“I hope it’s helpful to you, Dr. Fredericks,” I began. “I’m not a physicist, but I think we have something that might speed up the research time line and show some new possibilities.”
“Anything that could help, Colonel,” he said as I opened up my briefcase and began to spread out what I had. “Anything at all.”
CHAPTER 10
The U2 Program and Project Corona:
Spies in Space
“Of course, General Trudeau has been in touch with Don and the whole development team here,” Dr. Fredericks continued as he watched me open the night-vision file that I’d taken out of my briefcase. “And I’m aware of the nature of the material you’ve got. It’s not something we wanted to talk about over the phone.”
“I appreciate your being discreet about this, Dr. Fredericks,” I said. “If you think what I’m about to show you can help you in the development process, it’s yours to use. But the arrangement will be that everything is originated here at Fort Belvoir. All R&D will do will be to provide the budget necessary to fund this development. You use your own sources to manufacture the product and take all the credit for the process.”
“And this conversation?” Dr. Fredericks asked.
“Once you tell me you can use what I’ve brought and we get you the budget you require,” I began, “this conversation never took place and you will take my name off your appointment schedule.”
“Now you really do have my interest,” he said with just the edge of a bemused sarcasm in his voice as if he’d been down this road many times before. “What did you bring in that briefcase that’s so secret?”
And with that I held up the first of the army’s 1947 sketches of the night viewer we pulled from the wreckage at Roswell. I handed it across to Dr. Fredericks, who looked at it and turned it around with his fingertips as if he were holding one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“You don’t have to be so careful with it, Dr. Fredericks,” I said. “I made a few thermal copies.”
“Do you have the actual device?” he asked.
“Back at the Pentagon.”
“Who was wearing this?” he continued.
“At the time, nobody,” I told him. “According to the field report, they found this in the sand near one of the bodies.”
“Bodies? At the Roswell crash?” Now he was completely incredulous. “General Trudeau didn’t tell anyone about bodies.”
“No, that’s true,” I said. “That’s not information we give out. General Trudeau authorized me to answer any questions you have up to a certain level of security classification.”
“We’re not there yet,” Dr. Fredericks asked and asserted at the same time.
“But we’re close,” I suggested. “I can talk about the device, talk about where it was found, but that’s probably as far as I can go myself. If General Trudeau wants to give a background briefing and authorizes me to do so, then I can go deeper.”
“Funny, but I always thought Roswell was a kind of legend. You know, they found something but maybe it was Russian,” Dr. Fredericks said. Then he asked again if anyone at the Roswell retrieval had actually seen any of the creatures wearing the night-vision device in the sketches.
“No,” I said. “There was a lot of debris that spilled out of the craft. The soldiers on the retrieval team looked through one of the seams that had been split open running along the craft’s lengthwise axis and they saw view ports built into the hull. Well, what astonished them was that when they looked through the view ports, they could see daylight, or a greenish, hazy kind of diffused light that looked like dusk, but outside it was completely dark.”
Paul Fredericks was on the edge of his seat now.
“No one at the crash site knew anything about the night viewers the Germans were developing during the war,” I explained. “So even the officers on the retrieval team were amazed at what they were seeing. When they autopsied the alien at the 509th and pulled off these ‘eyepieces,’ is the only word I can use for them, they realized that they were a complicated set of reflectors that gathered all the available light and turned them into nighttime image intensifiers.” I continued, pointing to the sketch in Paul Fredericks’s hands. “Some medical officer tried to look through it down a darkened hall and it made the images stand out, but nothing was ever done with it and they packed it away with the rest of the alien.”
“Did they perform any analysis on this when they brought it back?” Fredericks asked.
“Some,” I told him. “But they had no facilities at the 509th and had to wait until they brought it back to Wright. It wasn’t until the intelligence boys at the Air Materiel Command got hold of it that they realized that this was something the Germans were trying to deploy.”
“But this is far more sophisticated,” Dr. Fredericks said. “The Germans weren’t even close to something like this.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Not even close. And that’s what got the intelligence people at Wright so concerned. Just how close were the Germans about to get when the war ended? What else had they gotten their hands on? Did they have help?”
“Or,” Dr. Fredericks said very slowly, “did they find a crash just like we found?”
“That’s exactly the point, Dr. Fredericks,” I said. “What did they find?”
“And if the Germans could get their hands on this material, what about the Soviets?” he asked. But he was talking to himself now, talking in a way that made him sound as if he were really thinking out loud. “Why not the Chinese or any of our European allies? Just how much of this stuff is out there?” he finally asked me.
“We don’t have any of those answers,” I told him. “At least not those of us in the army. And for obvious reasons nobody’s walking around sharing this information back and forth among the services or with any other agencies. We have what we have, and that’s as far as we’re willing to go.”
“And you don’t want me talking about this or trying to sniff around for any information,” he said.
