Once they were both down, Johnson and LeVier continued to argue. “What the hell were you trying to do, kill me?” LeVier said. He gave Johnson the finger. “Well, fuck you.”
“And fuck you, too,” Johnson replied.
The “you, too” attached itself to the airplane. Or so the tale goes.
Within minutes of the landing, a heavy rain began, the first in months, the equivalent of the lake’s total annual rainfall.
That night there was a big beer bash and the arm wrestling that Kelly, proud of the arm strength he had acquired putting up the wall laths during his youth, always fostered. “You did a great job,” he told LeVier, calmed down now. When they arm-wrestled, Johnson took LeVier down right away.
The next morning, LeVier appeared with his arm bandaged, wanting to make the point that Johnson had injured his chief test pilot. But Johnson remembered nothing of the night before.
The project was variously termed “Aquatone” or “Idealist,” but for a long time the plane was just referred to as “the Article,” as in the military phrase “test article.” Soon some of the Skunk Works folks were referring to it as “Kelly’s Angel.”
After a character in Milton Caniff’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates, it was later nicknamed “Dragon Lady.” Terry and the Dragon Lady were erstwhile enemies who had become tenuous friends as the Cold War brought hostility between Taiwan and mainland China. The reference suggested the uneasy relationship between the pilot and the tricky airplane that was the triumph of Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works — the first example of the new kinds of weapons the Cold War demanded.
To take off, the U-2 wore long, drop-off wheels on its wing tips—“pogo sticks,” they were called — and one pilot said they made the aircraft look like a vulture on crutches. That was the right image: The U-2 was delicate and shifty to fly. It would kill several men at the Ranch before it ever went overseas.
With a skin just 2⁄100 of an inch thick, the plane’s aerodynamics left only a tiny window between overspeeding and stalling. Its fuel could shift suddenly and throw it off balance, its engines were prone to flaming out, and its wings were so long they could snap with sudden maneuvers.
After the training operation was moved from the Ranch to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, in June 1957, one eager young pilot decided to fly his plane over his house to show off; he banked, dipped his wings, then stalled and crashed. He died in front of his family.
In early 1956, a pilot suffered a flameout over Tennessee and radioed back. Using a procedure set in place, where sealed envelopes had been left at selected SAC bases for just this eventuality, Bissell had the pilot directed to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. Then Bissell phoned the base commander and told him that in about forty-five minutes a secret plane would be landing at his field and he should immediately cover it and phone for further instructions. A half hour later Bissell got word that all had gone as planned. The U-2 had that much glide range.
What Frank Powers remembered about Watertown, as he knew the airstrip at Dreamland, was the food. There wasn’t much to do — a movie at night, a couple of pool tables, no bar, no club. He looked forward to getting back to Burbank on the weekends and the return from his new identity: from “Francis G. Palmer” back to Francis Gary Powers.
But the food was excellent. It was better food than in Turkey, where Powers was to be stationed — better food, to be sure, than in Lubyanka or Vladimir prisons, where he would be faced with fish soup, endless rations of potatoes, and, once a week, the highlight of the fare, a cube of meat the size of a thumbnail.
After his U-2 was shot down on May 1, 1960, Powers thought back to the food at the Ranch, as he called it, just as he had learned to refer to the CIA as “the company,” or “the government.” Before his release, he would lie on his cot, dreaming almost nightly of banana splits and coconut cream pies, hamburgers and green salads. Once, he argued with his cellmates about whether we dream in color or only in black-and-white. He resolved the argument that night. He had a dream that he clearly remembered was in color — a banquet of food and wine. Before he could taste any of it, he woke up.
Powers came to the Ranch in the spring of 1956, in the second class of pilots to be trained to fly the U-2. The week before, another pilot had bought it in the first U-2 to crash. In September 1956, Howard Carey, a pilot friend of Powers’s from the Ranch, was killed in Europe after a couple of curious Canadian interceptors zoomed by his U-2 for a closer look. The wake of the fighters tore the spy plane apart.
Powers had been excited about the boldness and daring of the U-2 scheme from the moment he had heard of it. Like many, he felt that the United States had stalled the Cold War after “the stalemate and compromise in Korea.” He already had a top-secret clearance: At Sandia Air Base in New Mexico, in 1953, he had gone through training for delivering nuclear weapons.
At the Ranch, he noted the miles of uninhabited land surrounding the little strip; in the airplane, which needed only a thousand feet of runway to soar into the sky, he enjoyed a feeling that he called a special aloneness.
The Skunk Works would cite the numbers forever after: It had taken just eighty-eight days to produce a prototype, eight months to fly the first plane, and now eighteen months to provide an operational spy craft. Overflights of the Soviet Union began in July 1956. The first go-ahead was for just ten days of flying. Eisenhower was leery, despite the promise of Bissell and others that Soviet missiles would never reach the U-2.
Soon it was clear that the whole thing had paid off. The pilots looked for bombers and missiles, tracked nuclear tests with filter paper that recorded the products of the explosions, even flew through clouds of fallout. They monitored and recorded radar and telemetry frequencies, and they actually learned a lot about the weather over the Soviet Union, their cover story.
When the first photos came back, Eisenhower and Dulles spread them on the floor of the Oval Office and looked at them with glee. The airplane discovered untold intelligence riches. In July 1955, the Soviets had shown off a mass of new bombers at their annual Aviation Day parade, and the bomber gap was born. Now, one U-2 pilot had found a base with thirty Bison bombers on the tarmac — was this evidence of a major buildup? Additional flights showed that this was the only base where the Bison bombers were stationed; it was the entire fleet. The bomber gap closed. Eisenhower was able to keep Curt LeMay’s demands for more B-52s and the B-70 in check. Richard Bissell’s friend the columnist Joe Alsop would later leak word of the operation to the public.
Another flight revealed the space facility at Tyuratum, the Cape Canaveral of Russia. A third flight located a tower that looked like a nuclear test facility. The CIA scoffed, but two days later an explosion was recorded at the previously unknown facility. Additionally, the U-2 found evidence of new radar facilities that made it — and successor airplanes — even more vulnerable to detection.
The U-2’s most secret flights, however, were not over Soviet airspace. They were the ones that spied on the English and French and Israelis, beginning with the Suez Crisis in 1956. From them, Eisenhower learned that the French and the Israelis had lied to him — that they had many more Mirage fighters than they had acknowledged. And after the fighting began, one U-2 did two passes over Cairo West airport in a couple of hours, capturing the before and after images of a bombing attack.