The Day After Roswell (9 page)

He described the aircraft as it had been reported in the
sightings: a “light reflective or metallic surface,
”

“absence of a trail except in those few instances
when the object was operating under high performance conditions,
”

“circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and
domed on top, ” flights in formation consisting of from
“three to nine objects, ” and no sound except for
those instances when “a substantial rumbling roar was noted.
” The objects moved quickly for aircraft at that time, he
noted to General Schulgen, at level flight speeds above three hundred
knots.

Were the United States to build such an aircraft, especially
one with a range of over seven thousand miles, the cost, commitment,
administrative and development overhead, and drain on existing high technology projects required that the entire project
should be independent or outside of the normal weapons development
bureaucracy. In other words, as I interpreted the memo, Twining was
suggesting to the commander of the Army Air Force that were the
airforce, which would become a separate branch of the military by the
following year, to attempt to exploit the technology that had quite
literally dropped into its lap, it had to do so separately and
independently from any normal weapons development program. The
descriptions of the super secret projects at Nellis Air Force Base or
Area 51 in the Nevada desert seem to fit the profile of the kind of
recommendation that General Twining was making, especially the
employment of the “skunk works” group at Lockheed
in the development of the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber.

Not revealing to the Army Air Forces command that Twining
himself had been ordered to visit bases in New Mexico in the hours
after the crash, the general advised his bosses that the military
should consider whether the flying disks were of domestic origin,
“the product of some high security project” already
developed by the United States outside of normal channels, or developed
by a foreign power that “has a form of propulsion possibly
nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge. ” At the
same time, weaving a cover story that takes him out of the loop of
reporting any of these flying disks as a first hand observer, Twining
writes that there is a “lack of physical evidence in the
shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the
existence of these objects. ”

But, even though General Twining has just written that there
is no evidence, he nevertheless recommends to his superiors that:

Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a
priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study of
this matter to include the preparation of complete sets of all
available and pertinent data which will then be made available to the
Army, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB, the Air Force Scientific
Advisory Group, NACA, and the RAND and NEPA projects for comments and
recommendations, with a preliminary report to be forwarded within 15
days of receipt of the data and a detailed report thereafter every 30
days as the investigation develops. A complete interchange of data
should be effected.

This was an important part of the memo, at least for me and my
research into how the army got the Roswell rile, because it accounted
for the army’s dissemination of the Roswell materials and
accompanying reports within only a couple of months after the
material’s arrival at Wright Field. When General Twining
suggested to his commanding officers at AAF that all the military
branches as well as existing government and civilian commissions needed
to share this information, the dispersal of the materials was already
under way. This is how the technology came into the possession of Army
R&D.

Finally, the general promised the Army Air Forces command that
the Air Material Command would continue to investigate the phenomenon
within its own resources in order to define its nature further and it
would route any more  information it developed through
channels. Three days after the memo, on September 26,1947, General
Twining gave his report on the Roswell crash and its implications for
the United States to President Truman and a short list of officials he
convened to begin the management of this top-secret combination of
inquiry, police development, and “ops. ” This
working group, which included Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Dr.
Vannevar Bush, Secretary James Forrestal, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Dr.
Detlev Bronk, Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, Sidney W. Souers, Gordon Gray, Dr.
Donald Menzel, Gen. Robert M. Montague, Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, and Gen.
Nathan Twining himself, became the nucleus for an ongoing fifty-year
operation that some people have called “Majestic-12.
”

At the Eisenhower White House, it was simply referred to as
“the group, ” and in the days after Roswell it went
into operation just as smoothly as slipping your new 1949 Buick with
its “Dynaflow” automatic transmission into drive
and pulling away from the curb. In this way General Twining had
carefully orchestrated a complete cover-up of what had happened at
Roswell as well as a full scale, top-secret military R&D
operation to identify the nature of the phenomenon and assess its
military threat to the United States. It was as elegant as it was
effective.

But the plan didn’t stop with the creation of the
working group - in fact, the operation very quickly developed into
something far more sophisticated because General Twining’s
“flying discs” simply wouldn’t go away.
As more information on sightings and encounters came rolling in through
every imaginable channel, from police officers taking reports from
frightened civilians to airline pilots tracking strange objects in the sky, the group realized that
they needed policies on how to handle what was turning into a mass
media phenomenon. They needed a mechanism for processing the thousands
of flying saucer reports that could be anything from a real crash or
close encounter to a couple of bohunks tossing a pie tin into the air
and snapping its picture with their Aunt Harriet’s Kodak
Brownie. The group also had to assess the threat from the Soviet Union
and Iron Curtain countries, assuming of course that flying saucers
weren’t restricted to North America, and gather intelligence
on what kinds of information our allies had on flying saucers as well.
And it still had to process the Roswell technology and figure out how
it could be used. So from the original group there developed a whole
tree structure of loosely confederated committees and subgroups,
sometimes complete organizations like the air force Project Blue Book,
all kept separate by administrative firewalls so that there would be no
information leakage, but all controlled from the top.

