The Day After Roswell (18 page)

The U2 Program and Project Corona : Spies in Space

“Of course, General Trudeau has been in touch with
Don and the whole development team here, ”Dr. Fredericks
continued as he watched me open the night vision file that
I’d taken out of my briefcase. “And I’m
aware of the nature of the material you’ve got.
It’s not something we wanted to talk about over the phone.
”

“I appreciate your being discreet about this, Dr.
Fredericks, ” I said. “If you think what
I’m about to show you can help you in the development
process, it’s yours to use. But the arrangement will be that
everything is originated here at Fort Belvoir. All R&D will do
will be to provide the budget necessary to fund this development. You
use your own sources to manufacture the product and take all the credit
for the process. ”

“And this conversation?” Dr. Fredericks
asked.

“Once you tell me you can use what I’ve
brought and we get you the budget you require, ” I began,
“this conversation never took place and you will take my name
off your appointment schedule. ”

“Now you really do have my interest, ” he
said with just the edge of a bemused sarcasm in his voice as if
he’d been down this road many times before. “What
did you bring in that briefcase that’s so secret?”

And with that I held up the first of the army’s 1947
sketches of the night viewer we pulled from the wreckage at Roswell. I
handed it across to Dr. Fredericks, who looked at it and turned it
around with his fingertips as if he were holding one of the Dead Sea
Scrolls.

“You don’t have to be so careful with it,
Dr. Fredericks, ” I said. “I made a few thermal
copies. ”

“Do you have the actual device?” he asked.

“Back at the Pentagon. ”

“Who was wearing this?” he continued.

“At the time, nobody, ” I told him.
“According to the field report, they found this in the sand
near one of the bodies. ”

“Bodies? At the Roswell crash?” Now he was
completely incredulous. “General Trudeau didn’t
tell anyone about bodies. ”

“No, that’s true, ” I said.
“That’s not information we give out. General
Trudeau authorized me to answer any questions you have up to a certain
level of security classification. ”

“We’re not there yet, ” Dr.
Fredericks asked and asserted at the same time.

“But we’re close, ” I suggested.
“I can talk about the device, talk about where it was found,
but that’s probably as far as I can go myself. If General
Trudeau wants to give a background briefing and authorizes me to do so,
then I can go deeper. ”

“Funny, but I always thought Roswell was a kind of
legend. You know, they found something but maybe it was Russian,
” Dr. Fredericks said. Then he asked again if anyone at the
Roswell retrieval had actually seen any of the creatures wearing the
night vision device in the sketches.

“No, ” I said. “There was a lot
of debris that spilled out of the craft. The soldiers on the retrieval
team looked through one of the seams that had been split open running
along the craft’s lengthwise axis and they saw view ports
built into the hull. Well, what astonished them was that when they
looked through the view ports, they could see daylight, or a greenish,
hazy kind of diffused light that looked like dusk, but outside it was
completely dark. ”

Paul Fredericks was on the edge of his seat now.

“No one at the crash site knew anything about the
night viewers the Germans were developing during the war, ” I
explained. “So even the officers on the retrieval team were
amazed at what they were seeing. When they autopsied the alien at the
509th and pulled off these ‘eyepieces,’ is the only
word I can use for them, they realized that they were a complicated set
of reflectors that gathered all the available light and turned them
into night time image intensifiers. ” I continued, pointing
to the sketch in Paul Fredericks’s hands. “Some
medical officer tried to look through it down a darkened hall and it
made the images stand out, but nothing was ever done with it and they
packed it away with the rest of the alien. ”

“Did they perform any analysis on this when they
brought it back?” Fredericks asked.

