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"Over Cuba? Listen, not even Khrushchev's own people are willing to sacrifice Moscow for Havana, " | told him. "It's a Russian gambit because the RGB told Khrushchev he could get away with it. He's punishing us for the U2 and the Bay of Pigs. We have to standup 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 | 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. "| 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 | might find myself in after | 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. | may have stepped on the toes of some of the most powerful people in Washington, but it was still the good fight and | 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 1960sas 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 ttunk 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, | 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, | once 110