Pico Rivera Plant : Stealth Job Is Living Up to Its Name

Soviet KGB agents puzzling over intelligence photographs of U.S. defense plants once received a special greeting from employees at Northrop’s top-secret Stealth bomber plant in Pico Rivera.

An employee, who has become something of a hero in the folklore of the facility, sneaked up to the roof of the plant a few years ago and painted a vulgar insult in Russian.

The Cyrillic lettering on the roof was large enough to have been visible to orbiting Soviet spy satellites, which pass over the plant several times a day looking for any shred of information about the huge Northrop bomber program.

But aside from rude greetings, Stealth intelligence is not easy to come by. The windowless exterior of the Pico Rivera facility, once a Ford automobile factory, discloses little about Northrop’s top-secret defense activities.

12,000 Employees

Inside the plant, life goes on in strange ways.

Although secret defense projects are becoming more commonplace, the Stealth bomber program is in a class all its own. And the Pico Rivera plant is the largest secret defense industrial site in the United States, employing more than 12,000 Americans who are developing a revolutionary aircraft that will be virtually invisible to enemy radar.

If the Stealth bomber is successful, it is expected to pose a grave new risk to Soviet defense forces. A leak of the secret technology could destroy years of effort and a multibillion-dollar U.S. investment to gain a military advantage over the Soviets.

In such a tense environment, employees face security measures that create a workplace quite alien to the average American experience.

Eyes Always Watching

In a long-running series of interviews, current and former employees at the plant have described a workplace in which counterespionage sometimes takes precedence over everything else.

Security measures routinely reduce privacy in hallways watched by motion detectors, on telephones that are monitored by management and even inside toilet stalls that are no sure refuge from the watchful eyes of spy busters.

Pity the innocent who wanders, unsuspecting, into this arcane world, as one hapless insurance adjuster did recently. He had been asked by a Northrop employee to provide a damage estimate on a car parked in a lot at the plant. But when security forces saw the insurance man walking around with a camera in his hand, they nabbed him.

They pulled him into a guardroom and checked out his story. Only after the employee was called to verify his tale was he allowed to leave. By then, his voice was trembling and his hands were shaking, the employee said.

Northrop and the Air Force go to great lengths to keep a low profile at Pico Rivera, but it is not easy to keep 12,000 people out of sight.

When Air Force officials go to the plant, they leave their military uniforms at home and travel in civilian clothes. One employee, unaware of this policy, complained that she had not seen an Air Force official at the plant in years.

In fact, they are all over the place. The Air Force has its own representative office at the plant and a staff to monitor operations there. Since the Stealth program is one of the Air Force’s largest, top officers make frequent visits to the plant as well.

Few Details

Official information about the work going on at the plant is all but non-existent. Northrop has been using the same phrase for about six years to describe its work as the “prime contractor for research and development of the U.S. Air Force’s Advanced Technology Bomber. Details of the ATB are classified.”

Such reticence causes problems for a lot of people with legitimate work to do. When a subsidiary of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency was hired by Northrop to develop a recruitment advertising campaign for the Pico Rivera plant, they could not learn anything about the program they had been hired to advertise.

A Thompson official was finally reduced to calling a newspaper reporter and setting up a luncheon meeting during which members of the company’s staff asked the reporter what he knew about the Stealth program.

Even Northrop employees often rely on the rumor mill for information because official news is so tightly controlled. The plant’s official newspaper never mentions the bomber. A recent issue featured stories on a golf tournament, the company credit union and some awards for “extraordinary performance” by cafeteria workers.

Underground Paper

The official newspaper, however, is not the only one at the plant. A few enterprising employees publish the IMPACT Enquirer, a gossipy newsletter that spoofs the people and the way of life at the plant. However, it also appears to skirt sensitive security matters.

One story that the newsletter published in February making fun of the corporate bureaucracy was headlined “Meeting Committee Organized.” It reported: “In the 16th of a series of meetings organized to schedule meetings, it was determined that a subcommittee will be organized at a future meeting for the purpose of scheduling future meetings.”

