Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

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.

Around the time we started working three shifts getting the U-2 built in the summer of 1955, a national poll of adult Americans indicated that more than half the population thought it more likely that they would die in a thermonuclear war than of old-age diseases. Around the country some anxious people began digging fallout shelters in their backyards and stocking them with Geiger counters and oxygen tanks. They were motivated to keep on digging by front-page diagrams in their papers showing how an H-bomb exploded over Manhattan would trigger a four-mile fireball, vaporizing all in its path from Central Park to Washington Square, and creating more than a million casualties in less than two minutes.

Like millions of other couples raising a family, my wife and I were forced to ponder the unthinkable: what would we do if L.A. was nuked? Assuming we survived the blast, where would we go? How would we protect ourselves from radiation and fallout? To even raise such questions was heartbreaking because there were no answers apparent at all.

So I had no trouble motivating myself to work hard, long hours to build the U-2. This was the airplane our government was impatiently waiting for to breach the Iron Curtain and finally discover the scope and dimensions of the Soviet threat. There was no way to hide from our cameras. And there was no hostile action the Russians could take that could stop us from our flights. We would be flying beyond reach of their defenses.

Eisenhower was being regularly briefed on our progress and sent word to Kelly via John Foster’s brother, Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA, to crack the whip and get that U-2 launched. The president was receiving persistent warnings from the Joint Chiefs and the CIA that the Russians might be preparing to launch a preemptive first-strike nuclear attack against the United States. The evidence was fragmentary but unsettling. Khrushchev had bragged, “We will bury you,” and at the 1954 May Day parade he gave our military attachés a chilling glimpse at what seemed to be his latest grave-makers: a half dozen new long-range missiles on huge portable launchers being trucked through Red Square, while overhead wave after wave of a new heavy bomber rattled the Moscow rooftops. Our military observers from the embassy counted one hundred bombers, nicknamed the Bison, that were capable of reaching New York with a nuclear payload. Only after the first U-2 flights was this estimate reassessed and our observers realized they had probably been duped: the Russians appeared to have flown the same twenty or so bombers over the Kremlin in a big circle. But the missiles seemed to confirm spy reports that the Soviets were working on a huge 240,000-pound-thrust rocket engine. Why this crash program in long-range weapons?

We were countering the Bisons with a new bomber of our own, the long-range B-52, but the trouble was we didn’t have enough reliable information on precise locations of Russian bases and key industries to devise strategic targeting plans. We possessed only the most rudimentary idea of where vital Soviet bases and industrial centers were located or how well they were defended, or the kinds of terrain that a bombing mission would encounter going in and coming out. A massive amount of photomapping and technical intelligence was needed to provide the Strategic Air Command with an up-to-date comprehensive targeting plan.

Without an airplane like the U-2 that could overfly at heights above harm, the blue-suiters were driven to use aggressive, dangerous tactics. Had the American public known about the ongoing “secret air war” between the two superpowers they would have been even more in despair than many already were about the state of the world. There had been dozens of American attempts during the early 1950s to gather important Russian radar and electronic communications frequencies by flying provocatively up against the Soviet coastline and occasionally overflying their territory by as much as two hundred miles. Several of these unarmed reconnaissance aircraft were shot down either by Soviet jets or ground fire. Most of the crews, totaling more than a hundred servicemen, simply disappeared off the scope and were presumed to have been sent to Siberia and/or killed.

Eisenhower finally ordered fighter escorts for these reconnaissance missions, resulting in several fierce dogfights with Soviet MiGs over the Sea of Japan. Ike was normally very cautious, but he was so intent on gaining information on Soviet missile development that he approved a joint CIA-British air force operation in the summer of 1955, in which a stripped-down Canberra bomber flew at fifty-five thousand feet, well above the range of Soviet fighters, and photographed the secret missile test facility called Kapustin Yar, east of Volgograd. The Canberra was hit more than a dozen times by ground fire and barely made it back to base. The crew reported that the Soviets seemed to have been alerted to the mission, and years later the CIA concluded that the operation had indeed been compromised by the notorious Kim Philby, a high-level official in British intelligence, who was a mole for the KGB.

