INTERVIEW WITH JAMES A. CUNNINGHAM JR.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90B00170R000200240001-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 44
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 29, 2008
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: October 4, 1983
• Content Type: REPORT

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Interview With
JAMES A. CUNNINGHAM, Jr.
4 October 1983
531A
DEW: Concerning the U-2 engines, the history is rather
unclear, there were two engines, the plane was designed for the
J-57/P-31 engine, but you couldn't get it right off. You had
to go with the J-57/P-37. It's unclear when you changed from
P-37 to P-31.
JAC: As soon as we could get our hands on them, and that
was some time in 1956, early on.
DEW: Did Detachment A have the proper engines?
JAC: They had the proper engines. That was May, June, July
of 1956. Now, we didn't have very many of them. In fact, we
had to rob ourselves in order to get enough to send them over
to A.
DEW: Now, A had four aircraft to start with? And they all
had the proper engines?
JAC: Yes.
DEW:
gines?
What was the penalty in altitude between the two en-
JAC: I can't give you an exact figure on that. It was
something on the order of 1,500 feet. I have in my bag in the
other room the thrust characteristics of it.
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DEW: Well, I have those. I have the difference in thrust
that the P-37 was 129 kg heavier and it lacked 1,127 kg in
thrust. In other words, the power-to-weight ratio was 3.4:1
for the P-31 and 2.7:1 for the P-37. So it's a significant
difference. Now, the other thing that came up, and it's only
mentioned when we get to the J-75 engine was that it was better
because it had less problems with contrails. Now, did you have
problems with contrails with the earlier engines?
JAC: We had problems with contrails practically all the way
through the program. What you did was to make sure that you
didn't penetrate the other guy's country until you were at your
penetration altitude which was 69,500 feet, by which time you
were out of the contrail area. In ascending, particularly in
the tropics, it didn't matter whose engine you had you'd get
contrails up to the point, depending on the day, it could be as
high as 60,000 feet.
DEW: There was still that much moisture in the air that it
caused condensation? Well, that answers that question. Now,
the first aircraft to go out -- what I did, was go through here
and get all the various types of systems, but it's unclear, who
had what systems. Now, I found systems number with Roman
numerals I through XXII. And I discovered that the earlier
systems were all built by Ramo-Wooldridge. From and operations
point of view, was there a great deal of pressure on you to do
these things, use these BUNT systems? As opposed to pictures?
JAC: Well, of course, there was always a battle between
people who wanted the pictures and the people who wanted the
sounds. We even got to a point in Adana where we would run
these "exciter" missions, you know, going around -- well, we
did just before Powers, for example -- around the periphery of
the Caspian Sea to try to excite some intercept information,
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telemetry wise. Particularly if anybody was going to fire a
rocket at you. But, these were not terribly successful. I
think I'd have to say in all honesty that ELINT was always se-
cond to photography. If you got something on your recorders,
then everybody was happy. And, of course, once we started fo-
cusing on the missile aspect, which I would say, by recollec-
tion, was somewhere in 1958, then we did run more ELINT-only
flights than we had at any point up to that stage. That was a
world of experimentation, fuss and fidget with the damned sys-
tems, try to optimize, and a lot of time we got things that
nobody knew what they were when we got them back. They'd say,
Jeez, what the hell is that?
DEW: As I get into it from the other vantage point, it be-
comes very obvious that the really important data for missiles
was not pictures but ELINT. But I could see that early on in
the program there was a definite bent toward photographs be-
cause it could be seen. The other was sort of a black art.
JAC: And, of course, by 1958, the Air Force had its own
stations along the northern coast of Turkey, at Sinop and
DEW: Did they fly U-2s out of there, also?
JAC: No, they didn't. They were stationary ground sites.
And, as a result, they couldn't get the initial stages of the
telemetry as the missile would lift off the pad, because of the
curvature of the earth. So they were always looking for that
first 90 seconds, that's what they wanted. Usually they could
not tune in until it had been 90 seconds into the flight, so
there was a certain pressure to try and get that, but in those
early airplanes you had just so much weight capacity. And, you
know, the damned' B camera weighed about 465 pounds, or some-
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thing, and you had a 500-pound capacity, you couldn't carry an
awful lot in there.
DEW: Was the B camera that much heavier than the A camera?
JAC: Yes, quite a bit.
DEW: Now the A-1 was not used much at all.
JAC: No.
DEW: What was the difference between the A-1 and the A-2?
JAC: Without my charts I couldn't really tell you.
DEW: But there was a difference between them?
JAC: Very small. We even had a C camera, which never real-
ly got off the ground.
DEW: They said they used it once -- a 144-inch monster.
JAC: Yes, folded optics and all kinds of things. It was
supposed to be able to count the hairs on Khrushchev's chin,
that sort of thing. But, my God, you had no sweep at all, if
you happened to miss the target by 20 feet you were out of
luck; it was focused that narrowly.
DEW: Well, the OSA history said it was used once and aban-
doned. Obviously, it wasn't used operationally.
JAC: No, that program was collapsed. I was always kind of
sorry that it didn't get a chance to run, because I thought
they really would have had some high-resolution stuff out of
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it. And I can't recall at the moment what the resolution was,
but it was infinitely better than the B camera. But you could-
n't, you know, the B camera went from horizon to horizon, and
the C camera was like driving down the white line on the high-
way. If your target was off the white line you were out of
luck.
DEW: This was obviously another difficult aspect of the
U-2, flying that high and trying to navigate that accurately.
JAC: Yes, exactly. It was something that was corrected in
the OXCART program, of course, with the inertial navigation
systems.
DEW: In other words, there was something that took control
away from the pilot, that was guided by a computer -- that's
not really clear in the history, either, that there was that
sort of navigation available.
JAC: At that point, we had learned from the Powers' inci-
dent. We had originally developed a map which was the map the
pilot followed. It was on two reels, a strip map. And his
whole mission would be plotted on that. But as he flew the
mission the part that disappeared off the screen in front of
him would go into a tank of water, in the cockpit area, and
dissolve. So that by the end of the mission all you would have
is a gummy mess in the cockpit which was the route map, so that
if he failed to make it you wouldn't know where he had been.
You might know where he was going to go, but you wouldn't know
where he had been. And it was quite an effort that was put out
to develop this soluable paper. I guess we must have spent a
year or more on that thing, and finally got it to a point where
it worked.
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DEW: How far along in the program was that?