With the initial and ongoing stories safely covered up, the
plans for the long term reverse engineering work on the Roswell
technology could begin. But who would do it? Where would the material
reside? And how could the camouflage of what the military was doing be
maintained amidst the push for new weapons, competition with the
Soviets, and the flying saucer mania that was sweeping the country in
the late 1940s? General Twining had a plan for that, too. Just a little
over a year after the initial group meetings at the White House, Air
Force Intelligence, now that the air force had become a separate
service, issued a December 1948 report - 100-203-79 - called
“Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S. ”
in which UFOs are never referred to as extraterrestrial objects but as
elements of “foreign technology, ” which is
actually the subject of the report. The report, innocuous to most
people because it doesn’t say that flying saucers came from
outer space, is actually one of the first indications showing how the
camouflage plan was supposed to work over the ensuing years.

The writers of the report had located within the existing
military administrative structure the precise place where all research
and development into the flying disk phenomenon could be pursued not
only under a veil of secrecy but in the very place were no one could be
expected to look: the Foreign Technology desk. Here, the materials
could be deposited for safe keeping within the military while army and
air force brass decided what our existing industrial and research
technology allowed them to do. There could he as weapons failed, secret
experiments without fear of exposure, and, most importantly, an ongoing
discussion of how the United States could develop this treasure trove
of engineering information, all within the very structure where it was
supposed to take place. Just don’t call it extraterrestrial;
call it “foreign technology” and throw it into the
hopper with the rest of the mundane stuff the foreign technology
officers were supposed to do.

And that’s how, twelve years later, the Roswell
technology turned up in an old combination locked military file cabinet
carted into my new Pentagon office by two of the biggest enlisted men
I’d ever seen.

The Cover-up while General Twining was flying back and forth
from Ohio to New Mexico, on the other side of the world in Moscow,
Chairman Josef Stalin was furious. Red-faced and not even trying to
hide the rage that erupted like an exploding volcano, Stalin held up a
copy of the Roswell Daily Record for Tuesday, July 8,1947, and threw it
out onto the center of the table for any of the scientists in the room
who could read English. Stalin didn’t need an American
newspaper to tell him what his NKVD agents on the ground at Alamogordo
reported weeks before: that a U.S. Army retrieval team had pulled a
crashed alien spacecraft out of the New Mexico desert and was already
evaluating the valuable technology they’d recovered.

At first, when the Soviet intelligence bosses got the reports
from their agents at the American bases, they were more than skeptical.
They figured the stories were plants, false information to flush out
the Soviet spies the Americans suspected had infiltrated their most
secret bases. If the Soviet government reacted to the disinformation,
the American counter intelligence agents would be able to determine the
path of the story and isolate the spies. But when newspapers began
reporting the crash, then covered it up with stories about weather
balloons, the Soviets knew they had stumbled onto the real thing. So it
was true, Stalin told the group, the Americans had actually gotten
their own flying saucer. Now, he asked, what would they do with it?

One of the chief designers of the Soviet’s embryonic
liquid-fuel-rocket program was at the meeting. He, like many of the
Soviet engineers who’d read the German secret weapons files
at the end of the war, knew exactly where the Americans should have
been in their guided-missile-development program. What information his
bosses in the Kremlin thought he still needed to know, they gave him
from the reports they received from agents in the field. But nothing,
nothing about the V2  launches at White Sands, nothing about
the new tracking radars at Alamogordo gave the scientists in the Soviet
rocket program any indications the Americans were even an iota ahead of
them in guided missiles until he heard the news of the Roswell crash.

Both the Russian and American missile programs were based
almost entirely upon the German weapons research spoils that the Allies
were dividing up even before the end of the war. I was a firsthand
participant in this, secreting out German weapons scientists through
Italy after we occupied Rome as part of a secret operation code named
“Paper Clip” that began in 1944. With V2 designers
Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and others running experiments on the
German missiles we brought back to the United States, the army had
successfully appropriated much of the German advanced weapons research
and was carrying on experiments in New Mexico. The Soviets also got
their own share of German technology through their own intelligence
agents and local Communist Party cells in occupied countries.

