The Day After Roswell (35 page)

While scientists from the 1950s through the 1970s argued over
the cost of such a weapon and whether an antiballistic missile weapon
would destabilize the otherwise stable world of mutual nuclear
deterrence, others who understood the real threat from outer space
argued that there were enemies besides the Soviet Union who might
someday acquire the technology to launch nuclear missiles against the
United States. No one would dare say that we had to defend ourselves
against flying saucers. In fact, it wasn’t until the election
of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that the particle beam weapon received another
pulse of life as part of the hotly debated but ultimately successful
strategy of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.
” Amid the guffaws from some political quarters and the hand
wringing from people who thought the thing simply cost too much money,
President Reagan managed to prevail. Just the strategy of Star Wars
itself and the limited deployment and testing of some of the components
were enough to put the United States on a wartime footing with the EBEs
and show the Soviets that we finally had a real nuclear deterrent.

The full story behind the SDI and the way it changed the Cold
War and forced the extraterrestrials to change the strategies for this
planet is a story that’s never been told. But as spectacular
and fantastic as it may sound, the story behind the limited deployment
of the SDI is the story of how humanity won its first victory against a
more powerful and technologically superior enemy who discovered, to
whatever version of shock it experiences, that there was real trouble
down on its farm.

Star Wars

Toward the spring of 1962, General Trudeau told me of his
intention to retire. He was not going to be the commander of U.S.
forces in Vietnam, he’d been told. The old man had charged up
too many hills during his years in the army, rifle in hand, and fired
back in the face of the enemy. Whatever he felt inside him, and General
Trudeau was only human and nothing more, he never showed fear. He was
unrelenting in the execution of his orders, unyielding when people
opposed him, and he never ducked away from a fight. Those who knew him
either respected or feared him, but they never discounted him. A West
Point graduate, he was born into a generation of U.S. military officers
who had absolutely no doubts about what was right and what was wrong,
and he marched through two wars and a series of commands, including the
head of U.S. Army Intelligence, secure in the knowledge that he was on
the right side.

These were great qualities in a wartime commander, but, as
both General Trudeau and I found out, they could be the very things
that make you vulnerable in a Cold War army of politicians angling for
power as they fought an enemy who could not be seen and whose presence
was only indirectly felt.

“There are no more Pork Chop Hills, Phil,
” General Trudeau told me after he had learned that General
Maxwell Taylor with the support of the army leadership had passed him
over for the South Vietnam command. It meant that this was his last
command and that he would retire as lieutenant general. “And
I’m afraid this is a war the army’s going to fight
by means of a political process instead of on the killing field.
”

“We would win it if we were going there, General,
” I said, fury welling up in my chest. “You and I
know what we learned in Korea. ”

Maybe the general could see my face getting flushed because he
said, “No, we probably would have gotten court-martialed
because of what we learned in Korea. Just think what they would do to
us if we were to win the war. ” Then he laughed in a way that
told me he was looking forward to his retirement. “We would
have made the Communists look bad. You know you can’t do
that, Phil. ”

Even as we were speaking that afternoon toward the end of the
summer, another Soviet trawler was heaving to at the entrance to the
port of Havana, awaiting instructions for the off loading of its cargo
while another one of our surveillance planes was circling high overhead
snapping away its photos of the tarpaulins coming off the ICBMs laid
out on the ship’s afterdeck. I didn’t know it yet,
but a sequence of events was unfolding that would swirl me into one of
the biggest controversies of my life just as the chilling truth about
the attempts to colonize our planet and the harvesting of human beings
and animals that were still going on made itself all too clear. A
showdown was coming. It was just over the horizon. No one could see it,
but a handful of us knew that something was stirring the waters just
below the surface.

General Trudeau was saying his good-byes and started counting
the days until he would change his uniform for civilian clothes and his
office in the Pentagon for a corporate executive suite that befitted
his experience as the commanding officer of some of our
military’s most important divisions. He had been at the helm
of R&D for six years after having commanded Army Intelligence
for three years before that. Although the general didn’t
explicitly comment much on the incredible facts we had uncovered in the
Roswell file because he considered it just part of his job, he did joke
about it from time to time with his old friend Senator Strom Thurmond.
More than once, I would take the back door into his inner office only
to find Senator Thurmond and General Trudeau sitting on his couch and
looking me up and down as I walked in.