JAC: Oh, this was before we went operational.
DEW: Just to jump ahead a bit, I have no documentation on
the U-2R, how different was it?
JAG: Let me get my charts. Here are the specs.
DEW: Used the same engine, maximum altitude
It went above that, didn't it?
DEW: Where could they put almost 3,000 gallons of fuel? Of
course this had external tanks, didn't it?
JAG: Well, of course, we had 900 and some odd gallons re-
serve. We had a total of 925 gallons in the mains, and 95 gal-
lons in the sump. The auxiliary tanks had 300 gallons, and if
you carried the slipper tanks, you got an extra 100 gallons
each. The B camera weighed 447 pounds, not 465.
DEW: When they did the Delta camera -- transferred it from
the CORONA program -- it wasn't used all that much. Was it
heavy?
JAG: I can't remember, because that's about the time I
signed off on the program.
DEW: Where did you go then?
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JAC: I went into the Far East. You see, anything after
1966 is after me. I was away.
DEW: Who took over from you?
JAC: John Parangosky. I pulled a fadeout and went over to
Southeast Asia and spent five and half years out there.
DEW: Were you aware of the other programs that were going
on, such as GENETRIX.
JAC:
461-L.
Yes, in general terms, not down to the nitty-gritty --
DEW: What about BLACK KNIGHT, was it the Canberra they used?
JAC: That the was D-model Canberra. They had taken the
Canberra and stretched the wings on it, made them bigger, and
then they went into the F-model, finally, which was supposed to
be the real challenger to the U-2. But the F-model never real-
ly made the grade either, because the Air Force was so desper-
ate to get all the missions they could away from the Agency,
they made a lot of fabulous claims for the engine on the F-mod-
el. They said they could sustain cruise indefinitely at 73,000
feet, and this kind of stuff, and I sat in on briefings when
they were making these claims, and then I talked to the guys at
Pratt & Whitney would were making the engine, and they said, no
way, this thing hiccups and dies at 69,500, which we used as
the penetration altitude.
DEW: Were they using the J-75 also?
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JAC: They had a different engine, a specially tailored en-
gine for the Canberra.
DEW: Your aircraft had to go in at 69,500.
JAC: That was the optimum penetration altitude. Now we did
fly a few missions
much lower than that for range. When
we
were going from
you
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couldn't really
get there if you were at maximum altitude.
So
you compromised and went at almost a "fairy" altitude at 67,500
all the way. And we had to plot the thing very carefully, bas-
ed on the known air order-of-battle. And, of course,
going
north from
there wasn't
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any air-defense capability to speak of.
and MiG-17s in that region, but, hell,
400 miles apart.
They had a few MiG-15s
the bases were 300 to
DEW: That was a long mission, I wondered how they ever got
there. Later on, in 1965-66, they mention that one of the U-2s
was fired on by a MiG-21. Now, how close did they come.
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JAC: On occasions, MiG-21s had been seen by the pilots arc-
ing up and over, so they could reach mission altitude on a zoom
climb, or what they call a dynamic-climb basis. They'd go to
about 45,000 and then go as fast as they possibly could and do
a snap-up. As they got up higher, they began to lose control
of the airplane, it was like a missile. Then he was through,
he'd arc on over, and that would be the end of it. That was
kind of exciting for the pilots.
There was one occasion, that I can remember, where an
air-to-air missile firing was made in China, but the missile
couldn't do anything either, because it was probably a copy of
the Sidewinder and didn't have enough dynamic stability to do
anything but wobble and lose control. But there was no real
threat from that. Although we did have System-IXB, as I remem-
ber, which was the tail-borne jammer, made by Granger Associ-
ates, which was designed to defeat heat-seekers. Of course,
Kelly put this scoop on the back end of the exhaust cone, which
he called a sugar scoop. This made the plume go up like so,
and it couldn't be gotten at from below quite as easily. This
was later abandoned, it is not now on the R-models.
fairly dicey.
It was
DEW: I take it that the R-model included all .the improve-
ments made to the C-model over the years.
JAC: What it really did was to -- you see there was a very
narrow envelope of stability at high altitude. It was about 4
to 6 knots, as I remember. The critical Mach number was right
here and then on either side of it was 3 knots. And if you ex-
ceeded that, if you went to the slow side, you then got a low-
speed buffet, and if you exceeded it on the high side you got a
high-speed buffet. In either event you were in danger of los-
ing control of the airplane. If you went 10 knots on either
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side you were apt to be in big trouble, because it would start
falling out of the sky. So when the R was built, one of the
first things Kelly did was change the distribution of weight in
the airplane, because it was much longer. They had two Q bays
on the R -- two pressurized equipment bays, one for the ELINT
equipment and one for the cameras. By keeping the same aspect
ratios and everything else, but by extending the airplane you
got a very comfortable margin of safety on either side of the
critical Mach number. I can't remember right now what it is,
but I would suspect it is 15 or 20 knots that you have to play
with. The pilots think its great, it's like driving a car.
And there is less danger of losing control, by a wide margin.
DEW: But at that, you didn't have so many crashes, did you?
JAC: Oh yes, we -- the Air Force and ourselves -- wiped out
over 30 airplanes.
DEW: In the high-altitude aspect of flying them?
JAC: No, they were all kinds of dumb things. One guy down
at Del Rio was showing off for his wife after he finished a
flight, and he flew over the house, 500 feet off the deck or
something like that, did a pull up and exceeded the limits of
the airplane and the wings came off -- so much for him, you
know. We had others where there must have been oxygen equip-
ment failure and the airplane kept flying and suddenly went
that way and crashed. The Air Force had a lot of crashes, be-
cause they had a little
had our share, too. One of our better pilots,
the two missions over the
different selection process. But we
who flew one of
Right
after he got back, he was making an ordinary approach at Ed-
wards AFB and turned on final [approach] and just went right
into the ground. Never could figure that out.
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JAC:
DEW:
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He had flown more missions than anybody.
531A
JAC: Whether he got too comfortable in the airplane, I
don't know, but there wasn't any radio transmission or any in-
dication of trouble. But it was an airplane you had to be very
respectful of at all times, because if you weren't, you'd be up
the creek. You sawe the movie, haven't you.
DEW: Yes, I did. Now, the BLACK KNIGHT thing, when they
got ready to put Detachment C out -- Detachment C had to leave,
right, because the Air Force wanted to get in and train its pi-
lots?
JAC: Yes.