In a final act of desperation before our spy plane could be launched, the blue-suiters began sending up spy balloons over Russia loaded with electronic gathering devices. They were announced as a weather systems survey, but the Soviets weren’t fooled and immediately fired off angry protests to Washington. They also shot down some of the balloons, while the majority floated off into limbo. Only about thirty made it back to our side, and we actually learned a lot of useful information about Russian weather, especially wind patterns and barometric pressures.

This was pathetic, primitive stuff compared to the promise of our U-2. Dr. Edwin Land, who had pushed the idea of a high-flying spy plane in his role as a special technical consultant to the White House, had promised President Eisenhower a tremendous intelligence bonanza: “A single mission in clear weather can photograph in revealing detail a strip of Russia two hundred miles wide and twenty-five hundred miles long and produce four thousand sharp pictures,” he wrote in his proposal. Land predicted the U-2 would obtain a detailed photographic record of Soviet railroads, power grids, industrial facilities, nuclear plants, shipyards, air bases, missile test sites, and any other target of strategic value. “If we are successful, it can be the greatest intelligence coup in history,” Land assured the president.

We had stretched the design of this airplane to the limit to achieve unprecedented range and altitude. It could fly nine hours, travel four thousand miles, and reach heights above seventy thousand feet. The wings extended eighty feet, providing unusual lift capacity, like a giant condor gliding on the thermals, except, of course, that the U-2 did no gliding and flew high above the jet stream. Our long wings stored 1,350 gallons of fuel in four separate tanks.

Each pound adding to the airplane’s overall weight cost us one foot of altitude, so while building the U-2 we were ruthless weight-watchers. Seventy thousand feet was our operational goal. Intelligence experts believed (erroneously as it turned out) that that altitude put our pilots beyond the range limits of Soviet defensive radar. That height was, however, beyond reach of their fighters and missiles.

We designed and built that airplane for lightness. The wings, for example, weighed only four pounds per square foot, one-third the weight of conventional jet aircraft wings. For taxiing and takeoffs, jettisonable twin-wheeled “pogos” were fitted beneath the enormous fuel-loaded wings and kept them from sagging onto the runway while taking off. The pogos dropped away as the U-2 became airborne.

The fuselage was fifty feet long, built of wafer-thin aluminum. One day on the assembly floor, I saw a worker accidentally bang his toolbox against the airplane and cause a four-inch dent! We looked at each other and shared the same unspoken thought: was this airplane too damned fragile to fly? It was a fear widely shared inside the Skunk Works that quickly transferred onto the flight line. Pilots were scared to death flying those big flapping wings into bad weather situations — afraid the wings would snap off. The U-2 had to be handled carefully, but proved to be a much tougher, more resilient bird than, frankly, I would ever have guessed. The landing gear was the lightest ever designed — weighing only two hundred pounds. It was a two-wheel bicycle configuration with a nose wheel and a second wheel in the belly of the airplane. Tandem wheels were used on gliders, but this was the first time ever for a powered airplane, which usually had tricycle landing gears. Ours would cause pilot trepidations about landing the U-2 that never quite evaporated, no matter how many landings a pilot successfully completed. Adding to the sense of the airplane’s fragility was that the razor-thin tail would be attached to the fuselage by just three five-eighth-inch bolts.

The heart of the U-2 were hatches in the equipment, or Q, bay that would house two high-resolution cameras, one a special long-focal-length spotting camera able to resolve objects two to three feet across from a height of seventy thousand feet, and the other a tracking camera that would produce a continuous strip of film of the whole flight path. The two cameras weighed 750 pounds. Kelly and Dr. Land argued constantly about each other’s needs to dominate the relatively small space inside those bays. Kelly needed room for batteries; Land needed all the room he could get for his bulky folding cameras. Kelly’s temper flashed at Land: “Let me remind you, unless we can fly this thing, you’ve got nothing to take pictures of.” In the end they compromised.

My principal work was on the engine’s air intake, which had to be designed and constructed with absolute precision to maximize delivery of the thin-altitude air into the compressor face. Up where the U-2 aimed to cruise, just south of the Pearly Gates, the air was so thin that an oxygen molecule was about as precious as a raindrop on the Mojave desert. So the intakes had to be extremely efficient to suck in the maximum amount of oxygen-starved air for compression and burning. The real crunch was building a reliable engine for flying at the top of the stratosphere and finding special fuel that could operate effectively with so little oxygen. Pratt & Whitney built the highest-pressure-ratio engine available at that time, their J57 engine, which Kelly hoped could somehow be adopted for the U-2. He had met with Bill Gwinn, the head of Pratt & Whitney, at the company’s main plant in Hartford, Connecticut.

