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Senator Thurmond was incensed and | was deeply worried. McNamara just didn't get it. He was completely misinformed about how the Soviets reacted to any weapons deployment on our part. They didn't negotiate with us out of a sense of Cooperation, only a sense of necessity that it was in their best interests to do so. If they thought we could knock out their ICBMs, that, more than anything, would keep them honest. Hadn't they backed down over Cuba because they saw that Kennedy actually meant business when he screwed up his resolve to order the navy to enforce the blockade? But the CIA had McNamara's ear and was giving him exactly the information the disinformation specialists in the Kremlin wanted him to have: don't develop the antimissile missile. General Trudeau and | had a secret agenda we had worked up the previous year at the Pentagon. The antimissile missile, utilizing laser targeting and tracking, was supposed to be the perfect mechanism for getting the funds to develop a laser beam weapon we could ultimately use to fire on UFOs. At least that was the way we'd planned it. The general had gotten it through the Pentagon bureaucracy while | covered his flank on the legislative side, testifying before the Armed Services Committee on the efficacy of a weapon that was capable of protecting American strategic forces with an umbrella. If any country were foolish enough to attack the United States, the antimissile missile would blunt their offensive and enable us not only to devastate their military forces but hold their population centers hostage as well. Not so, said the Defense Department. The deployment of an antimissile missile would encourage our enemies to attack our cities first and devastate our civilian population. What did it matter if we had the ability to strike back when the damage to us had already been done? The only thing that was keeping our civilian population centers safe was each side's ability to hold the other's nuclear forces hostage. If both sides devastated one another's nuclear forces, it would give each side time to stop before a mutual destruction of the civilian populations. But the secretary of defense didn't understand war. He especially hadn't seen what lessons the Soviets learned during World War Il when their population centers had been devastated and people were reduced to the point of starvation and cannibalized one another for food. That kind of experience doesn't toughen you against the ravages of war, it educates you. The Soviets’ only hope for a victory in the Cold War was in our putting down our guard and capitulating to them. By refusing to go forward with the antimissile missile, the secretary of defense was listening to arguments that were spoon fed to him, certainly without his knowledge, by people in the civilian intelligence community who were being manipulated by the KGB. Senator Thurmond's reaction to Bob McNamara's refusal to spend the antimissile missile appropriation was to hold subcommittee hearings on this issue to find out why. The Defense Department didn't want to disclose classified information about the capabilities of a proposed weapon and our defense policy before a public session of Congress. So Fred Buzhardt, who years later became President Nixon's counsel, suggested that Senator Thurmond invoke a senatorial privilege to close a session of the Senate so that the issue of the antimissile missile could be discussed in private before the full Senate. But first, we had to request specific information from the Department of Defense, and that task, because | was the Senator's adviser for military affairs, fell to me. No one knew that | was actually the officer who had initially prepared the information for the antimissile missile program to begin with and probably knew more about the documents than anyone because less than a year earlier | had prepared them myself. The first meeting with the Defense Department was held in my new office in the basement of the Capitol Building. Secretary McNamara sent his own scientific adviser, Harold Brown, who would later become the secretary of defense himself, along with an army colonel who had become the project officer for the antimissile missile development program. Brown didn't know who | was, but his assistant from the army certainly did. "Colonel, " the army project officer began as soon as | asked him a question about the request we'd sent for information, and Harold Brown sat up straight in his chair. Gradually, like chipping away parts of a granite block, | asked the project officer about the specific details of the antimissile missile program, how much of the budget allocation from previous Pentagon funding they'd already spent, and what their development time table would be if the current appropriation were spent for the current phase of the project. Then | asked more technical questions about the research into ground based radars, satellite based radars, speculation into Soviet counter antimissile missile strategies, and Soviet development of even bigger and more mobile ICBMs that would present more imperative targets for any antimissile missile system because we couldn't take them out in a first strike. Mounted on railway cars or trucks, mobile Soviet missiles would be almost impossible to track even though they would have to remain stationary for the liquid fueling process to be completed. "| see that my assistant keeps on calling you colonel, Mr. Corso, "Harold Brown said. "And you certainly seem to know a lot of details on this subject. " "Yes, sir," | said. "| only retired from the army a couple of months ago but while | was at the Pentagon, | was the acting projects officer for the antimissile missile program. " 81