Alien Agenda: Why They Came, Why They Stayed Read online

  Alien Agenda

  Why They Came

  Why They Stayed

  By

  Steve Peek

  Copyright © 2011 by Steve Peek

  all rights reserved

  CHAPTER ONE

  My name is James Sanford Tate. I am old but healthy. I am an only child. When I had friends they called me Jim. My wife died two years ago: cancer. Our only child was killed in Afghanistan, so I am without living relatives. I spent a career working for the government. Beginning at Naval Intelligence, my path wound through the Pentagon, the CIA, NSA, Congress, and groups you will never hear about. When I retired a black SUV followed me home. It was never far away. Three years ago I buried the family dog, a fifteen-year-old retriever named Crypto then vanished into Mexico and have been moving ever since. So far I have stayed ahead of the SUV, sometimes by only a few minutes. I expect someday that will change. While none of this has anything to do with you, my story does. I will begin in the middle.

  It is around 0100 hours on 22 May, 1949. A fifty-seven-year-old man in room 1618 sits at a table reading and copying part of Ajax, a play by Sophocles. In the play, the battle of Troy is over. Ajax swears revenge because the armor of the fallen Achilles has been given to Odysseus instead of Ajax. The reader finds irony in the poetry.

  He hears the man sleeping in the adjoining room. It is Dr. Robert Deen, assistant to his attending physician, Dr. George Raines. Dr. Deen mumbles something then rolls over and is silent. Dr. Deen’s room shares a bathroom with room 1618 in the hospital.

  The man hears something else. He stops writing in mid word, stands up, then walks to each of the three windows in his room, carefully checking to see they are securely locked. The windows in Room 1618 are large. Though the room is on the sixteenth floor, he has lately added windows to a growing list of fears. Dr. Raines tells him that fear of windows is new to the psychiatric vernacular and does not yet have a name. He is not afraid of the windows themselves, but rather what is on the other side. He cannot share this with the good doctor. Not because Dr. Raines would think him more ill than he is, but because the doctor does not have the proper security clearance.

  He pauses and looks down at the open book. What is Ajax to do? He has been loyal, he fought with the best. Only the dead sacrificed more, and his reward is humiliating betrayal. He sees only two choices: suicide or revenge.

  The man puts his finger alongside his twice-broken nose and rubs the ancient wound. His tight lips barely move, and no one is there to see the slight smile he almost never shows. He knows what Ajax should have done.

  His expression returns to its natural state: unreadable, devoid of humor, a hint of menace. He’s feeling hungry and moves toward the kitchen across the hall. Hunger is a good sign. He has gained twelve pounds since checking into Bethesda Naval Hospital fifty days ago. He has also gained strength, physical and mental, and will soon play his own Ajax.

  The kitchen is small. A refrigerator, sink, table with four chairs, and cupboard cabinets make it crowded. There is a short, iron radiator beneath a small window. The window is open. This is bad, he thinks, very bad.

  Just after 1:00 AM the seventh-floor night nurse hears a thump from outside but does not check. At 1:50 AM the attendant checks Room 1618 and finds the patient missing. He is remarkably calm considering this is his first night working at the hospital. The staff is roused and the search begun.

  At 1:50 AM they find the body directly below the kitchen window on the roof of a three-story wing of the hospital. One end of the robe’s belt is knotted tightly around his neck. Within one hour the Maryland County Coroner confirms the death a suicide. The theory is he tied the other end of the belt to the radiator, crawled through the small window, and jumped. The knot at the radiator must have come undone and now America’s first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, is dead. The Navy concluded an investigation into his death on 31 May, but refused to release any information until 12 October. Even then there was no mention of cause of death, only exoneration of the parties present. No one was to blame.