“Bill,” he said, “I need to fly at seventy thousand feet.” Gwinn scratched his head. “We’ve never come close to that height, Kelly. I have no idea what’s the fuel consumption and thrust needed to get up that high.”

He put his best people to work on the problem. They were modifying most of the J57’s innards — the alternator, oil cooler, hydraulic pump, and other key parts for extreme-altitude flying. The two-spool compressor and three-stage turbine were being hand-built. Even with these modifications, the engine would be able to produce only 7 percent of its takeoff sea-level thrust at seventy thousand feet. The U-2 would be flying where outside temperatures would be minus 70 degrees F, causing standard military JP-4 kerosene fuel to freeze or boil off due to low atmospheric pressures. So Kelly turned to retired General Jimmy Doolittle, who was a key Eisenhower adviser on military and intelligence matters, as well as a board member of Shell Oil. Doolittle put the muscle on Shell to develop a special low-vapor kerosene for high altitudes. The fuel was designated LF-1A. The rumor about the LF abbreviation was that it stood for “lighter fluid.” The stuff smelled like lighter fluid, but a match wouldn’t light it. Actually, it was very similar in chemistry to a popular insecticide and bug spray of that era known as Flit. Once our airplane became operational, Shell diverted tens of thousands of gallons of Flit to make LF-1A in the summer of 1955, triggering a nationwide shortage of bug spray.

Kelly suffered stress headaches worrying about the engine and fuel performance at such incredible altitudes. Several of our own engineers were dubious that a conventional jet engine could ever be made to function properly in a realm where experimental ramjets had flown for only minutes at blistering supersonic speeds. That kind of tremendous brute power was necessary to gulp down enormous quantities of oxygen-thin air. All of us worried about what would happen if the engine died above Russia, forcing the pilot to glide to lower altitudes to restart, placing him in range of Soviet missiles and fighters.

I had never before worked with so much intensity and camaraderie. Very quickly forty-five-hour workweeks would seem a luxury. We began logging sixty- to seventy-hour workweeks to meet the schedule. I had begun by reviewing the work of my predecessor, who I thought had done a competent job. But I quickly learned that Kelly had blind spots about certain people that could never be changed. For instance, I observed that he was particularly harsh in his dealings with a couple of engineers whom I considered to be extraordinarily good, and in my youthful naivete it never dawned on me that there might have been jealousy at play. Kelly was so hands-on that I quickly lost self-consciousness around him, although that was certainly not true of most others. I actually observed guys flushing and breaking out in a nervous sweat every time they had to deal with him — even several times a morning.

Very quickly I felt part of his team but far from being a key player. Some days he remembered my name and other times he clearly fudged it. But for whatever reason, I discovered that I really was not afraid of him. If I screwed up, I quickly admitted it and corrected my mistake. For example, one day I suggested something that would have added a hydraulic damper into the design and that meant decreasing altitude by increasing weight. I saw Kelly’s face cloud over before I even finished speaking, and I immediately slapped my forehead and said, “Wait a minute. I’m a dumb shit. You’re trying to take off pounds…. Back to the drawing board.” The guys who tried to finesse mistakes and hoped that Kelly would not notice usually wished they had never been born. Nothing got by the boss. Nothing. And that was my sharpest impression of him, one that never changed over the years: I had never known anyone so expert at every aspect of airplane design and building. He was a great structures man, a great designer, a great aerodynamicist, a great weights man. He was so sharp and instinctive that he often took my breath away. I’d say to him, “Kelly, the shock wave coming off this spike will hit the tail.” He would nod. “Yeah, the temperature there will be six hundred degrees.” I’d go back to my desk and spend two hours with a calculator and come up with a figure of 614 degrees. Truly amazing. Or, I’d remark, “Kelly, the structure load here will be…” And he would interrupt and say, “About six point two p.s.i.” And I’d go back and do some complicated drudge work and half an hour later reach a figure of 6.3.