“If we thought you were going to do that I wouldn’t even be here,” I said. “I have these reports here and descriptions of the device. I’ll leave them with you. If you think you can work these into your development program, I’ll have the material itself sent over and then it’s out of our hands completely. Farm it out to wherever you want it developed. Offer your defense contractor the right to patent it. Never tell them where you got it or what its origin might be. As far as we’re concerned whoever comes up with the night viewers you ultimately contract with to build can own the whole product and slap their name on it. All we want to do is get this thing developed. That’s it.”
“May I?” Dr. Fredericks asked, reaching for the reports I’d spread out on the arm of the leather chair.
I handed them across in a bundle, and he flipped through them as if he were my old college professor looking at a term paper, hrumphing, grunting, and nodding at every page.
“That’s more about how they handled the alien at Wright Field than about the eyepieces themselves,” I said. “Because in reality, they didn’t know what made the thing tick and they didn’t really want to tear it apart.”
“So they just threw it in a package?” he asked.
“Basically, that’s exactly what happened,” I said. “At first they didn’t know how it was supposed to work. Or maybe they thought it would turn human beings blind or something. They were that afraid. After a while, they just let it stay in dead storage and hoped someone else would take it off their hands.”
“And that’d be you,” Dr. Fredericks said.
“Actually,” I told him, “that’d be you, if you want it.”
“I need to read this material more thoroughly and see where we can slip your night vision into the project without causing a ripple on the surface,” Dr. Fredericks explained.
“How easy will that be?” I asked.
“At Fort Belvoir,” he answered, “teams here are taught to keep their own thoughts to themselves. If you tell them this
is a piece of foreign technology our intelligence boys got from some other country and we’re supposed to make it disappear into what we’re doing, that’s the story.”
“Nobody asks any questions?” I pushed.
“Nobody asks questions under any circumstances,” he said. “It would move along faster and create its own little development bureaucracy if we had the budget to turn it into a crash development project with a real development phase deadline.”
“Then what happens?” I asked.
“It’s just like Santa’s workshop on the first day of winter. None of the elves looks up from his workbench until it’s done. Then the next project comes along and everybody forgets. By the time the troops are wearing these things in the field and they’re handing out the gold watches over a prime rib at the Potomac Inn, night vision is just one big happy memory with the details rewritten to fit the view of history that serves the moment. No one will ever even guess, Colonel Corso,” he said. “From the moment your boys hand the material over, it goes into the developmental soup at Fort Belvoir and comes out the other end as a weapon in the field.”
I stood up and closed my briefcase while he walked around his desk. “So what are you going to recommend to General Trudeau?” he asked.
“I’d like to suggest we send the device over, you come up with the budget you need, and General Trudeau finds the allocation,” I said.
“And you?” he said.
“It was a pleasure not meeting you, Dr. Fredericks,” I told him. “Of course, there will be a liaison over in Army R&D who will officially be placed in charge of night-vision development. He will report to General Trudeau and anything I need to know I’ll find out from the general. I look forward to seeing the development reports as they come out. Congratulations on your new piece of technology. And congratulations to the company who winds up with this defense contract.”
“Congratulations, indeed,” Dr. Fredericks said.
We shook hands and he walked me out of his office into the corridor. For a moment, it was like stepping out of the surreal into the real. We’d just stitched our own piece of fabric over reality, created a piece of history. The technology boys in research and development at Fort Belvoir would receive a device from one of their consultants who would whisper to them that this was liberated from one of our enemies. Don’t ask any questions. But it was just the thing that the lab people at Fort Belvoir were looking for to show them how a finished device might look. Can they come up with a reverse-engineering plan? Is there a company they’re already working with on night vision? And within a few months, some company, whoever it might be, would wind up with a plan in place, a development budget, and a new identity for the strange-looking eyepieces that turned up in my Roswell files. It might take five or so years, but when it came rolling off the assembly line somewhere in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, or wherever, it would be “Made in the USA” and I’d read about it in the papers or see it on television.
Night vision was the first project we actually seeded during the first year of my tenure at Foreign Technology. It would turn out to be easier than most because of the history of German development during the war and the research already done through the 1950s. By the time I brought the Roswell night viewer to Fort Belvoir, it fit right in through the seam of an existing development program and no one was the wiser. The actual weapons-development program at Fort Belvoir served as the cover for the dissemination of Roswell technology so perfectly that the only distortion anyone could find as he went back through the history is what might seem like a sudden acceleration in the development program itself shortly after 1961. Night vision got a boost in funding, a new officer was assigned to the project by General Trudeau, and General Trudeau’s name starts turning up on a regular basis as one of the apparent benefactors of the program. By 1963, when he and I were gone from the Pentagon, the project was at Martin Marietta Electronics—now part of Lockheed Martin—and already on its way through the initial deployment that would take place in Europe and Vietnam.
