The Day After Roswell

by William J. Birnes

  “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 anything.”

  “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 Guantánamo 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 in 1964. 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 KGB told Khrushchev he could get away with it. He’s punishing us for the U2 and the Bay of Pigs. We have to stand up 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.”

  The story ran in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post within days, forcing the President back to Washington to confront a crisis that would go down in history as one of the defining moments of the Kennedy administration. Robert Kennedy knew that the White House was getting faulty intelligence from the CIA, and John Kennedy knew that he had to strike a middle course between the CIA people who told him everything would be OK if he let Khrushchev off the hook and his own air force chief, Curtis LeMay, who wanted him to invade Cuba.

  Very wisely, President Kennedy didn’t invade Cuba. He also didn’t back down, at least in public. Our blockade of Cuba turned the Russian navy around and humiliated Nikita Khrushchev, whose gambit had failed. President Kennedy traded off some obsolete missiles in Turkey to give Khrushchev something he could take back to the Kremlin. But we knew all along that when we deployed our Polaris submarines in the Mediterranean and North Seas, we’d have more firepower packed and ready to go against the Soviets than we ever had in Turkey, and the Soviets wouldn’t even know it was there. Besides, we knew the Turks would never let us fire our missiles against the Russians from their soil. They were afraid that the Russians would use the missiles as an excuse to attack Turkey, but the Kremlin knew that, too, and knew we wanted an excuse to get out of Turkey graciously.

  So it worked all the way around, and President Kennedy got the bragging rights to drawing a line right across the ocean where the Russian navy could not cross, firing a shot across their bows in the open ocean, and making them turn around in open water and sail back home. Before the whole world the Russians had backed down. President Kennedy was a hero.

  But I had made some powerful new enemies and could see the end of my own career in the army like the distant sign on an empty expressway coming up at eighty miles an hour that reads “Freeway Ends.” I now devoted myself to packing away the Roswell files for those whom they would go to after me and writing my own notes for the work that I might find myself in after I left the army. Who could have realized that within months I’d be sitting in an office on Capitol Hill looking across the desk at one of my own successors who was there as the scientific adviser to the secretary of defense. I may have stepped on the toes of some of the most powerful people in Washington, but it was still the good fight and I was, above all, still a soldier in the Cold War and still fighting the stealth war against the strategies of the EBEs, who were becoming more aggressive in their appearances over defense installations, cities, and our manned and unmanned space probes. Even the Russian intelligence services had begun to complain about the mysterious goings-on with their space probes. But they couldn’t come right out and tell us the reasons why. We had to figure those out for ourselves.

  If the Cold War sounded complex and chaotic in the early 1960s as Kennedy juggled the strategies of Truman and Eisenhower while recognizing that he couldn’t trust his own intelligence services, imagine what it was like when you factored in the “other” cold war or, as some have called it, the “real” cold war against the extraterrestrials. It was becoming like the elephant in a room that everybody knows is there but keeps denying it. Its presence is so massive that you have to walk around it. Its trunk swings with such a force that you have to duck when it sweeps over your head. Watch out that the big elephant feet don’t crush your toes when he plants them, and you don’t want to step too close to the elephant’s backside lest you get buried in what comes out.

  In other words, dealing with the Soviets was just a big mess that we had to accommodate while we all sat down at the same dinner table. The Soviets and the Americans, pretending to break bread while not blowing up the world. Yet each of us looking for the advantage while we watched one another’s hands the entire time. You watch your enemy’s hands, he watches your hands, and whatever you can do with your feet you do. Meanwhile your enemy’s doing the same thing.

  The army’s hands were tied by the cover-up, the refusal of the government to let us take on the alien threat with our full resources because we had to pussyfoot around the truth. But more than a few congressmen knew about the cover-up, were as concerned as we were about the intrusions of the EBEs, the human abductions, and the cattle mutilations, and supported the military’s agenda for a program of speeded weapons development in space.

  We were convinced that whoever the UFO extraterrestrials were, they were tampering with our planet, operating with impudence, and manipulating us constantly and secretly. But it was a secret that had our full compliance because we were unwilling to admit the truth and fight the war. Those of us in the military who knew what was happening also felt that we could be experiencing an invasion that was more of an infiltration. They were compromising our very systems of defense and government, I suggested, and then, by the time the conflict opened up, we would already be open and vulnerable. If the EBEs had been around long enough, I once suggested to General Trudeau, might they have seen the Trojans towing that huge wooden horse the Greeks left for them right through the open gates of their city?

  For his part, General Trudeau, in the months before he retired, made a number of appearances before Congress. He argued consistently that the army did have a real place in space and we had a capability in missile defense that he had proven at Los Alamos and at the guided-missile and Redstone command at Huntsville, Alabama. Moreover, the army had been able to use German scientists in the months immediately after the fighting in Europe had ended. It wasn’t just a matter of who could get the biggest budget, General Trudeau testified. In fact, he offered in a briefing before the Congressional Committee on Science and Astronautics, if the space effort was to be completely taken away from the army, then it should be given lock, stock, and barrel to the air force. At least, he said, the air force was a military service and had officers and enlisted personnel who knew how to fight. But, at least in the early years, Congress and the President decided that NASA should control the space program. By the end of the 1960s, however, they had reversed that decision and realized that there was a serious military aspect to space exploration.

  General Trudeau also had his allies among the major defense contractors we worked with. Not only scientists but members of the boards of directors suspected that the army had an urgency in developing weapons for use in space. Some of them even realized that we must have had a hidden agenda because each of the projects we proposed, like Horizon and the energy weapons, seemed designed for a war with enemies far more powerful and elusive than the Soviets. When he would address industri
al groups on matters of technical intelligence and applied engineering, General Trudeau received what I could only call a “knowing” response. He himself once wrote in his unpublished memoirs that when he was invited to give an address to one of the companies we worked with, the people who showed up were the decision makers. He said:

  • • •

  I think on every occasion that I went out, the chairman of the board was there, the chief executive officer who was usually the president, and an impressive cross section of their senior corporate officers or directors. I might say even when I went to Sperry-Rand, no less a person than General MacArthur honored me by his presence at dinner, and he didn’t turn out for many.

  • • •

  General Trudeau was the father of the ballistic missile and the person who, from the 1950s through the 1960s, made sure that our armed forces adapted the ballistic missile for our own use. His presence at Sperry-Rand with MacArthur, his boss in Korea, was all the more important because General MacArthur knew the truth about UFOs and commented that the army was girding itself to fight in space. And he didn’t mean fighting the Russians in space, he meant the extraterrestrials.

  But we were fighting so deeply immersed in the darkness of our own official denial that the fantastic nature of the truth, the ongoing effects of the truth, and the capitulation of the civilian intelligence services to some crazed blueprint they had for world order based upon an international government sometimes made us doubt our own senses. However, when you looked at what I called the secret history of the United States since 1947, you knew that the invisible elephant was walking through the room. A better analogy is the concept of the black hole. Black holes, the ultradense remains of stars that have collapsed upon themselves, swallow up light and gravity and, compressing them in like a galactic compactor into something that only subatomic particle physicists can describe and that can’t actually be “seen.” Only their effects can be determined from the way light and gravity seem to behave around them. So you guess that a black hole might be present in a specific region of space when light and gravity around it bend almost like the way water circulates around the drain at the bottom of your sink. That’s what the truth looked like in the region around our Cold War strategy and the development of any ultra-high-tech or exotic weapons. It might have made sense in 1947, but by 1962, the refusal of the government to admit the war it was fighting was getting in the way of actually fighting the war.