DEW: Then you had to find a place to put them and you tried
to get into Yokota. They wouldn't let you there because BLACK
KNIGHT was there and you had to go to Atsugi. Later on, after
Powers' crash, they also talked about making two flights, one
with a U-2 and
that?
JAC: We never did.
over Sary Shagan. Were you in on
DEW: No, you didn't do it, they wouldn't let you. And then
there was more talk about using the RB-57 around the Black Sea
area.
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JAC: ? The whole subject of manned reconnaissance after May
1960 was very unpopular for quite awhile.
DEW: There's an interesting thing in McCone's history where
he told McNamara that he had every intention of flying the OX-
CART over the Soviet Union. Later, he had to admit that they
couldn't do it.
JAC: There was a great amount of misinformation at high
levels. I remember going to a meeting one day with McNamara
and McCone and General Carter, and the whole joint staff in the
room. And McNamara said, "John, what's this I hear that you've
got two planes in Iran?" McCone did a double-take and turned
to us guys and said: "What the hell's he talking about? We
don't have any planes in Iran!" And McNamara said: "Oh yes
you have, right here on this piece of paper." McNamara was
nothing if not voluble. He passed the paper over, and it said
"Two aircraft are I.R.A.N." That means "Inspection and Repair
As Necessary." And McCone laughed and said "Aw, Bob!" Here
was the Secretary of Defense and didn't even know what the ac-
ronym was for.
DEW: Were you often in McNamara's presence, did he get into
this much?
JAC: I didn't spend that much time, except during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, and I was not that impressed.
DEW: What about McCone?
JAC: I personally didn't like McCone, I thought he was giv-
en to Divine Intervention, thought some things were true be-
cause he thought they should be. He was very resistive to cer-
tain subjects. One of his pet ones was the supersonic trans-
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port. There wasn't anybody in the world who knew anything
about the supersonic transport except John AcCone. But, unfor-
tunately, he became one the Presidential counsellors on the
subject, you see. He didn't think the U.S. should build a su-
personic transport and voted against it. I must agree that he
was partially right, when he said that if the fuel price ever
went up the supersonic transport would not be economic. But
there wasn't anybody that thought there'd be a fuel crisis, so
I guess you have to give him a plus for that statement. And
that's exactly what happened. I don't know, he did the work;
Walt Elder thought he was great, because he worked with him ev-
ery day. The security2picer who was with him for the whole
time he was here wasn'(Wteen on him. Mr. McCone made one fatal
A
mistake in terms of the Agency's role in reconnaissance, he
willingly turned over the funding of all Agency reconnaissance
programs to the NRO. Up to then -- you know, it's the old
story, he who controls the purse strings controls the way the
program goes. I can remember going up with Larry Houston and a
couple of other people to McCone's office -- the one he had
down in Central Building -- the day he made that decision and I
practically wept outside. I walked around with Houston and
said: "Jesus Christ, Larry, there goes the ballgame. He's
turning the whole funding thing over to the NRO, and we're only
going to get what they want to give us."
DEW: Do you remember what year that was?
JAC: Oh, goodness, I know it was in the springtime, like in
tiarch, but the year, I would say, was 1963, whenever it was
that the Agency lost its right to fund its programs. From then
on, we had to go down on bended knee to the Air Force control-
ler for every nickel we got, just to maintain the programs we
had, never mind starting anything new. There was this fairly
tedious review procedure that got screwed together, where you
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had to go to whoever was occupying the undersecretary of the
Air Force's chair and brief the hell out of him and try to con-
vince him that what you were doing was right. It even came
down to having to go to the secretary level in the Air Force to
get approval for major engineering changes on a program that
you'd been running. Like when we wanted to increase the number
of engines that were put into the A-12 program. We had to get
the Air Force to concur. Of course, they did so, grudgingly.
Jack Ledford made a masterful presentation on that to Brockway
McMillan, and they finally, grudgingly, let us do it.
As recently as two years ago, I heard people in the Air
Force say that the SR-71 program is in tough shape today on en-
gines because the CIA didn't order enough of them.
DEW: Is this a follow-on to the J-58 engine?
JAC: This is the J-58 engine. They took the engines out of
the A-12s and put them into the pipeline for the SR-71, but
they're saying, in effect, if it hadn't been for the stupid
bastards in the Agency we'd have had enough engines to support
the SR-71, because the engine went out of production.
DEW: Well, what was in the SR-71 to start with?
JAC: They had J-58s. But you see, they ordered for their
fleet and we ordered for our fleet. We ordered this slightly
larger engine -- bigger thrust -- than the Air Force did. The
Air Force never followed our lead on anything. They had -- it
was NIH [not invented here] all the way. We didn't invent it,
so, what they ended up with was insufficient engines to support
their own program, because they were doing it on the cheap.
Instead of facing up to who made the decision, they said, well,
it's CIA's fault for not having bought enough engines for their
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program. And yet, they accused us at the time of having bought
too many.
DEW: What was the difference between the SR-71 and the A-
12 in speed and altitude?
JAC: You couldn't get an honest figure out of anybody on
that, even today, I don't think. Maybe Kelly would give it to
you. Theirs was a heavier airplane, by about 10,000 pounds.
So you don't drag 10,000 pounds around at altitude without pay-
ing a penalty. These figures are recollection figures only,
but, as I remember, the Air Force felt very comfortable at
83,000 feet, whereas we were able to maneuver along at 89,000
to 93,000 feet. And the Air Force never really got above
83,000 feet; they don't today. The speed is roughly the same.
We were Mach 3.15 and they were 3.12, as I recall, because they
had the same engine. Once you get the thing moving it will
step right out.
DEW: You have another body in there, but surely that does-
n't account for 10,000 pounds?
JAC: No, it's not all body. You see, on the matter of tail
fins, for example, the tail fins we used were of composite ma-
terial. Theirs were good old titanium. They never did go over
to ours, even though, from the standpoint of radar reflection,
ours were much superior. There was a stainless spike on which
this whole fin pivoted, but that was the only stainless that
was involved in the after end. But the Air Force added up the
score and they didn't think it was profitable to go to the com-
posite tails. And they paid a weight penalty for that. And
there was weight all over the place on that machine. At one
point they even wanted to tanker fuel for themselves. They
wanted to put in, at the base of the wings where they join the
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fuselage, two tanks, one on each side, that would have increas-
ed their fuel capacity by 10,000 pounds, but shucks, the penal-
ty they would have paid for that made it totally infeasible,
even they could see that. But Kelly's told me right out, as
recently as last year, that the A-12 was a much superior air-
plane than the SR-71 in all departments -- defensive systems,
the works.