“Some, ” I told him. “But they
had no facilities at the 509th and had to wait until they brought it
back to Wright. It wasn’t until the intelligence boys at the
Air Material Command got hold of it that they realized that this was
something the Germans were trying to deploy. ”

“But this is far more sophisticated, ” Dr.
Fredericks said. “The Germans weren’t even close to
something like this. ”

“Yes, sir, ” I said. “Not even
close. And that’s what got the intelligence people at Wright
so concerned. Just how close were the Germans about to get when the war
ended? What else had they gotten their hands on? Did they have
help?”

“Or, ” Dr. Fredericks said very slowly,
“did they find a crash just like we found?”

“That’s exactly the point, Dr. Fredericks,
” I said. “What did they find?”

“And if the Germans could get their hands on this
material, what about the Soviets?” he asked. But he was
talking to himself now, talking in a way that made him sound as if he
were really thinking out loud. “Why not the Chinese or any of
our European allies? Just how much of this stuff is out
there?” he finally asked me.

“We don’t have any of those answers,
” I told him. “At least not those of us in the
army. And for obvious reasons nobody’s walking around sharing
this information back and forth among the services or with any other
agencies. We have what we have, and that’s as far as
we’re willing to go. ”

“And you don’t want me talking about this
or trying to sniff around for any information, ” he said.

“If we thought you were going to do that I
wouldn’t even be here, ” I said. “I have
these reports here and descriptions of the device. I’ll leave
them with you. If you think you can work these into your development
program, I’ll have the material itself sent over and then
it’s out of our hands completely. Farm it out to wherever you
want it developed. Offer your defense contractor the right to patent
it. Never tell them where you got it or what its origin might be. As
far as we’re concerned whoever comes up with the night
viewers you ultimately contract with to build can own the whole product
and slap their name on it. All we want to do is get this thing
developed. That’s it. ”

“May I?” Dr. Fredericks asked, reaching
for the reports I’d spread out on the arm of the leather
chair.

I handed them across in a bundle, and he flipped through them
as if he were my old college professor looking at a term paper,
hrumphing, grunting, and nodding at every page.

“That’s more about how they handled the
alien at Wright Field than about the eyepieces themselves, ”
I said. “Because in reality, they didn’t know what
made the thing tick and they didn’t really want to tear it
apart. ”

“So they just threw it in a package?” he
asked.

“Basically, that’s exactly what happened,
” I said. “At first they didn’t know how
it was supposed to work. Or maybe they thought it would turn human
beings blind or something. They were that afraid. After a while, they
just let it stay in dead storage and hoped someone else would take it
off their hands. ”

“And that’d be you, ” Dr.
Fredericks said.

“Actually, ” I told him,
“that’d be you, if you want it. ”

“I need to read this material more thoroughly and
see where we can slip your night vision into the project without
causing a ripple on the surface, ” Dr. Fredericks explained.

“How easy will that be?” I asked.

“At Fort Belvoir, ” he answered,
“teams here are taught to keep their own thoughts to
themselves. If you tell them this is a piece of foreign technology our
intelligence boys got from some other country and we’re
supposed to make it disappear into what we’re doing,
that’s the story. ”

“Nobody asks any questions?” I pushed.

“Nobody asks questions under any circumstances,
” he said. “It would move along faster and create
its own little development bureaucracy if we had the budget to turn it
into a crash development project with a real development phase
deadline. ”

“Then what happens?” I asked.

“It’s just like Santa’s workshop
on the first day of winter. None of the elves looks up from his
workbench until it’s done. Then the next project comes along
and everybody forgets. By the time the troops are wearing these things
in the field and they’re handing out the gold watches over a
prime rib at the Potomac Inn, night vision is just one big happy memory
with the details rewritten to fit the view of history that serves the
moment. No one will ever even guess, Colonel Corso, ” he
said. “From the moment your boys hand the material over, it
goes into the developmental soup at Fort Belvoir and comes out the
other end as a weapon in the field. ”

I stood up and closed my briefcase while he walked around his
desk. “So what are you going to recommend to General
Trudeau?” he asked.

“I’d like to suggest we send the device
over, you come up with the budget you need, and General Trudeau finds
the allocation, ” I said.

