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Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [205]

By Root 865 0
DC, April 5, 1984.

25. Alfred O’Donnell stood below deck: Interview with O’Donnell.

26. the DN-11 relay system: Interview with O’Donnell; copy of a handwritten letter by Herbert Grier from O’Donnell’s collection.

27. What Leghorn witnessed horrified him: Interviews with Colonel Leghorn.

28. tossed up into the air like bathtub toys: United States Atomic Energy Commission Memorandum for the Board, August 23, 1973, #718922, Naval Vessels Sunk During Operation Crossroads; AEC film footage of the explosion, Atomic Testing Museum library, Las Vegas, NV.

29. west of the Volga River: Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 22.

Leghorn believed: Interview with Colonel Leghorn.

30. what shipyards or missile-launch facilities: Ibid.; interview with Hervey Stockman, who was the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane.

31. Halfway across the world: Rhodes, Dark Sun, 261.

32. chain-reacting atomic pile would go critical: O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages, 134.

33. Joseph Stalin was developing another secret weapon: Author interview with EG&G engineer.

34. secret weapon, called Hermes: Interview with Lisa Blevins, U.S. Army public affairs officer, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; “Report on Hermes Missile Project,” Washington National Records Center, Record Group 156.

35. belonged to Adolf Hitler: Hunt, Secret Agenda, 27.

36. secret project called Operation Paperclip: Paperclip was a postwar operation carried out by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a special intelligence office that reported to the director of intelligence in the War Department. Today, this would be the equivalent of reporting to the intelligence chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most details about Project Paperclip remain classified despite the government’s insistence otherwise. Paperclip began before the war ended, and it was originally called Project Overcast and/or Project Pajamas. It had two primary goals: to exploit the minds of German scientists for American Cold War research projects and to keep the Russians from getting the German scientists, no matter how heinous their war crimes might have been. It is believed that at least sixteen hundred scientists were recruited by various U.S. intelligence groups and brought, with their dependents, to the United States. Paperclip had a number of secret, successor projects that remain classified as of 2011.

37. Wernher Von Braun: G-2 Paperclip “Top Secret” files, WNRC Record Group 330. Also from FBI dossier “Wernher Magnus Maximilian Von Braun, aka Freiherr Von Braun,” file 116-13038, 297 pages; also see Neufeld, Von Braun.

38. Dr. Ernst Steinhoff: G-2 Paperclip “Top Secret” files, WNRC, Record Group 319.

39. inside the two-million-square-acre: Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 169. Now called the White Sands Missile Range, the facility is the largest military installation in the country—the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. The first atomic bomb, Trinity, was exploded near the north boundary of the range.

40. Dr. Steinhoff said nothing: Hunt, Secret Agenda, 27; Neufeld, Von Braun, 239.

41. terrifying citizens: “V-2 Rocket, Off Course, Falls Near Juárez,” El Paso Times, May 30, 1947.

42. Allegations of sabotage: Army Intelligence, G-2 Paperclip, Memorandum for the AC of S G-2, Intelligence Summary, Captain Paul R. Lutjens, June 6, 1947, RG 319, Washington National Records Center (WNRC), Suitland, Maryland. Hunt, Secret Agenda, chapter 3; Major Lyman G. White, “Paperclip Project, Ft. Bliss, Texas and Adjacent Areas,” MID 918.3, November 26, 1947.

43. “beating a dead Nazi horse”: In a March 1948 letter to the State Department regarding “German scientists [who] were members of either the Nazi Party or one or more of its affiliates,” Bosquet Wev, director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, wrote, “[R]esponsible officials… have expressed opinions to the effect that, in so far as German scientists are concerned, Nazism no longer should be a serious consideration from a viewpoint of national security when the far greater threat of Communism is now jeopardizing

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