AS THE COLD War dragged into its second decade, CIA director Allen Dulles was hard at work on a new program: comprehensive overhead reconnaissance. With the help of the US Air Force, Dulles was creating an aerial spying system he believed was essential to preventing a nuclear showdown with Russia. One of his most essential partners was famed reconnaissance pilot and MIT-educated scientist Colonel Richard Leghorn of Winchester, Massachusetts. Leghorn had flown nearly one hundred secret missions over Hitler’s so-called Fortress Europe during World War II and provided aerial reconnaissance of the epic and bloody fight for control of the beaches of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944: D-day. Leghorn made three daring passes over the area in an unarmed aircraft. “In the face of intense fire from some of the strongest anti-aircraft installments in Western Europe, Richard Leghorn photographed bridges, rail junctions, airfields and other targets.”1
The camera in Leghorn’s plane and those in other reconnaissance aircraft had no gyrostabilizing mechanisms and could not withstand shock. This affected the quality of the photographs. Still, analysts later determined that at least 80 percent of useful military intelligence during the war came from aerial reconnaissance photos.
After leading the Army Air Force’s 67th Reconnaissance Group during World War II, Leghorn returned to the United States and went back to work at Eastman Kodak. He had seen firsthand the devastation of warfare and continued to stress the need for what he termed “pre-D-day reconnaissance” against America’s future foes.2 In 1946, during temporary duty for the US Army Air Force, he witnessed Operation Crossroads, the first atomic weapons detonation since the bombings of Japan. Leghorn photographed nuclear explosions at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands from the air. The US military had lined up ninety-five target ships, including captured Japanese and German warships and submarines, in Bikini Lagoon and detonated two twenty-three-kiloton nuclear bombs above and below the surface. Leghorn flew at a distance just beyond the mushroom cloud of the underwater detonation and captured photos of a radioactive wall of water some 6,000 feet high that vaporized the armada of seized warships. Leghorn could not imagine the destruction of an American city from a Soviet bomb of equal power. He would do everything in his power to prevent such an apocalypse. In his mind, reconnaissance was the key.
Until then, the US military had relied on aerial photographs of Russian military buildup taken by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. In the early 1950s, when NATO pilots flying converted Boeing RB-47s tried to penetrate Soviet airspace, they were immediately shot down by Russia’s feared MiG-15s and later the MiG-17s, which could fly at heights of 45,000 feet. Leghorn’s idea was to build an aircraft that could soar above 65,000 feet and keep safely out of the crosshairs of Soviet fighters. He also pushed for peripheral long-range photography, satellites, free balloons, and vertical takeoff and landing vehicles that would be of exceptional use to clandestine intelligence collectors.
Recalled to duty during the Korean War, Colonel Leghorn had planned the secret missions over denied territories performed by Rudy Anderson and other reconnaissance pilots.
Leghorn pushed his new plan on the Pentagon, where he initially met with resistance from those who wanted the aircraft designed not only for reconnaissance but for battle. He finally convinced the military brass that a spy plane weighed down by heavy airframes and armor plating could never reach the heights necessary to avoid radar and antiaircraft fire.
When the initiative was brought to Dulles, he was initially reluctant to allocate agency resources for such a project. But Edwin H. Land, cofounder of Polaroid and head of a presidential task force called Project 3, Technological Capabilities Panel, urged him on. In a letter sent to the CIA director on November 5, 1954, Land advised Dulles that aerial photography was “the kind of action that is right for the contemporary version of the CIA; a modern and scientific way for an Agency that is always supposed to be looking, to do its looking.”3
The objectives for the new program as Land defined them were to provide adequate locations of newly discovered Russian targets, an appraisal through test range photos of Soviet guided missile development, and improved estimates of the Soviet Union’s ability to produce and deliver nuclear weapons.
The Project 3 presidential panel wanted the program operational within twenty months. Edwin Land informed Dulles that a quick turnaround was needed because the Russians were making advancements of their own to develop radars, interceptors, and guided missile defense systems that could reach the 70,000-foot region.
The race was on.
