by Phil Patton
But in August 1960, the very day Frank Powers stood in the dock in Moscow for sentencing, another of Bissell’s secret projects had finally begun to pay off. After more than a dozen failures, the engineers running the Corona spy satellite program successfully recovered a film pod ejected from the satellite whose public identity was Discoverer XIV.
Snatched by a C-119 Flying Boxcar at 8,500 feet, the capsule contained film of a million square miles of the Soviet Union—more than all the U-2 flights together had produced.
This was the future: no human at risk, no violation of airspace. To celebrate, the engineers got drunk and threw one another into a swimming pool. The recovery was announced; the public would not learn of the true spy mission for another thirty years or so.
The most important days of the spy plane, and especially the U-2, were still ahead. In October 1960, Eisenhower got to see for the first time the airplane that had caused him so much trouble, when he stopped in Texas after a trip to meet with the president of Mexico. That same month he approved U-2 flights over Cuba, where the new government of Fidel Castro was showing increasing belligerence toward the United States.
In August 1962, U-2 photos of Cuba showed a shape that photointerpreters recognized from the thousands of images they had of the Soviet Union: the star-shaped emplacements of Soviet SAM sites, holding missiles like the one that had brought down Powers. In the next few weeks, comparing the new pictures with an extensive database of older ones of the Cuban landscape, they saw more and more sites under construction, and by October they had matched boxes and equipment, carefully measured by computer, with shapes and sizes known from Soviet weapons displayed in Red Square parades: MiG-21s and Sandal missiles. The agency’s top “crateologists,” experts in all sorts of weapons and equipment packaging, were consulted. It was soon clear that the medium-range missiles—missiles that normally carried nuclear warheads—were being installed in Cuba.
On Saturday, October 12, 1962, Maj. Richard Heyster took off from Edwards North Base in a U-2. He reached the coast of Cuba early the next morning and returned with the key photos showing the six-sided star of SAM sites protecting the medium-range missiles NATO had code-named Sandal at San Cristobal.
When Heyster’s take provided Art Lundahl, the head of the photo interpretation office that handled the U-2 photos, with unmistakable evidence of the presence of Soviet missiles, Lundahl hurried to the White House. By noon on Tuesday, he was displaying the photos to the president and his top advisers; a week later, President Kennedy sat in front of the television cameras, announcing the quarantine (the term was chosen instead of “blockade,” an act of war in international law).
While the president was speaking, fifty-four of LeMay’s SAC bombers joined the dozen that were constantly orbiting on alert. Before the crisis was over, SAC would go from the normal Defense Condition Five to DefCon Two—the highest ever reached. Three days later, Adlai Stevenson, accompanied by staff from the National Photo Interpretation Center, was displaying the wares of the U-2 at the United Nations.
Kennedy ordered more thorough photography of the island, which required low-level, high-speed RF 101 Voodoos—their snouted shadows show up in the most famous treetop close-ups of the shrouded missiles and launchers.
On October 27, Maj. Rudolph Anderson was shot down in his U-2—the sole casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis, save for several crews of military aircraft that crashed during the mobilization. Anderson’s death came just as the Russians agreed to remove their missiles; it was the act, the Soviets said years later, of a trigger-happy local SAM commander.
Even more dangerous was the U-2 that went off course during the crisis and strayed into Soviet airspace near Siberia. “There’s always some poor son of a bitch who doesn’t get the message,” Kennedy remarked with a sigh. Khrushchev had rightly protested that in the current state of tension no one could be sure the spy plane had not been a bomber, the first shot of a nuclear war.
LeMay, the commander of the Cuban reconnaissance group, and Major Heyster were called to the Oval Office for commendation. A photo shows Heyster squeezed on a couch between the bigger officers. “Let me do the talking,” LeMay said. But days later, what LeMay talked about was how he had lost. He harangued JFK about how he could have forced out not only the Soviet missiles but the Soviets and Castro as well. We had the Russian bear in a trap, he said, and “we should have taken his whole leg off. Hell, we should have taken his testicles off, too.”
