Ancillary Mercy полностью

Aside from the dispute over the Order of Battle, Lyndon Johnson had other points of friction with the CIA during 1967. He shut down Operation Mongoose, for instance. Then there was the extended issue over CIA assassinations. In March, Johnson asked Richard Helms directly about the rumors of CIA assassination plans in conjunction with the Mafia. Helms said he would get on it. On April 24, the CIA’s Inspector General presented to Helms a report on CIA assassination plots. Helms was not pleased. He often said, “the first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper.” The document apparently was quite thorough and has never been published, although the Church Assassinations Committee used it a decade later. On May 10, Helms gave his answer to Johnson. What he said is not completely known, but he did inform the president about the CIA’s longtime mail interception program “and some other things that were going on.” Johnson essentially appears to have said, be careful and don’t get caught.²⁹

Throughout 1967, Johnson also pressured Helms to discover foreign connections behind the wave of student unrest. By August, this led to a partnership between the CIA and FBI for Operation Chaos, a large-scale domestic spying program. The program ran through 1973, amassing ten thousand files and computer indexes on over 300,000 individuals and over one hundred domestic groups. Some files were several volumes long. The NSA provided assistance through Shamrock, and the effort from the NSA’s side was so significant that in 1969 the project there got its own name: Minaret. The NSA at this point had large files on at least seventy-five thousand Americans, including members of Congress and prominent businessmen. Aside from the obvious illegality of all this, the programs were unknown to the public for years. The program involved more than just surveillance, but direct action by agents provacateurs.³⁰

Over at the FBI, the NSA attempted without success to persuade Hoover to expand his collection techniques. Decades of illegal programs were beginning to make the old director a bit nervous. Still, in August 1967, Hoover approved an intense and disruptive Cointel program against black nationalist groups in the U.S. In the fall, the NSA agreed to a request by army intelligence to monitor international telephone and cable traffic to support the army’s civil disturbance responsibilities.³¹

UFOs IN EARLY 1967

Amid the controversy, social unrest, and secret dealings of 1967, one might forget that UFOs continued to present themselves around the world in large numbers. Although the investigators at Blue Book did very little, and the Colorado University Project was slow to start, NICAP and APRO were busy investigating reports. In 1967, NICAP’s membership had risen to eleven thousand, while APRO’s was at four thousand. Throughout the year, APRO collected many reports of UFO landings, near landings, and occupant sightings throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Lorenzens also printed the full version of the Villas-Boas incident in 1967, shortly after John Fuller had published the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story in Look magazine. James McDonald believed such stories would “set UFO research back ten years.” But like it or not, abductions were part of the package, and the UFO phenomenon was becoming stranger and more complex than most people had realized. Abductions were simply the most sensational of the new dimensions of the problem. Crop circles were increasingly part of the story, and, before the year was out, animal mutilations.³²

Several close-range sightings of landed UFO craft were reported in North and South America through the year. Many of these were detailed and presented by seemingly reliable people; multiple-witness sightings were not unusual, and several were South American military encounters.³³

The U.S. military was too busy with its own UFO reports to worry much about sightings by civilians. An oblique reference to Project Moon Dust in connection to UFOs surfaced on January 18, when a U.S. Defense attaché in Rabat, Morocco, forwarded press clippings and added:

[T]he page one coverage afforded this sighting demonstrates a high level of interest in the subject of UFOs and presages further reporting which could be valuable in pursuit of Project Moon Dust.³⁴

An air force memo from March 1, 1967, alluded to reports of visitations by Men in Black. “Information, not verifiable,” said the memo,

has reached HQ USAF that persons claiming to represent the air force or other defense establishments have contacted citizens who have sighted unidentified flying objects.

The memo ordered that all military personnel hearing of such incidents report them to their local OSI officers.³⁵