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CHAPTER 13 AS | WORKED MY WAY THROUGH THE LIST OF ITEMS IN MY NUT file, writing advisory reports and tecommendations to General Trudeau about the potential of each item, | lost all concept of time. | could see, as | drove up and down the Potomac shore to Fort Belvoir to check on the progress of night vision at Martin Marietta, that the summer was coming to an end and the leaves had started to change color. | could also see that now it was already dark when | left the Pentagon. And it was dark now when | set out for the Pentagon every morning. I'd gotten into the habit of taking different routes to work just to make sure that if the CIA had put a tail on me, I'd make him work harder to stay up with me. General Trudeau and | had settled down into a long daily routine ourselves at R&D. We had our early morning meetings about the Roswell file - he also called it the "junk pile" because it was filled with so much debris and pieces of items that had broken away from larger components - but we had buried the Roswell material development projects themselves so deep inside the regular functions of the R&D division that not even the other officers who worked with us every day knew what was going on. We'd categorized the work we did so carefully that when it came time to discuss anything about Roswell, even if it had a bearing on some other item we were working on at the time, we made sure that either no one was at the office, or we were at a place where we wouldn't have to stop talking just because someone came into the room. My responsibility at Foreign Technology was to feed R&D's ongoing project development with information and intelligence from sources outside the regular army channels. These ran in interconnected rings through the Pentagon to defense industry contractors to testing operations at army bases and to researchers at universities or independent laboratories who were under contract with us. If we were developing methods of preserving food, always trying to come up with a better way to prepare field rations, and the Italians and Germans had a process that seemed to work, it was my job to learn about it and slip the information into the development process. Even when there was no official development process underway for a specific item, if something | learned was appropriate to anyone of the army's major commands, whether it was the Medical Corps, the Signal Corps, the motor pool, ordnance, or even the Quartermaster Corps, it was also my job to find a way to make that information appropriate and drop it in without so much as a splash. This made the perfect cover for what | was doing with the Roswell file as long as | could find ways to slip the Roswell technology into the development process so invisibly no one would ever able to find the Roswell on ramp to the information highway. For all the world to see, General Trudeau and | regularly met to review the ongoing projects in Army R&D, those we had inherited from the previous command and those we wanted to initiate on our watch. Officers who'd been assigned to R&D before we arrived had their own projects already in development, too, and the general had assigned me the task of feeding those projects with information and intelligence, no matter where it came from, without disturbing either what the officers were doing or interfering with their staffs. It was tricky because | had to work in the dark, undercover even from my own colleagues whose reputations would have been destroyed if word leaked out that they were dealing in "flying saucer stuff." Yet at the same time, most high ranking officers at the Pentagon and key members of their staffs knew that Roswell technology was floating through most of the new projects under development. They were also vaguely, if not specifically, aware of what had happened at Roswell itself and of the current version of the Hillenkoetter/Bush/Twining working group, which had personnel stationed at the Pentagon to keep tabs on what the military was doing. Uniting what | called my official "day job" at R&D on regular projects and my undercover job in the Roswell file, was my official, but many times informal, role as General Trudeau's deputy at the division. In that job, | would carry out the general's orders as they related to the division and not specifically to any one project or another. If General Trudeau needed information to help him redefine his budgetary priorities or assemble information to help compile supplementary development budgets, he'd often ask me to help or at least give him advice. And | functioned as the general's intelligence officer as well, supporting him at meetings with information, helping him present position papers, assisting him whenever he had to hold briefings or meet with congressional committees, and defending him and the division against the almost weekly attacks on our turf from officers in the other military branches or from the civilian development and intelligence agencies. Everybody wanted to know what we knew, what we were spending, and what we were spending it on. And we had no quarrel with telling anybody who wanted to know exactly what kinds of goods the American people were getting for their money except when it came to one category - Roswell. That's when the mantle of darkness would fall and our memories about where certain things came from became very dim, as it did with the dramatic improvement in night vision technology shortly after the summer of 1961. Even our own people became very frustrated with us when General Trudeau would turn to me at a meeting and say, "You know that night vision information you sent over to Fort Belvoir a while back? Where did you find that file, Phil?" And if | couldn't play dumb and say, "| don't think | ever came across this before, must be someone else in charge, " then I'd simply shrug and say, "| don't know, General, must have been in the files somewhere. I'll have to go back and look." 75