Skunk Works

The van door opens and the young sergeant steps into the dark coolness, still looking as if he had hallucinated in the desert heat—seeing with his own eyes a strange diamond apparition that his missiles failed to lock onto.

“Captain,” he began, “you won’t believe this…”

THREE AND A HALF years earlier, on January 17, 1975, I drove to work in downtown Burbank, California, as I had for the past twenty-five years, only now I parked for the first time in the boss’s slot directly in front of an unmarked two-story windowless building that resembled a concrete blockhouse, in plain view of the main runway at Burbank’s busy Municipal Airport. This was Lockheed’s “Skunk Works,” which, throughout the long, tense years of the cold war, was one of the most secret facilities in North America and high on the targeting list of the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war. Russian satellites regularly overflew our parking lot in the midst of Lockheed’s sprawling five-square-mile production complex, probably counting our cars and analyzing how busy we were. Russian trawlers, just outside territorial limits off the southern California coastline, trained powerful eavesdropping dishes in our direction to monitor our phone calls. We believed the KGB knew our key phone numbers, and computerized recording devices aboard those trawlers probably switched on when those phones rang. U.S. intelligence intercepted references to “the Skunk Works” regularly from Soviet satellite communications simply because there was no Russian translation for our colorful nickname. Our formal name was Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects.

Even our rivals would acknowledge that whoever ran the Skunk Works had the most prestigious job in aerospace. Beginning with this mild day in January, that guy was me. I was fifty years old and in the pink.

Most Skunk Workers were handpicked by our just retired leader, Kelly Johnson, one of the reigning barons of American aviation, who first joined Lockheed in 1933 as a twenty-three-year-old fledgling engineer to help design and build the Electra twin-engine transport that helped put the young company and commercial aviation on the map. By the time he retired forty-two years later, Kelly Johnson was recognized as the preeminent aerodynamicist of his time, who had created the fastest and highest-flying military airplanes in history. Inside the Skunk Works, we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers. Our forte was building a small number of very technologically advanced airplanes for highly secret missions. What came off our drawing boards provided key strategic and technological advantages for the United States, since our enemies had no way to stop our overflights. Principal customers were the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Air Force; for years we functioned as the CIA’s unofficial “toy-makers,” building for it fabulously successful spy planes, while developing an intimate working partnership with the agency that was unique between government and private industry. Our relations with the Air Force blue-suiters were love-hate—depending on whose heads Kelly was knocking together at any given time to keep the Skunk Works as free as possible from bureaucratic interlopers or the imperious wills of overbearing generals. To his credit Kelly never wavered in his battle for our independence from outside interference, and although more than one Air Force chief of staff over the years had to act as peacemaker between Kelly and some generals on the Air Staff, the proof of our success was that the airplanes we built operated under tight secrecy for eight to ten years before the government even acknowledged their existence. Time and again, our marching orders from Washington were to produce airplanes or weapons systems that were so advanced that the Soviet bloc would be impotent to stop their missions. Which was why most of the airplanes we built remained shrouded in the deepest operational secrecy. If the other side didn’t know these aircraft existed until we introduced them in action, they would be that much farther behind in building defenses to bring them down. So inside the Skunk Works we operated on a tight-lipped need-to-know basis. I figured that an analyst for Soviet intelligence in Moscow probably knew more about my Skunk Works projects than my own wife and children.