For decades, the U-2 would continue to be a vital source of some of the most important, detailed political intelligence.
The U-2 victories that did the most to prevent World War III, however, were the ones over President Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. Such intelligence provided support for those resisting the building of more bombers, more missiles. The numbers that did get built were huge, of course, but without the solid information to counterbalance the Curtis LeMays, they would have been far greater and the temptation to use them much stronger.
11. The Blackbirds
The U-2 may have been “Kelly’s Angel,” but even before it had flown over the Soviet Union, it was clear that what the CIA needed was an “Archangel.” Radars and missiles were improving. From the very first U-2 flight, CIA operatives and Skunk Works technicians had been surprised at how quickly the Soviets learned to track the craft on radar. The U-2 would have to be replaced.
Richard Bissell had the Skunk Works look into the best ways to escape detection by radar—speed, height, reduced radar profile, or some combination of the three. The result was the most heroic story in the whole Skunk Works buffs’ catalog.
The Skunk Works plunged into an extensive study of a superplane powered by hydrogen. Project Suntan, as it was called, cost taxpayers the equivalent of two billion of today’s dollars before officials realized that creating a whole system of refrigerated tanks and pipes for liquid hydrogen at bases around the world would cost billions more. The program would remain secret for nearly twenty years.
In 1960, the CIA finally settled on a Skunk Works plan for a high-flying conventionally powered craft, flying so high and fast—three times the speed of sound—that it could elude missiles and fighters. It would be built of titanium, the first such use of the metal. The program was called Oxcart. Eisenhower, increasingly apprehensive about the U-2, just called it “the big one.”
Secrecy was even more intense, if that was possible, with Oxcart than with the U-2. Checks were made out to the dummy C&J corporation. Drawn on the CIA’s reserve funds, free from overzealous congressional or executive auditing, they were sent to anonymous post office boxes scattered around Los Angeles. Once, a suspicious supplier tried to track down the box; he was intercepted by security agents.
The Ranch, Watertown—or “home plate,” as some were now calling it—prepared for a much larger effort than the U-2 had required. The new plane, called the A-12, or Blackbird, would need a longer runway and larger support staff.
Construction began in earnest in September 1960, and continued on a double-shift schedule until mid-1964. The new runway measured 8,500 feet and required pouring over 25,000 yards of concrete. Kelly Johnson was concerned that with the high takeoff speed of the Blackbird, expansion joints could set off dangerous vibrations, so the runway was built of offset slabs, each 150 feet long and layered in tilelike patterns.
The Blackbird would also need about 500,000 gallons of PF-1 aircraft fuel per month. After considering an airlift or a pipeline, the team decided to rely on trucks, but that required paving eighteen miles of highway leading into the base.
SAC again provided support. In late 1961, Air Force colonel Robert J. Holbury became commander of the base, with a CIA manager as his deputy. Support aircraft began arriving in the spring of 1962—including eight F-101s, two T33s, a C-130 for cargo transport, a U-3A for administration purposes, a helicopter for search and rescue, a Cessna-180, and a Lockheed F-104 for chase. The Blackbirds were too big to be loaded onto planes and flown in from Burbank,
like the U-2s had been, so they were carted by truck. A pilot truck outfitted with thirty-five-foot bamboo outriggers—the size of the finished airplane—drove the route testing for obstacles, such as signs, branches, and so on. Then the obstacles had to be removed, sometimes through negotiation with local authorities. Road signs were hacksawed and hinged for the passage of the new bird.
Between the high-tech complexities of working with titanium and the lower-tech problems—they tested the ejection seat by towing it with a 1961 Ford Thunderbird convertible, the fastest car they could rent from Hertz—the Skunk Works fell behind schedule on the Blackbird’s first flight, and there were warnings from Richard Bissell.
For the first time, the Skunk Works was falling behind. The initial flight was originally planned for the end of May 1961, but it slipped to August, largely because of Lockheed’s difficulties in procuring and fabricating titanium. Ironically, much of the raw metal would come from the Soviet Union.
