The Black World of UFOs: Exempt from Disclosure

by Robert M. Collins

  3. How do we defend the past and prospective space experiments (high-altitude nuclear test Project West Ford), which may have lasting effects in space and impair the free use of space by other nations?

  4. How do we dispel foreign misapprehensions arising from our bitter domestic debate...and charges that the legislation is somehow inconsistent with U.N. statements. The president would like to see the positions developed to deal with these questions.

  McGeorge Bundy

  While the intelligence community was formulating plans on how to deal with the president’s new direction on the CIA’s space program and MJ-12 intelligence operations, Kennedy wrote a private letter to Nikita S. Khrushcev. In this letter he expressed relief that the nuclear confrontation arising over Khrushcev’s placing of offensive missiles on Castro’s Cuba had ended. Dated 14 December 1962, Kennedy revealed a new channel of communications which was later intercepted by the NSA:

  Dear Mr. Chairman:

  I was glad to have your message of December 11th and to know that you believe, as we do, that we have come to the final stage of the Cuban affair between us, the settlement of which will have significance for our future relations and for our ability to overcome other difficulties. I wish to thank you for your expression of appreciation of the understanding and flexibility we have tried to display.

  With regard to your reference to the confidential channels set up between us, I can assure you that I value them. I have not concealed from you that it was a serious disappointment to me that dangerously misleading information should have come through these channels before the recent crisis...

  The 12 November, 1963 JFK Memo and NSAM 271

  According to an alleged “Top Secret” memorandum (refer back to Chapter 1) leaked to Tim Cooper (2), Kennedy had requested the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, and the Deputy Director of Counterintelligence, James J. Angleton, to review all classified CIA and USAF UFO projects (supposedly issued by Kennedy just 10 days before he was gunned down in the streets of Dallas, TX). They were to provide this data to James Webb, NASA’s administrator, for a joint space exploration program with the Soviets. If true, this document may be the most significant document attesting to the reality of the super-secret MJ-12 intelligence organization created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 and perhaps provide us with one of the prime reasons and/or motives for Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas and the continuing cover-up.

  In it Kennedy wanted to convince Khrushchev of his sincerity by breaking down barriers and aligning the U.S. intelligence community with the Soviet space program. This would provide a basis for trust thus ending the mistrust between the U.S. and Soviet Union and perhaps ending the Cold War.

  In a surprising discovery made by several researchers in 1999, a relevant JFK document was discovered that supports the contents of the 12 November, 1963 “Top Secret” UFO memo. Issued on the same day, President Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum No. 271 (NSAM 271) directing James Webb, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to “assume personally the initiative and central responsibility within the Government for the development of a program of substantive cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space.” This would be a first in the Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union of any technical and scientific exchange.

  This was also an unbelievable, surreal threat to the U.S. intelligence community or to MJ-12 and an untenable position for NASA. The shock waves that went through the cubicles of the CIA and the corridors of the Pentagon must have been unbearable to the military-industrial complex and MJ-12.

  Kennedy had already made many enemies when he instructed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assume all paramilitary covert operations from the CIA through his NSAM numbers 55 and 56. This essentially would take the CIA out of the covert world of operations and removed Allen Dulles from his power base as Director of Central Intelligence.

  It is no coincidence that on 28 June 1961, the same day NSAM 55 was issued, he ordered Allen Dulles to disclose the covert operations of MJ-12 intelligence. For Dulles, it was the end of his career and his job as the President’s intelligence officer.

  In the wording of NSAM 271, Kennedy explicitly advised James Webb that NASA would include “the development of specific technical proposals” and “cooperation in lunar landing programs.” Kennedy’s goal was further expanded through a “means of continuing dialog between the scientists of both countries.”

  This substantiates other documents leaked to Tim Cooper that secret negotiations had reached a level of confidence in dealing with the UFO threat that existed and briefly mentioned in other secret executive communications between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

  ZR/Rifle, the Conspiracy to kill President Kennedy

  Called “Murder, Inc.” by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the CIA’s political action program known by its cover name ZR/Rifle was ordered activated by President Kennedy to eliminate Fidel Castro and was managed by his brother U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy from the Justice Department.

  In October 1963, while Dulles was moving his personal items out of his office at CIA headquarters, he was ordered by Kennedy to put Operation MONGOOSE––the assassination of Castro and as many of his top aides as possible––into readiness. What President Kennedy and his brother did not know was that foreign hit men had been approached through intermediaries on behalf of U.S. intelligence to kill an American politician in the United States.

  Kennedy had requested MJ-12 UFO intelligence and a proposal by 1 February 1964 in anticipation of winning the presidential election in his own right. He would be announcing the pullout of U.S. military advisers from Laos and Vietnam by the end of the year and then perhaps disclosing the classified UFO program to the public.