DEW: You helped write the piece in the Studies in Intelli-
gence, didn't you?
JAC: No.
DEW: Who did?
JAC: John Parangosky and a chap named Ed Duckett. You see,
I was in Southeast Asia at the time.
DEW: Well, they don't mention the camera in that plane.
Who designed the camera?
JAC: In the OXCART? Perkin-Elmer. And then a backup cam-
era by Eastman Kodak.
DEW: Was that a derivative of any of the other cameras?
JAC: No, this was again taking advantage of what they knew
and what they'd learned from the whole business of camera mak-
ing. Eastman's was not a success, the Perkin-Elmer was, that
was a good camera, I'm told. As, I say....
DEW: You weren't around for the deployment of the OXCART,
were you?
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JAC: No, I wasn't, I was over there and of course I knew
about it. I had helped to put the base together at Okinawa in
my last year, and established the communications, and every-
thing. We had real-time communications right from this floor.
You picked up -- down in the war room that we had at the other
end of the hall -- you picked up the phone, you didn't have to
ring, or anything, the minute you picked it up the light went
on over in Okinawa and a guy picked up the phone and gave you
his name. And that was a land line all the way, to keep it out
of the radio-telephone business. Just the rent on that was
$40,000 per month. So, it was an expensive airplane.
JAC:
DEW:
JAC:
DEW:
JAC:
DEW:
JAC:
you
old
And,
look
runway,
of
when
the
the
Not after the U-2 program.
It wasn't the same site, either, was it?
It was superimposed right on the old one. Well,
at it from the air, you can see the old base and
which was much shorter -- 5,200 feet, as I recall.
course, we had this monstrous runway that went all
way from hell to breakfast for the OXCART -- a total of 19,000
feet of usable surface. That was not all concrete, but we laid
the thing without any expansion joints in it, which was kind of
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DEW: Which way was the testing area from you?
JAC: Southwest. And, of course, the evacuation was to the
northeast.
DEW: Is there anything else you can remember.
JAC: The J-57 engine was also on the SAC B-52. The first
engines we got were out of the hide of SAC's B-52 program, and
LeMay was screaming madly about that. To my knowledge there
was no World War II training field at , there was no 25X1
airfield at all. Just the lake. There was,- consideration
given,,.. to putting the project at Indian Springs, a satel-
lite base of Nellis AFB and had been there throughout World War
II. But that was rejected because it was too close to the
highway.
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it was, and get the approval. Now, Wheelon was very sym-
pathetic to these things for ELM and countermeasures of all
kinds. I can't really remember on that whether it came out of
our own ELINT shop or whether it was a combination of those
guys working with industry. I think it was probably both.
DEW: I mean, it wasn't NRO or Air Force, was it?
JAC: No.
DEW: But they took it over?
JAC: Yes.
DEW: There was a lot of spinoff from this particular aspect
of the program in the early '60s that was directly applicable
to Vietnam, right?
JAC: The little System-XII thing was all over the place in
the Air Force, because at that point, let's see, about the time
they adopted it was when we were blessed with Admiral Rabor4.
Fortunately, Raborn's big role in life was to make the Shrike
work. He adopted that project, much to the horror of everybody
who had anything to do with the Shrike -- a Vild Wealsel
airplane. He kept off in that corner, fiddling with Shrike,
and nobody wanted Raborn in our back pocket, you know. We kept
him out. That's a horrible thing to have to say about the
Director, but he was something else.
DEW: I know. I was talking to and had asked him who 25X1
he thought the best director was that he had worked under. He
made a similar remark to yours. He says: "It has to be Mc-
Cone, but I didn't like him." That included up through Helms.
As a manager, I suppose.
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JAC: Well, that's what he did well. Like I say, he didn't
win any popularity contests. Of course, the one that everybody
loved was AWD, but we couldn't have him forever.
JAC: Now, as I go backward in time and come forward in
reading your document, as well as the OSA history, I'm astound-
ed that we ever got anything done. Because there were so many
special group restraints, so many foot-dragging maneuvers, ini-
tiated by State or, in some cases, certain elements in the
White House, and in other cases the NRO dragging its feet.
It's a wonder we ever got anything flown.
You know, I can remember, for example, when Bobby Kennedy
went over to Jakarta to meet with Sukarno. We were right in
the middle of trying to cover Indochina and parts of the penin-
sula. We were told at that point that we had to standdown be-
cause nobody wanted anything to go wrong while Bobby Kennedy
was in Indonesia. So the whole U-2 show ground to a halt.
DEW: This was in 1961?
JAC: Well, it was after Kennedy was elected. We were fly-
ing the Indochina area. What the hell, we weren't going to
drop one in on the palace in Jakarta. But they said: No, no,
the reason was that Kennedy was going to raise with Sukarno the
question of this guy named Pope who had fallen into Indonesian
hands on a crazy raid.
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DEW: Well, I think he was probably connected with the up-
rising back in '58.
We got all of these guys, McGeoge Bundy was another one.
He used to go down in the Situation Room and draw lines all
over the map down there and say, "Well, we've got a critical
period coming, elections coming up." We called that the "silly
season." Because elections are coming, nobody will fly closer
than 25 miles to, the Chinese border. Then, the closer you'd
get to the election or the primaries, or what have you, or con-
vention, he'd say "Now it will be 50 miles." Nobody gets any
closer than 50 miles. Well, it always happened that COMOR
would come up and say the targets we have to cover are right
there at the border. But we'd get turned down by McGeorge Bun-
dy. There was a lot of teeth-sucking going on all the time in
some of these -- "Hsss, Oh Jesus, what would happen if...?"
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DEW:
Were we involved in the testing of it.
JAC: Yes, out West, from Edwards AFB. We tested a lot of
strange things from Edwards, like the U.S. Mule. That was a
gadget and a half. It filled the Q-bay with four packages,
into which were placed four separate canisters, for want of a
better name, with parachutes. Each of these would carry leaf-
lets and, depending on the thinness of the paper, you could get
several million leaflets in the Q-bay. Then, you took it up-
stairs and got to the point where you either wanted to drop
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them all -- one, two, three, four in train -- or you dropped
them salvo, or you dropped one now and one later, and so
forth. As they would descend they had a little explosive squib
on them which would trigger the package to burst open. Coming
down on the parachute, it would get to 16,000 feet, as I remem-
ber.it, and would go poof and the whole thing would disperse.