Another story asked, “Are you bored with life? Is the drudgery of your daily routine driving you to chronic zombism? Do you find yourself enjoying the ‘Wheel of Fortune?’ ”

A March issue of the IMPACT Enquirer hit at the overtime work that is routine at the plant as Northrop rushes to meet its contract schedules. According to a spoof policy published by the paper, “Overtime will be paid for all employees who work more than 24 hours in any given day, except Sundays, Saturdays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Mondays, Fridays and Wednesdays.”

Off Limits

The Pico Rivera plant, known officially as Northrop’s Advanced Systems Division, is off limits to almost everybody outside the Stealth program, especially news reporters.

When a television station once sent a helicopter to take pictures from above the facility, a security guard used a powerful public address system to warn it off, suggesting that his officers were ready to “open fire,” according to witnesses.

All the employees at the plant have government security clearances, ranging up to the highest special-access clearances. Many of the employees had such clearances when they were hired but others were cleared only after they were put on Northrop’s payroll.

Special background investigations for top-secret clearances can take up to six months and often probe details of employees’ personal lives. A neighbor of one employee was asked what sort of garbage the employee routinely threw out and whether there were a lot of liquor bottles in the trash. The neighbor reportedly ordered the government investigator off her porch and slammed the door.

‘Drunk Tank’

While the investigations are going on, employees cannot perform the regular duties for which they were hired. Instead, they are sometimes sent to what is known irreverently at the plant as the “drunk tank.”

“It’s a lousy name,” said one Orange County aerospace personnel recruiter.

The “tank” is a special facility where very bright engineers and scientists sit around all day either reading books or doing “make work” assignments at government expense, he said. But it is just another of the penalties the government must pay if it wants advanced weaponry.

“There is no doubt that . . . (the Pico Rivera plant) is under attack from outside intelligence sources,” the headhunter, an ex-Marine, said.

And at least once the Pico Rivera plant was attacked by an inside intelligence source. In December, 1984, FBI agents arrested Thomas Patrick Cavanagh, an engineer who attempted to sell Stealth bomber secrets to Soviet agents.

‘I’m After Big Money’

The FBI got wise to Cavanagh’s plan when he repeatedly attempted to telephone the Soviet Embassy in Washington and was intercepted through a sophisticated FBI monitoring capability.

“I’m after big money; $25,000 is a drop in the bucket, believe me,” he was quoted as telling FBI agents who were posing as Russian spies. Cavanagh was sentenced to a life term in federal prison.

If security was tight before the Cavanagh affair, Northrop redoubled its efforts afterward, employees say. Additional security guards were hired. New procedures were instituted. And management attempted to raise employee awareness of the potential for espionage at the plant.

Northrop officials say they are proud of their security record, acknowledging that the Pico Rivera plant can sometimes be like a pressure cooker for its workers.

“Defense is a tense business, and working on very highly sensitive programs makes it more so,” one official said. “The fact that security has been so good is a tribute to the people in the program.”

Pressure Down Line

The pressure extends all the way down the line.

If an employee has to transport secret documents between buildings at the complex, for example, security guards call ahead to guards at the next building.

“If you take too long to get there, they come looking for you,” said one purchasing employee.

Even the security badges worn by employees inside the plant and used to open special electronically coded doors are considered a security issue. Employees are told to never wear the badges outside the plant or show them to any outsiders, an apparent effort to foil counterfeiting of the badges.

It would be impossible to operate such a plant with only cleared employees, though. Sometimes, a repairman or a plumber or a city building inspector has to be brought in.

Northrop has painted white dots on the floors in some buildings to indicate where such non-cleared people can step, according to two current employees. The white dots lead to such low-security areas as the medical center, the cafeteria and the employee store.

‘Uncleared Personnel!’

When an outsider has to stray from the white dots, a cleared Northrop employee escorts him and yells at the top of his lungs, “Uncleared personnel!” One time, an escort became momentarily confused and yelled, “Unclean personnel,” provoking an uproar in the area.

As is the case at all defense plants, employees are forbidden from bringing in radios, tape recorders, cameras or any devices that could be used to contact agents outside the plant or make unauthorized copies of documents.

Telephones are monitored, although it is not clear how management could possibly keep tabs on the conversations of 12,000 employees without having sophisticated voice-recognition computers that scan for special words that only a spy might use.