Not surprisingly, the manufacturer of the engines, Pratt & Whitney, found it difficult to turn out a power plant to drive the big airplane to three and a half times the speed of sound.
It must have galled Johnson to admit the delay when he got a stern note from Bissell:
I have learned of your expected additional delay in first flight from 30 August to 1 December 1961. This news is extremely shocking on top of our previous slippage from May to August and my understanding as of our meeting 19 December that the titanium extrusion problems were essentially overcome. I trust this is the last of such disappointments short of a severe earthquake in Burbank.
But delays could come as no surprise, since the Skunk Works was single-handedly pioneering the use of titanium, learning on the job that the metal had to be carefully protected against contact with chlorine, fluorine, and cadmium, which could make tools unusable. The engineers had discovered that the Burbank water supply was fluoridated, and from then on used only distilled water. A whole new family of lubricants and seals had to be invented, and even so, the airplane literally seeped fuel when it sat on the ground with full tanks. For its whole flying life, the Blackbird had to be “topped off” by in-flight refueling once it was in the air and expansion had tightened the tanks.
Kelly Johnson predicted that the craft would not be matched for the rest of the century. It was like a piece of technology retrieved from the future.
In January 1962, an agreement was reached with the Federal Aviation Administration that extended the restricted airspace around the test area. The first references to Area 51 began to appear around this time, as well as a new name applied to the control tower for the airspace: Dreamland.
A number of FAA air traffic controllers were cleared for the project, and the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) established procedures to prevent their radar stations from reporting the appearance of the Blackbirds on their radar screens. But on the high radar range at Tonopah, operators would soon be seeing things moving much faster than they could explain.
On February 17, construction of the first aircraft was finished, and in the next few days the plane underwent its final tests. It was taken apart and stowed on the special trucks designed to move it to Groom Lake. A famous film clip shows Kelly Johnson planning the movement of the first A-12 to the base. On the chalkboard behind him is this list:
Feb 17 Aircraft complete
Feb 18 Aircraft put down on its gear
Feb 19–Feb 22 Engineering final tests
Feb 23–25 Disassemble and load on trucks
Feb 26 4:00 AM—Move out to Area 51
On February 26, 1962, at two-thirty in the morning, the convoy bearing the first plane left Burbank. It arrived by the back road to Groom Lake at about one in the afternoon on February 28. The second aircraft struck a Greyhound bus en route; the bus company was quickly and quietly compensated some $4,800 to settle the damage.
Not until April was the plane ready to fly. On April 26, 1962, pilot Lou Schalk flew the plane for about a mile and a half, just twenty feet off the ground. The plane felt like it was wallowing, and he decided to set it back down. From the ground, the crew saw the plane begin a series of lateral oscillations, which terrified Johnson, who later recorded that “it was a horrible sight.”
The tower could no longer hear Schalk, and from the tower and the ground you could see the Blackbird disappear in a great cloud of dust from the lake. It was enveloped for minutes, then finally reemerged in the distance as Schalk made a turn. They were relieved he hadn’t run into the mountains.
The first “official” flight took place on April 30, a year behind schedule, and on the second flight, on May 4, the plane went supersonic. One spectator at the first flight was Richard Bissell. He had been eased out of the CIA in February 1962, a dismissal occasioned by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the previous April and delayed only for the sake of appearances. At Kelly Johnson’s personal invitation, Bissell was standing on the white surface at Groom when the long bird he had championed took off.
Space was the next frontier of espionage, and the first flight of the Blackbird coincided almost exactly with the orbiting of the first Soviet spy satellite. From now on, airplanes at Groom would have to be kept in hangars or covered with camouflage when Soviet satellites passed overhead, as they would be sure to do. In the Kremlin, they already knew about Dreamland.
The pressure to get the Blackbird operational mounted in the fall. In January 1963, Bob Gilliland arrived at the test location, ready to fly the Air Force fighter version of the plane, joining pilots Bill Park and Jim Eastham. On May 24 came the first crash, when the pitot tube iced up and left pilot Ken Collins with no accurate speed indication. He bailed out over Wendover, Utah. A farmer in a pickup truck found him. “I’ve just crashed an F-105 with a nuclear weapon on board,” Collins said. “Let’s get out of here and find a phone.” The farmer quickly complied.
