The Day After Roswell (11 page)

The official camouflage was sagging under the weight of the
information the group had to investigate and the pressure of time they
were allotted. Soon the military representatives found, just as we did
in Korea, that they really couldn’t trust the career
intelligence people, especially the CIA, because they seemed to have a
different agenda. Maybe the military became resistant to giving up all
the information it was collecting independently to the central group?
Maybe, in the absence of any actual legislation establishing how the
group’s work was to be paid for, the military saw valuable
and fundable weapons opportunities slip through its fingers to the
CIA’s budget? Maybe - and I know this is what happened - a
power struggle developed within the group itself.

The whole structure of the working group had changed, too,
since the late 1940s when it was formed. What started out as a
close-knit group of old friends from prep school had become an
unmanageable mess within five years. Many pieces of the pie were
floating around, and the different military branches wanted to break
off chunks of the black budget so that you needed an entire
administration just to manage the managers of the cover-up. Therefore,
at some point near the middle of the Eisenhower administration, seams
opened up in the grand camouflage scheme where nobody knew what anybody
else was doing. Because of the cover-up, nobody really had a need to
know, so nobody knew anything. The only people who wanted to get their
hands on information and hardware belonged to the CIA, but nobody, even
those who vaguely understood what had happened fourteen years earlier,
trusted the CIA. Officially, then, nobody knew nothing and nothing
happened.

Through the 1950s a cascade effect developed. What had started
out as a single-purpose camouflage operation was breaking up into
smaller units. Command and control functions started to weaken and,
just like a submarine that breaks up on the bottom of the ocean, debris
in the form of information bubbled to the surface. Army CIC, once a
powerful force to keep the Roswell story itself suppressed, had
weakened under the combined encroachments of the CIA and the FBI. It
was during this period that my old friend J. Edgar Hoover, never happy
at being kept out of any loop, jumped into the circle and very quietly
began investigating the Roswell incident. This shook things up, and
very soon afterward, other government agencies - the ones with official
reporting responsibilities - began poking around as well.

For all intents and purposes, the original scheme to
perpetrate a camouflage was defunct by the late 1950s. Its functions
were now being managed by series of individual groups within the
military and civilian intelligence agencies, all still sharing limited
information with each other, each pursuing its own individual research
and investigation, and each - astonishingly - still acting as if some
super intelligence group was still in command. But, like the Wizard of
Oz, there was no super intelligence group. Its functions had been
absorbed by the groups beneath it. But nobody bothered to tell anyone
because a super group was never supposed to exist officially in the
first place. That which did not exist officially could not go out of
existence officially. Hence, right through the next forty years, the
remnants of what once was a super group went through the motions, but
the real activities were carried out by individual agencies that
believed on blind faith that they were being managed by higher-ups.
Remember the lines of cars at gas pumps during the fuel shortage of
1973 when one driver, thinking a gas station was open, would wait at a
pump and within fifteen minutes scores of other cars pulled up behind
him? Lines a mile long formed behind pumps that were never open because
there was no gas. That’s what the great flying saucer
camouflage was like by the time President Kennedy was inaugurated.

“There’s nobody home, Phil, ”
General Trudeau told me as we compared our notes at that
morning’s briefing. “Nobody home except us. We have
to make our own policy. ”

I was a soldier and followed orders, but Trudeau was a
general, the product of a political process, stamped with congressional
approval, and reporting to a civilian executive. Generals are made by
the government, not by the army. They sit between the government and
the vast military machine and from the Army Chief of Staff all the way
down to the brigadiers at bases around the world, generals create the
way military policy is supposed to work. And on the morning of this
briefing over cups of coffee in his inner office of the third floor of
the Pentagon, Lieutenant General Trudeau was going to make policy and
do the very thing that over ten years of secret work groups and
committees and  research planning had failed to do : exploit
the Roswell technology.