  A few people whispered suspicions about Forrestal’s death. His brother Henry had fought hard to visit him and, after several denials, finally won a brief visit then, after threatening legal action, made arrangements to take his brother to a private hospital on 24 May. Forrestal’s long-time friend and priest, Monsignor Sheehy—also denied visitation rights—swears that, at Forrestal’s funeral, the regular hospital orderly for Room 1618 told him in hushed tones the death was not an accident. Dr. Raines measured the length of cloth belt, the distance from the radiator to the window, and saw the absurdity of Forrestal attempting to hang himself in this particular location. He also knew about Forrestal’s fear of windows. Even so, he kept his mouth shut.

  Why James Vincent Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide is not an official mystery. The stress of unifying the US military with severely restricted budgets in the face of the growing Soviet threat would have cracked most men.

  Then again, Forrestal wasn’t most men. A first-generation Irish-American who worked his way from a poor family in rural New York through Princeton University then to one of the top trading houses on Wall Street had to have something special. Though living the good life, he went off to fight as a naval pilot in World War I. His superiors saw his dogged determination and intelligence, and he worked his way up the ranks, eventually becoming Secretary of the Navy, and finally ending his illustrious career as America’s first Secretary of Defense, chosen so because he was exactly the right man at the right time to prepare the United States and the world to deal with something far worse than the growing Communist menace.

  To know why such a man might have cracked, we need to start in 1943. We need to begin four years before President Truman radioed Washington from his plane instructing that Forrestal be sworn in immediately and be available to meet with Air Force General Twining on 23 September regarding an urgent matter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I am involved in all of this because I had a very unusual security clearance.

  Let’s talk about security clearances. Just because a person has a high-level clearance doesn’t mean they know much. It’s sometimes the opposite. On assignment you may be expected to know every detail of a very narrow topic, but when your boss’s bosses decide something you think is relevant isn’t, then you cannot access what could be vital pieces to your puzzle. They call it compartmentalization. You are only allowed to know what you absolutely have to know. Someone above you is supposed to connect information between the compartments: the bigger the secrets, the more compartmentalization.

  Compartmentalization is intended to prevent individuals from knowing more than their security clearance warrants; oaths are intended to keep people from revealing what they know. Everyone with a security clearance takes an oath. In theory, the oath-taker vows never to intentionally or unintentionally, under threat of death or during torture, break the oath. In a perfect world this would be sufficient. In our world it’s a little more involved.

  There are oaths and then there are oaths. If a Boy Scout breaks an oath, he might lose a merit badge; a postal worker who doesn’t deliver in rain might lose his job, a doctor the license to practice. These are nonconsequential oaths. Swearing to serve in the US military puts a little bite in the oath. At this point, you accept military rules, regulations, and laws. If you are late for work and your boss is an asshole, you may be charged with Article Fifteen. Article Fifteen is a military catch-all infraction that basically says so long as the punishment is not too severe, your superior asshole who happens not to like you can make you work extra duty, or you can choose a court-martial. If you d
o something really horrible, like fall asleep while guarding a trash dump, you might even serve prison time. If the trash dump is in a combat zone, you might be executed for napping.

  An oath with teeth—that’s exactly what is needed to prevent people working on secret projects from letting top-secret cats out of government bags. If convicted of a security breach, a person may be imprisoned or executed. This, of course, crawls through a legal labyrinth and threatens the possibility of further secrets being disclosed, and exposure and embarrassment to organizations that technically do not exist. Somewhere along the line someone realized a fleet of black SUVs is a more efficient way to dispense swift justice to oath breakers.

  The boss of the SUVs, the Dispatcher, does not decide who an SUV visits. He merely accepts the call, evaluates the circumstances, decides which Driver to assign, and sets events in motion.

  Black SUV Drivers come in all shapes and sizes. The team that visited James Forrestal on the 16th floor of the hospital were black operatives of the CIA, NSA, or any of a number of acronyms that do not exist in any documentation available to the public, congress or, in some cases, even presidents (plausible deniability is a precious thing in Senate hearings.) On the other end of the spectrum are the people who are not on agencies’ payrolls. They are civilians, freelance thugs, hired by more important thugs who themselves are hired by voices on a phone. No one in this business accepts checks or credit cards. So the backbone of making sure people take oaths seriously is a fleet of SUVs.

