Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

7 OVERFLYING RUSSIA

A month after the first U-2 flight, the Skunk Works’ test pilots were soaring 70,000 feet above the desert, breaking all existing altitude records in secret. After a few months, our pilots had logged 1,000 hours of flight time, had been to 74,500 feet, and had flown ten-hour 5,000-mile missions on one tank of gas.

Kelly was delighted by the airplane’s performance even though our pilots experienced frequent engine stall-outs at these extreme altitudes, forcing Pratt & Whitney’s engineers to log huge overtime adjusting their high-altitude engine to become more efficient.

With its enormous wingspan, designed to provide quick lift, the U-2 was able to glide for 250 miles from 70,000 feet, taking more than an hour to do so. Pilots couldn’t restart their engine unless they descended to the more oxygen-rich altitude of 35,000 feet or lower. Meanwhile, that damned engine caused another big headache by spraying oil onto the cockpit windshield via the compressor that ran the cockpit air-conditioning. That was my domain. The airplane held sixty-four quarts of oil, and we often had to replace twenty lost quarts after a flight. Our pilots breathed potentially volatile pure oxygen inside their sealed helmets, while their windshield dripped potentially volatile hot oil. I tried all kinds of solutions, but in desperation I heeded a suggestion made by one of our veteran mechanics: “Why don’t we just stuff Kotex around the oil filter and absorb the mess before it hits the windshield.”

With great hesitation I approached the boss. Those steely eyes narrowed and he studied me hard. I saw my brief career at his side evaporate in one explosive bellow: “Rich, you’re out of here!”

Kelly silently heard my sanitary napkin suggestion, then raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and said, “What the hell, give it a shot.” I called the crew out at the facility and told them to stand by for a delivery of industrial-size cartons of sanitary napkins being airlifted their way immediately. And, by God, it worked!

But then a mysterious problem suddenly developed that held potentially disastrous consequences. The ground crews began reporting broken rubber seals inside engine valves and leaking pressure seals around the cockpit. The rubber had badly oxidized in only a few weeks, leaving all of us scratching our heads. We replaced the seals, but a few weeks later the seals leaked again. As it turned out, the answer to the mysterious malady was revealed one day on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, just beneath the fold. The article reported how European-made automobile tires were proving to be totally unacceptable for Los Angeles motorists. Because of our smog, the article reported, the rubber was badly oxidizing and causing “tire fatigue,” leading to flats and rapid deterioration. The villain was ozone, a key component of our noxious smog. U.S. tire manufacturers, aware of the smog problem, added silicone to the rubber for their tires shipped to Southern California in order to avoid this oxidation problem. Reading that story, I almost jumped out of my chair. The U-2 was flying at the top of the troposphere, which was heavily laden with ozone. I mentioned the article to Dick Boehme, the U-2 program manager, who took it directly to Kelly. The fix was made quickly. All our seals were replaced with silicone and the problem vanished.

Despite the dreadful hours and the problems they caused in family life, the Skunk Works was for me far more splendid than a misery. Each day I found myself stretching on tiptoes to keep pace with my colleagues. Working with that crew was invigorating and fun. One of my favorites was our hydraulics guru, Dave Robertson, who in his spare time built toy square shells for a toy square cannon he invented, just to prove it could work. One Sunday I went over to his house and we lit the powder charge on the front lawn. Boom! The square projectile shot in a high arc across the street and blasted through the neighbor’s upstairs window. “Wow,” Dave grinned, “that little sucker really works!”

I turned to Dave for help and advice during that period of U-2 test flights in the summer of 1955, when our test pilots began reporting “duct rumble” at fifty thousand feet, describing the sensation as driving down a deeply rutted road on four uneven tires. In an airplane as fragile as the U-2, such severe shaking was a serious problem. The cause was flying at a slant so that more air was entering one of the twin air-intake ducts than the other. The problem landed directly in my lap since I had designed the intakes. Dave helped me design a splitter to enhance more even airflow and that helped to alleviate the problem, but not entirely. At fifty thousand feet, pilots were continuing to experience a roughness, although not to the point of watching their wing flaps so that they broke into a cold sweat. I told Kelly, “We’ve got it under control, but it won’t go away. I have no idea why it happens only at fifty thousand feet.” He didn’t either. He just told our pilots: “Avoid flying at fifty thousand whenever possible. You should be up higher than that anyway.” Pratt & Whitney finally solved the problem completely a year or so later by revising the fuel control for a better match of air and fuel into the engine.

