Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [18]
Dr. Steinhoff was watching the missile’s trajectory through a telescope from an observation post one mile south of the launchpad, and having personally designed the V-2 rocket-guidance controls back when he worked for Adolf Hitler, Dr. Steinhoff was the one best equipped to recognize errors in the test. In the event that Steinhoff detected an errant launch, he would notify Army engineers, who would immediately cut the fuel to the rocket’s motors via remote control, allowing it to crash safely inside the missile range. But Dr. Steinhoff said nothing as the misguided V-2 arced over El Paso and headed for Mexico. Minutes later, the rocket crash-landed into the Tepeyac Cemetery, three miles south of Juárez, a heavily populated city of 120,000. The violent blast shook virtually every building in El Paso and Juárez, terrifying citizens of both cities, who “swamped newspaper offices, police headquarters and radio stations with anxious telephone inquiries.” The missile left a crater that was fifty feet wide and twenty-four feet deep. It was a miracle no one was killed.
Army officials rushed to Juárez to smooth over the event while Mexican soldiers were dispatched to guard the crater’s rim. The mission, the men, and the rocket were all classified top secret; no one could know specific details about any of this. Investigators silenced Mexican officials by cleaning up the large, bowl-shaped cavity and paying for damages. But back at White Sands, reparations were not so easily made. Allegations of sabotage by the German scientists who were in charge of the top secret project overwhelmed the workload of the intelligence officers at White Sands. Attitudes toward the former Third Reich scientists who were now working for the United States tended to fall into two distinct categories at the time. There was the let-bygones-be-bygones approach, an attitude summed up by the Army officer in charge of Operation Paperclip, Bosquet Wev, who stated that to preoccupy oneself with “picayune details” about German scientists’ past actions was “beating a dead Nazi horse.” The logic behind this thinking was that a disbanded Third Reich presented no future harm to America but a burgeoning Soviet military certainly did—and if the Germans were working for us, they couldn’t be working for them.
Others disagreed—including Albert Einstein. Five months before the Juárez crash, Einstein and the newly formed Federation of American Scientists appealed to President Truman: “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous… Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.” For Einstein, making deals with war criminals was undemocratic as well as dangerous.
While the public debate went on, internal investigations began. And the rocket work at White Sands continued. The German scientists had been testing V-2s there for fourteen months, and while investigations of the Juárez rocket crash were under way, three more missiles fired from Test Stand 33 crash-landed outside the restricted facility: one near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and another near Las Cruces, New Mexico. A third went down outside Juárez, Mexico, again. The German scientists blamed the near tragedies on old V-2 components. Seawater had corroded some of the parts during the original boat trip from Germany. But in top secret written reports, Army intelligence officers were building a case that would lay blame on