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bosses in the Kremlin thought he still needed to know, they gave him from the reports they received from agents in the field. But nothing, nothing about the V2 launches at White Sands, nothing about the new tracking radars at Alamogordo gave the scientists in the Soviet rocket program any indications the Americans were even an iota ahead of them in guided missiles until he heard the news of the Roswell crash. Both the Russian and American missile programs were based almost entirely upon the German weapons research spoils that the Allies were dividing up even before the end of the war. | was a firsthand participant in this, secreting out German weapons scientists through Italy after we occupied Rome as part of a secret operation code named "Paper Clip" that began in 1944. With V2 designers Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, and others running experiments on the German missiles we brought back to the United States, the army had successfully appropriated much of the German advanced weapons research and was carrying on experiments in New Mexico. The Soviets also got their own share of German technology through their own intelligence agents and local Communist Party cells in occupied countries. And what a technology it was. The Germans had developed a crescent shaped jet powered flying wing, jet powered Messerschmitts that blazed by our P51s as if they were standing still, and a U boat launched VI/V2 that, had the Germans been able to hide even a small flotilla off the American East Coast, could have bombed out much of heavily concentrated downtown Washington in a matter of hours. All they needed to buy was enough time to deploy their weapons and get their U-boats in position. And that was their strategy toward the end of 1944 when they turned around and counter attacked through Belgium in the dead of winter and pinned us down at the Battle of the Bulge. Break our advance on the ground, blast us out of the air with their new jets, bomb North American cities, and knock Britain out of the war. With their new weapons they could have fought us to a stand still and won a bitter truce. Both the Stalin didn't have to worry much about who held the advantage in German weaponry after the war. Both sides were about equal. But this flying saucer crash, that was a different matter, and it meant that in an instant the United States could have gained an enormous advantage in the Cold War weapons race that had begun only moments after the Germans surrendered. What might that advantage be? The Russian liquid fuel engineer wondered aloud. What could the Americans have retrieved from that crash? Soviet agents reported that the townspeople in Roswell had talked about little creatures at the crash site and a crescent shaped aircraft that the army hauled away on trucks, but the stories had been quickly silenced by military counter intelligence. So any real intelligence on what the Americans might be developing would have to come from Soviet agents deep inside the U.S. government. Stalin would order it. And, as if they were activated by an invisible switch, spies from one of the most efficient and ruthless intelligence machines in the world began homing in on the American military bases associated with the Roswell retrieval and the key American military and civilian personnel the Russians knew would have to be involved. The Americans might not have been the most efficient spy catchers in 1947, but Army Counter intelligence had been put on alert even before the Soviets knew that a flying saucer had been retrieved. Starting from the central point at the nexus of sensitive New Mexico bases during the summer of 1947, CIC agents questioned anybody who seemed interested in learning about what happened in Roswell. Ask too many questions and knocking at your door would be a couple of plain clothes investigators who didn't need a search warrant to tummage through your things. So maybe the army was a little overzealous about their interrogation procedures, but by early August it began producing results. By the time General Twining was writing his report to Army Air Forces command in Washington, both Army and Navy Intelligence commanders knew that the Soviets had a high priority operation in place at military bases around the country. Soviet agents were everywhere. Central Intelligence group director Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, a member of President Truman's advisory group on UFOs, informed the president. A top down counter intelligence operation had to he put in place immediately, here commended, or every plan the military had to evaluate what they'd retrieved from Roswell would be compromised. There were a million questions. Were these flying objects the prelude to something much bigger? Were they communicating with the Soviets? Were they allied with the Soviets? Were they probing our defenses for a planetary invasion? We had already assumed that the behavior of these aircraft was hostile, but what did they want? Meanwhile, other reports of civilian flying saucer sightings were turning up in newspapers and coming in through local police. Even airline pilots were seeing strange lights. There wasn't much time to act. A secret this big about flying saucers was bound to get out and cause untold panic among the civilian population unless an elaborate camouflage was established. And worse, we had to keep the Soviets away from this until we knew what we had. We needed a plan, and right away. Some have said it was Secretary of Defense James Forrestal's idea. Others said the whole scheme belonged to Central Intelligence director Hillenkoetter. |, frankly, don't know first hand because when the plan was hatched | was sweating out the end of the summer at Fort Riley, still trying to shake out of my mind the image of that ghoulishly unearthly thing I'd seen floating in its container. But whoever said it first was saying the obvious, according to the people on Eisenhower's National Security staff whom | worked with six years later. Maybe it was 29 Americans and the Soviets wanted to get their hands on those German weapons, especially the V2s.