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anyone outside his own branch of the military and certainly didn't talk to the CIA. So, in a way that could only happen inside the military bureaucracy, the cover-up became covered up from the cover-up, leaving the few of us in the know free to do whatever we wanted. General Trudeau and | were all alone out there in so far as the package went. Whatever vestige of the group remained had simply lost track of the material delivered to Foreign Technology fourteen years earlier. And the general was right, nobody was home and our enemies inside government were capitalizing on whatever information they could find. The Roswell package was one of the prizes, and if we didn't do anything with it, the Russians would. And they were onto us. Our own military intelligence personnel told us that the Soviets were trafficking so heavily in our military secrets that they knew things about us in the Kremlin before we knew them in Congress. The army at least knew the KGB had penetrated the CIA, and the leadership of the CIA had been an integral part of the working group on flying disks since the early 1950s. Thus, whatever secrets the group thought they had, they certainly weren't secrets to the KGB. But here's what kept the roof from falling in on all of us. The KGB and the CIA weren't really the adversaries everybody thought them to be. They spied on each other, but for all practical purposes, and also because each agency had thoroughly penetrated the other, they behaved just like the same organization. They were all professional spies in a single extended agency playing the same intelligence game and trafficking in information. Information is power to be used. You don't simply give it away to your government's political leadership, whether it's the Republicans, the Tories, or the Communists, just because they tell you to. You can't trust the politicians, but you Can trust other spies. At least that's what spies believe, so their primary loyalty is to their own group and the other groups playing the same game. The CIA, KGB, British Secret Service, and a whole host of other foreign intelligence agencies were loyal to themselves and to the profession first and to their respective governments last. That's one of the reasons we in the military knew that the professional KGB leadership, not the Communist Party officers who were only inside for political reasons, were keeping as much information from the Soviet government as the CIA was keeping from our government. Professional spy organizations like the CIA and the KGB tend to exist only to preserve themselves, and that's why neither the U.S. military nor the Russian military trusted them. If you look at how the great spy wars of the Cold War played out you'll see how the KGB and CIA acted like one organization: lots of professional courtesy, lots of shared information to make sure nobody got fired, and a few human sacrifices now and then just to keep everybody honest. But when it came down to loyalty, the CIA was loyal to the KGB and vice versa. | believe they had a rationale for what they did. | know they thought the rest of us were too stupid to keep the world safe and that by sharing information they kept us out of a nuclear war. | believe this because | knew enough KGB agents during my time and got enough bits and pieces of information off the record to give mea picture of the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s that's very different from what you'd read on the front page of the New York Times. CIA penetration by the KGB and what amounted to their joint spying on the military was a fact we accepted during the 1950s and1960s, even though most of us in the Pentagon played spy versus spy as much as we could; those of us, like me, who'd gone to intelligence school during the war and knew some of the counter espionage tricks that kept the people watching you guessing. We would change our routes to work, always used false information stories as bait to test phones we weren't sure about, swept our offices for listening devices, always used a code when talking with one another about sensitive subjects. We had a counter intelligence agent in the military attaché's office over at the Russian consulate in Washington whose friends in the Soviet army trusted the KGB less than | did. If my name came up associated with a story, he'd let me know it. But he'd never tell the It was very disconcerting that the CIA had a tail on me all throughout my four year tenure at the White House. | was mad about it, but there was nothing much | chose to do. Then, when | came back to Washington in 1961 to work for General Trudeau, they put the tail back on and | led him down every back alley and rough neighborhood in D.C. that | could. He wouldn't shake. So the next day, after | told my boss what | was going to do, | led my faceless pursuer right to Langley, Virginia, past a sputtering secretary, and straight into the office of my old adversary, the director of cover operations Frank Wiesner, one of the best friends the KGB ever had. | told Wiesner to his face that yesterday was the last day | would walk around Washington without a handgun. And | put my .45 automaticon his desk. | said if | saw his tail on me tomorrow, they'd find him in the Potomac the next day with two bloody holes for eyes; that is, if they bothered to look for him. Wiesner said, "You won't do that, Colonel." But | reminded him very pointedly that | knew where all his bodies were buried, the people he'd gotten killed through his own ineptitude and, worse, his cooperation with the Russians. I'd tell his story to everyone | knew in Congress. Wiesner backed down. Subsequently, on a trip to London, Wiesner committed suicide and was found hanging in his hotel room. | never did tell his story. Two years later in 1963, one of Wiesner's friends at the agency told me that it was "all in good fun, Phil." Part of an elaborate recruitment process to get me into the CIA 37 CIA. Believe it or not, in the capital of my very own country, that kind of information helped me stay alive.