And what a technology it was. The Germans had developed a
crescent shaped jet powered flying wing, jet powered Messerschmitts
that blazed by our P51s as if they were standing still, and a U boat
launched VI/V2 that, had the Germans been able to hide even a small
flotilla off the American East Coast, could have bombed out much of
heavily concentrated downtown Washington in a matter of hours. All they
needed to buy was enough time to deploy their weapons and get their
U-boats in position. And that was their strategy toward the end of 1944
when they turned around and counter attacked through Belgium in the
dead of winter and pinned us down at the Battle of the Bulge. Break our
advance on the ground, blast us out of the air with their new jets,
bomb North American cities, and knock Britain out of the war. With
their new weapons they could have fought us to a stand still and won a
bitter truce. Both the Americans and the Soviets wanted to get their hands on those
German weapons, especially the V2s.

Stalin didn’t have to worry much about who held the
advantage in German weaponry after the war. Both sides were about
equal. But this flying saucer crash, that was a different matter, and
it meant that in an instant the United States could have gained an
enormous advantage in the Cold War weapons race that had begun only
moments after the Germans surrendered. What might that advantage be?
The Russian liquid fuel engineer wondered aloud. What could the
Americans have retrieved from that crash?

Soviet agents reported that the townspeople in Roswell had
talked about little creatures at the crash site and a crescent shaped
aircraft that the army hauled away on trucks, but the stories had been
quickly silenced by military counter intelligence. So any real
intelligence on what the Americans might be developing would have to
come from Soviet agents deep inside the U.S. government. Stalin would
order it. And, as if they were activated by an invisible switch, spies
from one of the most efficient and ruthless intelligence machines in
the world began homing in on the American military bases associated
with the Roswell retrieval and the key American military and civilian
personnel the Russians knew would have to be involved.

The Americans might not have been the most efficient spy
catchers in 1947, but Army Counter intelligence had been put on alert
even before the Soviets knew that a flying saucer had been retrieved.
Starting from the central point at the nexus of sensitive New Mexico
bases during the summer of 1947, CIC agents questioned anybody who
seemed interested in learning about what happened in Roswell. Ask too
many questions and knocking at your door would be a couple of plain
clothes investigators who didn’t need a search warrant to
rummage through your things. So maybe the army was a little overzealous
about their interrogation procedures, but by early August it began
producing results. By the time General Twining was writing his report
to Army Air Forces command in Washington, both Army and Navy
Intelligence commanders knew that the Soviets had a high priority
operation in place at military bases around the country.

Soviet agents were everywhere. Central Intelligence group
director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, a member of President
Truman’s advisory group on UFOs, informed the president. A
top down counter intelligence operation had to he put in place
immediately, here commended, or every plan the military had to evaluate
what they’d retrieved from Roswell would be compromised.
There were a million questions. Were these flying objects the prelude
to something much bigger? Were they communicating with the Soviets?
Were they allied with the Soviets? Were they probing our defenses for a
planetary invasion? We had already assumed that the behavior of these
aircraft was hostile, but what did they want? Meanwhile, other reports
of civilian flying saucer sightings were turning up in newspapers and
coming in through local police. Even airline pilots were seeing strange
lights. There wasn’t much time to act. A secret this big
about flying saucers was bound to get out and cause untold panic among
the civilian population unless an elaborate camouflage was established.
And worse, we had to keep the Soviets away from this until we knew what
we had. We needed a plan, and right away.

Some have said it was Secretary of Defense James
Forrestal’s idea. Others said the whole scheme belonged to
Central Intelligence director Hillenkoetter. I, frankly,
don’t know first hand because when the plan was hatched I was
sweating out the end of the summer at Fort Riley, still trying to shake
out of my mind the image of that ghoulishly unearthly thing
I’d seen floating in its container. But whoever said it first
was saying the obvious, according to the people on
Eisenhower’s National Security staff whom I worked with six
years later. Maybe it was Forrestal after all who was the only person
in the cabinet who could have spoken to Truman that bluntly just a
little over two years after the man had inherited the office from FD
Rand was already a very unpopular president.

“It’s like this, ” I had heard
President Truman was told. “We’re in a real pickle
here. Nate Twining says he doesn’t know what the hell this
thing is except that if the Soviets get a hold of it, it’ll
change the shape of things to come for sure. ”

“You fellas going to write up some report for
me?” the President asked.