But our test pilots had a lot more on their minds than rumbling ducts. Landing the U-2 on its two tandem wheels was neither easy nor routine. Our veteran test pilots warned Kelly that training CIA pilots to fly the U-2 and not getting one or more killed in the process was going to be a major challenge. Pilots were also apprehensive when hitting clear air turbulence and watching those long thin wings flapping like a bird’s, worrying that the next big gust would snap them off entirely. And, by the way, there were no ejection seats in the early models of the airplane. Ejection seats would add thirty pounds above a regular seat, so to save precious weight, the CIA decided to dispense with them altogether.

U-2 pilots would be trained to fly 9-hour-and-40-minute missions, flying round-trip on deep-penetration flights over the Soviet Union. The pilot needed an iron butt for ten-hour flights. “I ran out of ass before I ran out of gas,” some U-2 drivers would later complain — and who could blame them? 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 to an oxygen breathing tube, a urine tube, and fighting off muscle cramps, hunger, sleepiness, and fatigue. If the cabin pressure and oxygen supply cut off, a pilot’s blood would boil off in seconds at more than thirteen miles above sea level.

The U-2 was a stern taskmaster, unforgiving of pilot error or lack of concentration. No U-2 pilot, no matter how tired, would risk a few winks and leave the driving to his autopilot. The airplane demanded extraordinary pilot vigilance from the moment of takeoff. It was designed for an immediate steep climb, but it was critical to keep the wings level because they stored a very heavy fuel load and as the U-2 rose in the sky the fuel expanded under diminishing air pressure. One wing would sometimes feed the fuel into the engine more quickly than the other and that upset the airplane’s delicate balances. To regain this balance the pilot had to activate pumps that moved fuel from one wing to the other. Another very tricky aspect of flying this particular machine was maintaining carefully controlled airspeed. A pilot could fly up to 220 knots during a climb with a special gust control turned on that stiffened the wings and allowed it to hit wind gusts of up to fifty knots. But he also had to guard against climbing too slowly, that is, below 98 knots, or the airplane would stall and fall out of the sky. Above 102 knots the airplane experienced dangerous Mach or speed buffeting. So the slowest it could safely go was right next to the fastest it could go as it climbed steeply to above sixty-five thousand feet. And the shuddering felt the same whether it was the result of going too fast or too slow, so a pilot had to keep totally alert while making corrections. A mistake might make the buffeting worse and shake the airplane to pieces. And to make life more interesting, our test pilots reported that sometimes during a turn the inside wing would be shaking in stall buffet while the outside wing was shaking even more violently in Mach buffet.

Once the pilot reached seventy thousand feet he tried to maintain 400 knots true airspeed, about as fast as a commercial jetliner, and keep the engine from overheating and operating at maximum efficiency.

At altitude the pilot flew nose high and wings level, so for him to be able to see down we installed a cockpit device known as a drift sight — basically an upside-down periscope that had four levels of magnification and could be swiveled in a 360-degree arc. The pilots also had to plot their navigation by sextant, plotting precise routes while maintaining total radio silence and photographing particular targets with the pinpoint accuracy of a bombardier. A screwup could mean death by ground fire or fighter attack — and a guaranteed international crisis.