[Tape Changed] This thing cost -- actually I just saw the
cost figures on it not too long ago -- $600,000 was what we
paid Lockheed to come up with this thing -- ONE. We had to go
test it, of course. We took it out in the desert from Ed-
wards. Of course, the first couple of times the squibs didn't
operate, the packages augered right into the ground. In fact,
we damned near hit some guy in a car going up the road. They
were heavy. You had close to SOO pounds of paper in it. But,
we finally got it to work.
And this was like, 1960. As a matter of fact, it came into
operational readiness about the same time that we were getting
ourselves wrapped around the axle in Cuba. I remember going to
a skull session down in L Building one day with all the people
who were then concerned about Cuba: Tracy Barnes, Dick Bis-
sell, and a Marine Corps colonel, I think his name was Hawk-
ins. The idea was: What could be do to make life miserable
for Castro, on a large scale? So I said to Dick: "Why don't
we use the U.S. Mule?" Oh, he hadn't thought of that. And I
said: "Why don't we go ahead and print up a bunch of bogus
pesos, Cuban pesos and drop them over Havana?" Of course, Bis-
sell was an economist, basically, and he sat there for a min-
ute, and finally said: "Pesos, Oh God, no, can't do that.
Don't want to debase their currency that way." He refused to
even consider itpYou know, it was sort of like Operation Cice-
ro all over again. He refused to let it be used in that
fashion.
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But, anyway it was a lot harder than you would think to do
this, because you had to be able to project the winds aloft in
order to be able to hit the target. And that meant generating
what was called a ballistic wind forecast, where your Air Wea-
ther Service guys, SAC global weather, would have to be able to
predict which directions the winds were going at all these al-
titudes up to 70,000 feet. And then average them out to see,
if you dropped a package at A, would it land here or here. It
would never go straight down because of conflicting winds. Not
only going this way, but that way, too. It became a real
nightmare for the weather guys to try to predict this, that was
why we almost hit that car out west.
at
the
So, the thing was never deployed usefully. It sat around
in a warehouse. When the Air Force took over 25X1
program in 1974, they suddenly found the thing and decided
they weren't going to have any use for it. So, in 1976, they
destroyed it.
Here recently, John McMahon remembered that we had this
thing and John was thinking about maybe using it in Nicaragua.
So, he got one of his lieutenants to call down here. It's an
emergency, you know. Cunningham, where in the hell did they
hide the U.S. Mule? So I went tracing it through the Lockheed
enterprise and found that the last known location was the
Then I was told it had been destroyed
1976. At that point Lockheed
in
said: "But we'll build you an-
other one." How much? I asked. Well, slightly more than it
was then, it would run into several million dollars. ?So, esca-
lation took over and the idea was dropped. I thought it was
kind of cute, myself, plastering the whole of Cuba with bogus
pesos and send everybody into the overhead, because we could
have gotten something on the order of 2 million peso notes in
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the Q bay. The winds would have taken them all over the sky.
Well, this is the vignette department.
DEW: You mention the escalating costs, how much did the
U-2R cost as contrasted with the U-2C, a ballpark figure. You
said the U-2C cost about $660,000 each.
JAC: Yes, $650,000. I'd be guessing now, but as I remember
the nine airplanes were about, at the time the order was plac-
ed, 1967 dollars, around $8 million each. Now, today, the one
that NASA flies, the ER-2, they got at a rock-bottom figure of
$13 million for that. And for the TR-1, the Air Force is pay-
ing, on average, something like $20 million or more per air-
plane. Now that's the U-2R with a slightly different configur-
ation, horizontal surfaces and stuff. Same airplane, same
A-.1EP6
tools. The tools we used to build the R were put in stor-
agea
by Lockheed, they just dragged them out. They made a big-
ger wing, it's 103 feet, as I remember...
DEW: It's 103 feet on the R model.
JAG: Well, its the same wing. Same engine, J-75/P-13B. In
fact, the engines come through -- in fact, the J-75 engine is
no longer operational in the Air Force. The last airplane to
carry it around was the F-105, and they've been taken out of
the inventory over the years now. It was called the Thunder-
sled. There are 650 engines existing in Air Force inventory,
stripped out of these F-105s. That's all there are, there are
no more. Now what they do to prepare one of these for the
TR-1, is they take it back to Pratt & Whitney and rebuild it --
make all the changes in it to bring it to the P-13B mode.
Those overhauls are running about $850,000 each on the en-
gines. The engine having been bought and paid for in the first
place. So, that is not an inexpensive airplane, the TR-1.
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DEW: That must have been a good engine.
JAC: Yes, nothing wrong with it at all. I guess in some
ways PW wishes they had another airplane to use it in. But I
must admit that the general public is not fully aware that this
expensive piece of machinery known as the TR-1 is flying around
with an engine in it that goes as far back as that one does.
DEW: Twenty years or more.
JAC: Twentyfive. Because people think: New airplane, new
engine. They don't think these 747s are flying around with a
25-year-old engine. But I know this, because I went after a
J-75 engine to put in the U-2 that's at the Smithsonian, only
to find that I couldn't get one, and the Air Force had robbed
the one out of the airplane that we got to go to the Smithson-
ian. They said: We have to have that, that'll be our 650th en-
gine to support the TR-1 program. So I? began to scratch my
head, and I remembered that they had a brassboard engine up at
Pratt & Whitney, which they used for bench testing, a proto-
type. It was not a flight-rated engine, but at the same time
it was a J-75/P-13. I must admit there were a couple of prob-
lems with it once we got it down here. Pratt & Whitney donated
it. And Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney paid to have it brought
down to Washington. Wait a minute, they didn't have to pay, I
cv(Z
got Jim McDonald JA, ADDA, who used to be our contracting offi-
cer for the U-2 and the SR-71, and he had an Agency truck go
and get it. The Air Force had to pay to bring the airplane in
from the West Coast. When we got it down here we found that,
because it was a brassboard engine, the engineers had just put
things where they thought they might be or should be: Oh well,
let's stick the ignition pack over here, except that in the
production engine it would be over there, wrong side of the en-
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gine, and so forth. So the people out at Smithsonian, who hap-
pened to be real damned good mechanics, had all the drawings on
the way it should be, so they had to redo the engine before
they could stick it in the airplane. They are sticklers for
authenticity, and there were a couple of hooks on it -- you
know, built right into the support flange that they had to
remove because otherwise it wouldn't go in the tail cone. One
guy installed the engine out there in Silver Hill, using these
special carts they have. I told Kelly afterwards, I said:
"Kelly, now I know you were screwing us, because there were
never less than eight guys required from Lockheed to change an
engine." Like a PolAck changing a lightbulb, and this guy out
there did it all by himself, one man!
