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be as circumspect as possible, draw no attention to myself. I'd learned this skill when | served on MacArthur's staff in Korea ten years earlier: | had to be the little man who wasn't there. If people don't think you're there, they talk. That's when you learn things. And within those first few weeks | saw and learned a lot about how the politics of the Roswell discovery had matured over the fourteen years since the crash and since the intense discussions at the White House after Eisenhower became president. Each of the different branches of the military had been protecting its own cache of Roswell - related files and had been actively seeking to gather as much new Roswell material as possible. Certainly all the services had their own reports from examiners at Walter Reed and Bethesda concerning the nature of the alien physiology. Mine were in my nut file along with the drawings. It was pretty clear, also, from the way the navy and air force were formulating their respective plans for advanced military technology hardware, that many of the same pieces of technology in my files were probably shared by the other services. But nobody was bragging because everybody wanted to know what the other guy had. But since, officially, Roswell had never happened in the first place, there was no technology to develop. On the other hand, the curiosity among weapons and intelligence people within the services was rabid. Nobody wanted to come in second place in the silent, unacknowledged alien technology development race going on at the Pentagon as each service quietly pursued its version of a secret Roswell weapon. | didn't know what the air force or navy had or what they might have been developing from their respective files on Roswell, but | assumed each service had something and was trying to find out what | had. That would have been a good intelligence procedure. If you were in the know about what was retrieved from Roswell, you kept your ears open for snippets of information about what was being developed by another branch of the military, what was going before the budget committees for funding, or what defense contractors were developing a specific technology for the services. If you weren't in the Roswell loop, but were too curious for your own good, you could be spun around by the swirling rumor mill that the Roswell race had kicked up among competing weapons development people in the services and wind up chasing nothing more than dust devils that vanished down the halls as soon as you turned the corner on them. There were real stories, however, that wouldn't go away no matter how many times somebody official stepped up to say the story was false. For example, | picked up the rumors pretty quickly concerning the UFO the air force was supposed to be keeping at Edwards Air Force Base in California and the research they were conducting on the spacecraft's technology, especially its electromagnetic wave propulsion system. There were also rumors circling around the air force about the early harvesting of Roswell technology in the design of the all- wing bombers, but | didn't know how much stock to put in them. The army had been developing an all-wing design since right after World War |, and within a year after the Roswell crash Jack Northrop's company began test flights of their YB49 flying wing recon/bomber models. The YB49's quadruple vertical tail fins were so uncannily reminiscent of the head on Roswell craft sketches in our files that it was hard not to make a connection between the spacecraft and the bomber. But the flying wing's development took place over ten years before | got to the Foreign Technology desk, so | had no direct evidence relating the bomber to the spacecraft. General Trudeau was right, though, when he said that people at the Pentagon were watching Army R&D because they thought we were onto something. People wanted to know what Foreign Technology was working on, especially the more exotic things in our portfolio just to make sure, the memos read, that we weren't duplicating budgetary resources by spending twice or three times for the same thing. There was a lot of talk and pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff about technology sharing and joint weapons development, but my boss wanted us to keep what we had to ourselves, especially what he jokingly kept calling "the alien harvest. " As if the eyes of the other military services weren't enough, we also had to contend with the analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency. Under the guise of coordination and cooperation, the CIA was amalgamating as much power as it could. Information is power, and the more the CIA tried to learn about the army weapons development program, the more nervous it made all of us at the center of R&D. Acquaintances of mine in the agency had dropped hints, shortly after | took over the Foreign Technology desk, that if | needed any intelligence about what other countries were developing, they could help me out. But one hand washes the other, and they dropped hints that if | had any clues about where any stray pieces of "the cargo, " or "the package" as the Roswell artifacts were commonly referred to within the military, might be found, they would surely appreciate it if | let them know. After the third time my CIA contacts bumped into me and whispered this proposal for exchanges of information into my ear, | told my boss that our friends might be anxious about what we had. "You really put me on the hot seat, General, " | said to Trudeau over one of our morning briefings at the end of my first month on the job. | was still working on the strategy for the nut file and, thankfully, my boss hadn't pressured me yet to come up with recommendations for the plan. But it was coming. "How does the CIA know what we have?" 23