The airplane and the missions were much too demanding to trust to any but the best pilots available. The CIA found that out in the late fall of 1955, when they made a totally off-the-wall decision to try to recruit foreign pilots to fly this top-secret program. The rationale was that it would be less embarrassing if, say, a Turkish national was shot down over Russia than an American. Our government could plausibly deny any involvement. The president had cut out the Air Force from the U-2 program on the basis that the CIA was better at keeping secret a very classified program and that if a plane should be shot down it was not as provocative somehow with a civilian pilot at the controls as with an Air Force fighter pilot. Much to the chagrin of the Air Force and of several high-level CIA officials, the White House ordered the CIA to recruit pilots from NATO countries who could pass themselves off as pilots for an international high-altitude weather survey program, which was the cover story for the U-2 operation. So seven foreign pilots arrived in the late fall of 1955 and began training under the tutelage of Colonel Bill Yancey, of the Strategic Air Command, and a small crew of top-notch blue-suiter flight instructors, who had been thoroughly checked out on the U-2 by our own test pilot corps. But from the first day the undertaking appeared hopeless. The pilots lacked experience to fly such a demanding airplane as the U-2, and several of them freaked out, realizing that they would be forced to land on two tandem wheels. In less than two weeks, they were sent packing, and Kelly noted with a sigh of relief in his journal: “It’s been decided to use only American pilots from now on, thank God.”

Before the year ended, General Curtis LeMay, the tough, cigar-chomping commander of the Strategic Air Command, got into the U-2 act by insisting that SAC recruit the pilots for the U-2 program. LeMay was furious that his own organization was not running the program operationally and thought that Eisenhower had lost his senses by allowing the CIA to start up its own air force. He raised so much hell with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott that he was finally cut into the deal around the edges by being tasked to hire and train the pilots from within SAC, with the additional promise that U-2s would be made available to the blue-suiters at some future time. In those days the Strategic Air Command had its own fighter wings that were used to escort its bomber force into combat. The SAC fighter pilots selected would have to resign their Air Force commissions and come to work for Lockheed as contract employees under assumed names. We would put them on our payroll and so integrate them into the company that, at the end of the line, even the KGB might have a tough time tracing any of those pilots back to the military. The spooks called this kind of total identity change “sheep dipping.” This was about as close as the government and private enterprise were likely to get as teammates in top-secret espionage.

The Skunk Works would also be reimbursed by special government funds for the salaries and use of its mechanics and maintenance people who would service the U-2s at the secret overseas bases for the duration of the overflights. The agency insisted on using our mechanics over the usual Air Force crews simply because we held the monopoly on knowledge and experience on the workings of the U-2, and on these critical missions over Russia there was no margin for any mechanical failure. We needed perfectly functioning airplanes from takeoff to landing. No pancake landings on a Russian beet field, thank you.

God knows, the Skunk Works had gone out of its way to earn the agency’s trust. We had even kept the production line going by putting up our own money when Congress was late appropriating money to the CIA’s secret Contingency Reserve Fund. Eventually, more than $54 million was allocated for the U-2 program. Out of pure patriotism Kelly defied one of his own strictly held commandments — number 11 to be exact — which insisted that a customer’s funding must be timely. We were sticklers for delivering prompt monthly progress reports to customers and keeping a close accounting of our costs. Kelly required incremental customer payouts to keep us from having to carry the government with our own bank loans. But because of the national security urgency, Kelly obtained a $3 million bank loan to cover our U-2 production costs, at a time when interest rates were only about 5 percent. Still, it was a good example of a defense contractor bailing out his government. And at the end of the line we were actually able to refund about 15 percent of the total U-2 production cost back to the CIA and in the bargain build five extra airplanes from spare fuselages and parts we didn’t need because both the Skunk Works and the U-2 had functioned so beautifully. This was probably the only instance of a cost underrun in the history of the military-industrial complex.

The first group of six U-2 pilots recruited from the SAC fighter squadrons showed up at the Skunk Works in the fall of 1955 wearing civilian clothes and carrying phony IDs. They spent three days getting a thorough briefing on the airplane before flying off to the secret base to begin training with our test pilots. I remember talking to one of them, a nice, dark-haired fellow with a soft West Virginia accent who asked me a few technical questions about the air intakes. I would instantly recognize him four years later when his face was plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the world as Francis Gary Powers.

