ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 119
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