Ancillary Mercy полностью

Over at the NSA, all one can say with certainty is that its budget dwarfed all others within the intelligence community. The FY 1969 budget for the NSA was estimated at upwards of $2 billion, a staggering amount of money at the time, supporting, among other things, a cryptologic community of ninety-five thousand personnel—five times larger than the CIA.

A basic feature of the pervasiveness of domestic spying was the general lack of civilian control. In the words of historian Frank Donner, “the civilian leadership of the Defense Department, the White House, and the attorney general’s office, were left in the dark about the military intelligence colossus. But it is fair to conclude that they preferred it that way.”¹⁰²

By the time Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969, nearly every American intelligence organization was involved in major violations of the law. Still, Nixon found this to be insufficient. He distrusted the CIA and was frustrated with Hoover’s jealousy and timidity. Of course, Nixon gladly accepted the useful dirt offered by Hoover, under the code name “Inlet.” By June 1969, Nixon ordered seven wiretaps to be placed on the phones of his staffers.¹⁰³

Internationally, the American press remained silent while the rest of the world commented on the devastation of America’s “secret” bombing of northern Laos, described in Le Monde as “a world without noise, for the surrounding villages had disappeared.” It took nearly an entire year before the New York Times was willing to publish this fact, which it finally did (without editorial) in May 1969. By then, the U.S. was also bombing and defoliating Cambodia, an operation which remained covert until 1970. The official denials kept coming. On October 1, 1969, Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans visited the Plain of Jars in Laos and reported that he saw “no evidence of indiscriminate bombing.¹⁰⁴

A final event of some interest. The year 1969 saw the publication of an interesting, little known book by Andrew Tully, with the hyperbolic title The Super Spies. The book is significant as an early report on the NSA, and even more so as its first chapter discussed the UFO controversy, albeit superficially. Tully stated that UFOs were products of secret military technology:

Despite efforts by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency to debunk the flying saucer as a natural phenomenon, informed speculation has continued to maintain that it existed—as an intelligence device.

It was common knowledge, wrote Tully, that the American and Russian intelligence communities were launching unmanned aircraft electronically equipped to eavesdrop from the skies on each other’s secrets. Within and outside government, “many of those who have given the flying saucer their scientific attention have concluded that they are mechanical creatures of the nation’s most hush-hush espionage outfit, the code-breaking National Security Agency and its Soviet counterpart.” Although these unmanned craft operated mostly in space, they occasionally lost control, “and thus are sighted by the Norman Muscarellos of Exeter, and, probably, by the Ivan Ivanoviches of Smolensk.” That essentially ended the UFO segment of Tully’s book, as shallow as it was brief.¹⁰⁵

THE END OF PROJECT BLUE BOOK

On October 20, 1969, Brig. Gen. Carroll H. Bolender, the Air Force Deputy Director of Development, wrote a classified memo recommending the termination of Project Blue Book. As a result of the Condon Report recommendations and its endorsement from the scientific community, he stated, “we agree, that the continuation of Project Blue Book cannot be justified, either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.” Blue Book data, he argued, served neither the air force’s environmental research program nor any intelligence function. Moreover, wrote Bolender,

reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system [emphasis added] (Atch 10). The air force experience therefore confirms the impression of the University of Colorado researchers “that the defense function could be performed within the framework established for intelligence and surveillance operations without the continuance of a special unit such as Project Blue Book.”

An indisputable statement that UFOs affecting national security—the important sightings—were “not part of the Blue Book system.” As if Bolender had not been clear enough, he restated his point: “Reports of UFOs which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard air force procedures designed for this purpose.”