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CHAPTER 5
The Cover-up
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 naivete 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?”
“But we really don’t know anything, “ the director of intelligence
said. “Not a thing until we analyze what we’ve retrieved. “
But both the secretary of defense and director of intelligence
agreed with President Truman that he was right to be skeptical,
especially on his final point about disclosure.
“So can we postpone coming to any conclusions at least until after
you’ve meet with General Twining?”
Admiral Hillenkoetter asked. “I think he’ll provide some of the
answers we’re all looking for. “
While Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter and James Forrestal were briefing
President Truman on their plan for the working group, Gen. Nathan P.
Twining was completing his preliminary analysis of the reports and
material sent to Wright Field. Almost immediately, he dispatched the
remains of the aliens to the Bethesda Naval Hospital and the Walter
Reed Army Hospital for further analysis by the two military
services.
The aircraft itself remained at Wright Field but, as he
would promise in his memo to the Army Air Forces command, General
Twining was preparing to distribute the material from the wreckage
among the different military and civilian bureaus for further
evaluation. He’d already been cautioned by Admiral Hillenkoetter
that new security classifications had been put in place regarding
the Roswell intelligence package. No one within the military other
than names he would receive from the President himself had the full
security clearance to learn the complete story. about Roswell that
Twining would deliver to the President and other members of a
working group.
Within three months after he’d been dispatched to New Mexico to
learn what had happened at Roswell, General Twining met with
President Truman, as Hillenkoetter and Forrestal had suggested, and
explained exactly what he believed the army had pulled out of the
desert. It was almost beyond comprehension, he described to the
President, nothing that could have come from this planet. If the
Russians were working on something like this, it was so secret that
not even their own military commanders knew anything about it, and
the United States would have to establish a crash program just to
prepare a defense. So it was Twining’s assessment that what they
found outside of Roswell was, in his words, “not of this earth. “
Now President Truman had heard it, he told
Forestall after Twining
had left for Ohio, “directly from the horse’s mouth, “ and he was
convinced. This was bigger than the Manhattan Project and required
that it be managed on a larger scale and obviously for a longer
period.
The group proposed by Forrestal and Hillenkoetter had to
consider what they were really managing and for how long. Were they
only trying to keep one secret - that an extraterrestrial alien
spaceship crashed at Roswell - or were they hiding what would
quickly become the largest military R&D undertaking in history, the
management of what would become America’s relationship with
extraterrestrials?
General Twining had made it clear in his preliminary analysis that
they were investigating the whole phenomenon of flying disks,
including Roswell and any other encounter that happened to take
place. These were hostile entities, the general said, who, if they
were on a peaceful mission, would have not avoided contact by taking
evasive maneuvers even as they penetrated our airspace and observed
our most secret military installations.
They had a technology vastly
superior to ours, which we had to study and exploit in case they
turned more aggressive. If we were forced to fight a war in outer
space, we would have to understand the nature of the enemy better,
especially if it came to preparing the American people for an enemy
they had to face. So investigate first, he suggested, but prepare
for the day when the whole undertaking would have to be disclosed.
This, Truman could understand. He had trusted Twining to manage this
potential crisis from the moment Forrestal had alerted him that the
crash had taken place. And Twining had done a brilliant job. He kept
the lid on the story and brought back everything that he could under
one roof.
He understood as Twining described to him the strangeness
of the spacecraft that seemed to have no engines, no fuel, nor any
apparent methods of propulsion, yet out flew our fastest fighters;
the odd childlike creatures who were inside and how one of them was
killed by a gunshot; the way you could see daylight through the
inside of the craft even though the sun had not yet risen; the
swatches of metallic fabric that they couldn’t burn or melt; thin
beams of light that you couldn’t see until they hit an object and
then burned right through it, and on and on; more questions than
answers. It would take years to find these answers, Twining had
said, and it was beyond the immediate capacity of our military to do
anything about it. This will take a lot of man power, the general
said, and most of the work will have to be done in secret.
General Twining showed photographs of these alien beings and autopsy
reports that suggested they were too human; they had to be related
to our species in some way. They were obviously intelligent and able
to communicate, witnesses at the scene had reported, by some sort of
thought projection unlike any mental telepathy you’d see at a
carnival show. We didn’t know whether they came from a planet like
Mars in our own solar system or from some galaxy we could barely see
with our strongest telescopes. But they possessed a military
technology whose edges we could understand and exploit, even if only
for self defense against the Soviets. But by studying what these
extraterrestrials had we might be able to build a defense system
against them as well.
At the very least, Twining had suggested, the crescent shaped craft
looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had
seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had
bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his conversations
with Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after
the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be thought of as but
intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had
engineered.