But I didn’t know that as I drove through the Fort Belvoir gate and headed back to my Pentagon office. I only felt satisfied that it looked like we had successfully inserted one of our own Foreign Technology projects into an ongoing development stream already under way and had camouflaged our appropriation of a piece of alien technology. At this point, I believed, we’d kept it out of the hands of the Soviets for the time being, and the aliens, if they were monitoring what we were doing, maybe didn’t know what we were doing with it either. It would give us time.
I headed north along the Potomac and through the green woods of Fairfax County, Virginia, back to a desk that was quickly piling up with other projects that needed disposition. One of them, which was running parallel with the night vision I’d just handed off, was the embryonic “Project Corona,” an idea whose time was suddenly thrust upon us by the shooting down of a U2 surveillance plane and the capture of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.
The air force and the CIA had been running the U2 program for a while during the Eisenhower administration, and the reports and photos routinely crossed my desk at the National Security Council. Like so many other events during the Cold War, the U2 didn’t have just a single purpose, the surveillance of the Soviet Union to monitor their guided-missile development program. It had a triple intent. Of course, we wanted to know exactly what the Soviets were up to, but we also wanted to test their air defense capability. We wanted to know how accurately their radars could track the U2 and whether any of their missiles could bring it down. So we deliberately provoked them by making our presence known when we wanted them to fire at us. Could they shoot us down? Cameras on the U2 picked up the launch of enemy surface-to-air missiles as the pilot flew over sensitive installations where the Soviets had to challenge us or cede to us the control of top classified zones in their airspace.
So we played gamesmanship with them, probing their defenses, deliberately sacrificing pilots who we believed died when their planes were shot down, and always denying what we were doing even as Khrushchev screamed at Eisenhower that the U2 program was putting Khrushchev himself at risk inside the Kremlin. “We can deal with each other,” the Communist Party chairman told Ike. “But not if you force me out of office.” But as much as Eisenhower hated the U2 program and the jeopardy into which it placed our pilots, the President had to accommodate himself to one of the other agendas of the surveillance: the ongoing search for any evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft landings or crashes within the vastness of the Soviet Union. We also wanted to see whether the Soviets were harvesting any of the alien aircraft technology for themselves. That’s what made the U2 program too valuable to give up until we had an alternative. And the alternative, although it was an air force and not an army program, was part of a shared R&D between our intelligence services and the National Security Council/CIA apparatus. And it was already in development within Lockheed in a division they called “skunk works.”
Because we had set up our U2 flights to provoke the Soviets and because we knew that ultimately we would start to lose pilots and planes, the National Security staff began looking aggressively for a more secure surveillance program as early as 1957, my last year at the White House. Intelligence decided to take orbital satellite photos of Soviet installations, but only if they could get a bird up there that would be reliable. Also, we didn’t want to let the Soviets know we were turning earth orbit into a surveillance facility because we didn’t want to encourage them to go after our satellites. So the trick was to get a satellite up there in complete secrecy. But how could you do that with the whole world watching?
The army and air force had an idea. Lockheed had already shown that it could develop a surveillance plane, the U2 and eventually the SR71, out of the public view and run those flights without too much interference from Senate watchdog committees and out of the presence of any newspaper reporters. Could they do the same thing with a satellite? And if they could, would the satellite recon photos be as relia
ble as the photos we were getting from the U2s?
Normally, I would have said that if the army were putting up a satellite, it could do anything it wanted because everything we did under our intelligence blanket remained relatively secure. However, both the army and the air force were effectively put out of the satellite-launching business toward the end of the Eisenhower administration by the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Agency under a pooled resources crash program to get satellites up into space to show the world the flag. The Soviets had beaten us in the race initially with Sputnik, and the failed army and navy attempts to launch satellites only made us look worse. I learned for a fact that when the New York Daily News ran the full-page headline, “Oh Dear,” after the Corporal rose a few inches, fell back onto the launchpad, and blew up into smithereens, no one was laughing harder than Nikita Khrushchev.
After a few of these attempts, the National Security Council advised President Eisenhower to throw in the towel, pool all the national scientific resources he could, and turn the U.S. entry into the space race over to a civilian agency. The military services had learned their lesson about competing over the same technology the hard way and had to stand back and watch NASA take over.
NASA had some immediate successes, and before the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1960, they had managed to put satellites in orbit and experiment with the effects of orbital flight on animals in far more sophisticated ways than the army’s V2 experiments with small primates at Alamogordo in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the army and air force intelligence offices looked at the successes of these NASA satellites and at the increasing vulnerabilities of the U2 flights, they saw the possible answer to their need for a fail-safe surveillance program. When NASA began its Discoverer orbiter program, launching a payload into low orbit and returning it, the military services thought they saw a solution. If they could somehow manage to build a workable photo-recon satellite small enough to fit into the very limited space inside the Discoverer payload capsule, recover the surveillance device when the orbiter returned to Earth, and install the entire military-spying program within a civilian scientific exploration program that was getting a lot of attention from the newspapers without alerting the public to the military’s secret agenda, they would have their covert surveillance.
The Day After Roswell Page 17