  The SUV system worked so well that one day, someone started worrying about the possibility of someone breaching security. They were apparently successful in making their point, and authorized the Dispatcher to send a preemptive visit. The Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, did not actually break an oath. He died because someone was afraid he might. Forrestal is not the only case of preemptive strikes to preserve national secrets. Not by a long shot—across a grassy knoll.

  Everyone who works with ultrasensitive information is aware of this system. They don’t know the details. What they do know is if you have access to top secrets, you are watched. If you become a person of interest, your every movement and conversation is recorded. If you become a possible threat, you will probably be dead within a year.

  How you die is based on how you live. It might be a heart attack, a traffic accident, an overdose, or a suicide. It depends on what works for you. Aren’t they considerate? Only in the most extreme cases will someone be killed in a way that raises suspicions of foul play.

  Let’s say you work with ultrasensitive data and you are developing twangs of conscience. You think it is in the greater good to make this information public. Let’s go a step further and say you recently found out you are dying of cancer and have a year to live. What’s to stop you from coming forward? Nothing unless you have a family: children, grandchildren, spouses, parents, siblings, and pets—it’s all roadkill to the men who drive SUVs.

  No one knows about all this when they take their oath, but everyone figures it out. So at this level there are more than teeth in the oath.

  In 1970 I was a Scribe. Scribes create white-paper documents and summaries when two or more compartmentalized top secrets are connected. Needless to say, there are never many Scribes.

  In the old days we reported only to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Today it is much more political, the lines of power blurred. We can work almost anywhere there is a secure Internet connection, but in the 70s we worked mostly in the Pentagon or Langley with TDY assignments to military bases when we needed to see something firsthand. We travel under fake identities when we leave the United States.

  Obviously, the few Scribes do not suffer as much compartmentalization. We do suffer constant scrutiny in every aspect of our lives. We have access to the most terrifying information available, and will be eliminated in the blink of an eye if suspected of dreaming about breaching the oath.

  You might say being a Scribe is a dead-end job. Once you are assigned to it, there’s no place else to go. Scribes go in, but they don’t come out. It is a lifetime assignment.

  I happened to be one of the Scribes on duty when I fell into this mess, of which Forrestal’s death is only the tip of the iceberg.

  Harry Parcel—a fellow Scribe—and I completed cleansing the Roswell documents when our boss called. I was given the new assignment for two reasons: I was up to speed on Roswell, and typed faster than Harry.

  This begins the tale that led to what now seems the inconsequential death of James Forrestal. Now hear this.

  The urgent matter that caused Forrestal to be hastily sworn in as Secretary of Defense in 1947 began during World War II with something called the Philadelphia Experiment. I was not part of that project, but nine years later was assigned to the official files as they related to the Roswell Incident.

  There is almost always some truth in a myth. The popular Philadelphia Experiment legend contains only three truths: there was an experiment involving a ship in Philadelphia.

  In 1955, Dr. Morris Jessup (he never obtained his PhD, but liked to be called doctor) wrote a book titled A Case for UFOs. A reader, Carlos Allende, wrote Jessup claiming while aboard a ship in August, 1943 he witnessed an experiment at the Philadelphia shipyard in which Destroyer 173, the USS Eldridge, was made to vanish in a green fog. When it reappeared 11 minutes later, the crew suffered nightmarish effects from invisibility. Over the next few years, Jessup worked with Allende (whose real name was Carl Allen). Jessup concluded the Philadelphia Experiment was a secret project—using Einstein’s Unified Field Theory—that went wrong. In 1959, while driving to visit a friend, Jessup apparently and quite suddenly decided life was not so great, turned around, went back to his garage, ran a hose from his exhaust to inside his car, and died. Those inclined to conspiracy theories maintain Jessup’s death was one of those early demises brought on by the men who drive black SUVs. Of course the alleged suicide added fuel to the strange tale, and when Charles Berlitz’s book on the Philadelphia Experiment became a best seller the story went national. Dozens of articles and books, as well as television shows and movies, have covered the subject. Today, clear-thinking people recognize the Philadelphia Experiment story as a successful media hoax.

