Nation: Chronicle of a Security Leak

• Share

How the Stealth plane lost its cloak of invisibility

The argument will rage on until Election Day: Did the Carter Administration cynically leak military secrets to help the President win re-election ? Or was it only releasing heartening defense news that was rapidly becoming public anyway? And more important, was the national security really damaged by disclosure that the U.S. is developing a Stealth bomber that may be able to elude Soviet radar? Although still incomplete, the reconstruction of how the news came out makes a fascinating—and disturbing—tale.

For an extremely sensitive project, Stealth was talked about amazingly early, and often. A former official of an aerospace company reports that he heard as early as 1962 about a project to develop a plane that would be nearly invisible to radar. Stories about the aircraft began appearing in such technical journals as Defense Daily and Aerospace Daily as early as 1975. The Stealth project was not even stamped classified until 1977 by Defense Secretary Harold Brown; items continued to appear after that year. In 1979 a novel called Poseidon's Shadow described the use of an oddly shaped U.S. spy plane named Stealth F in a confrontation against the Soviets. Author Allen Paul Kobryn says he got the idea from stories in Aviation Week and the New York Times.

Still, up until early August, the details of the project were as shadowy as the plane was meant to be on a radar screen. All that was generally known was that the U.S. was working on some sort of radar-foiling aircraft, although aspects of the program had been quietly incorporated into the design of the operational SR-71 reconnaissance plane and the cruise missile. Then someone began leaking news on Stealth. Within five days, Aviation Week, ABC-TV and the Washington Post reported on the project. On Aug. 14, Post Reporter George C. Wilson wrote that President Carter was about to commit himself to the development of a bomber "virtually invisible to enemy radar" and that it might help him counter Republican charges that he had neglected U.S. defenses. Actually, Carter has not gone that far, but the Administration is seriously considering recommending the development of a bomber using the Stealth technology.

The story horrified military commanders. General Richard H. Ellis, chief of the Strategic Air Command, whose men would fly the Stealth, telegraphed the Pentagon that the story "brought the hair up on the back of my neck." He urged his superiors to "discredit" the story.

The Pentagon did the exact opposite. It told Benjamin F. Schemmer, owner and editor of the widely respected Armed Forces Journal, that he could now publish a detailed story about Stealth that he had been sitting on for two years at the Government's request. Indeed, William J. Perry, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, briefed Schemmer with additional information.