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tracking strange objects in the sky, the group realized that they needed policies on how to handle what was turning into a mass media phenomenon. They needed a mechanism for processing the thousands of flying saucer reports that could be anything from a real crash or close encounter to a couple of bohunks tossing a pie tin into the air and snapping its picture with their Aunt Harriet's Kodak Brownie. The group also had to assess the threat from the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries, assuming of course that flying saucers weren't restricted to North America, and gather intelligence on what kinds of information our allies had on flying saucers as well. And it still had to process the Roswell technology and figure out how it could be used. So from the original group there developed a whole tree structure of loosely confederated committees and subgroups, sometimes complete organizations like the air force Project Blue Book, all kept separate by administrative firewalls so that there would be no information leakage, but all controlled from the top. With the initial and ongoing stories safely covered up, the plans for the long term reverse engineering work on the Roswell technology could begin. But who would do it? Where would the material reside? And how could the camouflage of what the military was doing be maintained amidst the push for new weapons, competition with the Soviets, and the flying saucer mania that was sweeping the country in the late 1940s? General Twining had a plan for that, too. Just a little over a year after the initial group meetings at the White House, Air Force Intelligence, now that the air force had become a separate service, issued a December 1948 report - 100-203-79 - called "Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the U.S. " in which UFOs are never referred to as extraterrestrial objects but as elements of "foreign technology, " which is actually the subject of the report. The report, innocuous to most people because it doesn't say that flying saucers came from outer space, is actually one of the first indications showing how the camouflage plan was supposed to work over the ensuing years. The writers of the report had located within the existing military administrative structure the precise place where all research and development into the flying disk phenomenon could be pursued not only under a veil of secrecy but in the very place were no one could be expected to look: the Foreign Technology desk. Here, the materials could be deposited for safe keeping within the military while army and air force brass decided what our existing industrial and research technology allowed them to do. There could he as weapons failed, secret experiments without fear of exposure, and, most importantly, an ongoing discussion of how the United States could develop this treasure trove of engineering information, all within the very structure where it was supposed to take place. Just don't call it extraterrestrial; call it "foreign technology" and throw it into the hopper with the rest of the mundane stuff the foreign technology officers were supposed to do. And that's how, twelve years later, the Roswell technology turned up in an old combination locked military file cabinet carted into my new Pentagon office by two of the biggest enlisted men I'd ever seen. The Cover-up while General Twining was flying back and forth from Ohio to New Mexico, on the other side of the world in Moscow, Chairman Josef Stalin was furious. Red-faced and not even trying to hide the rage that erupted like an exploding volcano, Stalin held up a copy of the Roswell Daily Record for Tuesday, July 8,1947, and threw it out onto the center of the table for any of the scientists in the room who could read English. Stalin didn't need an American newspaper to tell him what his NKVD agents on the ground at Alamogordo reported weeks before: that a U.S. Army retrieval team had pulled a crashed alien spacecraft out of the New Mexico desert and was already evaluating the valuable technology they'd recovered. At first, when the Soviet intelligence bosses got the reports from their agents at the American bases, they were more than skeptical. They figured the stories were plants, false information to flush out the Soviet spies the Americans suspected had infiltrated their most secret bases. If the Soviet government reacted to the disinformation, the American counter intelligence agents would be able to determine the path of the story and isolate the spies. But when newspapers began reporting the crash, then covered it up with stories about weather balloons, the Soviets knew they had stumbled onto the real thing. So it was true, Stalin told the group, the Americans had actually gotten their own flying saucer. Now, he asked, what would they do with it? One of the chief designers of the Soviet's embryonic liquid-fuel-rocket program was at the meeting. He, like many of the Soviet engineers who'd read the German secret weapons files at the end of the war, knew exactly where the Americans should have been in their guided-missile-development program. What information his 28 CHAPTER 5 __oo ooo