Kelly just assumed that anyone he selected to work for him would be more than merely competent. I assume he felt that way about me. But during those feverish days of getting that first U-2 prototype built, I was just another worker bee in his swarming hive. And I actually learned to love our slumlike working conditions. Everyone smoked in those days and the smoke clouds resembled a thick London fog. Since no outsiders, including secretaries or janitors, were allowed near us, we did our own sweeping up and took turns making our own coffee. Working to giddiness, we acted like college sophomores a shocking amount of the time. We hung “daring” pictures of Petty girls in scanty swimsuits which could be flipped around to reveal on the opposite side a reproduction of waterfowl. On rare occasions, when Kelly brought in visitors, someone would shout, “Present ducks,” and we’d flip our three framed pictures of full-breasted beauties. Once we had a contest to measure our asses with calipers. Leave it to me, I had never won a contest before in my life and I won that one. I was presented with a certificate proclaiming me “Broad Butt of the Year.” From then on, “Broad Butt” was my nickname. It was still better than Dick Fuller’s, though. Everyone called him “Fulla Dick.” And we were supposedly an elite group doing momentous work.

The CIA was not at all in evidence unless I knew who I was looking for. Every few weeks I would catch a glimpse of a tall, patrician gentleman dressed improbably in tennis shoes, freshly pressed gray trousers, and a garish big-checked sport jacket that any racetrack bookmaker would have been proud of. I once asked Dick Boehme who that guy was, and he replied with a stern “What guy? I don’t see a soul.” Kelly made sure that few of us had any dealings with the visitor who appeared every few weeks or so. Many months went by before I heard someone refer to him as “Mr. B.” No one besides Kelly knew his name. “Mr. B” was Richard Bissell, former Yale economics professor and Allen Dulles’s special assistant, put in charge of running the CIA’s spy plane project, who became the unofficial godfather of the Skunk Works, the government official who really put us on the map. He became one of Kelly’s closest confidants and our most ardent champion. Ultimately, he ran all the spy plane and satellite operations for the agency until the last months of the Eisenhower administration in late 1959, when Allen Dulles put him in charge of organizing a group of Cuban émigrés into a rag-tag battle brigade that would attempt to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs. But in the early days of the U-2, he was a mysterious figure to most of us, part of a complicated working arrangement involving the agency, Lockheed, and the Air Force that was unprecedented in the annals of the military-industrial complex.

The operational plan for deploying our highly secret airplane was approved personally by President Eisenhower. Under this plan, the CIA was responsible for overseeing production of the airplane and its cameras, for choosing the bases and providing security, and for processing the film, no mean feat since the special, tightly wound film developed by Eastman Kodak would stretch from Washington halfway to Baltimore on each mission. The Air Force would recruit the pilots, provide mission and weather planning, and run the daily base operations. Lockheed would design and build the airplane and provide ground crews for the bases and a cover for the pilots, who would carry Lockheed IDs and be officially logged on the company books as pilots for a government-contracted weather investigation program.

The reason why Kelly could move so quickly building the U-2 was that he could use the same tools from the prototype of the XF-104 fighter. The U-2, from nose to cockpit, was basically the front half of the F-104, but with an extended body from cockpit to tail. Using that tooling would save many months and a lot of money. Our goal was to put four birds in flight by the end of the first year. Each airplane would cost the American taxpayers $1 million, including all development costs, making it the greatest procurement bargain ever.

By April 1955, the first U-2 was being built under tight wraps inside the assembly area of Building 82, and Kelly sent for his chief engineering test pilot, Tony LeVier, who had flight-tested all of Johnson’s airplanes since the days of the P-38. “Close the goddam door,” he said to Tony. “Listen, you want to fly my new airplane?” Tony replied, “What is it?” Kelly shook his head. “I can’t tell you — only if you say yes first. If not, get your ass out of here.” Tony said yes. Kelly reached into his desk and unrolled a large blueprint drawing of the U-2. Tony began to laugh. “For chrissake, Kelly, first you have me flying your goddam F-104, which has the shortest wings ever built, and now you got me flying a big goddam sailplane with the longest wingspan I ever saw — like a goddam bridge.”

