Ancillary Mercy полностью

The resurrection of the OSS was not the only facet of wartime continuity. In September 1945, the army’s Signal Security Agency used a combination of arm-twisting and calls to patriotism to persuade ITT, RCA, and Western Union to continue its wartime cable intercept program, code-named Shamrock. This was a massive operation (albeit unknown to Congress) to intercept foreign and domestic cable transmissions. It targeted companies, governments, and private citizens, with or without grounds for suspected espionage. The army implemented it by physically scanning the text of cables made available by the three companies, and by directly monitoring international telephone and cable traffic. After the war, the participating companies conveyed their fears to Forrestal. After all, this was wholly illegal. Forrestal assured them that the Administration would soon introduce legislation to legalize the program. True to his word, he floated the idea to several members of Congress, but got nowhere. Such technicalities, however, did not end Operation Shamrock, which continued in extreme secrecy for the next thirty years. Truman appears not to have known about it, and certainly no other president until Nixon knew. The implications are well worth pondering.³⁹

By the end of 1946, much of America’s “invisible government” was in place, just in time to respond to a steady increase in domestic UFO sightings. There had been at least one interesting American UFO sighting during the ghost rocket period. On August 1, 1946, Capt. Jack E. Puckett was flying a C-47 transport plane thirty miles from Tampa, Florida. Suddenly, he and his copilot saw a large object speeding toward them on a collision course. The object had a long cylindrical shape, which Puckett described as “twice the size of a B-29 bomber.” He claimed to see a row of portholes. The object trailed a stream of fire half its length, and disappeared at the incredible speed of 1,500 to 2,000 mph.⁴⁰

The defense establishment was secretly receiving UFO reports from its military no later than January 1947. On January 16, 1947, an army air force plane had a long chase over the North Sea at twenty-two thousand feet. A classified memo wrote that “the unidentified craft appeared to take efficient, controlled evasive action.” A month later, in the afternoon of February 28, 1947, an air force jet pilot, a Lieutenant Armstrong, flying thirty miles north of Lake Meade, Nevada, saw a formation of five or six white discs at an altitude of six thousand feet. Throughout the spring of 1947, sightings of disc-like objects occurred sporadically throughout the United States, including at least one that was observed through a theodolite (a small telescope that pivots in two directions to give accurate sighting angles, and is used for accurate tracking of airborne objects). Several of these sightings were later investigated by the FBI and air force intelligence.⁴¹

On May 1, 1947, Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter replaced Hoyt Vandenberg as DCI. Hillenkoetter was an Annapolis graduate who spoke three languages, had been at Pearl Harbor, and had set up an intelligence network for Adm. Chester W Nimitz. He was also a friend and Annapolis classmate of future UFO researcher Donald E. Keyhoe. One of the interesting, ignored tidbits of American history is the fact that, from 1957 until 1962, Hillenkoetter sat on the board of directors of the country’s leading civilian UFO organization, the National Investigative Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). For some reason, historians of American national security and the cold war do not find this interesting. Why, we may ask, did a CIA director who held the post for three years—during some of the most dramatic moments of the cold war—become interested in NICAP, and even make public statements regarding the need to end UFO secrecy? Was Hillenkoetter “eccentric”? Was he spreading disinformation? Was he sincere? What did he know about UFOs? Professional historians, taking the road most traveled, do not ask these questions, or indeed any questions regarding Hillenkoetter and UFOs, even though the most cursory review of the man’s career clamors for such treatment.

SUMMARY

A process began during the war years which gained momentum during 1946 and 1947. This concerned the ability of human beings to detect and do something about an age-old phenomenon: UFOs. Such a development required the growth of a large and technologically sophisticated national security apparatus. After all, until the 1940s, the only way to detect UFOs had been by looking up at the sky. Moreover, there had been nothing one could do about such things. By the war’s end, this was no longer the case. On the contrary, the emerging cold war required extreme diligence by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the other major militaries of the world to monitor their national borders against unauthorized intrusions.