Wizard

by Marc Seifer

“At this point,” Hedetneimi concluded, “Dr. Trump indicated that he had no further interest in the case.”

  An FBI report written just two weeks prior to Trump’s visit to the hotel described the managers’ assessment of the inventor somewhat differently, and it does not appear that they took him as seriously as Trump alleges. “The Hotel managers report he [Tesla] was very eccentric, if not mentally deranged during the past ten years and it is doubtful if he has created anything of value during that time, although prior to that he probably was a very brilliant inventor.”31

  DID TESLA ACTUALLY BUILD A PROTOTYPE OF THE

  DEATH RAY?

  The inventor appears to have told both Hausler, his pigeon caretaker, and Fitzgerald, the army engineer, that he did build a working model; and in an interview I had with Mrs. Czito, whose husband’s father and grandfather were both trusted Tesla employees, she recalls that her father-in-law used to recount stories of Tesla bouncing electronic beams off the moon. This is not a death ray, but it certainly supports the hypothesis that the inventor created working models along these lines.

  The well-known columnist Joseph Alsop, who interviewed Tesla at the Hotel New Yorker and who was one of the first to fully report Tesla’s work with particle-beam weapons, described an experience Tesla had when experimenting with cathode-ray tubes, “Sometimes a particle larger than an electron, but still very tiny, would break off from the cathode, pass out of the tube and hit him. He said he could feel a sharp, stinging pain where it entered his body, and again at the place where it passed out. The particles in the beam of force, [i.e., the] ammunition…will travel far faster.”32

  Other evidence has been reported by Corum and Corum, who assert that this invention was an outcropping of Tesla’s work on X-ray machines patented in the mid-1890s. Thus, we can trace the Tesla death ray to at least three earlier inventions, his Tesla coil and work in high-frequency currents from the early 1890s, his work in bombarding targets with Roentgen rays in 1896, and also his 1901 ideas associated with transmitting energy by means of wireless by beaming up an ionizing ray from his magnifying transmitter and using it is a conduit to reach the ionosphere. With this mechanism, Tesla planned not only to circle the globe with information but also to illuminate shipping lanes over the oceans and control the weather.

  The deBobula schematic, the Corums write, having studied the plans in Belgrade, was also taken to Alcoa Aluminum, which said that it was ready to supply the materials as soon as Tesla raised the necessary capital.33 Alcoa, however, was unable to locate any reference to Tesla in their corporate records.34

  At the age of eighty-one, Tesla stated at a luncheon attended by ministers of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia that he had constructed a number of beam-transmission devices, including the death ray, for protecting a country from incoming invasions and a laserlike machine that could send impulses to the moon and other planets (in Exhibit I). He also said that he was going to take the death ray to a Geneva conference for world peace. When pressed by the columnists to “give a full description…Dr. Tesla said, ‘But it is not an experiment…I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world.”35

  Considering that Tesla had two secret laboratories throughout the 1930s in which no reporter ever set foot,36 we are left with a mystery. Did Tesla really “scam” the hotel by frightening the management into accepting a bogus invention in lieu of $400 rent? Feeling that the world owed him a place in which to live, perhaps he purposely chose not to pay for his housing. This certainly was a compulsive and self-destructive pattern during the latter quarter of his life. Lesser mortals often fore the brunt of his repressed rage. He was known to be abrasive to maids and office secretaries. Having made it a habit to live on credit, Tesla may have derived great pleasure during those lugubrious nights when he was forced to face his failures in thinking back to the chaps at the Hotel Governor Clinton trembling at the terrible weapon they kept protected in their midst.

  THE CONSPIRACY SCENARIO

  Secret agents break into Tesla’s New Yorker Hotel safe without Kasanovic knowing, remove keys to his Hotel Governor Clinton vault, and steal the death-ray prototype, substituting the equipment Trump found a week or two later. This potential incident would have had to have taken place between January 9 and January 29, 1943, the dates of Tesla’s death, and the end of Trump’s investigations. The agents who performed this task, if it occurred, could have been Bloyce Fitzgerald and Ralph E. Doty. The evidence is as follows:

