Chad Beaudin

“Everything about this project was dark alley, cloak and dagger. Even the way they financed the operation was highly unconventional: using secret contingency funds, they back-doored payment to Lockheed by writing personal checks to Kelly for more than a million bucks as start-up costs. The checks arrived by regular mail at his Encino home, which had to be the wildest government payout in history. Johnson could have absconded with the dough and taken off on a one-way ticket to Tahiti. He banked the funds through a phony company called “C & J Engineering,” the “C & J” standing for Clarence Johnson. Even our drawings bore the logo “C & J”—the word “Lockheed” never appeared. We used a mail drop out at Sunland, a remote locale in the San Fernando Valley, for suppliers to send us parts. The local postmaster got curious about all the crates and boxes piling up in his bins and looked up “C & J” in the phone book and, of course, found nothing. So he decided to have one of his inspectors follow our unmarked van as it traveled back to Burbank. Our security people nabbed him just outside the plant and had him signing national security secrecy forms until he pleaded writer’s cramp.”
― Ben R. Rich, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed