Book ideas #11: Skunk Works
A chopped-up aircraft, thirsty horses in the desert, and other side effects of pursuing excellence in secrecy
Skunk Works was the informal name of a division at Lockheed that specialized in building cutting-edge aircraft under secrecy. This post is about the eponymous book by Ben Rich, president of Skunk Works between 1975 and 1991. The book covers his era but also that of his predecessor, legendary president Clarence “Kelly” Johnson. Although not explicitly its objective, the book is largely about how to create an innovation-focused organization within an existing large organization. In this sense, it’s similar to classics like Dealers of Lightning (about Xerox PARC) and The Idea Factory (about Bell Labs). In another important respect, however, it’s different. Skunk Works designed and manufactured secret aircraft. Beyond the already heroic task of creating something new, the imperative to maintain secrecy created an extra layer of complexity for the organization. It’s this extra layer I’ll focus on in my post.
I’ll discuss secrecy-related complications in three (somewhat arbitrary) categories: the need to prevent industrial espionage and theft, ways to avoid information leakage, and covering up significant information leakage.
Preventing espionage via the two-man rule
When developing the prototype of the stealth attack aircraft that would later become the F-117A Nighthawk, Skunk Works implemented a two-man rule: at no point could an engineer or shop worker stay alone with the blueprint of the aircraft. The point of the two-man rule was to prevent industrial espionage and theft. This requirement could seem far-fetched, but history is full of examples where such caution would have paid off. For example, a couple of years later, Soviet engineer Adolf Tolkachev passed secrets about Soviet radar systems to the CIA by secretly photographing documents at his workplace and by taking them home during his lunch break. (I wrote about Tolkachev in a previous post.)
Tolkachev couldn’t have done what he did, or at least not that easily, if he had a colleague peering over his shoulders. Having a two-man rule makes the stealing of sensitive information less likely. But it also creates waste and inefficiency. A person monitoring someone else is not doing their own productive work. Just like with any trade-off, there is a sweet spot: the benefit of increased protection against espionage may justify this rule for the most sensitive blueprints, but as we expand the scope of the rule to include less and less important documents, the costs start to outweigh the benefits.
Avoiding information leakage
Information leakage occurs on a spectrum, ranging from no information leakage all the way to successful espionage that reveals the most important details of a secret operation. Of course, the goal is always to maintain complete secrecy. But as the following examples show, keeping the whole operation secret is very difficult, if not outright impossible. What can be done, however, is to arrest the slide toward further leakage once the initial leakage has occurred.
What can’t be seen can’t give you away
Secret operations want to be invisible. Limiting visibility can take the most mundane form, like working in a hangar, preventing overflying enemy assets from spying on you. Other times, this objective is achieved in a more creative way. During the testing of the Sea Shadow stealth ship, Skunk Works wanted to make sure that no boats would accidentally see something they weren’t supposed to see. For that, they needed the Coast Guard’s help. If there is something boats don’t like, it’s inspections. So, Skunk Works had the Coast Guard spread the word that there would be patrols in the area, officially to fight smuggling activity. Not surprisingly, boat traffic dropped to almost zero.
An amusing non-human equivalent of keeping away unauthorized visitors occurred when Skunk Works built a swimming pool for testing purposes close to Death Valley. Wild horses quickly discovered the new water source, interfering with product testing. One of the engineers solved the problem by adding salt to the water, causing the horses to lose interest.
If you can’t hide it, make it innocuous
Aircraft need to be tested, and this frequently requires moving them to a testing site, potentially hundreds of miles away from the production site. Transporting large objects, such as aircraft or aircraft parts, is challenging enough even if secrecy is not a concern. For instance, to transport the Blackbird (another Skunk Works aircraft) to the testing site, it needed to be disassembled into large pieces. They sent out a forward team, who attached two bamboo poles (one horizontal, one vertical) to the transport vehicle, matching the dimensions of the actual shipment. This way, they could identify, ahead of time, obstacles that would need to be dealt with (e.g., sawed off, unbolted, etc.).
An oversized convoy draws attention, increasing the possibility of information leakage. An overzealous citizen or the police could inquire why street signs are sawed off or otherwise damaged. Something more dramatic could happen too, like an incident involving another vehicle. During the journey, a Greyhound, a long-distance intercity bus popular at the time, was scraped. To avoid having to file an accident report and deal with insurance companies, the bus driver was paid $3500 in cash ($37,000 in 2025 dollars) and sent on his way. Further information leakage was avoided. The bus driver was probably under the impression that the oversized convoy just didn’t want to deal with legal and administrative implications, or maybe that the transport company had something to hide. The latter was true, but the hidden activity was most likely outside the realm of what the bus driver had imagined.
The lesson of this story is that if you can’t hide something, make it look ordinary and have a credible cover story. One caveat with this approach, though, is that this only avoids information leakage in the moment, but not necessarily indefinitely. For instance, if it’s made public that a secret aircraft was moved to a testing site, someone might connect the dots and remember their encounter with the oversized convoy.
Keep the leakage under control
In a bid to increase the speed of their aircraft, Skunk Works experimented with liquid hydrogen, a highly flammable and explosive liquid, as a potential fuel. During one of these tests, a wooden element of their setup caught fire. They couldn’t extinguish it themselves, so they needed to call the fire brigade. During the short wait time, to avoid explosion risk, they got rid of the stored liquid hydrogen by letting it evaporate. When the fire brigade arrived, they saw a dense fog inside the building. Naturally, they asked what was in there. Ben Rich’s response was rather short: “National security stuff. Can’t tell you.” The fire brigade put on their gas masks, extinguished the fire in 2 minutes, and left.
In another case, the issue was a nosy postmaster. Whenever Skunk Works needed spare parts for their aircraft, they wouldn’t get them delivered directly to their site. Instead, the parts were first sent to another site, then rerouted to the final location. The local postmaster became curious about these deliveries. He sent one of his inspectors to track down the destination of the packages. The inspector was apprehended by security at Skunk Works and made to sign national secrecy security forms “until he pleaded writer’s cramp.”
In both cases, total secrecy was breached. The firemen and the postal inspector realized that the site hosted secret activities, but further leakage was prevented by 1) not revealing the exact nature of the operation to the firemen and 2) by placing the inspector under a legal obligation to keep the information to himself.
Be creative if there is a big-time leakage
The CIA was flying a U-2 spy plane, another Skunk Works aircraft, against Chinese nuclear facilities. On the way back to his base, the pilot had to crash-land the plane somewhere in a Thai village. A spy plane falling into the hands of unauthorized people was a jarring prospect. The quick-thinking pilot negotiated a deal with the village headman: the villagers would cut up the plane and haul the pieces to a clearing, to be picked up by the CIA the next day. The village headman was paid a handsome compensation in return.
Few things provide more robust evidence of secret activity than a stealth aircraft falling into unauthorized hands. Sometimes, even such a catastrophic outcome can be averted by a quick-thinking pilot and a generous sum of money.