Read This on a Strictly Need to Know Basis

One of my most memorable moments covering the aerospace industry came during an early ‘90s visit to Lockheed Corp.’s advanced development division in Burbank--an operation more commonly known as the Skunk Works.

The facility, named after the “Skonk Works” in the comic strip “Li’l Abner,” was legendary. It had been the birthplace of the U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance jet, the F-117 stealth fighter and a gaggle of other flying machines whose realization depended on two things: brilliant engineering and tight lips.

Ushered into a private office, I sat across from Sherman Mullin, the president of the place. Before we could exchange pleasantries, he reached behind his desk and pushed a button. With that, the door swung shut, sealing us inside what Mullin terms “a top-secret vault.”

It was totally “Get Smart,” and very cool.

That episode popped into my head after I read of Mark J. Rauzon’s odyssey into the Pacific Project-- a Cold War-era bioweapons initiative, he writes, “known only to those with the highest security clearances” (“Live Ammo,” page 18). Although much of what he chronicles occurred offshore, he taps into a hush-hush culture that remains a big part of Southern California.

Just how big nobody knows. (Or, more precisely, the few who do know can’t tell you--or then they’d have to kill you.) But Loren Thompson, a military analyst at a think tank called the Lexington Institute, figures that about $10 billion a year in so-called black budget funding flows through L.A. Most of it, he says, goes for satellites and aircraft (some of which the government won’t admit exist).

Critics complain that ever more Pentagon programs are being painted black so as to evade scrutiny.

Yet what fascinates me is how so many people--perhaps as many as 50,000 here, by Thompson’s count--can’t reveal what they do. Not to their spouses. Or friends. Or even to too many folks inside their own companies.

Ben Rich, who preceded Mullin as Skunk Works chief, once expressed his frustration at having to keep his greatest successes under wraps, likening it to “the rabbi who gets a hole-in-one on Saturday.”

But Mullin, who retired from Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) in 1994, never saw it that way. He loved the fact that he wasn’t permitted to discuss his work beyond a chosen few. “I don’t think everybody appreciates how absolute the wall is,” Mullin says. That, he adds, allowed him and his colleagues to stay focused on the task at hand, without a lot of preening and posturing.

It’s interesting how one of the other major industries in town has such a different ethic--one in which the gossip flows freely and nothing is sacred. Hollywood does have one thing in common with the black world, though: It doesn’t like to talk about its bombs, either.