“I need you to tell me you found a way to make
something out of this mess, ” General Trudeau told me.
“There must be some piece of technology in your file
that’ll make a weapon, that we can use for one of our
helicopters. What do we have in there, Phil?” Then he said.
“Time is now of the essence. We have to do something because
nobody else will. ”

In the great cloud of unknowing that had descended upon the
Pentagon with respect to the Roswell package, the five or six of us in
the navy, air force, and army who actually knew what we had
didn’t confide in anyone outside his own branch of the
military and certainly didn’t talk to the CIA. So, in a way
that could only happen inside the military bureaucracy, the cover-up
became covered up from the cover-up, leaving the few of us in the know
free to do whatever we wanted.

General Trudeau and I were all alone out there in so far as
the package went. Whatever vestige of the group remained had simply
lost track of the material delivered to Foreign Technology fourteen
years earlier. And the general was right, nobody was home and our
enemies inside government were capitalizing on whatever information
they could find. The Roswell package was one of the prizes, and if we
didn’t do anything with it, the Russians would. And they were
onto us.

Our own military intelligence personnel told us that the
Soviets were trafficking so heavily in our military secrets that they
knew things about us in the Kremlin before we knew them in Congress.
The army at least knew the KGB had penetrated the CIA, and the
leadership of the CIA had been an integral part of the working group on
flying disks since the early 1950s. Thus, whatever secrets the group
thought they had, they certainly weren’t secrets to the KGB.

But here’s what kept the roof from falling in on all
of us. The KGB and the CIA weren’t really the adversaries
everybody thought them to be. They spied on each other, but for all
practical purposes, and also because each agency had thoroughly
penetrated the other, they behaved just like the same organization.
They were all professional spies in a single extended agency playing
the same intelligence game and trafficking in information. Information
is power to be used. You don’t simply give it away to your
government’s political leadership, whether it’s the
Republicans, the Tories, or the Communists, just because they tell you
to. You can’t trust the politicians, but you can trust other
spies. At least that’s what spies believe, so their primary
loyalty is to their own group and the other groups playing the same
game. The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other
foreign intelligence agencies were loyal to themselves and to the
profession first and to their respective governments last.

That’s one of the reasons we in the military knew
that the professional KGB leadership, not the Communist Party officers
who were only inside for political reasons, were keeping as much
information from the Soviet government as the CIA was keeping from our
government. Professional spy organizations like the CIA and the KGB
tend to exist only to preserve themselves, and that’s why
neither the U.S. military nor the Russian military trusted them. If you
look at how the great spy wars of the Cold War played out
you’ll see how the KGB and CIA acted like one organization:
lots of professional courtesy, lots of shared information to make sure
nobody got fired, and a few human sacrifices now and then just to keep
everybody honest. But when it came down to loyalty, the CIA was loyal
to the KGB and vice versa.

I believe they had a rationale for what they did. I know they
thought the rest of us were too stupid to keep the world safe and that
by sharing information they kept us out of a nuclear war. I believe
this because I knew enough KGB agents during my time and got enough
bits and pieces of information off the record to give me a picture of
the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s that’s very
different from what you’d read on the front page of the New
York Times.

CIA penetration by the KGB and what amounted to their joint
spying on the military was a fact we accepted during the 1950s
and1960s, even though most of us in the Pentagon played spy versus spy
as much as we could; those of us, like me, who’d gone to
intelligence school during the war and knew some of the counter
espionage tricks that kept the people watching you guessing. We would
change our routes to work, always used false information stories as
bait to test phones we weren’t sure about, swept our offices
for listening devices, always used a code when talking with one another
about sensitive subjects. We had a counter intelligence agent in the
military attaché‘s office over at the Russian
consulate in Washington whose friends in the Soviet army trusted the
KGB less than I did. If my name came up associated with a story,
he’d let me know it. But he’d never tell the CIA. Believe it or not, in the capital of my very own country,
that kind of information helped me stay alive.