  It doesn’t take much research to discover the USS Eldridge was elsewhere during the time the experiment supposedly took place. Diehards claimed the Navy simply changed the Eldridge’s log, but when numerous other ships’ logs mentioned her in company, those conspiracy fans acknowledged maybe it was not the Eldridge but another ship. God knows how they came up with the name, but they claimed it was the Timmerman, another destroyer. The Timmerman was in Philadelphia as part of an experiment to amplify electronic degaussing being used to make ships hulls less likely to detonate magnetic mines.

  I suspect an admiral or two sweated bullets when the Timmerman’s name came up. I am told it is mentioned in some of Jessup’s notes, and in his uncompleted manuscript—which officially never existed.

  My new assignment was about to teach me what really happened. I sat at a table with pen, pad, typewriter, and a document box labeled Project Rainbow: Events Preceding 8 July, 1947.

  Now hear this!

  Prior to entering World War II, the US had a secret weapon—the magnetic torpedo. It targeted a ship’s own magnetic field to detonate directly beneath the keel, accomplishing the destructive work of two or three torpedoes exploding upon striking the side of the target. By 1942, it was obvious German submarines had a similar weapon.

  While the magnetically detonated torpedo remained classified until well after World War II, the existence of magnetic mines was common knowledge. Unlike contact mines, they did not have to touch the ship to detonate. The Navy wanted a way to neutralize both these weapons.

  While mines were a threat to allied shipping, they were of minor concern compared to torpedoes. The numbers of ships lost to each type of weapon makes this extremely clear. The Navy had already demonstrated minor success against magnetic mines by degaus
sing ships, but it wasn’t close to perfect, and it had no effect on torpedoes. The idea was to create one device that could counter both.

  Making a ship invisible to a magnetic proximity fuse would certainly do the trick. If the ship’s magnetic field could be eliminated, the torpedoes would speed beneath the surface until they ran out of fuel then sink harmlessly to the bottom. All the same, the method would be extremely expensive if it were intended to protect thousands of small freighters, each of which would have to be fitted with its own electronic array of magnetic invisibility equipment.

  The Navy took a more efficient approach. We wanted to fit warships with an electrical apparatus that projected a strong magnetic field some distance around the ship—a field strong enough to detonate magnetic proximity fuses a hundred yards from intended targets. If this idea worked, destroyer escorts—ringing a convoy of dozens of merchant vessels—could protect the entire group from the threat of magnetic torpedoes at a fraction of the cost of fitting every merchantman with its own device.

  With this in mind, the Navy enlisted the best brains in the country, including Mr. E=MC² himself. But the team’s real genius was Richard Feynman (pronounced Fineman). He was a brilliant young physicist working with the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Einstein said he would be invaluable on the Rainbow team. Einstein received what he wanted, and he wanted Feynman because when it came to electronics there was no one better. After the war, Feynman won a Noble Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics.

  On 28 March, 1943 the team from Rainbow presented their theory and recommendations for stage-one experiments. The Navy went to work obtaining or creating machines, and began looking for a ship: enter the USS Hambleton.

  The destroyer was designated DD-455, and entered service at Norfolk, Virginia on 31 January, 1942. 28 October she joined the Western Naval Task Force and participated in the invasion of French Morocco. On 11 November a U-boat torpedo struck the Hambleton amidships on the port side. Damage control parties kept her afloat, and she was towed to Casablanca for emergency repairs. Seabees cut the ship in two, removed a 40-foot section of damaged hull, then joined the two remaining halves together. Tended by a skeleton crew and escorted by a tug, Hambleton reached Boston on 28 June, 1943 for permanent repairs.