“Art, ” Senator Thurmond would drawl,
barely hiding his Cheshire cat smile, “what spooky things you
think old Phil’s been into?”

“You been inside your junk file,‘
Phil?” the general would ask.

“I would guess that you’re able to tell
the future, Phil, ” Senator Thurmond said. “With
what you’re readin‘ you can predict any-thing.
”

“Just acting like a good intelligence officer,
Senator, ” I said, being as correct and noncommittal as
possible in the presence of my commanding officer. “My job is
to read intelligence and make analyses. ”

“Well, they ain’t got nuthin‘ on
you, Phil, ” the senator said, and everybody in the room knew
exactly what “they” meant even if we
weren’t allowed to talk about “them” in
public.

As for me? I was preparing my files for General Beech, the
incoming chief of research and development, knowing that my own
retirement would come at the end of 1962. So I would prepare to go
silent about Roswell while setting up a run of about six months to push
as many projects through as I could, including whatever was left in my
nut file. Only I didn’t call it a nut file or anything after
General Trudeau left. My new boss and I had a tacit agreement not to
broadcast anything about Roswell or the files.

As the summer of 1962 came to an end, ominous reports were
circulating all through Washington concerning Soviet freighters making
their way into Cuban waters. The traffic was intense, but there was no
response from our intelligence people on what was happening. The CIA
was completely mum, and the word making its way through the Pentagon
was that we were getting slapped around by the Soviets and were going
to sit still for it. Whatever it was, friends of mine in Army
Intelligence were saying, the CIA was going to downplay it because the
Kennedy administration didn’t want a confrontation with the
Soviet Union.

What was it? I kept asking, knowing all the while that the
Soviets must have been playing around with something in Cuba and
that’s why there were so many ships. Were they massing troops
there? Was it a series of military exercises? My answer came in a
shocking series of photographs, unmistakable surveillance photographs,
that were leaked to me by my friends in an office of Army Intelligence
so deep inside the Pentagon and so secret that you weren’t
even allowed to take notes inside the room. I was asked, by officers
who may still be alive and therefore shall go unnamed, to take a good look at
the photographs they had developed from the spy planes over Cuba. They
said, “Memorize these, Colonel, because nobody can make any
copies here. ” I couldn’t believe my eyes as I
looked down at the glossies and then ran a magnifying glass over them
just to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things. Nope, there
they were, Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles of the latest
vintage. These babies could take out Washington in just minutes, and
yet there they were, sitting outside of hangars only a few miles from
our marine base at Guantanamo Bay.

Had Gen. Curtis LeMay seen these photos, I had to ask myself?
LeMay, a veteran of Korean bombing runs, should have been drooling over
his desk at the prospect of bombing the hell out of Castro just for
thinking he could even park IRBMs so close to U.S. airspace. Yet no
reaction from Washington at all. The army had nothing to say, the air
force had nothing to say, and my navy friends were simply unresponsive.
Somebody was putting the lid on this, and I was getting deeply worried.
So I called one of my friends, New York senator Kenneth Keating, and
asked him what he knew.

“What do you mean missiles, Colonel
Corso?” he asked. “What missiles, where?”

It was October 1962.

“In Cuba, Senator, ” I said.
“They’re sitting in Cuba waiting to be deployed on
launchers. Don’t you know?”

The truth was Senator Keating did not, nor did Representative
Mike Feighan, whom I also called. Both legislators knew better than to
ask me where I found the photos or who gave them to me, but before they
did or said anything, they wanted to know why I believed them to be
authentic.

“They come from our best resources, ” I
told them. “I could pick out the missiles myself. I know what
they look like. And it’s not just a single photo but a series
over weeks of tracking the delivery of them on the decks of Soviet
freighters. They’re unmistakable, very damning. ”

Senator Keating asked whether I knew for sure that President
Kennedy had been informed of the presence of the missiles, but I told
him there was no way of knowing. Privately, I would have been shocked
if intelligence sources had kept this information away from the
President because there were so many intelligence pathways to the Oval
Office the President would have found out no matter who tried to keep the information away. So it was pretty clear to
me that the administration was trying to keep the news from the
American people so that neither the Russians nor the Cubans would be
embarrassed and have their backs against the wall.