“General Twining says he’d rather do it as
a briefing, sir, for the time being, ” Admiral Hillenkoetter
suggested. “For your ears only. Then we have to have a
working task group to manage this whole issue. ”

Maybe the working group, whatever it was going to be called,
would come up with a report analyzing the situation as soon as they
reviewed what General Twining was putting under lock and key at Wright
field, but nobody wanted to speculate until they knew what was there.

“Maybe you should sit down with General Twining
first, ” both Forrestal and Hillenkoetter suggested. They
knew that Harry Truman liked to get first hand reports from people who
had seen the situation with their own eyes. FDR was corporate and knew
how to digest reports. He trusted his subordinates. But Truman was
different. He knew how to run a haberdashery store; if a hat
didn’t fit he’d have to go back to the factory to
find out why. It was the same with General Twining, who’d
been at the crash sites himself. If Truman wanted answers,
he’d have to see it through the eyes of someone
who’d been there.

“Does he know what these SOBs are after?”
Truman asked, referring to the aliens in the crashed saucer.

“That’s one of the questions we want to
address, ” they said.

“How do you plan to do it?”

Forrestal and Hillenkoetter explained that they wanted the
President to hear what General Twining had to say and then convene a
group of military, civilian, and intelligence personnel with strong old
school ties of trust for one another. In this way whatever decisions
they made wouldn’t have to be memoed all over the place, thus
risking the possibilities of leaks and tip-offs to the Soviets.
“We don’t want the newspapers or radio people
getting their hands on any of this either, ” they told the
President.

“Winchell would crucify me with this if he found out
what we were doing, ” Truman was reported to have said at
that meeting. Nobody in the know liked President Truman very much, and
he could appreciate it.

“It’s just like the Manhattan Project, Mr.
President, ” Admiral Hillenkoetter reminded him.
“It was war. We couldn’t tell anyone. This is war.
Same thing. ”

Then they explained that after they had convened a working
group, they would task out the research of the technology while keeping
it from the Soviet spy machine already operating at full bore within
the government.

“We hide it from the government itself, ”
the secretary explained.

“Create a whole new level of security classification
just for this, ”the Central Intelligence director said.
“Any information we decide to release, even internally, we
down grade so the people getting the information never have the
security clearance that allows them all the way to the top. The only way to hide it from the Russians is
to hide it from ourselves. “

But the President was still thinking about the difficulties of
keeping an operation this far reaching out of the news, especially when
flying saucers had become one of the hottest new items to talk about.
What was he supposed to say when people ask the government about the
flying disk stories? he asked, pressing for details that still had to
be established. How could they research these strange creatures without
the news getting out? And how could they analyze the wealth of physical
material Hillenkoetter had described to him without bringing people
from outside government? President Truman simply didn’t see
how this government within a government camouflage idea could work
without the whole thing spinning out of control. Despite
Forrestal’s assurances, the president remained skeptical.

“And there’s one final point, ”
Truman was said to have brought up to his Central Intelligence group
director and secretary of defense. It was a question so basic that its
apparent naivety belied an ominous threat that it suggested was just
over the horizon. “Do we ever tell the American people what
really happened?” There was silence.

Don’t ask me how I know. My old friend and enemy
from the KGB wouldn’t tell me how he knew, and I
didn’t press him. But, accept it as fact from the only source
that could know, just as I did back when I was told, that neither the
secretary of defense nor the director of intelligence had considered a
disclosure like this as even a remote possibility.

“Well, ” President Truman said.
“Do we?”

On November 7, 1944, the day FDR was elected to his fourth and
final term, his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, had described the new
vice president Harry Truman as a man who couldn’t block a hat
but who shouldn’t be underestimated. And James Forrestal, the
man to whom he was speaking at the time, now understood what he meant
as the secretary sat across from the now President Harry Truman.

This was a basic yes/no question, and although Forrestal and
Hillenkoetter had a knee jerk reflex answer, “no, ”
Forrestal quickly saw that it wasn’t that easy. As wartime
administrators their first response was naturally to disclose nothing,
abiding by the old saw that what the people don’t know, they
don’t need to know.  But President Truman, who had
not come from a military background,

had seen something neither Forrestal nor Hillenkoetter had
seen. If these ships could evade our radar and land anywhere at will,
what would stop them from landing in front of the White House or, for
that matter, the Kremlin? Certainly not the U.S. Army Air Force.

“So what do we say when they land, ”
I’m told that Truman continued, “and create more
panic in the streets than if we’d disclosed what we think we
know now?”