After a three-day trial, the Soviets determined that Gary Powers, having been caught spying on Russia, exposed the United States for what it really was: “an enemy of the peace.” Powers was sentenced to ten years in prison. President Eisenhower was judged to be a “follower of Hitler,” the lowest insult in the Russian lexicon. Hitler had double-crossed Khrushchev’s predecessor, Joseph Stalin, in 1941, and the result of that double cross was twenty million Russians dead. In comparing Eisenhower to Hitler, Khrushchev was sending a clear message: diplomacy was off the table. The upcoming east-west summit in Paris was canceled. How bad could things get?
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics issued a press release identifying Watertown as the U-2 training facility but stating falsely that it was no longer used as a training base. The Russians knew that statement was meant to mislead the American public and not Russia’s intelligence service, the KGB—and the CIA knew the Soviets had first-person information about Area 51 in the form of Gary Powers, not just photographic images of the facility from the satellites they’d been sending overhead.
With the White House absorbing the fallout from the Gary Powers affair, the CIA and the Air Force were deeply involved in the Mach 3 replacement for the U-2 out at the Ranch. The 8,500-foot-long runway, designated 14/32 and believed to be the longest in the world, had been finished, complete with a two-mile semicircular extension called the Hook, which would allow an A-12 pilot extra room for maneuvering were he to overshoot the runway. Four new aircraft hangars were built, designated 4, 5, 6, and 7. The former U-2 hangars whose metal doors had buckled in the atomic blast were converted into maintenance facilities and machine shops. Navy housing units, 140 in all, were transported to the base and laid out in neat rows. The commissary was expanded, as was the movie house and fire station. Richard Bissell had a tennis court put in, and plans for an Olympic-size swimming pool were drawn. The airspace over the entire region was given its own designation, R-4808N, separate from what had previously been designated Prohibited Area P-275; it included the Nevada Test Site, Area 13, and Area 51. All the CIA was waiting for was Lockheed’s delivery of the A-12 airplanes.
At Lockheed, each Mach 3 aircraft was literally being hand forged, part by part, one airplane at a time. The production of the aircraft, according to Richard Bissell, “spawned its own industrial base. Special tools had to be developed, along with new paints, chemicals, wires, oils, engines, fuel, even special titanium screws. By the time Lockheed finished building the A-12, they themselves had developed and manufactured thirteen million different parts.” It was the titanium that first held everything up. Titanium was the only metal strong enough to handle the kind of heat the Mach 3 aircraft would have to endure: 500-to 600-degree temperatures on the fuselage’s skin and nearly 1,000 degrees in places close to the engines. This meant the titanium alloy had to be pure; nearly 95 percent of what Lockheed initially received had to be rejected. Titanium was also critically sensitive to the chemical chlorine, a fact Lockheed engineers did not realize at first. During the summer, when chlorine levels in the Burbank water system were elevated to fight algae, inside the Skunk Works, airplane pieces started to mysteriously corrode. Eventually, the problem was discovered, and the entire Skunk Works crew had to switch over to distilled water. Next it was discovered that titanium was also sensitive to cadmium, which was what most of Lockheed’s tools were plated with. Hundreds of toolboxes had to be reconfigured, thousands of tools tossed out. The next problem was power related. Wind-tunnel testing in Burbank was draining too much electricity off the local grid. If a reporter found out about the electricity drain, it could lead to unwanted questions. NASA offered Kelly Johnson an alternative wind-tunnel test facility up in Northern California, near the Mojave, which was where Lockheed engineers ended up—performing their tests late at night under cover of darkness. The complicated nature of all things Oxcart pushed the new spy plane further and further behind the schedule.