Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

by Ben R Rich

  The Taiwanese squadron, which became known as the Black Cats, was a joint CIA-Taiwanese operation, flying from Taoyuan airfield, just south of Taipei. These U-2 flights over Red China lasted for more than fourteen years, from late in 1959 until 1974, when President Nixon finally put a stop to them in deference to his new diplomatic opening to the People’s Republic. But especially during the early 1960s, the overflights were considered by the intelligence community to be extremely urgent. We needed hard information on Chinese nuclear and missile development. The Pentagon was particularly eager to learn how the Sino-Soviet split was affecting China’s military capacity and its weapons procurements.

  The flights were much more grueling and dangerous than the Soviet overflights—typical eight- to ten-hour missions calling for a three-thousand-mile flight over hostile territory practically from takeoff to landing. To reach the highest-priority targets of nuclear test sites in northwestern China and the Chiuchuan intermediate ballistic missile range in Kansu province meant flying twelve-hour round-trips. Over the years, as Chinese ground-to-air missile defenses improved, the Taiwanese took a pounding. Four U-2s were shot down and their pilots lost. During the sixties, the remains of those downed airplanes were put on display in downtown Peking, and the overflights so enraged the Communist Chinese, they offered $250,000 in gold to the Taiwanese pilot who would defect with a U-2 to the mainland. And no wonder. The intelligence acquired by these flights was so revealing that U.S. experts were able to accurately predict when the Chinese would finally test their first nuclear weapon in October 1964.

  Back in Burbank, we did what we could to help cut down the U-2 losses. We developed improved electronic counter-measures (ECM), calculated to confuse Chinese radar operators working their SA-2 ground-to-air missile systems. On radar screens the U-2 would present a false display so that the missile would be launched in the wrong piece of sky. Our ECM package was bulky and heavy and cost around two hundred gallons of fuel-carrying capacity, cutting into range and altitude performance.

  Some of the more distant nuclear test sites near the Tibetan border were out of range of the Taiwan-based U-2s. To cover these targets the agency flew from dirt landing strips in India and Pakistan on an ad hoc basis. In fact, three months before Powers was shot down over Russia, a CIA pilot flew from a secret base in Thailand against Chinese nuclear facilities. The U-2 dropped a javelin spike that we had dreamed up that contained special miniature seismic sensors to record an expected thermonuclear bomb test. Unfortunately, we never got any data back and never learned why. But the pilot on that mission was forced to crash-land short of his base in Thailand and came down in a rice paddy. He was able to negotiate a deal with the village headman: the villagers helped him to cut up the U-2 and put the pieces aboard oxcarts and haul it to a clearing, where a CIA C-124 landed the next day and took him and his plane out. In return, the agency paid the headman five hundred bucks to build a schoolhouse. Gary Powers should have been so lucky.

  Other Voices

  Buddy Brown

  I was just a dumb twenty-three-year-old fighter jock, which is exactly what the Air Force was looking for back in 1957. All they told me was “How would you like to fly at very high altitude in a pressure suit?” I immediately thought, Rocket ships! Buck Rogers! Count me in. I was shipped down to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, on the Mexican border, way out of sight, which is how the Air Force wanted it, because it wasn’t until the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that the world learned the Air Force was flying U-2s.

  We had twenty airplanes there and Air Force instructors to check us out, but we had a lot of fatalities. The U-2 was strictly a one-seater. The first time you flew it, you soloed, ready or not. We did a lot of landing pattern and takeoff practicing, and got up to sixty thousand feet to get the feel of our pressure suits. It was a very tricky airplane and we had a lot of fatal pilot errors. One guy was killed flying over his house, while showing off for his wife and two little boys. He banked too low and slammed into a hill. Another time the squadron commander was forced to eject when his flap switch stuck and he lost his tail and we didn’t have an ejection seat. So he jumped out, making the highest bailout ever—a record fifty-five thousand feet—and was very badly hurt. Another time I watched a guy nose in on landing and kill himself. I shit because I had to fly next.

