The money trail called for creative accounting; to allow Kelly Johnson to begin work before the official financial arrangements were in place, the Agency used a portion of its black funds, funneled through subsidiary accounts attached to front companies, to pay Lockheed using personal checks. More than a million dollars arrived that way, by regular mail at Johnson’s Encino home, and he deposited the checks into a phony corporation he called C&J Engineering. This process, Johnson’s deputy, Ben Rich, remarked, “has to be the wildest government payout in history.”
