The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  General Trudeau’s questions forced me to ask myself what the big picture was that he saw. He was obviously looking for something in my descriptions of the architecture of the group, as I had learned it from my review of the history, and of the staffers on the lower security classification periphery as I understood it from my experience at the White House. He really wanted to know how the bureaucracy worked, how much activity the group itself generated, what kinds of policy questions came up in my presence, and whether I was asked to comment informally on anything having to do with the issues of the group.

  Did Admiral Hillenkoetter host many briefings for President Eisenhower where Generals Twining, Smith, Montague, and Vandenburg were present? Gen. W. B. Smith had replaced Secretary Forrestal after he committed suicide during the second year of the Truman administration. Were Professor Menzel and Drs. Bush and Berkner visitors to the White House on regular occasions? Did they meet at the White House with Admiral Hillenkoetter or the generals? What was the level of presence of the CIA staffers at the White House through all of this? And did I recognize anyone from the Joint Research and Development Board or the Atomic Energy Commission at any briefings chaired by Admiral Hillenkoetter?

  Through General Trudeau’s questions I could see not only that the general knew his history almost as well as I did about how the original group was formed and how it must have operated, but he also had a sense of what kind of problem was facing the military R&D and how much leeway he had to solve it. Like most ad hoc creations of government, the group must have at some point become as self-serving as every other joint committee eventually became the longer it functioned and the more its job increased. As the camouflage about flying disks grew, so did the role of the group. Only the group didn’t have the one thing most government committees had: the ability to draw upon other areas of the government for more resources. This group was above top secret and, officially, had no right to exist. Therefore, as its functions grew over the next ten years to encompass the investigations of more flying saucer sightings and the research into more encounters with alien aircraft or with the extraterrestrials themselves, its resources became stretched so thin that it had to create reasons for drawing upon other areas of the government.

  Accordingly, task-defined subgroups were formed to handle specific areas of investigation or research. These had to have had lower security classifications even if only because the number of personnel involved couldn’t have been cleared that quickly to respond to the additional work the group was taking on. In fact, the work of the group must have become unmanageable. Bits and pieces of information slipped out, and the group had to determine what it could let go into the public record and what had to be protected at all costs. As in the story about the shacks, the group members retreated to create new protected structures for the information they had to preserve.

  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 cov
ered 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 insofar 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 and 1960s, 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 counterespionage 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 counterintelligence 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 covert 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.”

  “So how do you recommend we operate?” he asked. I think he already figured out what I was saying but wanted me to spell it out so we could start moving my nut file out of the Pentagon and out of the encroaching shadow of the CIA.

  “We start the same way this desk has always started: with reports,” I said. “I’ll write up reports on the alien technology just like it’s an intelligence report on any piece of foreign technology. What I see, what I think the potential may be, where we might be able to develop, what company we should take it to, and what kind of contract we should draw up.”