I learned that those pilots were being paid forty grand annually with an additional thousand a month bonus once they became active overseas. The forty grand would be held for them by our payroll department and they’d collect it only after they were mustered out. Which meant they had to survive in order to collect their just rewards.

Those pilots disappeared off my screen on the morning when they flew off to the base in a CIA-operated C-47 that had all its passenger windows blacked out. But since Skunk Works mechanics and ground crews were used exclusively to maintain the airplanes overseas, and several of my colleagues were forced to make periodic quick trips to add some new device or make a fix, we were able to keep up with the U-2 operations in fits and starts. The first contingent became operational, setting up at a base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, only ten months after the first test flight and less than eighteen months since the plane was first designed. Dick Bissell had personally obtained permission from then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to use German soil for this secret spy operation. Simultaneously, in early June 1956, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of the NASA space program, announced in Washington the beginning of a new high-altitude weather research program using a new Lockheed U-2 airplane that was expected to fly above ten miles high. The announcement was a fraud, claiming that the new U-2 would be charting weather patterns in advance of tomorrow’s jet transports. Our U-2 detachment called itself “The First Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (Provisional).” They were strange weather birds — hidden away in a remote corner of the Wiesbaden air base, guarded by CIA agents carrying submachine guns. And by the time these guys were setting up operations in Germany, with four U-2s and six pilots, we at the Skunk Works were building ten more airplanes that would supply three operational detachments: Detachment A in Germany, Detachment B in Turkey, and Detachment C in Japan.

Once that first detachment was deployed, the secrecy lid clamped shut. All of us inside the Skunk Works felt in our bones that the overflights of Russia were imminent, but only Kelly was plugged in with the CIA; he would disappear for several days and we all speculated that he was either on the scene in Germany (which was untrue) or being briefed in Washington by Mr. B (which was true) and actually shown the photos taken from the first flights (also true).

The first Russian overflight occurred on July 4, 1956. A CIA pilot named Harvey Stockman flew over northern Poland into Belorussia and over Minsk, then turned left and headed to Leningrad. He was tracked on radar all the way, and dozens of Soviet interceptors tried in vain to reach him, but he made it back safely into Germany having flown for nearly nine hours. When I came to work after that holiday weekend, Kelly sent for several of us in the analytical section and briefed us in a somewhat limited fashion. “Well, boys, Ike got his first picture postcard. The first take is being processed right now. But goddam it, we were spotted almost as soon as we took off. I think we’ve badly underestimated their radar capabilities. We could tell from overhearing their ground chatter that they were way off in estimating our altitude, but we always figured they wouldn’t even see us at sixty-five thousand feet. And you know why? Because we gave them lend-lease early-warning radar during World War II and presumed that, like us, they wouldn’t do anything to improve it. Obviously they have. I want you guys to brainstorm what we can do to make us less visible or help us go even higher.”

The Soviets were launching half their damned air force to try to stop these flights, and the president was upset at how easily they were tracking the U-2. “Mr. B is trying to bunch these flights before Ike gets cold feet or the Russians get lucky,” Kelly sighed. “The president has given us ten good weather days for these missions. After that, who knows?”

The CIA code-named the project Rainbow. The orders came directly from the Oval Office and had the highest priority. Every one of Kelly’s engineers and designers was put to work. The object: significantly lower the U-2’s radar signature or face a presidential cancellation of the entire program. These orders arrived just before the new year in 1956, after only seven or eight overflights of the Soviet Union. The Russians were using diplomatic channels to scream at us. They were too embarrassed by their own ineptitude in being able to stop the overflights to make their threats public, but that did not make these threats less ominous.

So the heat was on to find ways to reduce the airplane’s radar signature from approximately that of a Fifth Avenue bus to the size of a two-door coupe. But the U-2’s big tail, wings, and large inlets designed for its lift and thrust got in the way, acting like a circus spotlight on hostile radar scopes. Kelly flew to Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeking advice from a high-powered scientific group doing research on antiradar technology. He brought back with him two of their best radar experts, Dr. Frank Rogers and Ed Purcell, to help us brainstorm. I was involved analyzing various composites and paints that might be tried to absorb radar energy without adding too much weight to the airplane. The U-2 was painted a dull black to prevent it from glinting in the sun. We wanted to make it as difficult as possible to achieve human detection from the ground or from below in an interceptor trying to reach it. And we began experimenting with chromic paint that changed from different shades of blue to black at different temperatures like a chameleon. But paint added more weight than deception, as did the idea of painting the U-2 with polka dots to break up the silhouette against the sky. As for fooling radar, Rogers and Purcell suggested a radical fix: stringing piano wire of various dipole lengths along the entire fuselage in the hope of scattering as much radar energy in as many frequencies as possible in every direction. The wires made the U-2 draggy and we lost seven thousand feet in altitude.

The next thing we tried was something called a Salisbury screen, a metallic grid applied to the airplane’s undercarriage in the hope of deflecting incoming radar beams, but it worked only at some frequencies and altitudes and not at others.

Kelly thought it was more practical to try special iron ferrite paints that would absorb a radar ping rather than bounce it back to the sender. The paints were moderately effective but inhibited heat dissipation through the airframe’s outer skin and we experienced overheating engine problems. But the paint lowered the radar cross section by one order of magnitude, so we decided to give it a try. We called these specially painted airplanes “dirty birds” and shipped the first one out for flight testing in April 1957. Our test pilot, Bob Sieker, took the U-2 up to over seventy thousand feet and suddenly radioed that he was experiencing rapid airframe heat buildup. Moments later his engine blew out and the faceplate blew off Bob’s oxygen mask as his pressure suit instantly inflated. The U-2 dove straight down and crashed. It took us three days to locate the wreckage and Bob’s body. An autopsy revealed that above seventy thousand feet he had suffered acute hypoxia and lost consciousness in only ten seconds. The culprit that killed him was a defective faceplate clasp that cost fifty cents.

The CIA was so desperate to buy time for these Soviet overflights that Bissell got Kelly to sequester four of our test flight engineers and have them write a bogus flight manual for a U-2 twice as heavy as ours and with a maximum altitude of only fifty thousand feet that carried only scientific weather gear in its bay. The manual included phony instrument panel photos with altered markings for speed, altitude, and load factor limits. Four copies were produced and then artificially aged with grease, coffee stains, and cigarette burns. How or if the agency got them into Soviet hands only Mr. B knew, and he never told.

During the final winter of the U-2 overflights of Russia, Kelly Johnson came back from a visit to CIA headquarters looking profoundly gloomy. He couldn’t believe how easily the Russians were tracking our overflights and knew it was only a matter of time before their ground-to-air missile defenses caught up with their prowess in radar development and blew us out of the sky. “Putting fixes on this airplane won’t do any good. We need a fresh piece of paper,” Kelly told a group of us. His mind was already churning, thinking about the U-2’s successor that could survive flying above Moscow. He had asked our ace mathematician Bill Schroeder to predict how long it would take the Soviets to bring down a U-2 with their latest missile system. Schroeder gave the U-2 less than a year.

One of our engineers came back from a quick-fix visit to the secret U-2 base in Turkey to say that the morale among the pilots was sagging. The guys were worried about new SA-2 missile sites under construction around the Soviet Union’s main target areas. The president was very aware of the growing dangers and had cut back sharply on authorizing U-2 missions. And the trip our engineer made to Turkey indicated the growing concerns about pilot safety: he was on hand to supervise a new “black box” installed into the U-2’s tail section to electronically counter incoming radar beams and scatter them away. In the jargon of the trade, the box was called an ECM — electronic counter-measure — and would hopefully prevent a missile fired at a U-2 from locking on.

The word Kelly received from Dick Bissell was that the intelligence community was pushing hard for at least one more overflight over Tyuratam, the big Russian missile test center deep in the Urals, since a recent flight had revealed significant advances toward development of their first operational intercontinental missile. Eisenhower was ready to approve the follow-up flight, but the State Department heard about it and Secretary of State Christian Herter was strongly opposed. Herter had replaced John Foster Dulles, who had died of cancer earlier in the year, and was worried that any overflight might upset the delicate planning that had revolved around a summit in Paris between Ike and Khrushchev scheduled to start on May 14.