I also knew that by going to Senator Keating and
Representative Feighan I was taking a huge risk. I was leaking
information outside the military and executive chains of command to the
legislative branch. But, that same April, I had already testified to
Senator Dirksen’s committee on the administration of the
Internal Security Act that it was my belief - and I had proof to back
it up - that our intelligence services, particularly the Board of
Estimate, had been penetrated by the KGB and as a result we lost a war
in Korea that we should have won. The testimony was regarded as
classified and was never released. But it made its way to Attorney
General Robert Kennedy, who promised me, in a private interview at the
Justice Department, that he would personally make sure his brother, the
President, read it. Now here it was a little more than six months later
and whatever intelligence information the President was getting about a
serious Soviet threat to U.S. security, it was clear that unless
somebody stopped them, the Russians were going to get away with it. Not
on my watch.

President Kennedy had gone up to Hyannis Port, and the vice
president, Lyndon Johnson, a friend of Ken Keating’s from his
days as Senate majority leader, was completely out of the
decision-making loop within the White House. The rumors were that
because of his association with Bobby Baker, there was going to be an
investigation of the vice president and he might return as a member of
the ticket in1964. So Senator Keating didn’t recommend going
to Lyndon Johnson with this information. Besides, we had to get it
right in front of the public so it couldn’t be swept away,
leaving the White House free to ignore it until it was too late to
force the Soviets’ hand. This was a gamble, of course,
because the whole world could explode in our faces, but I knew that the
only way to deal with the Russians was put their noses in it and teach
them a lesson. Had we done that in Korea the way MacArthur wanted to,
there probably wouldn’t have been a Vietnam War.

One of my old friends in the Washington press corps was Paul
Scott, the syndicated political columnist whose pieces appeared in the
Boston Globe and the Washington Post. If we gave him the story, it
would find its way into the Globe and the Post at the same time, right in the President’s face and forcing him to act. I
didn’t enjoy this, but there was no other way. So Senator
Keating, Mike Feighan, and I coordinated strategy. I called Scott and
told him I had seen some photos and had an interpretation he needed to
hear. We met, not at the Pentagon, and I described to him the copies of
the photos that I had seen and explained, in very general terms and
without revealing anything classified about our surveillance apparatus,
how they were taken, why they were authentic, and what they meant.

“You understand that when I saw these cylinders,
” I said to him, drawing on a notepad the tiny barrels in the
photos on the deck of a ship, “these are intermediate range
ballistic missiles that can hit Washington, New York, or Boston within
fifteen minutes after launch. We don’t even detect these
babies until they’re just below orbit and coming down. That
gives us maybe five minutes to get under our desks. But with nuclear
warheads on them, anybody sitting anywhere near where they detonate is
not going to be protected. ”

“What’s the point?” he asked.
“Why would the Cubans want to get into a war with the United
States?”

“It’s not the Cubans, ” I
explained. “It’s Soviet blackmail.
They’re not going to turn a bunch of missiles over to Fidel
Castro and put the trigger for a nuclear war in someone
else’s hand. The Soviets will have complete control,
they’ll have their own troops on the island, and
they’ll threaten to launch them if we or anybody tries to
throw Castro out. ”

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“Because, ” I said hoping for a sense of
outrageous indignation in him that would motivate him to action,
“the President already knows and won’t do anything
about it. ”

I was right; the newspaperman was in shock. He half suspected
that Kennedy wanted to avoid any and all confrontation until he made it
to his second term, but this was outright capitulation, he said.
“He can’t get away with it. ”

“Oh, yes, he can, ” I warned him.
“If we don’t get the story out, it goes away. The
President’s sticking his head in the sand and hoping nobody
pulls it out. You have to run this in the Globe right when
he’s in Massachusetts and force him to confront it. He flies
back to Washington and it’s in the Post. Then the Soviets
know that he knows and it’s all a complete mess. ”

“But what if this sets off a war, ” Scott
said.

“Over Cuba? Listen, not even Khrushchev’s
own people are  willing to sacrifice Moscow for Havana,
” I told him. “It’s a Russian gambit
because the RGB told Khrushchev he could get away with it.
He’s punishing us for the U2 and the Bay of Pigs. We have to
standup to the Russians right here and now because if we
don’t the Cold War’s over and we lost.
It’s all about territory, and if we don’t defend
our own hemisphere, we lose. If we make them back down, humiliate them,
we win. ”