DEW: That airplane out there, what missions had it made?
JAC:
347.
As
Colonel
That flew the first mission
a matter of fact, it was
-- in fact, he was
over Russia, pr,sicle No.
in the Hanoi Hilton
for
about six years. He's retired and living in Texas. I took
out, and laid out with my shirt this morning, the list of all
the airplane numbers to bring into you. But I didn't bring it
with me.
DEW: You would probably like to read some of these other
chapters that take place early in the program.
JAC: Yes, I would. Well, of course, in many ways, one of
the problems is that people say, gee whiz, you spent 12 years
in the U-2 program. We never had a central headquarters during
most of that time. Bissell was down in L Building, we were up
on K street. We didn't get together as we should have. So it
would be like some guy saying: You were at Pearl Harbor, now
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what were you doing? Well, I was down in the engine room and I
didn't see a thing, I just heard the bombs go off.
DEW: I got that impression, too. In late 1960, when Bis-
sell started getting involved in the Bay of Pigs, was there a
slacking off of his interest in his three big programs?
JAC: No, there really wasn't. He was a very hard-driving
man. He would still go to suppliers meetings -- of course,
Tracy Barnes carried a lot of the load on the day-to-day stuff,
and, of course, we were playing all of these keyboards: the
CORONA over here, and the OX here, and U-2, here, IDEALIST.
And we were also having to do all the planning and staffing for
the Bay of Pigs. In other words, going out and commandeering
at the 13-26 planes, arranging all the logistics for that, hav-
ing them shipped up to Hill AFB, modified, brought up to
speed. Going down to Guatemala and Nicaragua, not only pick
out Where to put the airfields, but then our staff had to su-
perintend the building of the airfields, in both places, the
coffee plantation.
DEW: In other words, you're talking about DPD and so, in
addition to all these other things, that is, in addition to
three multimillion dollar programs -- in fact, one was a bil-
lion dollar program, or was it two billion, it might not have
been all our money, still OXCART cost $2 billion before it was
over and done with -- you were doing all these other things,
too? How big was the staff?
JAC: I don't know, a hundred, and that included the secre-
taries. Well, in fact, when we got out here to this building,
we just had part of this floor on this side. The colonel's of-
fice used to be in the corner and mine was next to his -- or
the general. That included the guys in operations who put the
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Zip-a-tone on the maps and the weather officers who came in to
do the daily weather briefing and all.
But not only that, we had to come in, in those days, and
share, among the three of us, the business of making on-orbit
decisions for cameras for the CORONA missions. Once the damned
thing would get off the pad and into orbit, you had to arrange
your camera program for on and off. So then they'd have to
plot the ephemera on the big boards, the size of that wall and
show you that on pass 16 it would be coming down this way and
would be covering the following target-areas of interest. You
were film limited and you'd have to say: We'll take pass 16,
and that will use up so many feet of film. But these on-orbit
decision conferences, because of the time difference, took
place at 1 or 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.
So, you'd finish your day's work, go home and eat dinner,
maybe watch an hour of TV, jump in your car and come back to
work. The only thing you got was you didn't have to come in at
8 o'clock the next morning, you could wait until 10. This be-
came sort of a lottery, you know. You'd sit there, drink cof-
fee, or whatever, and wait, because you had to get a real-time
weather forecast. When you started the mission you'd have one
forecast and then the weather would go to pieces east of the
Urals or something. So you'd say, Oh shit, that means we've
got to use up more film west of the Urals. So, I remember the
time when...
DEW: When you say "we," that was you and Reber?
JAC: An Air Force operations officer, either the colonel or
the general, or the colonel in charge of operations or the ma-
jor in charge, an ops officer. There'd be two of us, usually,
a civilian and a military. Then, we'd have the COMOR menu in
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front of us. But this got kind of tiring, because these were
not missions that ran one day. You had to keep doing this un-
til it was time for the film to come home.
DEW: Yes, as they managed to extend those missions from
four days, at the end they were 15 days.
JAC: I remember at the time the complex, the Russian ABM
complex around Leningrad was first brought in. Nobody knew
any- thing about it; there was no collateral intelligence on it
whatever. We had a mission aloft at the time, and it came my
turn at 2 o'clock in the morning to make the decision. The
last pass was over Leningrad, and I remember the major's name
was Art Dula, Art was saying: Well, what do we do, do we take
this or don't we. And I said: Aw, shit! He said: We could
go home, we've got all the good stuff already, you know. I
said: Well, let's make a wager on this thing. I'll wager that
we ought to take Leningrad. He said: You're on, but what are
we going to do it for? I said: A martini. Okay, you're on for
a martini. If there is anything on that pass, I'll buy you a
martini.
So we took that pass over Leningrad. And that was the one
which had the first evidence of the ABM installation going in.
Of course, the bells went off and the lights went on in the
Community when that happened. And Dula t paid me a martini.
But this was the sort of monumental decision-making that was
done at that stage. You know, we were all dog tired and we
were betting martinis on whether or not there would be anything
useful. I remember Art said: Well, hell, Leningrad, all the
tourist buses go there. You know, you don't need to take pic-
tures of that damned place. I said: But you can't tell, there
might be something out in the suburbs. And there sure as hell
was.
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DEW: That's where it was. That had ramifications
CORONA program and later on it was a spur for
not much available on except the fact
as a covert satellite. Were you aware of that?
JAC: No, I wasn't.
that
it
531A
for the
There's
started
DEW: It started because what they discovered around Lenin-
grad, the ABM sites, and later on around Moscow, and then two
big radars down in Sary Shagan, and they got to thinking "They
are working on an antisatellite system. How can we protect our
satellites?" Then they went around on a thing called
see how you get a secret or
decided that you really can't.
covert
If you
satellite?
25X1
25X1
to 25X1
Well, they
launch it they know when
you put it up. Well, then they said, we'll put it way out, and
we'll bring it back in to take closeup photographs. But the
more they got talking about it the more they realized that what
they needed was an instant indications satellite. And you did-
n't have time to fuel up a big liquid-propelled missile and
fire the thing off if you're just about ready to have a war.