  My first assignment was the most dangerous flying I had ever done—by far. I flew out of Alaska in what was officially called the High Altitude Sampling Program. That meant flying into the drifting radioactive clouds following Soviet and Chinese nuclear tests. Up there on polar flights when the sky was crystal clear and you could see the curvature of the earth, you’d be able to spot the nasty-looking iodine cloud drifting from god knows how many miles off. And we’d fly right into it. That program was entirely Air Force, and every bit as important as the agency flights over Russia. We flew for the Defense Atomic Support Agency, which collected our six bottles of gaseous samples of particulates after each flight and rushed them back to Washington for laboratory analysis.

  They could tell by debris samples carried in the wind whether the Chinese exploded an air or ground burst, what part of the country it was set off in, how advanced their trigger and weapon were just by the materials that vaporized. And we always knew their tests from our own because we placed a tiny metal object in our nuclear devices that left an unmistakable signature on a spectroscope. We figured we were pretty safe from radiation hazards while insulated in a pressure suit, but we were naive about the dangers in those days. The most penetrating radiation was believed to decay so quickly that by the time we flew into a cloud of gases and suspended debris, the risks were supposedly minimal. We wore radiation badges. Still, every so often an aircraft landed very damned hot and had to be isolated and washed down and the pilot spent the night in hospital as a precaution. As far as I know, no one was the worse for it.

  We flew these sampling missions every Tuesday and Thursday, in conjunction with other blue-suiters flying U-2s in Puerto Rico and Argentina, taking an opposite route from us. So we had one north and one south mission, and in that way we were able to sample half the globe per mission.

  I flew some sampling missions out of Laverton, which was the Australian version of Edwards Air Force Base, flying toward Antarctica. I was more fearful then than I was later flying U-2 reconnaissance flights in combat over Vietnam. The reason was the extreme weather. You’d last two seconds if forced to bail out in those awful temperatures. And you’d last five minutes on the ground. The distances were so vast, there was no way to be rescued in time.

  I flew at a time when the Chinese were exploding a lot of nukes, so I got used to ten-hour missions. I drank a pint and a half of orange juice through my feeding hole in my helmet, but even so, after a long flight my fingernails were so brittle from body dehydration that I could just crack them off. We also worried that ozone from so much high-altitude flying would rot our teeth. Maybe that was an old wives’ tale, but we all worried about it; I got the base dentist to make me a set of rotten-looking greenish false teeth to wear over my real teeth at base parties.

  I also flew a lot of what we called peripheral missions, flying just outside the borders of the Soviet Union or China, collecting intelligence. All I had to do was throw a switch and recorders on board would collect the bad guy’s radar frequencies and signals, and monitor everything. I remember one particular mission, code-named Congo Maiden, where we had five U-2s up there at the same time in the northern part of the Soviet Union. We carried on board an ECM package called a System 12, so you knew when you were being picked up by Soviet radar by hearing pings in your headset. Tightened my sphincter for sure.

  I flew Vietnam missions out of Okinawa as early as 1960. I flew over the Plain of Jars and watched the French get their butts kicked by Uncle Ho. Then, in ’62, the Russians took a few shots at me with SA-2s during the Cuban missile crisis. Didn’t come close thanks to my black box in the tail that jammed effectively. So I’m a believer.

  But
that was inconsequential compared to another blue-suiter U-2 pilot, Major Chuck Maultsby, who was flying out of Alaska on a routine sampling mission right at the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. His mission took him over the North Pole in the middle of the night, and when he turned to return to Alaska, he took the wrong south heading and wound up flying deep into Soviet territory. The Russians picked him up right away and thought SAC was coming in the back way to nuke them and start World War III. We monitored them scrambling jets against Chuck. He could see the contrails of dozens of fighters trying to reach his altitude and shoot him down. Finally, President Kennedy got on the hot line with Khrushchev and told him we have a lost U-2 pilot over your country on a weather mission, and he is not—repeat, not—a hostile aircraft. Maultsby had no direct radio communications, only a passive HF receiver that allowed him to listen. Someone on the tanker that had refueled him got on the horn and informed Chuck that it was sunrise over Alaska and suggested he turn his airplane 90 degrees until he saw light, then fly in that direction. Chuck obeyed and headed for the western tip of Alaska, where he was met by a couple of our F-106s that escorted him to base. He had made the longest U-2 flight ever—about fifteen straight hours and ran his fuel down to zero, flamed out, had to deadstick in with his face mask all frosted over.