Employee suspicions were raised last year when telephones lines to the outside went dead shortly after the space shuttle Challenger blew up. It is not known whether the company instituted the telephone shutdown for a security reason or whether the phones simply failed coincidentally.

And sometimes, privacy just goes down the drain. One woman, merely wanting to balance her checkbook, took refuge in a toilet stall to do her arithmetic on a calculator. When other employees overheard the clicking keys of the calculator, they mistook it for a camera and notified guards, who did not hesitate to barge into the stall, according to an employee who observed the incident.

Communications Hurt

But such strict security exacts a price. For one thing, it restricts normal communication and that can result in snafus.

Take, for example, Northrop’s effort last year to move some secret Stealth documents. The company told employees in one facility that all secret documents were to be cleared out. On the day when all the classified papers were supposed to be gone, the company issued a memo saying that henceforth no secret documents were to be kept in the facility.

“Somebody classified the memo itself,” an employee recalled. “The fact that the memo was in the facility became a violation of the policy it was supposed to be making. It was ridiculous.”

Such slip-ups are difficult to avoid, however. The power to create an official secret in the defense industry is not restricted to top scientists and powerful executives. Anybody with a security clearance can create a secret document up to his or her level of security. But it takes a special board to lower or remove a security classification that has been stamped on a document. So secret documents multiply like rabbits and keep companies scrambling to keep track of them all.

Lockheed, which operates another large secret aircraft program in Burbank, was raked over the coals last year by a congressional committee for losing hundreds of secret documents.

Lesser Problems

Investigators for the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations said the Pico Rivera plant also has a problem with lost secret documents but that it is not as serious as Lockheed’s.

“When Lockheed had their problems, Northrop went through the (Pico Rivera) plant and cleaned things up,” an investigator said. “So, they don’t have as many problems as Lockheed had. That’s not to say they don’t have any problems.”

Some employees say they are genuinely spooked by secret documents and avoid learning secrets because they do not want to be held accountable if there is ever a security breech.

“I didn’t want to touch them because then you are accountable,” said a former data programmer at the plant.

“If you lose one of those things,” he joked, “they cut your fingers and toes off and throw you in jail for 20 years.”

“The security system is as perfect as it can be,” he added. “On occasion it was a pain in the neck, though.”

Indeed, security and other aspects of life at the plant lead many employees to leave, according to colleagues, headhunters and executives of competing firms.

High Turnover

“The one area where I worked experienced a 30% turnover in my first six months,” said a former professional employee at the Pico Rivera plant. Turnover in that department is thought to be higher than in most other areas of the plant.

A high rate of turnover can be costly to a major aircraft program because experienced employees are the most productive.

Still, Air Force officials have said that the Stealth program is “going very, very nicely and the technology is extraordinarily satisfying.” They add that the technological risks have been reduced and they consider it a feasible aircraft to produce.

Although Northrop’s performance on its Stealth bomber contract is not discussed by the Air Force, Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has raised “concerns” over the performance.

He recently said he will attempt to force the Air Force to introduce competition for production of the Stealth bomber in order to put pressure on Northrop to improve.

Within the aircraft industry, many executives also suspect that Northrop has encountered cost problems on the program. The firm took a $90-million charge against profits last year on an unidentified program widely believed to have been the bomber.

Risky Position

Northrop is deriving almost half of its revenues from the Stealth program, according to securities analysts, putting the firm in a risky position.

The Air Force plans to buy 132 of the bombers. Analysts and employees say the plane is expected to make its first flight this year, departing from a assembly site that Northrop has built in Palmdale. It will be a proud moment for the company and its employees.

Many Pico Rivera employees with security clearances have already received a special privilege: They were shown a mock-up of the Stealth bomber after they were hired.

Several employees interviewed described the bomber’s design as awesome.

“It looks like a living creature,” one said. “I can see why the Air Force is willing to give Northrop all this money. They’ll do anything to have it.”

Another employee who has seen the mock-up, however, said it was not terribly surprising, given all the speculation in technical journals about the bomber’s design. It has been widely speculated that the bomber looks like the original flying wing, designed in the 1940s by none other than Northrop founder Jack Northrop.