  Sava Kosavonic’s secretary at this time was Charlotte Muzar. She reports that she saw Tesla during his last days for the purpose of delivering funds that he required and that she was also present at the opening of the safe after Tesla died. Present were Kenneth Swezey, Sava Kosanovic, and George Clark. According to her story and official reports, a locksmith was called in to change the combination of the safe and give the new combination to Kosanovic, who was the only one who had it. In the safe, before he locked it again, was a set of keys and the 1917 Edison Medal. About ten years later, when the estate was finally shipped to Belgrade and the safe opened, the Edison Medal and the keys were found to be missing. The medal was never recovered, but the keys were found outside the safe “in one of the numerous cases of documents.”37

  A January 12, 1943, OAP memorandum states that Charles McNamara, assistant manager of the Hotel Governor Clinton, “permitted [the OAP] to seal safety deposit box #103, which contained the $10,000 machine…Box #103 is not a specially constructed box as Fitzgerald said. It is, however, one of the largest boxes of the lower tiers.” The day before this, at the Hotel New Yorker, Tesla’s bedside safe was opened. Present, according to another OAP memorandum, aside from Swezey, Clark, and Kosanovic, were two hotel personnel from the New Yorker, Mr. L. O. Doty, credit manager, and Mr. L. A. Fitzgerald, assistant credit manager.

  It strikes this researcher as a rather odd coincidence that these two individuals carried the same last names as a colonel from military intelligence and the ever-present Bloyce Fitzgerald.

  If, in fact, these two supposed credit managers were really government agents, it would have been a fairly easy task for them to retrieve the key (or make a copy) to box no. 103 and swap the device.

  A further investigation of the FBI files reveals that on October 17, 1945, E. E. Conroy from the New York office, sent two copies of the Trump report to J. Edgar Hoover and reviewed with him, once again, the roles played by Fitzgerald, Spanel, a censored person “X” and Kosanovic. Conroy said that “X” (probably another FBI agent) suspected that Spanel was “definitely pro-Russian in attitude” and that Spanel was spreading pro-Communist propaganda in full-page ads in various newspapers and yet also suing these newspapers for libel. Conroy also reiterated that Spanel had ties to Vice President Henry Wallace, so caution was advised.

  It appears that Spanel had met Fitzgerald (a friend of “X”) at an engineering meeting in November 1942. Fitzgerald at the time was an army private at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio. He was described in the FBI report as “a brilliant 20-year-old scientist who spent endless hours with Tesla before his death…Fitzgerald had developed some sort of anti-tank gun.” Spanel tried to form a partnership with Fitzgerald in order to sell this weapon to the Remington Arms Company, but for some reason “Spanel blocked the final sale” and then tried to arrange a more lucrative deal with Eiogens Ship Building Company of New Orleans.

  In November 1943, Eiogens fired Fitzgerald, and a year later the young engineer returned to the army. “Today, [1945, Fitzgerald is]…engaged in a highly secret experimental project at Wright Field…In spite of his rank of private, Fitzgerald is actually director of this research and is working with many top young scientists…on perfection of Tesla’s ‘death ray’ which in Fitzgerald’s opinion is the only defense against offensive use by another nation of the atom bomb.”38

  Conroy suggested cooperating with Fitzgerald in order to secure “legal possession of Tesla’s effects.” The goal, of course, was to obtain an
d protect the details of the weapons system, yet also to set up a “memorial foundation…for the preservation of the inventor’s memory.” Fitzgerald purportedly also interested Henry Ford in the project.

  On October 19, 1945, Brig. Gen. L. C. Craigee, Chief Engineering Division Control Equipment Branch, Wright Field, writing at the request of Bloyce Fitzgerald, David Pratt, Herbert Schutt, and P. E. Houle, all engineers working at Wright Field, contacted Harvey Ross of the FBI in New York in order to officially “request…in the interest of National Defense, access…to the effects of Dr. Nicola Tesla held in Manhattan Storage Warehouse.” Col. Ralph Doty, from military intelligence in Washington, followed up the inquiry by working as a liaison officer between the War Department, the OAP, and the FBI.39

  Since the FBI had no jurisdiction over the Tesla estate, Fitzgerald, Conroy, and Craigee were referred to the OAP.

