The SR-71 Blackbird is a fantastic aircraft. It was designed and built by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson’s Lockheed “Skunk Works” in Burbank, California.
It was intended to be a long-range, high-altitude, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft. Kelly Johnson, the man behind Skunk Works, is a legend in the aircraft industry.
The CIA and the Air Force teamed up in the 1950s with Johnson’s Lockheed Skunk Works to work on some of the most successful reconnaissance planes in the world. The CIA had contacted Johnson to build the first reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2.
In the early 1960s, the United States needed a plane the Soviet Union could not shoot down, track, or even reliably see coming.
What it got, eventually, was the Lockheed A-12 and its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird — an aircraft that could cruise at Mach 3.2 above 80,000 feet, so fast that its own designers had to invent new metallurgical techniques just to keep it from tearing itself apart…
Johnson designed the plane in less than 13 months, an incredible feat.
They began overflights of the Soviet Union in 1956; however, the Russians could track the aircraft, even at the edge of space, at an altitude of 80,000 feet.
However, the Agency, the Air Force, and Johnson knew they needed a replacement, an aircraft much faster to better protect itself from the missiles they knew would be coming. Under the code name “Oxcart,” Johnson began work on the A-12.
SR-71 Blackbird. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
CIA Contracted The Skunk Works For the Archangel Program
The agency again contracted Johnson and Lockheed Skunk Works to build a spy plane capable of traveling at Mach 3 (2301 mph).
The program was codenamed ARCHANGEL.
The level of secrecy was extremely high for two reasons.
One reason was the advanced technology Lockheed was developing, but another was that the United States was secretly buying materials from within the Soviet Union to build these jets.
The problem was that the titanium needed to build the aircraft was in the hands of the U.S.’s enemy: the Soviets. But the strangest part of the Blackbird’s origin story isn’t the engineering. It’s the metal itself, and where it came from
Flight suit. Image Credit: 19FortyFive Original Image.
SR-71 Suit. 19FortyFive original image.
Getting The Help Of Moscow…Surreptitiously
CIA Historian David Robage, in his book “Archangel: CIA’s Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft,” detailed some of the incredible exploits the US had to pull off to get the A-12 built. And about the men who flew it.
Titanium was needed, but the US had limited supplies at the time. So they decided they had to buy it from the world’s largest supplier: the Soviet Union.
Keeping the Soviets in the dark was tough.
The agency built a procurement network of shell companies and third-country intermediaries, using Third World trading partners, designed to obscure who was actually buying the metal and why.
SR-71 Blackbird Photo from Dr. Brent Eastwood at the Smithsonian. 19FortyFive.com Original Image.
SR-71 Blackbird Lockheed Martin Image
Titanium ore purchased on the open market moved through this network and eventually into the hands of Lockheed’s engineers in Burbank, California.
The A-12 would fly over the Soviet Union and outrun fighters and missiles built with the titanium that the Soviets sold to the US. It was the opposite of the Lenin quote, “We will hang the last capitalist with the rope he sold us.”
Oh, the irony.
The Pizza Oven Cover Story
What makes this story a staple of aviation trivia is the cover used to justify such enormous titanium orders without raising Soviet suspicion.
As the story is most commonly told, and repeated by SR-71 pilot and historian Colonel Rich Graham, and picked up by outlets from the Smithsonian to the BBC, one of the shell companies’ cover stories was that the metal was needed to manufacture commercial pizza ovens.
It’s an absolutely absurd image: Soviet titanium ore, headed to feed the appetite of American pizzerias, actually destined for the skin of a Mach 3 reconnaissance jet designed to photograph Soviet missile sites from the edge of space.
Ben Rich wrote that the Soviets had no idea what their titanium was really building, calling it one of the great ironies of the Cold War’s great ironies.
Sixty-One Years Later, The SR-71 Is Still The Fastest
The SR-71 first flew in 1964. President Johnson had just taken office after President Kennedy was assassinated less than a year before.
The “British Invasion” was in full swing, with the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.
The Ford Mustang and the G.I. Joe were introduced.
The SR-71 set the world record for the quickest flight between London and New York in 1974.
It also became the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft in 1976.
The SR-71 was retired in 1989 for political reasons, and NASA used it as a research platform until 1999. As of 2025, it still holds many aviation records.
The Special Reconnaissance (spy) aircraft was the target of more than 4,000 missiles launched at it during its service and was never hit.
Beyond its unique shape, the Blackbird incorporated several other stealth features. Its distinctive blue-black paint was intended to reduce heat emission and help it blend with the night sky, giving it its iconic nickname.
The Blackbird may soon have a replacement, as Lockheed Martin and the Skunk Works are reportedly working on the SR-72, Son of Blackbird (SOB), or the Dark Star.
SR-72 Darkstar. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The Pizza Oven Story Is One We All WANT To Be True
However, the fact that the SR-71 was built overwhelmingly from titanium, and that the Soviet Union was the era’s dominant titanium supplier, are well documented and undisputed.
The claim that the CIA used shell companies to buy that titanium is also widely accepted among historians and SR-71 veterans, though it traces mainly back to Rich’s memoir rather than a declassified paper trail.
The “pizza ovens” detail specifically sits a notch below that: it’s repeated constantly in aviation histories and interviews with program veterans, but it functions more as oft-told program lore than as something documented in a specific memo or shipping manifest.
That doesn’t make it false; cover stories, by design, rarely leave records, but it’s the kind of detail worth enjoying as a great story while holding loosely as unverified history.
Either way, the underlying fact stands on its own: for a stretch of the Cold War, the aircraft built to outrun and outspy the Soviet Union was, quite literally, made of it.
About the Author: Steve Balestrieri
Steve Balestrieri is a National Security Columnist. He served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer. In addition to writing on defense, he covers the NFL for PatsFans.com and is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA). His work was regularly featured in many military publications.
