by Ben R Rich
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 fi
rst 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 speci
al 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.