  On September 5, 1945, Lloyd Shaulis, of the OAP, mailed off two copies of the Trump report to Colonel Holliday of the Equipment Laboratory, Propulsions and Accessories Subdivision, who no doubt forwarded them to Fitzgerald. “These were the full photostatic copies, not merely the abstracts.”40 Two years later, Colonel Duffy of Air Material Command, Wright Field, wrote to the OAP that the papers were still being evaluated.

  By 1950, Kosanovic was still barred from the warehouse.41 He was now officially the Yugoslavian ambassador to both the United States and the United Nations, and his patience had reached its limit. Kosanovic wanted his uncle’s effects in Belgrade, where they would be rightly honored. In March he went to the warehouse to inform them of the inventor’s wishes to send the estate to the Tesla Museum. It was at this time that the ambassador was informed that the FBI had microfilmed the entire contents. He called J. Edgar Hoover to request a copy of the microfilm, but Hoover said that they did not have such a copy. Kosanovic had probably been misinformed; one of the warehouse people may have mistaken the Trump people for the FBI; or another group microfilmed the papers (now held in the Library of Congress) at a different time.

  Finally, in 1952, arrangements were made, and the entire eighty trunks were shipped to Belgrade. Included were many valuable original papers completely unknown to O’Neill, such as Tesla’s 1899 Colorado diary, various photographs, tens of thousands of letters, and most of his inventions, including the remote-controlled boat, wireless fluorescent lamp, motors, turbines, plans for his vertical takeoff flivver plane, and a model of the magnifying transmitter. Tesla’s ashes were sent at a later date.

  Spanel would be questioned by Joseph MaCarthy, and the copies of the death ray papers moved further underground.

  THE PROBABLE TRAIL OF THE SECRET PAPER

  In 1984, Andrija Puharich presented Tesla’s secret death-ray paper to the International Tesla Centennial Symposium, held in Colorado Springs. It was published in the proceedings. Puharich told this author that the original source of the report was Ralph Bergstresser, author of a notable Tesla article published in 1957. Puharich thought that Bergstresser, along with an associate (who may have been Bloyce Fitzgerald), was linked to the FBI and thus obtained the paper in that capacity. In the 1940s, Bergstresser worked for RCA and “Marconi’s boys. I always believed that Marconi was the inventor of the wireless…Then I found out it was all a lie.” Bergstresser, who was about eighty years old when I spoke to him, recalled that Marconi had lived on a ship on the high seas to avoid subpoenas Tesla tried to give him.

  At the outbreak of World War II, Bergstresser began to work on “behalf of the war effort…[when] he [Tesla] turned over to me [his various papers]. I would take and read them and return them to him.” According to one source, Bergstresser was under the command of the new secret organization the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), (later the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]), and in that capacity he was analyzing the papers for their military significance.

  Bergstresser recounted that he had only known Tesla during the last six months of his life. “He was skinny, tall, stooped, emaciated—didn’t eat right.” In further questioning, he also said that he had known Jack O’Neill and his colleague William Lawrence, author of the 1940 New York Times death-ray article, which sparked such interest by the FBI and factions of the armed forces, and that he and Bergstresser had attended Tesla’s funeral together in 1943.

  During the conversation, I asked Bergstresser if he had any proof to support his contention that Tesla’s papers had been systematically removed from libraries. He said that the conspiracy was massive and extremely complex, going back to J. Pierpont Morgan and his wish to suppress Tesla’s wireless power distribution inventions because they threatened to provide cheap or free power for the masses. He was upset that Tesla’s entire estate was “hauled away…behind the Iron Curtain” and partially blamed Lawrence, who he said was later found to be a Communist. He agreed that Bloyce Fitzgerald had probably taken the papers to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but he declined to comment on any relationship to Fitzgerald or the trail of the secret papers.

  Puharich had said that the particle beam article had been passed from Bergstresser to Bob Beck of the U.S. Psychotronics Society around 1981 and from there they were passed to him.42

  INFLUENCE OF THE McCARTHY PERIOD

  It was true that by the time the FBI and federal government became actively involved in suppressing Tesla’s scientific papers, the inventor had already slipped from the mass consciousness. Nevertheless, an air of secrecy, supported by the taint of ties to a German fifth column or the Communists via his Yugoslav heritage, served to submerge even further the inventor’s work. This was augmented by the transfer of Tesla’s papers to the remote city of Belgrade.

