American Notes Security

Lawrence Kitchen, chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Corp., was more than a little embarrassed when he told a congressional committee about the loss last week. A batch of 1,460 documents dealing with the F-19 Stealth fighter plane, nearly all of them classified secret and one top secret, has simply disappeared from Lockheed's files in California. The plane, whose shape and skin make it nearly undetectable by radar, is so secret that the Air Force refuses even to acknowledge that it exists.

As far as Kitchen and the Pentagon know, none of the documents fell into the hands of foreign agents, but there is no question that the F-19 is under less of a shroud than it once was. The Pentagon was investigating a report last week that a Lockheed employee took blueprints of the plane to show to his girlfriend.