Kelly rolled up the drawing. “Tony, this is top secret. What you just saw you must never ever mention to another living soul. Not your wife, your mother, nobody. You understand? Now, listen. I want you to take the company Bonanza and find us a place out on the desert somewhere where we can test this thing in secret. And don’t tell anyone what you’re up to.”

LeVier knew the vast sprawl of desert terrain shared by California and Nevada as well as any mule-packing Forty-Niner; as a test pilot he had mapped in his mind nearly every dry lake bed between Burbank and Las Vegas as a possible emergency landing strip. So he took off on his scouting expedition, after telling fellow pilots he was off to count whales for the Navy — a project Lockheed had actually done from time to time — and headed north toward Death Valley. Two days later, he found the perfect spot. “I gave it a ten plus,” he told me years later. “Just dandy. A dry lake bed about three and a half miles around. I had some sixteen-pound cast-iron shotput balls with me and dropped one out to see if the surface was deep sand. Damned if it wasn’t hard as a tabletop. I landed and took pictures.” A few days later Tony flew Kelly and a tall civilian introduced to him only as “Mr. B.” to the site to take a look. His wife had packed a picnic lunch, but a stiff wind began howling, blowing large stones across the surface of the dry lake. “This will do nicely,” Mr. B. remarked. The area was not only remote but off-limits to all unauthorized air traffic because of its proximity to nuclear testing. As Kelly noted in his private log that day: “Flew out and located runway at south end of lake, then flew back (very illegally) over the atomic bomb sitting on its tower about nine hours before it was set to go off. Mr. Bissell pleased. He enjoyed my proposed name for the site as ‘Paradise Ranch.’ ”

From mid-May to mid-July the pressure on the workers building the first U-2 grew in intensity to a point where three shifts were working eighty hours weekly. To put an airplane in the sky in only eight months was a tremendous achievement. On June 20, 1955, Kelly noted in his log: “A very busy time in that we have only 650 hours to airplane completion point. Having terrific struggle with the wing.”

That long narrow wing was two-thirds as long as the length of the fuselage and crucial to sustained high-altitude flight. But wings that long created structural problems, including a bending instability in flight known as aeroelastic divergence, a fancy way of describing wings flapping like a seagull’s and possibly tearing off. We worked on the problem around the clock. Kelly, meanwhile, was a blur of activity, juggling five or six production problems simultaneously. As our airplane neared completion, he was also sweating out the construction of our remote facility. Fronting for the CIA under the phony C & J Engineering logo, he hired a construction company to put in wells, two hangars, an airstrip, and a mess hall in the middle of a desert in blistering 130-degree summer heat. At one point, the guy Kelly used as his contractor put out a subcontracting bid. One subcontractor warned him: “Look out for this C & J outfit. We looked them up in Dun & Bradstreet, and they don’t even have a credit rating.” This base was built for only $800,000. “I’ll bet this is one of the best deals the government will ever get,” Kelly remarked to several of us. And he was right.

By early July both the airplane and the test site were nearing completion when Kelly suffered a nearly fatal car wreck, after a driver ran a red light in Encino and clobbered him. He was hospitalized with four broken ribs but hobbled back to work in less than two weeks, just in time for what he referred to in his log as “a terrific final drive to finish the airplane.”

The first U-2 was completed on July 15, 1955. I remember the sense of shock I experienced the first time I stood next to it on the assembly floor. The airplane was so low slung that although I was slightly less than six feet tall, my own nose was higher than the airplane’s. Over the next few days, the airplane was subjected to all kinds of flutter and vibration and control tests, culminating in the most severe test of them all — Kelly’s personal final check and inspection. “I found thirty items to improve,” he told Dick Boehme with a grimace.

On July 23, the airplane was disassembled and loaded into special shipping containers. At four in the morning, the containers were loaded in a remote section of the Burbank Airport onto a C-124 cargo plane and roared off before sunrise, headed for the desert base. Kelly followed in a C-47. We unloaded the bird on schedule into the semi-completed hangars and assembled it. We were ready to fly.

On that day British and West German intelligence finished tunneling into East Berlin to eavesdrop on Soviet and East German military headquarters. Allen Dulles visited the Oval Office and made his report personally to President Eisenhower: “I’ve come to tell you about two successes today — one very high and the other very low.”