  STAR WARS

  Tesla’s numerous inventions could be applied in a variety of ways for military purposes, for example, particle-beam weapons, worldwide radar, earthquake contrivances, brain-wave manipulation. One or more magnifying transmitters could supposedly send destructive impulses through the earth to any location. Thus, a well-placed jolt of many millions of volts could theoretically destroy the communications network of any major city. Recent discourses on potential future warfare technologies stemming mainly from war games analyst Lt. Col. Tom Bearden and parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, M.D., suggest that the Soviets had harnessed various Tesla weapons, including apparatus for seismic, weather, and mind control.43

  According to Bearden, the Tesla magnifying transmitter produced a fundamental one-point gravity vector (or electrostatic scalar wave) that disturbs the very fabric of the space/time grid itself and therefore is not bound by the speed of light. Thus, a theoretical instantaneous Tesla wave, emitted from the magnifying transmitter, could potentially affect the planet’s geomagnetic pulse and thereby be directed to any number of targets on any continent.44

  This research is highly controversial and speculative, and should be read with caution. Nevertheless, in 1977, in its May 2 issue, Aviation Week published a seven-thousand-word article on Soviet particle-beam weapons. The exposé, which “shook Washington,” was also abstracted in Science. It contained a schematic drawing of a particle beam weapon which bears a remarkable resemblance to Tesla’s then unpublished drawings made four decades earlier. Coupled with the realization that the Soviets were well advanced in this area, this is strong evidence in support of the claim that Tesla did, in fact, sell the schematics of such a device to them in the mid-1930’s.

  Aviation Week also described the use of “young geniuses under [the age of] 29…located at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio” who were trying to conceive of a breakthrough in the technology; and also, surprisingly, that “the President [Jimmy Carter] was screened from vital technical developments by the bureaucracy of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.” The source was General George Keegen, former head of Air Force Intelligence.45

  Three intriguing points emerge: (1) the concept of intense secrecy of particle-beam weapons; (2) the mention of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; and (3) the policy of utilizing bright young geniuses. All of these variab
les are evident in the FBI files on Tesla reviewed earlier. Great support is lent to the conspiracy hypothesis that Tesla’s work and papers were systematically hidden from public view in order to protect the trail of this top-secret research, which today is known as Star Wars.

  Particle-beam weaponry is still more a dream than a reality, at this time in 1996. Therefore, if indeed the inner sanctum of one or both superpowers has access to Tesla’s plans, why is it that no death ray has ever been constructed? Perhaps there are prototypes, but it seems to me that they should have been tried out in the field during such wars as Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Kuwait/Iraq. This part of the story must remain a mystery.

  48

  THE WIZARD’S LEGACY

  When a man looks back over the events associated with his work…he begins to realize how minor is that part which he himself has played in shaping the events of his career, how overpowering the part played by circumstances utterly beyond his control.

  EDWIN ARMSTRONG ACCEPTING THE EDISON MEDAL1

  As an echo from the Tesla-Morgan affair, Edwin Armstrong had to battle the giant RCA to get FM accepted over AM radio, even though it was a superior means for transmitting music. Col. David Sarnoff, “Napoleonic” head of RCA and NBC, had simply pirated his friend’s FM invention because he required it for use in television. With the help of CBS, Sarnoff also manipulated the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create a stipulation that severely restricted the power of FM transmitters “to one tenth their intended level…and shifted the FM band to a less desirable frequency range.” That is why AM became the dominant band for long-distance radio transmission.

  Required to rebuild his own radio station because of the FCC ruling and forced to battle the media Goliath in the courts for patent infringement, Armstrong cashed in his remaining block of RCA stock to finance the enormous expenditure that would be required. Lawyers for NBC were able to persuade the high court in New York that it was their engineers that invented FM and not Armstrong! Although the Institute of Radio Engineers as a group filed a formal protest (an unprecedented move in such situations), which eventually caused the ruling to be reversed by the Supreme Court, it was too late for Armstrong. With his marriage in shambles, his key patents expired, and his fortune drained by litigation, he jumped out a thirteen-story window in the dead of winter of 1954, spiritually trammeled by the very people who profited from his creative endeavors. That Tesla survived such a fate is a testament to his fortitude and transcendent nature.2