Bissell told Kelly that Allen Dulles had wrested one final flight out of the president, provided it took place two weeks before the Paris summit. The target date was May 1, 1960, the Soviet May Day, akin to our Fourth of July. We hoped to catch them with their defenses down, with only skeleton crews at work.

As it turned out, our black box and the route of the mission finally selected would seal the fate of that tragic last flight. Ike had signed off on two mission options and left the final decision to the CIA. The choices were missions code-named Time Step, which would overfly certain key nuclear and missile test sites, and Grand Slam, a marathon nine-hour mission from Pakistan clear across Russia to land at a base in Bodo, Norway. The heart of Grand Slam was overflying Tyuratam, then heading south to photograph the huge military-industrial complexes at Sverdlovsk and Plesetsk. All were heavily defended.

The two plans were sent for review to the Air Force chief of staff, General Nathan Twining, who quickly spotted a flaw in the Grand Slam mission and called Allen Dulles to personally urge changes. Twining had noticed that the proposed mission repeated the exact route into Sverdlovsk from the south used less than a month earlier by U-2 pilot Marty Knutson. “Allen, if you come in that way again, they’ll know exactly where you are heading and will just be lying in wait. You’ll get nailed.” Dulles obviously didn’t agree. He personally chose Grand Slam with no changes.

Because the mission would be so demanding and long, covering 3,700 miles from Pakistan to Norway, the agency chose its most experienced pilot and the best navigator of the group — thirty-four-year-old Francis Gary Powers. The pilot had twenty-seven U-2 missions logged, including several marathon-length flights across the eastern Mediterranean in 1956 to gather intelligence on the movements of British and French warships participating with Israel in attacking Egypt during the Suez crisis.

Powers took off at dawn from Peshawar, Pakistan, on Sunday, May 1, 1960. Flying across the Soviet border for the first time from Pakistan was another way to catch the Russians napping. And for the first three hours into the flight the plan worked perfectly. He flew over Tyuratam without difficulty then changed course and headed south toward Sverdlovsk, on the same flight plan as Knutson’s only weeks earlier. As he approached the Sverdlovsk complex, Powers was suddenly blinded by a brilliant orange flash and felt an explosion from behind. His right wing dropped and he began pitching down. His instincts told him his tail had been hit as the airplane began a steep nosedive. In horror he saw his wings rip off. His pressure suit inflated, squeezing him in a viselike grip, and his faceplate began to frost. He glanced at the altimeter, saw he was at thirty-four thousand feet and falling fast, and almost panicked realizing he was pinned by the centrifugal force up against the instrument panel. If he hit the ejection lever, he’d be blasted out of the cabin while leaving both his pinned legs behind. He struggled to push back in his seat and manually open the canopy. He unhitched his safety harness, and as the wingless fuselage spun upside down, Francis Gary Powers fell free.

As his chute opened, Powers was startled to see another chute opening in the distance. Whatever hit him had also hit a Soviet pilot as well. He landed hard in a farmer’s field. Several villagers came running to him. They weren’t unfriendly and had no idea he was an American because he was too stunned to even say a word while they conversed among themselves excitedly. They finally helped him to a truck and drove him off. He would later learn they were driving him to the local airport, assuming he was a Russian pilot and not knowing what else to do with him. At some point, though, the truck was stopped by the militia. The police grabbed Powers and took him away.

It would later be determined that a Soviet missile battery had launched in shotgun fashion fourteen SA-2s at the approaching U-2—an indication that they were waiting for his arrival. One missile had knocked down a Russian fighter trying to intercept Powers, and the shock waves from the exploding missiles had knocked off the U-2’s tail.

Kelly received the call at home, well after midnight, and he grimly arrived at the Skunk Works that Monday morning and assembled a group of us. “We got nailed over Sverdlovsk by an SA-2. That’s that. We’re dead.”