Now convinced of the project’s importance, Dulles looked to the one man he had complete faith in to lead the effort, his special assistant Richard Bissell. Dulles was a Princeton graduate, and like him, Bissell was the product of privilege as his father had served as president of Hartford Fire Insurance, the second-largest insurance agency in the country. Wealth, stature, and a keen intelligence helped pave the way for the younger Bissell’s entry to Groton, Yale University, and the London School of Economics. He scored high marks wherever he went, but no traditional text could measure Bissell’s level of determination to get the job done. For that, one would have to travel to Pinnacle Rock, a six-hundred-foot cliff located just outside Hartford. There Bissell, at twenty-one years old, had fallen off a seventy-foot ledge and nearly died. After a brief case of amnesia and months of intense physical therapy, he returned to the site alone, successfully made the climb, and conquered his fear. Espionage was also in his blood. An ancestor, Daniel Bissell, had served as a spy in George Washington’s Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.
Bespectacled, pale, and painfully shy, Bissell did not project outward confidence but had a quick mind and a keen attention to detail. He was also no stranger to big and demanding projects. In the late 1940s, Bissell had served as one of the key architects of the Marshall Plan to rebuild much of Western Europe following World War II.4
Dulles called Bissell into his large mahogany-lined office, where they discussed a packet of top-secret documents that laid out the need to build a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. Bissell had been studying the dossier since Thanksgiving. The CIA director then ordered him to attend a meeting with air force officials the following day at the Pentagon, where they discussed how to pay for the program. For their part, the air force would divert Pratt & Whitney J57 engines currently being produced for B-52 bombers and F-100s to the top-secret project. When Bissell asked who would pay for the airframes to be built by engineers at American defense contractor Lockheed Martin, the senior airmen made it clear that the CIA would have to come up with the money.
Dick Bissell would have to dig deep into the agency’s Contingency Reserve Fund, set up to support covert actions, to kick-start the project. It was given the code name AQUATONE.
With a blank check for $35 million from the Contingency Reserve Fund approved by President Dwight Eisenhower, Bissell began building his large project staff consisting of over five hundred CIA and air force personnel and eventually set up shop on the fifth floor of the Matomic Building at 1717 H Street NW in Washington, DC. The first task was to negotiate a contract for the airframes with Lockheed Martin. The contractor offered to deliver twenty airframes and a two-seat training model for $26 million. Bissell rejected the offer as it would leave him very little to pay for cameras and life-support gear. The parties eventually agreed on a fixed price of $22.5 million and signed a formal contract in March 1955. Lockheed Martin pledged to deliver the very first model in just five months. Engineers were confident they could meet the deadline because the airframes were relatively easy to build. Lockheed had recently created a prototype for a new lightweight fighter called the XF-104. The design called for a single engine, thin wings, and a sleek design. The company would replicate this model for America’s new spy plane.
Lockheed’s top engineer, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, assembled a crew of his best engineers, draftsmen, and mechanics and went to work on the project at the company’s Advanced Development facility, better known as Skunk Works, in Burbank, California. The top-secret facility took its nickname from the run-down distillery featured in the Lil’ Abner comic strip. There, Kelly Johnson and his small army worked around the clock with near-full autonomy. So secret was the project that Bissell sent the first check for $1.256 million not to Skunk Works but directly to Johnson’s home.
Dick Bissell was confident that Johnson would put the money to good use. At forty-five-years old, Johnson was already a legend in his field. The son of Swedish immigrants, he grew up on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a small town called Ishpeming.
In rugged, rural Ishpeming, men found work in the iron ore mines while their boys challenged one another on the local ball fields. Many of the children were especially cruel to Johnson and teased him mercilessly about his first name, Clarence. The young tormentors called him “Clara” and then “Kelly” after the popular song “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” The nickname stuck. His family was among the poorest in town. Johnson’s mother took in laundry to put food on the table, while he delivered the wash to neighborhood customers in his wagon or, during the winter months, in his sled. As a young boy, he feared a lifetime of poverty and anonymity and dreamed about returning triumphantly to his hometown, “not on the back streets, but on the best streets.”5
Driven to succeed, Johnson discovered a passion for aircraft design as a teenager. He excelled academically and was granted a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studied aeronautical engineering. After earning his master’s degree, he was hired as a tool designer at Lockheed. Johnson was both brash and bookish. With a wide face and a narrow set of eyes, he looked like he was always squinting or searching for an answer. He pored over calculus and engineering textbooks in his spare time. Johnson’s brain was always working, and he rose quickly in the company. In 1938, he joined a team of Lockheed executives on a trip to England, where they were trying to sell the British on a new militarized version of the Model 14 Super Electra, Lockheed’s civilian and cargo carrier. The British Air Ministry was not initially sold on the idea, so Johnson spent the next seventy-two hours improving on the design, ultimately winning the contract and an order for 250 airplanes—at the time the largest order ever placed with an American manufacturer.