It was very disconcerting that the CIA had a tail on me all
throughout my four year tenure at the White House. I was mad about it,
but there was nothing much I chose to do. Then, when I came back to
Washington in 1961 to work for General Trudeau, they put the tail back
on and I led him down every back alley and rough neighborhood in D.C.
that I could. He wouldn’t shake. So the next day, after I
told my boss what I was going to do, I  led my faceless
pursuer right to Langley, Virginia, past a sputtering secretary, and
straight into the office of my old adversary, the director of cover
operations Frank Wiesner, one of the best friends the KGB ever had. I
told Wiesner to his face that yesterday was the last day I would walk
around Washington without a handgun. And I put my .45 automatic on his
desk. I said if I saw his tail on me tomorrow, they’d find
him in the Potomac the next day with two bloody holes for eyes; that
is, if they bothered to look for him. Wiesner said, “You
won’t do that, Colonel. ” But I reminded him very
pointedly that I knew where all his bodies were buried, the people
he’d gotten killed through his own ineptitude and, worse, his
cooperation with the Russians. I’d tell his story to everyone
I knew in Congress. Wiesner backed down. Subsequently, on a trip to
London, Wiesner committed suicide and was found hanging in his hotel
room. I never did tell his story. Two years later in 1963, one of
Wiesner’s friends at the agency told me that it was
“all in good fun, Phil. ” Part of an elaborate
recruitment process to get me into the CIA after I retired from the
army. But I went to work for Senator Strom Thurmond on the Foreign
Relations Committee and then Senator Richard Russell on the Warren
Commission instead.

Our collective experience dodging the CIA and the KGB only
meant that when General Trudeau wanted the CIA kept out of our
deliberations at all cost, it was because he knew that everything we
discussed would be a topic of conversation at the KGB within twenty
four hours, faster if it were serious enough for the KGB to get their
counterparts in the CIA to throw a monkey wrench into things.

How do I know all this? The same way I knew how the KGB stayed
one step ahead of us during the Korean War and were able to advise
their friends, the North Koreans, how to hold POWs back during the
exchange. We had leaks inside the Kremlin just like they had leaks
inside the White House. What General Trudeau and I knew in Army R&D, our counterparts in the navy and air
force also believed. The CIA was the enemy. You trust no one. So when
it became clear to the general even before 1961 that no one remembered
what the army had appropriated at Roswell, whatever we had was ours to
develop according to our own strategy. But we had to do it so as not to
allow the CIA, and ultimately our government’s enemies, to
appropriate it from us. So when General Trudeau said we have to run
radio silent on the Roswell package, I knew exactly what he was talking
about.

Logic, and clearly not my military genius, dictated the
obvious course. If nobody knows what you have, don’t announce
it. But if you think you can make something out of what you have, make
it. Use any resources at your disposal, but don’t say
anything to anyone about what you’re doing. The only people
in the room when we came up with our plan were the general and myself,
and he promised, “I won’t say anything if you
don’t, Phil. ”

“There’s nobody in here but us brooms,
General, ” I answered.

So we began to devise a strategy.

“Hypothetically, Phil, ” Trudeau laid the
question out. “What’s the best way to exploit what
we have without anybody knowing we’re doing anything
special?”

“Simple, General, ” I answered.
“We don’t do anything special. ”

“You have a plan?” he asked.

“More of an idea than a plan, ” I began.
“But it starts like this. It’s what you asked : If
we don’t want anybody to think we’re doing anything
out of the ordinary, we don’t do anything out of the
ordinary. When General Twining made his original recommendations to
President Truman and the army, he didn’t suggest they do
anything with this nut file other than what they ordinarily do.
Business as usual? That’s how this whole secret group
operated. Nobody did anything special. What they did was organize
according to a business plan even though the operation was something
that hadn’t been done before. That’s the
camouflage: don’t change a thing but use your same procedures
to handle this alien technology. ”