I'm John Batchew with Josh Dean. His new book is The Impossible Factory. This is the story of the Lockheed Corporation's skunk works.

Inside the Lockheed Corporation's success in the 50s and 60s was one man, Kelly Johnson, a vice president and a senior vice president, who ran the skunk works as an imperator.

Absolutely, he was in charge. He had everyone attached to him like a

winning football coach. Along comes a request for a reconnaissance over the Soviet Union because of

concerns that it was building preparation for an invasion or its unusual thermonuclear tests.

They had the bomb at this point.

There were lots of reasons to demand surveillance.

But what could do it?

An aircraft that flew very high and very fast.

And they came to Lockheed Corporation.

But they is no longer the Air Force. They is the CIA. That was a risk,

Josh. Did Kelly appreciate that he was making a change of bosses into the dark, the dark

avenues of the CIA? I think he did, though. This is the nascent, this is a nascent organization known as the CIA.

It had been born out of, you know, in the decade after World War II, out of the OSS, and was relatively new by the time Kelly starts working with them.

And the problem that's put on his desk this time is that

this so-called intelligence gap, the bomber gap specifically, there was real concern all the way

up to the president that the Soviets had superior bombers that were capable of carrying nuclear

payloads, the larger numbers of those bombers. And also, there was just a general

feeling that they know way more about us than we know about them. And that makes sense because

it's very easy to spy in an open democratic society. They could just send people here who can live

as America. I mean, we still see it today. It was very difficult to send human spies into the Soviet

Union because they would be executed upon

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