  The CIA had been covering Cuba with U-2 flights for years. And then, in August 1962, they hit pay dirt and came up with the pictures that showed the Russians were planting ballistic missiles right next door, SS-4s and SS-5s. When Kennedy was shown the site constructions, he asked, “How do we know these sites are being manned?” They showed Kennedy a picture taken from 72,000 feet, showing a worker taking a dump in an outdoor latrine. The picture was so clear you could see that guy reading a newspaper.

  The first thing Kennedy did was to step up the flights. The second thing he did was to take the agency off the case and put in us blue-suiters in their place. If a guy was shot down, he wanted it to be a military driver, not a CIA employee. So I was one of eight Air Force guys who took over the Cuban overflights during the crisis. We flew out of McCoy Air Force Base in Florida, three or four missions a day. Since our missions were relatively short, we carried less fuel and so we could climb higher than usual, which was good because some of these missions got hairy.

  On October 27, one of our guys, Major Rudy Anderson, got nailed when an SA-2 missile, fired from a Cuban naval base at the eastern end of the island, exploded above and to the rear. Shrapnel blasted into Rudy’s canopy and blew holes into him. It was standard procedure to brief a primary and backup mission pilot for each day’s mission. The morning Rudy was hit by a SAM, I was flying the primary mission area, while Rudy was scheduled to fly the backup mission if my area was weathered in. As it turned out, my area was completely socked in with clouds, so Rudy flew the backup mission and got hit. One of the more awful aspects to this tragedy happened during a training accident earlier in the year. A pilot named Campbell was killed during a refueling exercise back in California. A garbled message got back to Edwards base control tower that Anderson was the pilot killed and everyone rushed over to Rudy’s house to comfort his wife, Jane. Well, you can imagine the impact on Jane until the phone rang and she heard Rudy’s voice and then damned near fainted away. Then she was forced to go through the same shit the second time only eight months later—but this time for real.

  After Rudy was shot down, we got the word that Kennedy had warned Castro and Khrushchev that if another reconnaissance airplane was shot down, we would stage an all-out bombing attack against these installations. The rumor was he was prepared to nuke the island. If we heard that rumor, figure the Cubans did too.

  I was selected to fly to Homestead Air Force Base, in Florida, and brief President Kennedy on the Cuban missions. When I was introduced to the president, he smiled and remarked, “Major Brown, you take damned good pictures.”

  In late 1963, we began launching U-2s from U.S. aircraft carriers, having developed a workable tailhook. In May 1964, the U-2 took off from the USS Ranger to monitor French nuclear tests in an atoll in French Polynesia, but only after one of our test pilots, Bob Schumacher, crashed while landing on deck. We had the airplane fixed and flying by the next morning. The target of the operation was Mururoa Atoll, a part of French Polynesia. We monitored all of their testing, and the French never knew we were observing them. The flights were secret, and the carrier crew had to go below deck when the bird took off and landed. The agency painted on its tail “Office of Naval Research,” just in case it was forced to crash-land in French territory. The photographic evidence acquired by the overflights revealed that DeGaulle’s government would be ready for full-scale nuclear weapons production in a year.

  During the Vietnam War, we launched gliders from our U-2s as decoys—a Kelly Johnson idea. The gliders carried tiny transmitters that fooled the North Vietnamese missile batteries into thinking they were actually B-52 bombers or fighter-bombers. So for $500 a decoy we forced them to launch missiles costing thousands of dollars.

