On May 1, 1954, the Soviet Union unveiled a new bomber, the Myasishchev M-4 Hammer. It was a plane the U.S. knew almost nothing about, other than it could carry nuclear weapons. With human intelligence almost impossible from inside Russia, there was only one thing to do: The U.S. had to build a spy plane that could fly over the Soviet Union at 70,000 feet, above air defenses, take high-resolution photos of military installations, and do so without being detected. The result was the U-2 spy plane.
This and other secret projects are detailed in Josh Deanâs âThe Impossible Factory.â Mr. Deanâwhose other books include âThe Taking of K-129,â about a CIA plot to steal a Russian submarineâfollows the career of Kelly Johnson, an engineer at Lockheed Martin, through the clandestine world of top-secret and groundbreaking weapons development.
Born Clarence Johnson in Michiganâs Upper Peninsula in 1910, Johnson studied aeronautics at the University of Michigan and spent time in wind tunnels learning about locomotive and automobile design. After earning his bachelorâs and masterâs degrees, he headed to California and landed a job at Lockheed. Rising quickly, Johnson oversaw the development of Howard Hughesâs Constellation, a plane that revolutionized commercial air travel with hydraulically assisted power controls, a pressurized cabin that allowed the aircraft to fly at 20,000 feetâabove most weatherâand a top speed of 350 miles an hour.
Next up was the P-38 Lightning, one of the most successful fighter planes of World War II. Johnson was the one who came up with the idea for flaps to fix the planeâs wobble and potential crashing during high-speed dives. He also headed up the team for the experimental XP-80, an early American jet built in response to the Nazisâ Messerschmitt Me 262. It was on this project that the company first used the term Skunk Works to describe, in Mr. Deanâs words, âa thriving, rapidly iterating division that rewrote rules for design, for management, and for doing business; that trained many of the centuryâs most audacious aerospace engineers; and that created both the fastest plane ever flown and the stealth fighter.â
It was exactly this kind of outfit that the U.S. needed to build the U-2, which was developed for the CIA, not the Air Force, because President Dwight D. Eisenhower worried that a military aircraft violating Soviet airspace would be seen as an act of war.
In December 1954 Johnson assembled a small team of âskunksâ to begin work on this new high-altitude reconnaissance plane. In an early 23-page memo, Johnson described the aircraft he called the Angel (because it was going to fly so high). As Mr. Dean tells us, it âwould have a maximum speed of Mach 0.8 (460 knots) in level flight, a ceiling of 73,100 feetâan absurd altitude that had only been reached at this point by research balloons and a few highly experimental one-off aircraft,â to be âdelivered to an as-yet-unchosen test siteâ by Dec. 1, 1955. (That site, conspiracy theorists will be happy to know, was Area 51.)
The U-2 flew its first mission over Soviet airspace on July 4, 1956. Johnson estimated that â95% of our hard information on the missiles in Russia came from the take of that plane.â Learning that the Soviets werenât as capable as weâd thought lowered global tensions.
In 1960 a U-2 was shot down over Russia. Francis Gary Powers, the pilot, was captured by the Soviets and for two years was used as a Cold War bargaining chip. The U-2 stopped flying missions over Russia as a result, but, we are told, its âutility as an intelligence platform continued to be an asset for the CIA and the U.S. military.â It provided valuable intelligence in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, confirming that the Russians were, indeed, building missile bases there.
By the time Powersâs U-2 was shot down, Johnson was already on to his next project, the even more successful SR-71 Blackbirdâanother high-altitude reconnaissance planeâthat flew higher, faster and farther than the U-2.
The biggest challenge with the SR-71âthe best-known version of the A12âweâre told, was the heat generated when flying faster than 2,000 mph (roughly Mach 3). The skin of the plane would need to withstand temperatures up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit at top speed, and zero degreesâthe external temperatureâwhen the plane came to lower altitudes and slower speeds. Johnson and his team chose to build the planeâs exterior with titanium, but that was a problem, too. The worldâs largest producer of titanium was the Soviet Union, and the Soviets werenât about to sell the material to the U.S. to build a plane to spy on them. âThe CIA used a network of shell companies, working through Third World countries, to purchase the ore,â Mr. Dean writes. âAccording to one former pilot, the Soviets thought they were selling these large quantities for the manufacture of pizza ovens.â
When they werenât battling the Soviets, Johnson and his team were battling the Pentagon bureaucracy. With the SR-71, the Air Force, taking over high-altitude reconnaissance from the CIA, insisted that markings and insignias be painted on the all-black planeâa ridiculous request. Mr. Dean recounts Johnsonâs objection: âThe surface of the Blackbird at Mach 3 reached 600 degrees, which,â as Johnson pointed out, âis roughly the temperature of an oven broiler. Paint a piece of metal and put it in the broiler,â Johnson and his chief thermodynamicist told the bureaucrats. âSee what happens to the paint.â
Many in the Defense Department didnât realize that Johnsonâs streamlined, entrepreneurial management style at the Skunk Works was the reason it produced results, often at lower costs than other more-audited defense programs. As Mr. Dean points out, in the age of sky-high weapons prices and cost-overruns, each U-2 cost less than $1 million, or about $12 million today.
As Gen. Leo Geary of the Air Force Special Projects Office later said, every one of the Skunk Works projects overseen by Johnson operated outside the usual Pentagon procurement process and thus had âtwo things in common. All were eminently successful and all were done outside the system. Now, if that doesnât tell us something, I donât know what does. This is the legacy that Kelly has really left us.â