It was the first time in history that a ground-to-air missile had shot down an airplane, and all of us assumed, knowing how fragile the U-2 was and at the height it was probably flying when it was hit, that the pilot had been killed. The CIA immediately had NASA launch a preplanned cover story that one of its weather research planes, flying out of Turkey, had strayed off course and was missing after the pilot indicated he was having oxygen problems. Cagey Khrushchev waited for Eisenhower to arrive in Paris for the summit before announcing that the Russians had shot down a U-2 spy plane. The administration called that a “fantastic allegation.” Eisenhower denied spy flights, and then on the eve of the summit Khrushchev announced that the pilot had been captured and confessed his spy mission. The pilot was named Francis Gary Powers.

Eisenhower was humiliated and forced to admit the U-2 spy operation, which he said was justified since Khrushchev had recently turned down his Open Skies proposal. To mollify the Russians and save the summit, Ike announced we would end the flights, which he had privately done anyway. But when Khrushchev demanded an apology, the summit collapsed and Eisenhower went back home.

Inside the Skunk Works we were no less stunned that Powers had survived than the CIA and the White House. The agency was livid at Powers for not dying in the hit or taking his own life, even though using the poison needle that had replaced the cyanide pill in a pilot’s kit was entirely optional. But some of the more macho patriots around the Skunk Works agreed with their opposite numbers thundering around at the CIA that Powers was a damned traitor for not self-destructing. And they meant it! Because he was chicken, the president endured a terrible international humiliation. Power’s survival also embarrassed Dulles and Bissell, who had assured the president, presumably in good faith, that not much would be left of a U-2 or a pilot if shot down by a missile. Powers was also faulted for not pulling a seventy-second delayed explosive charge before bailing out that would have destroyed the film and cameras and kept them out of the hands of the KGB.

There was little sympathy for Powers, who was kept incommunicado inside the notorious Lubianka prison for months before enduring a propaganda show trial that heaped embarrassment on the agency and the administration for more than three weeks. Powers was sentenced harshly to ten years at hard labor and served nearly two years before being exchanged in February 1962, for the captured Russian master spy Rudolph Abel, a decision that only enraged many at the CIA even more. “That’s like trading Mickey Mantle for a goddam bullpen catcher,” one of the agency guys exploded when hearing the news.

Had Powers killed himself or not survived the missile hit, he would have come home a hero in a flag-draped wooden box. But coming home haggard and alive, he was greeted like a traitor and was whisked off in great secrecy to a CIA safe house in Virginia to be grilled unmercifully for days about his experiences over and inside Russia. Kelly was summoned to the debriefing to hear the part about the shoot-down and was satisfied that Powers was telling the truth.

Kelly had long ago analyzed photographs of the U-2 wreckage released by the Russians and reported to Bissell his conviction that the airplane had been hit from the rear. “It looks like they knocked off his tail.” At the debriefing, Powers confirmed that fact. Kelly felt sorry for the guy and offered him a job as a U-2 flight test engineer at the Skunk Works. He gratefully accepted and worked for us for eight years, until the mid-1970s, when he went to work for a local TV station as a helicopter traffic reporter. He was killed in a helicopter crash on August 1, 1977. Ten years later the Air Force awarded the former captain a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal well earned if sadly late in arriving.

Kelly long suspected that the electronic counter-measure black box we installed on the tail section of Power’s U-2 may have acted in an opposite way from the one we intended. The box was code-named Granger, and we provided the frequencies used to jam and confuse the enemy missile. These were the same frequencies the Russians used on their defensive radar. But it was possible that the Russians had changed these frequencies by the time we incorporated them into our missile spoofer, so that the incoming missile’s seeker head was on the same frequency as the beams transmitted off our tail and acted as a homing device. A few years later a similar black box was installed in the tails of CIA U-2s piloted by Taiwanese flying highly dangerous missions over the Chinese mainland. One day three of four U-2s were shot down, and the sole survivor told CIA debriefers that he was amazed to be alive because he forgot to turn on his black box. To Kelly, that clinched the case. But we’ll never really know.