  He would also engage NASA in a joint lunar exploration program with the Soviets thereby ending the nuclear arms race all in his second term. With Castro out of the way and liberating Cuba, Kennedy’s popularity would guarantee his presidency for another four years thus paving the way for his brother, Robert Kennedy, the 1968 presidential election and a Democratic controlled White House for the 1970s. Whether JFK’s later discovered extensive use of pain killers for back pain or his extra-marital affairs would have changed all that is a matter of continued historical debate and speculation.

  But, on November 22, 1963, all those hopes for JFK and the world ended with three or more gun shots. No Vietnam pull out, no reorganization of the CIA, and no UFO disclosures. Allen Dulles was then free to finish his work on the Warren Commission and forever hence keep those secrets that were deemed “Exempt from Disclosure” as Richard Helms would do as we’ll see in the next chapter.

  References/Footnotes

  (1) JFK National Security Directive, June 28, 1961. Review of MJ-12 Intelligence Operations as they relate Cold War Psychological Warfare Plans:

  http://www.ufoconspiracy.com/reports/kennedy_ciadirector.pdf

  (2) JFK Memorandum for the Director, Central Intelligence Agency. November 12, 1963. Classification review of all UFO intelligence file affecting national security:

  http://www.majesticdocuments.com/pdf/kennedy_cia.pdf

  (3) Figures 1a & b: This is Allen Dulles’s identification card from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States’ intelligence gathering agency during World War II. Dulles was stationed in Bern, Switzerland for much of the war where he gained his reputation as a spymaster.

  Second illustration is the back of Allen Dulles’s identification card from the Office of Strategic Services, the United States intelligence gathering agency during World War II, signed by William Donovan.

  Donovan drafted the plans for the OSS and was its director during the war:

  http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/adulles/index.html

  4) Dulles biographical references.

  a) Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, James Srodes, 2000, Regency Publishing, Inc.
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br />   Chapter 3

  RICHARD HELMS: DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

  “Richard Helms was briefed into the subject of UFOs in the early days. He knew about Roswell and knew the involvement of the CIA from around 1950 to the 1970s. Helms knew the NSA involvement with programs to capture ET signals.”

  —Rick Doty

  “The Central Intelligence Agency,” Allen Dulles once told Congress “should be directed by a relatively small, but elite corps of men with a passion for anonymity and a willingness to stick at that particular job (1).” Richard Helms, the eighth Director of Central Intelligence (1966-1973) had those qualities. He died in Washington on October 23rd 2002 at the age of 89. He was among the last of a dwindling group of trailblazers like James Jesus Angleton and Allen Dulles (Chapters 1 & 2) who dominated American intelligence for much of the Cold War, but who like his cohorts was deeply steeped in covert UFO operations.

  When Helms started his career with the new agency 55 years ago, he was one of a group of young veterans of clandestine warfare during World War II. They chose to stay in the secret world to fight a new and, in many ways, a more formidable enemy. Seemingly, Helms was a natural at managing secret operations. He rose from desk officer to DCI and came to represent a new type of government professional: The career intelligence officer steeped in the culture of clandestine activities––like Majestic-12 ––and devoted to the agency as an institution. Intelligence work, Helms would later say, was “not merely . . . a job, but rather . . . a calling.”

  Richard Helms was born in 1913 into a family of means and international connections. He grew up in the middle class suburbs of Philadelphia and New York. One of his brothers described their youth as “conventional upper-middle class, well educated, well traveled, interested in good schools and sports, and with a social life centering on the country club (1).” Helms took part of his schooling at academies in Switzerland and Germany and became fluent in French and German. In 1931, he entered Williams College and majored in literature and history. He became class president and head of the school paper, and was voted “most respected,” “best politician,” and “most likely to succeed.”

  Wartime with the OSS

  In 1942, Helms joined the US Naval Reserve, received a commission as a lieutenant, and worked in the Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters in New York City, plotting the locations of German submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. A former wire service colleague approached him about working for the new Office of Strategic Services in its Morale Operations Branch, which produced “black” propaganda. In 1943, the Navy transferred Helms to the OSS in Washington.

  Helms was able to organize infiltrations of agents behind German lines to spy and set up resistance networks. Late in the war, he was “forward deployed” to Paris. Then, after V-E Day, he moved on to Luxembourg and Germany where he was made deputy chief of the espionage element in Wiesbaden. In August 1945, he was transferred to a similar job in Berlin under Allen Dulles. From there, he tracked down Nazi sympathizers and war criminals, collected information on stolen goods, traced German scientists, and monitored Soviet military misdeeds.

  A Life’s Work

  After President Truman abolished the OSS in late 1945, Helms moved into the Berlin office of the Strategic Services Unit, a carryover operational organization warehoused in the War Department. In December, he came back to Washington (for good, as it turned out) to run the central Europe branch of the short-lived Central Intelligence Group. Then in late 1947, he took a somewhat similar position in the new CIA’s Office of Special Operations which was the same office that James Angleton worked in; as a senior aide, he undoubtedly kept Helms informed of the most guarded secrets and most likely UFOs were on the list.

