Skunk Works

But who would have guessed that Bissell’s days were numbered? By April 1961, he was on his way out, his brilliant career shattered by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Bissell had been overseeing the invasion attempt, staged by the agency using Cuban exiles trained in secret Florida camps. It was a botched mission from start to finish, and all of us were deeply depressed that Bissell had to fall on the sword along with his boss, Allen Dulles. Bissell was godfather to the Skunk Works. He started the U-2 and that really put us in business to stay. But he took his fall gracefully, and in April 1962, even though he was out of government by then, Kelly invited him out to the secret base to watch the first flight of the Blackbird. Both men were as tough as titanium, but both were clearly moved watching our test pilot, Lou Schalk, gun those two tremendous engines and rip into the early-morning cloudless sky. It was one of those unmatched moments when all the pain and stress involved in building that damned machine melted away in the most powerful engine roar ever heard.

Kelly worried that, with Bissell gone, Mac the Knife might convince the president to cut out the expensive Blackbird CIA operation altogether and cancel us before we had a chance to prove our worth collecting radar and electronic intercepts along the borders of the Soviet Union. From our great heights we could penetrate hundreds of miles into Russia with side-looking radar without actually crossing their borders. But in June 1961, the new president attended his first summit, in Vienna with Khrushchev, trying to de-escalate tensions with the Russians over the future status of Berlin. The meeting with the Russian leader was so unnervingly hostile that JFK came away privately convinced that we and the Russians were on the brink of war.

At the Skunk Works we sensed those mounting tensions immediately, when Air Force Chief of Staff LeMay made his first trip to Burbank to see the Skunk Works for himself. The trip itself was highly unusual because Kelly and Curtis were not exactly buddies and had pretty well avoided each other. The word we got was that Curtis LeMay wasn’t paying a courtesy call, but was bringing his checkbook.

Still, Kelly was wary. LeMay blamed Kelly for the administration’s decision to suddenly cut back on the B-70 program from ten bombers to only four. He thought Kelly and Bissell had connived to sabotage his B-70 with Kennedy. LeMay was also sore about our close relationship to the CIA because in his view the agency had no right to have its own independent air wing, furnished by the Skunk Works. But now LeMay whisked in with his entourage and a shopping list that included converting the Blackbird into an extended-range deep-penetration bomber that the Russians could not stop. LeMay had fathered the SAC strategy called MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction. That said it all. Our Blackbird would nuke ’em back to the Stone Age.

Kelly briefed LeMay personally and invited several of us who were experts on various components of the airplane to sit in just in case the general had technical questions. I was intrigued watching the big, two-fisted LeMay puffing on a thick cigar, his shrewd eyes focused in concentration as Kelly zipped through a classified slide show detailing all the performance characteristics of the new airplane.

“Could you fire air-to-ground missiles from that airplane while going at Mach 3 speed?” the general asked Kelly. Kelly replied affirmatively. “We’ve done the theoretics on this, General, and we feel confident that we could do this successfully.”

“Could you guide a missile to within two hundred feet of a target?” LeMay asked. Kelly again said yes, theoretically, and added that if the missiles were nuclear, pinpoint accuracy was unnecessary. Used as a deep-penetration tactical bomber, the Russians couldn’t stop us. Used as an interceptor, we were also unstoppable. Using look-down, shoot-down air-to-air missiles, our high-flying interceptor could defend all of North America against any long-range bomber force that would be expected to fly low to the deck to avoid radar detection. “With our speed,” Kelly insisted, “fewer interceptors would be needed to cover the entire North American continent. We’d look down at the Soviet bomber fleet and pick them off like fish in a barrel.” Kelly declared, “General, the fellow who gains the high ground takes the battle. Our speed gives us our height. We’re king of the mountain.”

LeMay suddenly raised his hand as a signal for Kelly to stop talking. Then he stood up, grabbed Kelly by the arm, and led him to the far corner of Kelly’s huge office for a private, whispered conference that lasted nearly ten minutes, while the rest of us sat transfixed, watching these two titans of military aviation cooking up some sort of scheme or scenario.