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It was an act, and many of the officers who suspected we had a stash of information somewhere knew we were covering up something. But if they were career, they also knew how to play the Pentagon version of steal the bacon. We had it and we were hiding it. No one would find out anything unless we let them. So the general would typically hand off anything having to do with military intelligence information to me and | would usually find a way not only to lose the answer but to lose the question as well. We became so practiced at this that entirely new inventions could find their way into development at many different places at the same time without anyone's ever becoming aware of the source of the technology, especially the officer who was assigned the task of project manager within our very own division. The CIA got so frustrated at not getting any information out of us that they began keeping closer tabs on the Russian attaches floating around Washington and working under their KGB controllers at the embassies and consulates. Because the CIA knew how thoroughly our universities had been penetrated they figured they'd get information on the rebound by photographing what was inside the photocopiers at the Russian embassy in Washington. And sure enough, from the rumor mill circulating around the exchange of scientists between industry and academia, the CIA knew that we were on to something at Army R&D and kept the circle as tight around us as they possibly could. So | had to keep close tabs on the general, not letting him go into meetings, any meetings, unprotected and always making sure that the CIA knew that they would have to climb over me to get to General Trudeau and anything he knew. And the CIA knew that | knew what they were doing and where their loyalties lay and also knew that it would have to come to a showdown someday. General Trudeau and | had quickly established our routine in early1961, and our categorization of how we did our jobs seemed to be working. Night vision was under development at Fort Belvoir, and researchers who worked with us had made sure that the silicon wafer chips had gotten to their colleagues at Bell Labs and assured us that anew generation of transistorized circuitry was already finding its way into development. The silicon chips were a covert reintroduction to the people at Bell Labs because the initial introduction of the integrated circuit chips from the Roswell crash had reached defense contractors as early as 1947 in the weeks after the material reached Wright Field. A similar history of introduction and reintroduction had occurred with stimulated energy radiation, a weapon the early analysts believed they were looking at in the wreckage of the Roswell craft. Since directed energy radiation was a technology we'd already deployed in World War Il, seeing what they thought was a super advanced version of that technology, so advanced as to be in a completely different realm, so excited the analysts at Wright Field that they wanted to get it out to research scientists as quickly as possible, which they did. And by the early 1950s, a version of stimulated energy radiation had found its way into the scientific community, which was developing new products around the process of microwave generation. Most Americans who were alive in the 1950s remember the introduction of the microwave oven that helped us "live better electrically" in our new modern kitchens. One of the miracle appliances that burst onto the scene in the 1950s promised to cook food in less than half the time of conventional ovens, even when the food had been completely frozen. Marketed under a variety of brand names including the now historic "Radar Range, " the microwave oven cooked whatever was inside not by the application of pure heat, the way conventional ovens did, but by bombarding the food with showers of tiny waves of electromagnetic radiation, usually only a centimeter or so long. The waves would pass through the food, exciting the water molecules deep inside and causing them to align and realign, back and forth, with greater velocity. The molecular activity generated heat from within and the food cooked from the inside out. Once you enclosed it in the right kind of container to keep all the moisture from evaporating, you had a quick cooked meal. The theory behind the microwave oven that started us down the long and profitable path of stimulated energy research was formulated in 1945 with the first commercial microwave ovens rolling off the line at Raytheon in Massachusetts in 1947 before any dissemination of either intelligence or material from the crash of the Roswell spacecraft. But in the wreckage of that craft, the scientists from the test firing range at Alamogordo reported that the inhabitants of the craft seemed to use very advanced wave stimulation instrumentation that, according to their analysis, bore a relationship to the physics of a basic microwave generator. The retrieval team that pulled the wreckage out of the desert also found a short, stubby, internally powered flashlight device that threw a pencil thin, intense beam of light for a short distance that could actually cut through metal. This, the engineers at Wright Field believed, was also based on wave stimulation. The questions then were, how did the EBEs use wave stimulation and how could we adapt it to military uses or slip it into the product development already under way? By 1954, when | was at the White House, the National Security Council was already receiving reports of a theory, developed by Charles H. Townes, that described how the atoms of a gas could be excited to extraordinarily high energy levels by the application of bursts of energy. The gas would release its excess energy as microwaves of a very precise frequency that could be controlled. In theory, we thought, the energy beam could be a signal to carry communications or an amplifier for the signal. When the first maser was assembled at Bell Laboratories in 1956, it was used as a timer because of the very exact calibration of the wave frequency. 76