  This is reinforced by a conversation on March 26, 2000 between Tim Cooper and James Angleton Jr. where JA Jr. said that his grandfather James Jesus Angleton (JJA) helped establish MJ MAJESTIC-12 CI operations before he was appointed Director of Counter-Intelligence (2). Note: recent information has come to light and it seems Jim Angleton’s Jr. Father Angleton SR (who died of a brain tumor in 2004) was adopted out of wedlock. Angleton SR would often call himself the nephew of James Jesus Angleton.

  Since its inception in 1947, the CIA was engaged in advancing the art of reconnaissance especially over the old Soviet Union and UFOs (Chapters 1 and 2).

  In the same breath, the CIA was busy debunking the many “flying saucer” reports being reported to the USAF. Informed speculation had circulated among upper air intelligence officers that some foreign power must have operated them, but suspicions were always diverted away from the CIA. However, according to a 1975 FOIA release, Walter B. Smith (3) who was the DCI before Dulles, had such an intense interest in the UFO subject, he went so far as asking for cooperation between all the military services, the Research and Development Board of the DOD, the Psychological Strategy Board and other government agencies as appropriate (4). We can only surmise from chapters 1 and 2 that this interest never waned even up to today, and it’s not too difficult to say that roughly 90 percent of all things done by the CIA are done covertly.

  The covertness of the CIA was keenly brought to the surface by the then new CIA Director Porter J. Goss who in 2003, before the 9-11 Commission, said that the classification policy was “dysfunctional.” “There’s a lot of gratuitous classification going on,” he said at a May 23, 2003 hearing of the Commission. “We over-classify very badly.”

  In 1962, John McCone, DCI, who had replaced Allen Dulles the year before, selected Helms as the DDP, Deputy Directorate of Plans, which proved to be important symbolically and substantively. It quieted many of the rumblings from the clandestine service careerists after the Bissell and Dulles ousters, and allayed their fears that McCone, a shipping and construction tycoon, was bent on running the agency like a big business. Helms’ promotion also signaled a shift in emphasis from covert action to espionage—a reorientation with which he wholeheartedly agreed.

  After McCone resigned in 1965 and was replaced by Adm. William Raborn, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Helms Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) to give him more Washington seasoning before elevating him to the top job. When that occurred a year later, LBJ handled it in his inimitable way by announcing it at a press conference without asking Helms first; the DCI-designate heard about the fait accompli from an administration official only a short time before President Johnson told the media.

  Helm’s Style

  Urbane, cool, shrewd, sure-footed, tight-lipped (kept all the little dirty secrets) controlled, discreet—such adjectives appear frequently in colleagues and friends’ recollections of Helms. On the job, he was serious and demanding. An efficient worker and delegator, he left his desk clear at the end of the day (almost always before 7 p.m.), feeling assured that the trustworthy subordinates he had carefully chosen could pick up the details and handle any problems. According to a colleague, “Helms was a fellow who by and large gave the people who worked with him his confidence . . . his instinct was to trust them. . . .”

  Sometimes, however, Helms’ hands-off style and deference to deputies worked against him. In the area of covert action, for example, more “proactive” management on his part might have averted the near-collapse of the CIA’s political action capabilities after the agency’s network of international organizations, propaganda outlets, proprieties, foundations, and trusts were exposed in a 1967 Ramparts’ magazine article. Similarly, in the area of counter-intelligence, Helms accorded (as mentioned before) the chief of the CI Staff DD/CI James Angleton, much leeway in vetting assets, dealing with defectors and suspected double agents, and searching for “moles” inside the Agency—despite the costs of disrupting legitimate operations and tarnishing officers’ careers (5).

  Helms declined a presidential request to submit his resignation after the 1972 elections, not wanting to set a precedent that he thought would politicize the position of DCI. After he was forced out in 1973— he believed that Nixon was very angry at him for
refusing to use the CIA in the Watergate cover up—Helms spent several years coping with controversies ensuing in part from some of his acts of omission and commission while at the agency.

  He became a lightning rod for criticism of the CIA during its “time of troubles” in the mid-1970s. He was called back many times from his ambassadorial post in Tehran to testify before investigative bodies about assassination plots, domestic operations, drug testing, the destruction of records, and other activities of dubious legality and ethicality known collectively as the “Family Jewels.” He responded to inquiries about them cautiously, sometimes testily, as he tried to walk the increasingly fuzzy line between discretion and disclosure. Everything was kept, “in the family” and the black subject of UFOs was part of those family secrets.

  Helms ran into legal troubles resulting from his judgment about when and when not to reveal secrets. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just after leaving the agency, he firmly denied that the CIA had tried to influence the outcome of the Chilean presidential election in 1970. Helms described his quandary this way: “If I was to live up to my oath and fulfill my statutory responsibility to protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure, I could not reveal covert operations to people unauthorized to learn about them.” He eventually pleaded no contest to charges of not testifying “fully, completely and accurately” to the committee.