On August 7, 1962, the AF-12, the fighter version of the Blackbird, first flew. A whole family of Blackbirds was hatching in the desert, and they could not be kept hidden much longer.
Shortly after he became president, Lyndon Johnson, briefed about the Blackbirds, ordered that preparations be made to reveal their existence. It was an election year and crucial for the president to appear tough on defense. The leading Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, had already begun to criticize administration defense policy.
At a press conference on February 24, 1964, Johnson read a statement that described the new “A-11” as “an advanced experimental jet aircraft.” (For some reason, Johnson said A-11 instead of A-12. Similarly, when he announced the SAC version of the Blackbird, Johnson misstated the assigned name—RS-71, for “reconnaissance strike,” instead of SR-71. The brass and contractor scrambled to invent “Strategic Reconnaissance” to back up the reversed initials.)
There was no mention of the first Blackbird, the CIA spy version. And, of course, there were no “A-11s”—the Lockheed design number for the fighter version of the Blackbird—at Edwards, so some were quickly flown from Dreamland to the base. As the “Oxcart Story,” the official CIA history of the project, reported, “So rushed was this operation, so speedily were the aircraft put into hangars upon arrival, that heat from them activated the hangar sprinkler system, dousing the reception team which awaited them.”
In July 1964, pilot Bill Park nearly lost his life when a servo locked up and set his plane rolling just five hundred feet above the runway. In December of the next year, Mele Vojvodich ejected safely at an altitude of 150 feet on takeoff: An electrician had reversed the yaw and pitch gyros—in effect flipped the controls—and the result was another fireball on the lakebed.
In November 1964, the airplane was pronounced ready for use. As early as October 1962, the agency had been eager to offer the still-adolescent Blackbird for spying on Cuba, where the U-2s were vulnerable to SAMs. And in the fall of 1964, Khrushchev threatened to shoot down U-2s over Cuba after the presidential election. At Dreamland, hasty preparations were made to ready A-12s for the job
if the Soviet premier carried out his threat.
The Blackbirds were not black at first, but metallic, except in front of the canopy and on the edges, where they were painted dark, like the greasepaint on a football player’s cheekbones to cut the glare. Now Ben Rich had the idea to paint them black, to deal with the heat of high-speed flight.
To showcase the new plane’s abilities, on December 21, 1966, pilot Bill Park flew 10,198 statute miles in six hours. Taking off from Dreamland, he started north toward Yellowstone National Park, then eastward to Bismarck, North Dakota, and on to Duluth, Minnesota. Turning south, Park passed Atlanta en route to Tampa, Florida, then back northwest to Portland, Oregon, and southeast to Nevada. The flight continued eastward, passing Denver and St. Louis. Turning around at Knoxville, Tennessee, Park slipped by Bob Gilliland’s hometown of Memphis in the home stretch back to Nevada. This flight established a record unapproachable by any other aircraft.
The guys on the start carts—the big twin Buick and Chevy V-8s they would roll up to “crank” the engines on the Blackbirds—really liked Bill Park. So it was especially tough for them to watch, from the south end of the Groom runway, as the long black plane, just five hundred feet above the lake, went careening to one side and began rolling steadily like a boat going over, until they could see only the bottom of the airplane, with its landing-gear doors and streaks and smears, finally plunging down. The lake filled with an ugly orange balloon of flame, blackening at its edges. They were talking on the phone to the guys back at the hangar trying to figure out what the hell had happened when Park walked up, the picture of calm.
Park hadn’t had much time to think. He couldn’t get the plane to respond. It wouldn’t stop rolling. It was down to two hundred feet when he flicked the arm switch for the seat, then leaned forward and grabbed the big D-ring between his legs—like some big, loopy luggage handle—and leaned back, putting his weight into it. And suddenly the top was gone, the air rushing cleanly through the cockpit, and in another fraction of a second, still in the seat, he was sailing up into the rangy mountains around Dreamland.