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years after having commanded Army Intelligence for three years before that. Although the general didn't explicitly comment much on the incredible facts we had uncovered in the Roswell file because he considered it just part of his job, he did joke about it from time to time with his old friend Senator Strom Thurmond. More than once, | would take the back door into his inner office only to find Senator Thurmond and General Trudeau sitting on his couch and looking me up and down as | walked in. "Art, " Senator Thurmond would drawl, barely hiding his Cheshire cat smile, "what spooky things you think old Phil's been into?" "| would guess that you're able to tell the future, Phil, "Senator Thurmond said. "With what you're readin’ you can predict any-thing. " "Just acting like a good intelligence officer, Senator, "| 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? | 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 | would prepare to go silent about Roswell while setting up a run of about six months to push as many projects through as | could, including whatever was left in my nut file. Only | didn't call it a nut file or anything after General Trudeau left. My new boss and | 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? | 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. | 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. " | couldn't believe my eyes as | looked down at the glossies and then ran a magnifying glass over them just to make sure that | 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 Guantanamo Bay. Had Gen. Curtis LeMay seen these photos, | 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 | was getting deeply worried. So | called one of my friends, New York senator Kenneth Keating, and asked him what he knew. The truth was Senator Keating did not, nor did Representative Mike Feighan, whom | also called. Both legislators knew better than to ask me where | found the photos or who gave them to me, but before they did or said anything, they wanted to know why | believed them to be authentic. "They come from our best resources, "| told them. "| could pick out the missiles myself. | 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." 108 "You been inside your junk file,’ Phil?" the general would ask. "What do you mean missiles, Colonel Corso?" he asked. "What missiles, where?" It was October 1962. "In Cuba, Senator, "| said. "They're sitting in Cuba waiting to be deployed on launchers. Don't you know?"