Page Content (OCR)
We shook hands and he walked me out of his office into the corridor. For a moment, it was like stepping out of the surreal into the real. We'd just stitched our own piece of fabric over reality, created a piece of history. The technology boys in research and development at Fort Belvoir would receive a device from one of their consultants who would whisper to them that this was liberated from one of our enemies. Don't ask any questions. But it was just the thing that the lab people at Fort Belvoir were looking for to show them how a finished device might look. Can they come up with a reverse engineering plan? Is there a company they're already working with on night vision? And within a few months, some company, whoever it might be, would wind up with a plan in place, a development budget, and a new identity for the strange looking eyepieces that turned up in my Roswell files. It might take five or so years, but when it came rolling off the assembly line somewhere in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, or wherever, it would be "Made in the USA" and I'd read about it in the papers or see it on television. Night vision was the first project we actually seeded during the first year of my tenure at Foreign Technology. It would turn out to be easier than most because of the history of German development during the war and the research already done through the 1950s. By the time | brought the Roswell night viewer to Fort Belvoir, it fit right in through the seam of an existing development program and no one was the wiser. The actual weapons development program at Fort Belvoir served as the cover for the dissemination of Roswell technology so perfectly that the only distortion anyone could find as he went back through the history is what might seem like a sudden acceleration in the development program itself shortly after 1961. Night vision got a boost in funding, a new officer was assigned to the project by General Trudeau, and General Trudeau's name starts turning up on a regular basis as one of the apparent benefactors of the program. By 1963, when he and | were gone from the Pentagon, the project was at Martin Marietta Electronics - now part of Lockheed Martin - and already on its way through the initial deployment that would take place in Europe and Vietnam.. But | didn't know that as | drove through the Fort Belvoir gate and headed back to my Pentagon office. | only felt satisfied that it looked like we had successfully inserted one of our own Foreign Technology projects into an ongoing development stream already under way and had camouflaged our appropriation of a piece of alien technology. At this point, | believed, we'd kept it out of the hands of the Soviets for the time being, and the aliens, if they were monitoring what we were doing, maybe didn't know what we were doing with it either. It would give us time. | headed north along the Potomac and through the green woods of Fairfax County, Virginia, back to a desk that was quickly piling up with other projects that needed disposition. One of them, which was running parallel with the night vision I'd just handed off, was the embryonic "Project Corona, " an idea whose time was suddenly thrust upon us by the shooting down of a U2 surveillance plane and the capture of its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. The air force and the CIA had been running the U2 program for awhile during the Eisenhower administration, and the reports and photos routinely crossed my desk at the National Security Council. Like so many other events during the Cold War, the U2 didn't have just a single purpose, the surveillance of the Soviet Union to monitor their guided missile development program. It had a triple intent. Of course, we wanted to know exactly what the Soviets were up to, but we also wanted to test their air defense capability. We wanted to know how accurately their radars could track the U2 and whether any of their missiles could bring it down. So we deliberately provoked them by making our presence known when we wanted them to fire at us. Could they shoot us down? Cameras on the U2 picked up the launch of enemy surface to air missiles as the pilot flew over sensitive installations where the Soviets had to challenge us or cede to us the control of top classified zones in their airspace. So we played gamesmanship with them, probing their defenses, deliberately sacrificing pilots who we believed died when their planes were shot down, and always denying what we were doing even as Khrushchev screamed at Eisenhower that the U2 program was putting Khrushchev himself at risk inside the Kremlin. "We can deal with each other, " the Communist Party chairman told Ike. "But not if you force me out of office. " But as much as Eisenhower hated the U2 program and the jeopardy into which it placed our pilots, the President had to accommodate himself to one of the other agendas of the surveillance: the ongoing search for any evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft landings or crashes within the vastness of the Soviet Union. We also wanted to see whether the Soviets were harvesting any of the alien aircraft technology for themselves. That's what made the U2 program too valuable to give up until we had an alternative. And the alternative, although it was an air force and not an army program, was part of a shared R&D between our intelligence services and the National Security Council/CIA apparatus. And it was already in development within Lockheed in a division they called "skunk works. " Because we had set up our U2 flights to provoke the Soviets and because we knew that ultimately we would start to lose pilots and planes, the National Security staff began looking aggressively for a more secure surveillance program as early as 1957, my last year at the White House. Intelligence decided to take orbital satellite photos of Soviet installations, but only if they could get a bird up there that would be reliable. Also, we didn't want to let the Soviets know we were turning earth orbit into a surveillance facility because we didn't want to encourage them to go after our satellites. So the trick was to get a satellite up there in complete secrecy. But how could you do that with the whole world watching? 59