denys was the best there was. He loved solving radar problems the way that some people love crossword puzzles.

“Boss,” he said, handing me the diamond-shaped sketch, “Meet the Hopeless Diamond.”

“How good are your radar-cross-section numbers on this one?” I asked.

“Pretty good.” Denys grinned impishly. “Ask me, ‘How good?’ ”

I asked him and he told me. “This shape is one thousand times less visible than the least visible shape previously produced at the Skunk Works.”

“Whoa!” I exclaimed. “Are you telling me that this shape is a thousand times less visible than the D-21 drone?”

“You’ve got it!” Denys exclaimed.

“If we made this shape into a full-size tactical fighter, what would be its equivalent radar signature… as big as what — a Piper Cub, a T-38 trainer… what?”

Denys shook his head vigorously. “Ben, understand, we are talking about a major, major, big-time revolution here. We are talking infinitesimal.”

“Well,” I persisted, “what does that mean? On a radar screen it would appear as a… what? As big as a condor, an eagle, an owl, a what?”

“Ben,” he replied with a loud guffaw, “try as big as an eagle’s eyeball.”