Five years later, in 1944, while Lockheed engineers worked six days a week, in multiple shifts, to produce twenty-eight airplanes each day for the war effort, Johnson took on the task of designing a fighter plane to match superior jet fighters being produced in Germany. He set up a secret shop under a circus tent and over the next 150 days perfected the design for the P-80 Shooting Star. With that, Skunk Works was born.
Now, a full decade later, Johnson and his team faced a new challenge. The Skunk Works staff drew up plans for the U-2. Normally, a reconnaissance plane’s designation would fit with its mission. But instead of incorporating an R for “reconnaissance,” the air force chose a different letter for its secret spy plane, U, for “utility.” Only two other utility planes existed at the time: U-1 and U-3. Both the army and navy used the U-1 Otter to deliver cargo to makeshift airfields in remote places such as Antarctica. The U-3, dubbed the “Blue Canoe,” was the military version of a Cessna 310 transport used by the air force to shuttle light cargo and administrative personnel. The brains at Skunk Works nicknamed their new U-2 spy plane “Angel” because it was to fly to the heavens.
Johnson drafted a twenty-three-page report outlining both the obstacles and the solutions in designing the U-2. First, he had to account for weight and fuel capacity. The aircraft needed a large fuel supply for long, intercontinental flights, but it had to be lightweight in order to achieve altitudes of more than 70,000 feet. He confronted this challenge by attaching the tail assembly to the main body of the airframe with only three tension bolts. Another way to build a lighter aircraft was to construct the U-2 with two separate wing panels attached to the fuselage sides. This way, engineers could place the camera ahead of the engine and behind the pilot, improving the plane’s center of gravity.
Fragility was also a major issue. Johnson and his team needed to protect the pilots from gusts of wind, which could destroy the plane at altitudes below 35,000 feet. They devised a “gust control” mechanism similar to that found on a sailplane. The engineers set the horizontal stabilizers and ailerons on the trailing edge of each wing in a position that allowed the U-2 to remain slightly nose up, which would protect the plane from wind gusts. Flight at elevations above 50,000 feet was also fraught with peril. This altitude level was known as “the chimney.” If a pilot flew too slowly, the U-2 would stall and fall into a tailspin. If a U-2 pilot flew too fast, the aircraft could break apart in midair.
Another problem arose over the likelihood that the plane’s fuel would boil and burn off at ultrahigh altitudes. Shell Oil was contracted to develop a new low-vapor-pressure kerosene fuel to hold in specially designed tanks.
But how would the seven-ton spy plane land? The landing gear is normally one of an aircraft’s heaviest mechanisms. Johnson and his team designed a new structure with a hydraulic shock absorber called an “oleostrut,” with two lightweight wheels in the front and a pair of small mounted wheels under the tail. The landing gear resembled a bicycle and weighed just over two hundred pounds. The plane was also equipped with detachable pogo sticks to keep it level during takeoff.
As design of the airframe neared completion in Southern California, project manager Dick Bissell looked to Colonel Richard Leghorn and other experts for development of the new spy plane’s high-powered cameras. Among the leaders in this field was James G. Baker, a Kentucky-born astronomer with a PhD from Harvard, and Richard Perkin, cofounder of the optical design company Perkin-Elmer in Norwalk, Connecticut.
During World War II, the pair collaborated on the design of a forty-eight-inch focal-length scanning camera, which was mounted on a modified B-36 bomber. The experimental camera was then tested at 34,000 feet over a golf course in Fort Worth, Texas. It could identify and distinguish two golf balls on a putting green. The camera had the accuracy needed for the job but weighed more than a ton and therefore could not be used in the U-2.
The new spy plane had a payload limit of only 450 pounds. Baker and Perkin decided to modify an aerial framing camera called the K-38, already in use by the air force, to make it more compact. The system they came up with had three twenty-four-inch K-38 cameras designed to shoot vertically, left, and right. Called the A-2 camera system, it also employed sophisticated lenses and increased the sharpness of each photograph. Baker worked to grind the objective lenses until they could resolve sixty lines per millimeter—a vast improvement over existing lenses. The optics team would continue to improve on the design over time until the camera system was light and accurate enough to fit into Kelly Johnson’s U-2 airframe.
Once the camera was sharp enough, the weight just right, and the logistics problems solved, the Angel would fly so high as to be all but invisible.