The photo-processing center was set up in a seedy part of town at K and Fifth streets, NW, on four floors above offices of the Stuart Motor Car Company, an auto repair shop. It was code-named Automat.
Aircraft ferried workers and materials between the Skunk Works in Burbank and another factory, set up in the little town of Oildale near Bakersfield, a scruffy cotton and oil town where the country singer Merle Haggard had grown up in an old boxcar. The pilots flying to the new secret base were not told where it was. They were simply ordered to fly to a set of coordinates in the middle of the desert and then to await instructions from an unknown air control center, called Sage Control, for further instructions from “Delta.” At the point when the radar picked them up, the crews were ordered to descend into the dark desert and lower their gears and flaps. Only then did the runway lights flicker on beneath them.
Between flights, those working at the base lived four to a trailer and could contact families only if absolutely necessary. The phone for this purpose was called the “hello” phone, because that was the only way it was to be answered. It became a fixture of black projects. The number was given out for use only in emergencies. A message was left and the worker or engineer would call back.
There was much drinking and poker. With lots of idle time on their hands, one group of workers fired off homemade rockets made of sawdust, gunpowder, and cigar tubes. Once they nearly hit a cargo plane.
On November 17, 1955, a C-54 making the run from Burbank mistook its altitude and struck Mount Charleston, northwest of Las Vegas, just thirty feet short of its peak. It took three days for a rescue party to reach the crash; an Air Force colonel picked through the wreckage removing briefcases with classified documents. The Skunk Works was lucky; some of its key people had missed the flight because of overindulgence at a beer bash the night before.
Curtis LeMay didn’t like the idea of a bunch of civilians running an airplane program. But Eisenhower felt with equal certainty that he needed a less biased source of intelligence than the Air Force, which had a record of exaggerating the threat to keep its bomber budgets generous. Protecting himself and the American taxpayer from the military was as important a function of the U-2 program as was protecting us from the Soviet Union. LeMay’s deputy, Tom Powers, was flown to the Watertown camp in 1955 and briefed. In the deal that was worked out, SAC would “sheep-dip” the pilots — moving them from military to civilian status and training them. The base now had Air Force and CIA co-commanders.
LeMay carefully planned on letting the agency build the U-2 but then to take it away on behalf of SAC. The Skunk Works and the agency, however, worked to build their own credibility and went over LeMay’s head. In December 1955, Secretary of Defense Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson was flown to the site to bolster his enthusiasm for the program. He talked from the tower to a U-2 pilot high above. Later, Allen Dulles, pipe and all, dropped in to chat with the pilots-in-training.
The Atomic Energy Commission covered the construction work with a brief statement about the building of the airstrip, suggesting it was for nuclear testing activities, and later the familiar weather research cover story was put to work again. On May 7, 1956, a press release was issued over the name of NACA director Hugh Dryden announcing that the new weather research plane had been developed and flown. “The first data, covering conditions in the Rocky Mountain area, are being obtained from flights from Watertown Strip, Nevada.” This fooled few people; the Soviets had a copy of it when they shot down U-2 pilot Gary Powers.
At the same time, a long-planned press visit to the X-15 rocket plane at Edwards was hastily expanded to include a look at a “NACA” U-2, which had to be moved from the secretive North Base section of the flight test complex and painted up; it was given a bogus tail number. The paint wasn’t even dry when the reporters entered the hangar, and the ground crew was terrified one of the reporters would get close enough to touch the plane. Photos of the weather U-2 look retouched, with the NACA initials in a band on the tail.
At four-thirty on the morning of July 14, 1955, the U-2 was loaded on a C-124 and flown to Nevada. By August 4, it had been assembled and was ready to fly.
Test pilot Tony LeVier, who had chosen as his code name for the project “Anthony Evans,” was forty-two, at the top of a career wringing out the P-38 for Lockheed and then flying the first Skunk Works airplane, the XP-80 jet. He was fourteen when Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, and he’d immediately begun earning money collecting old tires and other junk in his Whittier, California, neighborhood, paying five dollars for his first airplane ride. Beginning with the Waco 10, in which he soloed three years later, LeVier would fly more than 250 different aircraft. By the time he came to Lockheed in 1941, he was already well known as a stunt and aerobatics pilot. He flew such exotic craft as the Mendenhall Special from Muroc Dry Lake in 1936 and won major trophy races in 1938 in a craft called the Schoenfeldt Firecracker.
At Lockheed, he immediately helped to figure out the odd high-speed compression problem of the P-38—a precursor of the shock waves at the sound barrier — and would put in more hours in its cockpit than any other test pilot. In June 1944 he made the first flight in the XP-80, and then flew its successor, the XP-80A “Gray Ghost”—of all the planes he flew, the one that he said came closest to killing him.
In March 1945, LeVier pushed the jet past 550 miles per hour when a turbine blade let go and he found himself embarrassed by the sudden lack of a tail. The plane began to tumble, and with the G’s he could barely reach the canopy release handle. When he did, it came off in his hand. Reaching behind the seat he grabbed the raw cable. Finally, the plane turned over and dumped him out and he pulled himself up into a little ball, waiting for what was left of the airplane to strike him. At just 3,000 feet he managed to get his parachute open.
Yet for all the near escapes and the flamboyance, LeVier developed into the most scientific and cautious of test pilots. He was not a wild-eyed Yeager type, but was obsessed with safety. He had seen too many guys go in. In his retirement he would establish an organization to teach better, safer flying practices and was constantly frustrated with the lack of support he got from government and industry. He developed such practical and basic safety devices as the master warning light system, the trim switch on the control stick, and the afterburner igniter.
With the U-2, LeVier would take no more risks than necessary. It was hard to see out of the cockpit and hard to get a sense of horizon; he wanted the landing strip painted with markings, but the penny-pinching Kelly Johnson found the four-hundred-dollar expenditure excessive. Finally LeVier himself put strips of black electrical tape on the canopy to indicate the true horizon.
U-2—“Utility 2”—was the innocuous and noncommittal tag for the plane. But another story circulated about the source of the name.
The plane’s long wings gave it so much lift that it was hard to land. The first flight happened by accident: LeVier took it out for a taxi test, but the airplane took off. “It went up like a homesick angel,” LeVier said later, more for quotation than anything else. “It flies like a baby buggy.” The only problem was it didn’t want to come down. In the C-47 chase plane, Johnson kept after LeVier to land nose down, but the plane kept porpoising — it would get down into ground effect, the area where the proximity of the ground added to its lift, and begin a forward and aft wiggle, the “porpoise.” After five or six tries, and mounting tempers on both sides, LeVier came in and did it the way he wanted to in the first place — he stalled the plane to get it on the ground.