It took too much time. So what you needed was something that
was up there all the time, and you didn't have time to deploy a
capsule back to earth and go out and catch it if you could.
You had to have a picture. So they took that -- one thing led
to the other, led to the other -- and said we're in the real-
time or near-real-time area and that's when they started going
into the photocells and the whole
JAC: That was about the time
concept evolved.
leaving, but
had
25X1
25X1
I was
started. In fact, a guy named was working
on
it
25X1
then, full time. I think Alex is still alive and still
around
Washington, retired. A very bright guy, but, you know, sort of
like Bathless Groggins. He looked like the seediest guy in
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town. John Parangosky used to tell him: For Christ's sake,
Al, go out and get yourself a haircut. And, by the way, shave
tomorrow morning. But he was double-domed, way out there. He
really busted his ass on that particular program, I remember.
DEW: took it over later on.
was a very difficult man to get along with.
evidently 25X1
JAC: That's what I heard. I knew him slightly, but that's
all.
DEW: When I started into I was amazed at how one 25X1
started way out here -- it actually started with the Leningrad
photographs but, together with the Sary radars, it evolved.
Out of it comes something 21st century again. I've just fin-
ished the one on
[Interruption]
DEW: Did TAGBOARD get in the way of OXCART?
25X1
JAG: Damned near. We had it on our hands for seven
months. I guess it was longer than that if you count how long
it took Kelly to think it up. In terms of contracting we had
it seven months. We didn't seem to be going anywhere, because
it looked at first as though OXCART had solved all the problems
that might be presented by TAGBOARD -- radar cross section re-
duction, general planform, all this good stuff. But there was
so little experience in the real world about ram-jet engines.
At the time when got involved in this there was some- 25X1
thing like six hours of running time on ram-jet engines. We we
were a little bit ahead of the curve, I think.
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DEW: The other things that I came across was KEDLOCK and
WEDLOCK. I suspect they're Air Force programs.
JAC: I've forgotten those two. I should know. I know Ber-
nie EdwAtowski, our Registry fiend, will know in a minute be-
cause he's got it, somewhere in his head he's got all of these
things. Whenever I have difficulty with them, I give Bernie a
call.
DEW: Now, TAGBOARD was a drone. Originally it as going
to be carried aloft by the OXCART was it?
JAC: Yes, in factSAwas.
DEW: Destroyed one [OXCART]:
JAC: And cost us an airplane and one guy's life. We had a
two-man airplane crew. For a brief moment there we had the No.
2 guy in this truncated seating arrangement in the back of the
plane, in what would have been the equipment bay. The drone
didn't separate properly out over the Pacific missile-test
range. It fell back on the airplane, apparently. At that al-
titude it must have been an engine hiccup. But both the guys
got out, punched out. The only thing is, one of them landed
upside down in the water, became tangled with his chute, I
guess, and drowned. The other guy survived nicely. But at
that point we thought we had better separate the two, because
TAGBOARD was going to hold us back in achieving operational
readiness on the OX. So we gave it over to the Air Force will-
ingly.
And they immediately took off in a separate direction, of
course, with the B-52 thing. I gather, I don't know how many
missions were flown -- wasn't very many -- but according to
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Dino Brugioni, he claims that one of them went astray over
China.. It didn't go through the program it was supposed to, it
had a regular routine, you know, you launched it, it went and
flew, and did its thing, and then it came back. When it got
back it spit out the package. When it got below 60,000 feet, I
think it was, the drone was programmed to self-destruct.
Well, all of this didn't happen. It just took off, and
maybe it took pictures, but it kept going in a northwesterly
direction and was never heard of again. Not very long ago, say
within the last two years, a report surfaced in the Agency,
came through this, what is it, Soviet weapons, and so forth,
group here. They came over to see me, and said: Does this
sound like anything we had anything to do with? Because there
was a report out of Russia saying that this thing had ended up
in Kazakhstan, or some bloody place, you know, way out a 100
million miles from nowhere, reasonably intact -- never mind the
self-destruct, it did not. And the Soviets were terribly im-
pressed with the metallurgy and the plastic laminates, and all
these other things that were built into it, you know. And did
I think there was any reasonable chance this was a TAGBOARD.
And I said: It sounds like the only thing it could be. I said
you better go talk to the Air Force, although they are probably
not going to want to talk to you, because it's the sort of
thing they don't go around advertising.
DEW: So they did use the TAGBOARD from a B-52?
JAC: They used it, yes. In fact, I have in the safe in
there, the complete Presidential briefing for it, which shows
in all these wonderful colors and schematics and pictures.
They carried them two at a time under the 13-52, one under each
wing. I don't know whether one of them was a backup or whether
you were supposed to be able to launch two.
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DEW: Well, they must have changed the actual launch proce-
dure, because as I understand it, the original assumption was
that you had to break the sound barrier; you had to get over
Mach 1 before you could launch.
JAC: That was the assumption we started the program on. I
would say the B-52 doesn't go transonic. They have a ram
booster on it now. What they did was they put a separate tank
underneath the flight article, which gave it that push to Mach
1 or better, and that was jettisoned.
DEW: Almost like a JATO bottle then?
JAC: Yes, in fact, it made it rather awkward looking with
this big, conformal tank underneath the drone.
DEW: And it had a small radar cross section?
JAC: Yes, it tracked like a pigeon. Well, of course, it
was smaller to begin with. It was only a scale model of the
other one, and it had a single fin and rudder arrangement. It
was programmed for about Mach 4, as I remember, something like
that.
DEW: And altitude?
JAC: Up in the 90s.
DEW: How high did our OXCART ever go?
JAC: Ninetythree thousand feet, as I remember.
DEW: And it had a small radar cross section?
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JAC: Yes, it did. Extremely small, by the time Kelly got
through playing with it.
DEW: It's the original "stealth" aircraft?
JAC: Yes, in fact, he [Kelly Johnson] is getting a National
Science Medal day after tomorrow (6 October 1934) here in town,
from Mr. Reagan, and one of the things for which he is being
honored is his pioneer work in "stealth" technology, going back
to RAINBOW.OUga
DEW: Well, was he involved in RAINBOW? I thought it was
Dr. Purcell of Harvard who was doing all that.