No, the similarity between
the Horten wing and the craft
they had pulled out of the arroyo was no accident. We always
wondered how the Germans were able to incorporate such advanced
technology into their weapons development in so short a time and
during the Great Depression. Did they have help? Maybe we were now
as lucky as the Germans and broke off a piece of this technology for
ourselves. With an acceleration capability and maneuverability we’d
never seen before, this craft would keep American aircraft engineers
busy for years just incorporating what they could see into immediate
designs.
The issue of security was paramount, but so were questions of
disclosure, the President reminded him. This thing was too big to
hide and getting bigger all the time while reporters were just like
dogs on a scent. So just putting a higher security classification on
it and threatening anybody who came too close wasn’t enough to hide
a secret this big. You couldn’t prevent leaks, and eventually it
would all have to come out anyway. General Twining should think
about that before the group made any final decisions, the President
advised.
By the middle of September it was obvious to every member
of President Truman’s working group, which included the following:
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Central Intelligence Director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter
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Secretary of
Defense James Forrestal
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Lt. Gen. Nathan
Twining of the AAF and then USAF Air Materiel Command
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Professor
Donald Menzel, Harvard astronomer and
Naval Intelligence cryptography expert
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Vannevar Bush, Joint Research
and Development Board Chairman
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Detlev Bronk, Chairman of the National Research Council and
biologist who would ultimately be named to
the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics
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Gen. Robert Montague, who was General Twining’s classmate at West
Point, Commandant of Fort Bliss with
operational control over the command at White Sands
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Gordon Gray,
President Truman’s Secretary of the Army
and chairman of the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board
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Sidney Souers, Director of the National Security Council
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Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Central Intelligence Group Director prior to
Roscoe Hillenkoetter and then USAF Chief of
Staff in 1948
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Jerome Hunsaker, aircraft engineer and Director of the National
Advisory Committee on Aeronautics
-
Lloyd
Berkner, member of the Joint Research and Development Board
Unless this group established a long term plan for protecting and
developing the Roswell project, the secrets would soon leak out. I
understand that it was General Twining who pointed out to the group
that, in fact, the story had already leaked out. It was leaked, he
said, hours after the crash and then retracted. In fact, people were
still talking about it in New Mexico, but after the army’s weather
balloon story, the national newspapers were treating the flying disk
reports as the delusions of people who had seen too many Buck Rogers
movies. The national press was already doing the committee’s work.
What was really needed, Twining suggested, was a method for
gathering the information about continuing UFO activity - especially
crashes, high probability sightings by pilots or the military, or
actual physical encounters with individuals - and surreptitiously
filtering that information to the group while coming up with
practical explanations that would turn unidentified flying disks
into completely identifiable and explainable phenomena.
Under the cover of explaining away all the flying disk activity, the
appropriate agencies represented by members
of the working group would be free to research the real flying disk
phenomenon as they deemed appropriate. But through it all, Twining
stressed, there had to be a way of maintaining full deniability of
the flying disk phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a
disclosure by gradually desensitizing them to the potential terror
of confronting a more powerful biological entity from a different
world. It would have to be, General Twining suggested, at the same
time both the greatest cover-up and greatest public relations
program ever undertaken.
The group agreed that these were the requirements of the endeavor
they would undertake. They would form nothing less than a government
within the government, sustaining itself from presidential
administration to presidential administration regardless of whatever
political party took power, and ruthlessly guarding their secrets
while evaluating every new bit of information on flying saucers they
received. But at the same time, they would allow disclosure of some
of the most farfetched information, whether true or not, because it
would help create a climate of public attitude that would be able to
accept the existence of extraterrestrial life without a general
sense of panic.
“It will be, “ General Twining said, “a case where the cover-up is
the disclosure and the disclosure is the coverup. Deny everything,
but let the public sentiment take its course. Let skepticism do our
work for us until the truth becomes common acceptance. “
Meanwhile, the group agreed to establish an information gathering
project, ultimately named Blue Book and
managed explicitly by the air force, which would serve public
relations purposes by allowing individuals to file
reports on flying disk sightings. While the Blue Book field officers
attributed commonplace explanations to
the reported sightings, the entire project was a mechanism to
acquire photographic records of flying saucer activity for
evaluation and research. The most intriguing sightings that had the
highest probability of being truly unidentified objects would be
bumped upstairs to the working group for dissemination to the
authorized agencies carrying on the research. For my purposes, when
I entered the Pentagon, the general category of all flying disk
phenomena research and evaluation was referred to simply as “foreign
technology. “
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