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antennas sprung up on roofs of brand-new houses in thousands of subdivisions around the country, we were in the midst of a treacherous war of nerves. Deep inside our intelligence services and even within the President's own cabinet were cadres of career government officers working - some knowingly, some not - for the Soviet Union by carrying out policies devised inside the KGB. Some of the position papers that came out of these offices made no sense otherwise. We also knew the CIA had been penetrated by KGB moles, just as we knew that some of our own policy makers were advocating ideas that would only weaken the United States and lead us down the paths that served the best interests of our enemies. A handful of us knew the awful truth about Korea. We lost it not because we were beaten on the battlefield but because we were compromised from within. The Russian advisers fighting alongside the North Koreans were given our plans even before they reached those of us on Mac Arthur's staff. And when we threw our host technology into the field and into the air, the Soviets had already formulated plans to capture it and take it back to Russia. When the time came to talk peace at Panmunjom and negotiate a POW exchange, | knew where those Americans were, ten miles north of the border, who wouldn't be coming home. And there were people right inside our own government who let them stay there, in prison camps, where some of them might be alive to this very day. So General Trudeau gave me his very grim smile and said, as he walked me toward the locked dark olive military file cabinet on the wall of his private office, "|! need you to cover my back, Colonel. | need you to watch because what I'm going to do, | can't cover it myself. " Whatever Trudeau was planning, | knew he'd tell me in his own time. And he'd tell me only what he thought | needed to know when | needed it. For the immediate present, | was to be his special assistant in R&D, one of the most sensitive divisions in the whole Pentagon bureaucracy because that was where the most classified plans of the scientists and weapons designers were translated into the reality of defense contracts. R&D was the interface between the gleam in someone's eye and a piece of hardware prototype rolling out of a factory to show its potential for the army brass. Only it was my job to keep it a secret while it was developed. "But there's something else | want you to do for me, Phil, "General Trudeau continued as he put his hand on top of the cabinet. "I'm going to have this cabinet moved downstairs to your office. " The general had put me in an office on the second floor of the outer ring directly under him. That way, as | would soon find out, whenever he needed me in a hurry | could get upstairs and through the back door before anybody even knew where | was. "This has some special files, war materiel you've never seen before, that | want to put under your Foreign Technology responsibilities, " he continued. My specific assignment was to the Research & Development Division's Foreign Technology desk, what | thought would be a pretty dry post because it mainly required me to keep up on the kinds of weapons and research our allies were doing. Read the intelligence reports, review films of weapons tests, debrief scientists and the research people at universities on what their colleagues overseas were doing, and write up proposals for weapons the army might need. It was important and it had its share of cloak and dagger, but after what I'd been through in Rome chasing down the Gestapoand SS officers the Nazis left behind and the Soviet NKVD units masquerading themselves as Italian Communist partisans, it seemed like a great opportunity to help General Trudeau keep some of the army's ideas out of the hands of the other military services. But then | didn't know what was inside that file cabinet. The army generally categorized the types of weapons research it was doing into two basic groups, domestic and foreign. There was the research that sprang out of work going on in the United States and research by people overseas. | knew I'd be keeping track of what the French were doing with advanced helicopter design and whether the British would be able to build a practical vertical takeoff and landing fighter, something we'd given up on after World War Il. Then there was the German big gun, the V3, granddaughter of Big Bertha that the Germans threatened Paris with during the First World War. We'd found the barrel assemblies of the German artillery pieces near Calais after we invaded Normandy and knew that the Nazis were working on something that, like their jet engine fighter and new Panzer tank, could have changed the outcome of the war if they'd held us off any longer at the Battle of the Bulge. | was responsible for developing this technology, ideas we hadn't come up with ourselves, and work up recommendations for how we could incorporate this into our weapons planning. But | didn't know why the general kept on patting the top drawer of that file cabinet. "I'll get to those files right away if you like, General, " | said. "And write up some preliminary reports on what | think about it. " "It's going to take you a little longer than that, Phil, " Trudeau said. Now he was almost laughing, something he didn't do very much in those days. In fact, the only time | remember him laughing that way was after he heard 17