JAC: Yes, with all the trapezoids and everything like that,
but Kelly was into the additive coatings.
DEW: Wallpaper? Now, the trapezoid worked?
JAC: Yes, but only in S- and X-band, as I remember.
DEW: What about the coatings, the Wallpaper, did it work?
JAC: Not as well as the trapezoid, but, of course, Kelly
has been a major contributor to,
"stealth" fighter that's flying
or had a lot of input to this
Of course,
DEW: The B-1 with another name?
JAC: I guess so, I've never seen any drawings of what it
may look like, but, since it's Northrup, you have to assume
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that they've learned something since the "Flying Wing" days.
It's probably something as weird as that.
DEW: You haven't read my history of the OXCART yet.
There's a passage about revealing the OXCART. McCone said that
Black of the World Bank had told him that he thought they had
to make it public because thought that Lockheed and Pratt &
Whitney had a $700 million head start on the SST.
JAG: And then they didn't get it.
DEW: He [McConel probably was right that we didn't need it.
JAG: They went through this whole exercise of bringing in
all of the competion and briefing them. That was bitter pill
for Kelly.
DEW: Oh, yes, another question: ISINGLASS. What's that.
JAG: That was a hypersonic, far out, boost-glide recce ve-
hicle that looked like a scaled-down space shuttle. One man,
liquid hydrogen propellant, with an RL-20 engine from Pratt &
Whitney, one of the engines off the Saturn, I guess. No, it's
one that Pratt & Whitney has made so many of and has never
failed. I guess it's used in the current program, too, where
they cluster them, you know. It was throttleable, and the
throttling was achieved through a shroud which moved back and
forth on the throat of the engine. It was initially proposed
by McDonnell-Douglas, who came sort of came in and said: Hey,
what do you guys think of this? Do you think this would float?
Ledford, Parangosky, and I got together with Mr. Mac and
his son, who is now running the company, and McDonnell-Douglas
agreed to company-fund, because we were, at that point, under
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the NRO and didn't have any money. They said they'd put in $10
million and they would go as far as that money would take
them. We would trade inputs as far as some of the things we'd
learned out of OXCART, ,which might be applicable, especially in
the business of camera windows in high-speed environments.
This thing was supposed to be launched from a B-52. It
would be launched, say, off the coast of Spain. It would
promptly ascend to 125,000 feet under throttling, and you'd
point it in the general direction of east, let's say, and pour
the coal to it, and then shut it off. It would go tootling
along at roughly Mach 22, just below escape velocity, which I
think is Mach 24.5, or something like that. You'd take your-
self all
kinds of pictures all the way across Russia, and then
you'd recover in
25X1
Damn near circumnavigate the globe, you know. We carried
it through, I guess we must have been on that for about 14
months. Some fascinating records in the Registry in here --
well, maybe they're out at but they brought them in 25X1
because Air Force was about to spend a bunch of money to do
some of the same research, as usual, never having heard of it.
And John Parangosky -- who's consulting with a company over
here that has Air Force contracts in this space arena -- when
he started hearing about the money the Air Force was putting
into it, he got hold of the records again and, sort of on a
disembodied basis, he said: By the way, you might like to know
that this is what happens when you mate this particular metal
with that particular metal. Where'd you get that? they'd ask.
Well, that was research that was done about 1965.
There were going to be eight of the airplanes built. They
landed on skids, by the way, they didn't have wheels, landing
gear, and all that, they just had skids. But they had the con-
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trol characteristics of an airplane when they got to the low
speed. You either dead-sticked it in, or, if you had anything
left, if you had a shorter mission, you could throttle it right
down to the runway, almost. And it would land on a convention-
al, 10,000-foot runway. They built a third-scale cross-section
of this thing, showing what they could do in a metallurgical
sense, because it had all kinds of exotic metals in it, you
know, heat-reflecting materials -- columbium and all these
other weird things that you don't see on the grocery shelves.
We had complete, fully staffed out proposals from them. I
remember one day doing a briefing, in a conference room right
down the hall here, for Wheelon on where we stood. Well,
Wheelon was in the audience, it was for the Budget people
what did it used to be called? Congressional Budget Office, or
something like that, the predecessor of OMB. And it was then
in shape to talk seriously about going into production. Well,
of course, the bill was, by anybody's standards, pretty stag-
gering. It was like the eight vehicles were spaced out over
three years and the total cost was like $2.6 billion. And this
was in 1965 dollars. So you can say three times that today, at
least. It got a very polite reception, like everybody in the
audience clapped with one hand. It got an airing in the Air
Force, but, of course, the NIH feature took over. They didn't
even want to hear it, basically.
We thought it was a pretty good idea, because McDonnell-
Douglas did an excellent job. They did their ho,pwork like
nobody's business. In fact, a guy named Harold Alis, who to-
day is senior executive vice president of McDonnell, was the
project manager for this thing. We had a security office out
in St. Louis that cleared over 200 people from McDonnell-Doug-
las to work on this thing. We were all set to go, except we
didn't have the money. Times were tough and the Air Force was-
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n't buying anything like that, but now they're back to thinking
that because they've got something called a Space Division,
they have to have something to fill it. It's like Parkinson's
law of airplanes.
But ISINGLASS showed great promise. Virtually unstop-
pable. In other words, you couldn't shoot it down with an SA-
anything. Now, you'd probably get all kinds of protests and
there was always the concern that maybe they might think this
was the big one. But, if you lug it up to their front door in
a 3-52 and they can watch it take off on radar, it's a little
bit less likely than if something came over the pole. But it's
probably, in a tense atmosphere like we seem to have today, the
kind of thing that would be given very long thought before it
was used over the [Russian] heartland. That doesn't mean you
couldn't fly over China or someplace, but it's kind of an ex-
pensive way to get coverage, based on what you can get now from
satellites. Of course, it was in some aspects overtaken by the
sophistication of the KEYHOLE system. Christ sakes, now when
you can take a picture and a PI can sit there and turn it and
see the building rotate, a vehicle turn around, why hell, you'd
have to go an awful long way and spend an awful lot of money to
duplicate that on some manned type of vehicle.
JAC: You are now at a stage where these machines that are
used over in
apiece. It used to be, if you had a light-table and a
magnifying glass you were in business.
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DEW: It's a great deal like OXCART. OXCART was 21st
century and we hardly used it.
JAC: That broke my heart when I went out there and saw them
all backed up against the fence.
DEW: They'll never build another one like it.
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