Stealth, like the bomb, then, had owed its genesis to algebraic formulae. In a sense, it was pure accident that it had been discovered within the nuts-and-bolts world of the aerospace industry.
Podkletnov's apparent discovery of gravity shielding in Tampere, Finland, had been an accidental by-product of the Russian's work with superconductors. What they all shared was their origins in pure math and physics. That thought gnawed at me as, working through a decade's worth of my files, I began to reimmerse myself in the world of the F-l 17A Stealth Fighter, Have Blue's operational successor.
Lockheed was used to black programs. It had built the U-2 spy plane that the CIA had used to overfly the Soviet Union on reconnaissance missions in the late 1950s and it had developed the Mach 3.2 A-12 for the CIA as the U-2's successor. Both projects had come together under rules of draconian secrecy, but stealth, from a security standpoint, would need to be protected even more stringently. The problem facing Rich and his customer in the Pentagon, the Air Force Special Projects Office, was how to go about shielding an entire industry. The U-2 and the A-12 had been built in "onesies and twosies," but the F-117A was required in multiple squadron strength. Clearly, there would come a time when the program would need to be revealed, but the longer it could be shielded from public view, the less time the Russians would have to react when it finally emerged into the light.
Rich was one of five Lockheed employees cleared for top secret work and above. Everyone else connected with the program — including several thousand factory floor workers — had to be rigorously securitychecked. And nothing about their lives was off-limits. "Security's dragnet poked and prodded into every nook and cranny of our operation," Rich wrote years later. It almost drove him insane.
As the F-117A began to take shape at Burbank, arrangements were made to accommodate it operationally. A secret base was constructed in the desert at Tonopah, Nevada, and pilots were asked to volunteer without being told anything about the assignment. In New Mexico, at a radar range miles from the nearest public land, the final configuration of the F-l 17A was subjected to more RCS checks to validate its insect-like radar properties. When the aircraft made its first flight, in June 1981, it did so at Area 51, shielded from the remotest scrutiny by the jagged mountains of southern Nevada and a crack air force special forces unit authorized to use "lethal force" to protect Groom Lake from intruders.
As production ramped up under the administration of the hawkish presidential incumbent, Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1980, it rapidly became clear that the Skunk Works was outgrowing its Burbank facilities and so plans were drawn up to relocate the plant eastward, to Palmdale, on the edge of California's Mojave Desert. Palmdale was also home to a giant new production facility operated by Northrop, designer of the B-2, the USAF's four-engine strategic Stealth Bomber. The B-2 was black, but not as black as the F-l 17A. This meant it was acknowledged to exist, even though the rudiments of its design were classified.
It was in this triangle of land, bordered by New Mexico to the south, California to the west and Nevada to the northeast, that people— ordinary people — started seeing things on moonlit desert nights that they could not correlate with the known facts. Speculation grew that a "stealth fighter" program of some description existed — and almost certainly at Lockheed, where security in recent years had tightened considerably— but the detail was invariably way off the mark. And since the money for the F-117A program — to the tune of several billion dollars — had been appropriated from the Pentagon's "black budget," ring-fenced as it was from public scrutiny, that was how things remained until late 1988, when the outgoing Reagan administration revealed just what it had hushed up for so many years.
The F-117A, the bland press release stated, had gone operational in 1983. For five years, its pilots had operated at squadron strength "in the black," roaming the desert night skies of the U.S. Southwest, practicing for the nighttime attack mission they would be required to perform in a war. The disclosure had only been made at all because the air force wanted to expand the training envelope and start flying the F-117A by day. Otherwise it would have remained buried even longer.
During the F-l 17A's five years of secret ops, thousands of workers had been involved in the assembly process at Burbank; hundreds more in supporting the aircraft at Tonopah. And yet, not one had breathed a word about it.
The big story in November 1988, then, related to the existence and capabilities of the Stealth Fighter, a program that rivaled the scale and daring of the Manhattan Project almost 50 years earlier. Like the bomb program, the F-117A had been meticulously covered up, but unlike the bomb program, the secrecy had held. With hindsight, this was understandable. The moment the U.S. government had decided not just to develop the bomb, but to use it on the enemy, its security was compromised. Atom spies sympathetic to the Soviet Union — the liberal, heady atmosphere of Los Alamos cultivated them like seeds in a hothouse — were always going to ensure that details of the weapon would be passed to Moscow; and the traffic merely accelerated when it was dropped on the Japanese.
The logic these people had applied in betraying their country was simple. They didn't want America to have a monopoly on such a devastatingly powerful strand of weapons technology. By passing bomb secrets to the Russians, the atom spies believed they were restoring the balance of power and making the world a safer place. It was a lesson that U.S. security managers would not forget.
Stealth was a passive technology. It did not need to be "dropped" on an unsuspecting enemy, but it had the power to begin and end wars just the same. Because it didn't need to be revealed, it had been easy to cover up, until the moment it suited the U.S. government to make the revelation — to bring it out of the black. Neglected in the process of disclosure, however, was any analysis of the system that had allowed this superhuman feat of engineering and parallel security to materialize; and the black world was a system — a huge, sprawling machine.
Between the bomb and the Stealth Fighter, a massive security structure had swung into place to protect America's ever-proliferating black programs. And in the vastness of the desert, it wasn't hard for individuals — the little cogs of the machine — to develop a sense of their frailty. The desert had been a good place to build the bomb and the perfect place to field stealth. It had swallowed both programs — the weapons and the people who'd constructed them — whole.
If antigravity was real — and by now I believed the white world contained evidence that something was going on — the desert was where it would have come together.
According to Marckus, the black world had known I was coming from the moment I set foot in NASA and had had plenty of time to prepare for my visits. In London, I struggled to make the right connections. I returned to something Marckus had said during our meeting by the estuary; something about the Northrop B-2 Stealth Bomber. There was a strand of thought, even among some quite high-profile academics, that the B-2 used some kind of antigravity drive system. I wasn't inclined to believe the story at face value. But with scant entry points to the black world, it seemed, for the moment, as good a place as any to start. If there were lessons still to be learned from the media's coverage of the F-l 17A in the early 1980s — before the program had been revealed, but when people were reporting things they couldn't explain in the night skies of California, Nevada and New Mexico — the most appropriate was the old one about smoke and fire.