  Other Voices

  James R. Schlesinger

  (Director of the CIA 1973; Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975)

  As secretary of defense, I confronted my own version of a Cuban missile crisis scenario in the mid-1970s, when I suddenly found myself under enormous political pressure and the U-2 came to my rescue and bailed me out. This happened during the Ford administration, in the spring of 1975, a period during which the Soviets were aggressively establishing bases and influence in northeastern Africa, in places like Somalia, Angola, and Uganda. Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, was pushing aggressively for detente with the Soviets. He and I were on opposite ends of a tug of war about establishing an American naval base in the Indian Ocean on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia. Kissinger was adamantly opposed to building such a base and had a lot of powerful support for his position in Congress. Democratic Majority Leader Mike Mansfield urged that the entire Indian Ocean region remain “a zone of peace” that would preclude us from operating there. The dispute with Congress over that base was endless. The Russians also screamed loudly about the provocation of an American naval installation in the Indian Ocean, even though they were crawling all over the place, aggressively extending their influence throughout the region. We had good intelligence on what they were up to in Somalia and Uganda, which were pretty much under their domination.

  In April, spy satellite photos landed on my desk showing that the Soviets had constructed a missile handling and storage facility at the Somalian port of Berbera, commanding strategic approaches to the Red Sea, which would be a depot for storing Styx missiles used by the Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean. These were missiles fired against other ships. The pictures provided proof of a Soviet military buildup in the area, but I was stymied by a blanket injunction against any public disclosure of satellite photography, extending even to members of Congress. In those days we didn’t admit that spy satellites existed, so I could not release the pictures, especially to make a political point. Instead, I ordered the Air Force to schedule a U-2 flight over the Berbera installation and provide overhead photos that I could make available to the press. The photos taken by the U-2 were superb, and I decided to go public and announced that the Soviets had begun storing missiles in Somalia. I knew that my announcement would fire a lot of angry skepticism in my direction, among detente proponents on the Hill as well as among some in the press, who heaped scorn on the Pentagon, claiming we were eager to sabotage detente and using scare tactics to overcome congressional opposition to a U.S. base in the Indian Ocean. The Russians and the Somalis vigorously denied my accusation. The Russians claimed they were only building a meat-packing plant at Berbera, and nothing more. Kissinger was concerned that I was about to upset his detente policy, so he was not enamored about having me release the U-2 pictures to the press to prove my contention. To be frank, he was rather infuriated with me over the entire episode, especially when I showed the U-2 pictures to the Senate Armed Services Commit
tee and gave copies to the New York Times, which ran a picture in early June. The Russians called the picture “a mirage,” intended to win support for a larger Pentagon budget. But for me the release of those U-2 photos became a jolly good episode. Once again, overhead photography caught the Russians trying to upset strategic balances just as they had in the Cuban missile crisis by secretly extending their military capabilities on friendly shores. But before that summer ended, the U-2 pictures had nailed our case: the Somali government backed off its futile denials and, trying to save face and win congressional support for drought aid, actually invited us into Berbera to build a naval supply installation of our own.

  In August 1970, Henry Kissinger arranged for two U-2s to monitor the unsettled Middle East buffer zone between Israel and Egypt. And in April 1974, after twenty years, the CIA ended its aviation activities and turned over all its twenty remaining U-2 aircraft to the Air Force. In more recent years the airplane has seen service monitoring the oil leak in the Santa Barbara channel, the Mount St. Helens eruption, floods, topography, earthquake and hurricane damage assessments, and by drug enforcement agencies to monitor poppy fields around the globe. The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) was involved in a test project on the U.S.–Mexican border in the late 1970s to test infrared film filter combinations on poppy fields photographed from high altitudes. Every growing thing has its own infrared signature, and the agents wanted to discover how poppies photographed at various stages in their growth cycle; photo interpreters could tell how close to harvesting a particular field was. The field in question was in Yuma, Arizona, specially cultivated under the DEA’s supervision, using fugitive Mexican poppy planters. A U-2 would overfly the field at various stages in the growth cycle and photograph it. Finally, the agency, after conferring with the Mexican planters, ordered a last flight for photos showing poppies ready to harvest. The U-2 flew over the field, as scheduled, only to discover the poppy field had been swept clean: the workers had harvested the crop the night before and slipped back into Mexico. The first U.S. government–subsidized and grown heroin was probably on the streets a few weeks later.