“And you?” he said.

“It was a pleasure not meeting you, Dr. Fredericks,
” I told him. “Of course, there will be a liaison
over in Army R&D who will officially be placed in charge of
night vision development. He will report to General Trudeau and
anything I need to know I’ll find out from the general. I
look forward to seeing the development reports as they come out.
Congratulations on your new piece of technology. And congratulations to
the company who winds up with this defense contract. ”

“Congratulations, indeed, ” Dr. Fredericks
said.

We shook hands and he walked me out of his office into the
corridor. For a moment, it was like stepping out of the surreal into
the real. We’d just stitched our own piece of fabric over
reality, created a piece of history. The technology boys in research
and development at Fort Belvoir would receive a device from one of
their consultants who would whisper to them that this was liberated
from one of our enemies. Don’t ask any questions. But it was
just the thing that the lab people at Fort Belvoir were looking for to
show them how a finished device might look. Can they come up with a
reverse engineering plan? Is there a company they’re already
working with on night vision? And within a few months, some company,
whoever it might be, would wind up with a plan in place, a development
budget, and a new identity for the strange looking eyepieces that
turned up in my Roswell files. It might take five or so years, but when
it came rolling off the assembly line somewhere in Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Ohio, or wherever, it would be “Made in the
USA” and I’d read about it in the papers or see it
on television.

Night vision was the first project we actually seeded during
the first year of my tenure at Foreign Technology. It would turn out to
be easier than most because of the history of German development during
the war and the research already done through the 1950s. By the time I
brought the Roswell night viewer to Fort Belvoir, it fit right in
through the seam of an existing development program and no one was the
wiser. The actual weapons development program at Fort Belvoir served as
the cover for the dissemination of Roswell technology so perfectly that
the only distortion anyone could find as he went back through the
history is what might seem like a sudden acceleration in the
development program itself shortly after 1961. Night vision got a boost
in funding, a new officer was assigned to the project by General
Trudeau, and General Trudeau’s name starts turning up on a
regular basis as one of the apparent benefactors of the program. By
1963, when he and I were gone from the Pentagon, the project was at
Martin Marietta Electronics - now part of Lockheed Martin - and already
on its way through the initial deployment that would take place in
Europe and Vietnam..

But I didn’t know that as I drove through the Fort
Belvoir gate and headed back to my Pentagon office. I only felt
satisfied that it looked like we had successfully inserted one of our
own Foreign Technology projects into an ongoing development stream
already under way and had camouflaged our appropriation of a piece of
alien technology. At this point, I believed, we’d kept it out
of the hands of the Soviets for the time being, and the aliens, if they
were monitoring what we were doing, maybe didn’t know what we
were doing with it either. It would give us time.

I headed north along the Potomac and through the green woods
of Fairfax County, Virginia, back to a desk that was quickly piling up
with other projects that needed disposition. One of them, which was
running parallel with the night vision I’d just handed off,
was the embryonic “Project Corona, ” an idea whose
time was suddenly thrust upon us by the shooting down of a U2
surveillance plane and the capture of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

The air force and the CIA had been running the U2 program for
awhile during the Eisenhower administration, and the reports and photos
routinely crossed my desk at the National Security Council. Like so
many other events during the Cold War, the U2 didn’t have
just a single purpose, the surveillance of the Soviet Union to monitor
their guided missile development program. It had a triple intent. Of
course, we wanted to know exactly what the Soviets were up to, but we
also wanted to test their air defense capability. We wanted to know how
accurately their radars could track the U2 and whether any of their
missiles could bring it down. So we deliberately provoked them by
making our presence known when we wanted them to fire at us. Could they
shoot us down? Cameras on the U2 picked up the launch of enemy surface
to air missiles as the pilot flew over sensitive installations where
the Soviets had to challenge us or cede to us the control of top
classified zones in their airspace.