Skunk Works

Some of the riskiest missions had to be personally cleared by the president and were undertaken at moments of high drama and international tensions when the chief executive’s need to know what was happening inside denied or hostile territory was so explicit that issues of war and peace hung in the balance.

For example, during the early hours of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Arab armies caught the Israelis by surprise and scored quick victories on three separate fronts, President Nixon was informed that the Russians had repositioned their Cosmos satellite to provide their Arab clients with real-time overflight intelligence showing troop positions and deployments—a huge tactical advantage. Nixon ordered Blackbird overflights to provide these same kinds of real-time war zone overviews to the Israelis and level the battlefield. However, the British government, afraid of offending the Arabs, refused to allow the Blackbird mission to leave or land at their Mildenhall base, so we flew nonstop to the Middle East from a base in upstate New York—a twelve-thousand-mile round-trip in less than half a day. By the following day, Blackbird’s photo take was on the desk of the Israeli general staff.

During one of the most tense moments of his presidency, Reagan ordered the Air Force Blackbirds to mount deep-penetration flights along the Polish-Soviet border, in January 1982, following the Polish government’s brutal crackdown against the Solidarity reformers. Poland’s Communist ruler, General Jaruzelski, cut communications with the West and declared martial law; the White House was deeply concerned that the Kremlin not only had ordered these drastic moves, but was about to commit troops to crush the uprising as they had done in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Much to Reagan’s relief, the overflights revealed no Soviet troop movements or any evidence of a military buildup along the border.

The Blackbird flew again by direct presidential order during Operation Eldorado Canyon, the April 1986 air raid against Muammar Kaddafi of Libya, in direct retaliation for a terrorist attack against a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. The Blackbirds provided post-raid reconnaissance and damage assessments. These overflights, only six hours following the raid, were extremely dangerous since Libya’s entire air defense system was on maximum alert and eager to bring down the prestigious Blackbird as a prized trophy. Dozens of missiles were launched, but none came close. The photo take was transmitted to the Situation Room an hour after safe landing back in Britain, completing a six-hour, twelve-thousand-mile round-trip, and a few hours later, table-size blowups of bomb damage were shown to Secretary of Defense Weinberger. One photo revealed that an errant bomb had accidentally hit an underground ammunition storage facility not far from the presidential palace. The Libyans thought that the hit was intentional and were stunned at our apparent intimate knowledge of their secret storage facilities. “How did the Americans know?”

In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.