Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [212]
15. President Eisenhower was gravely concerned: Top Secret Memorandum of Conference with the President, July 8, 1959. With Dulles and Bissell present at the meeting, USAF Brigadier General A. J. Goodpaster observed, “There remains in the President’s mind the question of whether we were getting to the point where we must decide if we are trying to prepare to fight a war, or trying to prevent one.” Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, Box 15, Intelligence Matters.
16. Richard Bissell promised the president: Oral history interview with Richard M. Bissell Jr. by Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie, East Hartford, Connecticut, July 9, 1971.
17. Alexander Orlov related: Orlov, “The U-2 Program,” 5–14.
18. “We will shoot down uninvited guests”: Ibid., 7.
19. he would be even more enraged: Ibid.; Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 124–35.
20. CIA men armed with machine guns: Interview with Hervey Stockman.
21. Eisenhower’s cows: P. Taubman, Secret Empire, 167.
22. Stockman approached Russia’s submarine city: Stockman also recalled in our interview, “This was good solid proof that what so many had thought to be over there, that there was this huge, dominant, strategic bomber force for the Soviet Union, [proved] not to be there.”
23. Herbert Miller wrote a triumphant memo: Declassified in 2000, the memo is called Top Secret Memorandum for: Project Director, Subject: Suggestions re the Intelligence Value of Aquatone, July 17, 1956. Three more U-2 flights followed Hervey Stockman’s. On July 10, 1956, the Soviet Union filed a note of protest. Later that same day, Eisenhower ordered Bissell to stop all overflights until further notice. Miller’s memo summarizes the intelligence value of the U-2 flights for the president and argues that the danger of stopping them was far greater than of continuing them.
24. Khrushchev told his son, Sergei: W. Taubman, Khrushchev, 443.
25. “lost enthusiasm” for the CIA’s aerial espionage program: Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 110. Further, the president noted that if Russia were to make these kinds of incursions over U.S. airspace, “The reaction would be drastic.” Also from Andrew J. Goodpaster, memorandum on the record, July 19, 1956. The president expressed concern that if the public found out about the overflights, they would be shocked. “Soviet protests would be one thing, any loss of confidence by our own people would be quite another.”
26. he hired a team to analyze: Interview with Edward Lovick.
27. painting the U-2 was a bad idea: Ibid.
28. Air Force transferred money over to the CIA: Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 77.
29. Among those selected: Interview with Tony Bevacqua.
30. The next test was a freezing experiment: Interview with Bevacqua. Cold experiments were presented in the Nuremberg doctors’ trials as “The Effect of Freezing on Human Beings,” the purpose of which was for Nazi doctors to determine at what temperature a human subject dies from heart failure when being frozen.
31. aviation medicine school at Wright-Patterson: Hunt, Secret Agenda, 10, 16, 19, 21. Hunt wrote that during the war, Lieutenant General Donald “Putt gathered the Germans together and, without approval from higher authorities in the War Department, promised them jobs at Wright Field,” sourcing her interview with Lieutenant General Putt; “Report on Events and Conditions Which Occurred During Procurement of Foreign Technical Men for Work in the U.S.A.,” September 25, 1945, Department of the Air Force, History of the AAF Participation in Project Paperclip, Appendix, May 1945–March 1947.
32. previously worked at Nazi concentration camps: Bower, Paperclip Conspiracy, 214–323. Colonel Harry Armstrong, a surgeon with the U.S. Eighth Air Force, petitioned for the Nazi doctors to come to America after the war and “at the end of his distinguished career, in 1976, he would boast that the thirty-four German aviation doctors he brought to America had saved ‘a great many millions of dollars.’” Armstrong had obtained approval from Eisenhower