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Authors: Philip J. Corso
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lost it
not because we were beaten on the battlefield but because we were
compromised from within. The Russian advisers fighting alongside the
North Koreans were given our plans even before they reached those of us
on Mac Arthur’s staff. And when we threw our host technology
into the field and into the air, the Soviets had already formulated
plans to capture it and take it back to Russia. When the time came to
talk peace at Panmunjom and negotiate a POW exchange, I knew where
those Americans were, ten miles north of the border, who
wouldn’t be coming home. And there were people right inside
our own government who let them stay there, in prison camps, where some
of them might be alive to this very day.
So General Trudeau gave me his very grim smile and said, as he
walked me toward the locked dark olive military file cabinet on the
wall of his private office, “I need you to cover my back,
Colonel. I need you to watch because what I’m going to do, I
can’t cover it myself. ”
Whatever Trudeau was planning, I knew he’d tell me
in his own time. And he’d tell me only what he thought I
needed to know when I needed it. For the immediate present, I was to be
his special assistant in R&D, one of the most sensitive
divisions in the whole Pentagon bureaucracy because that was where the
most classified plans of the scientists and weapons designers were
translated into the reality of defense contracts. R&D was the
interface between the gleam in someone’s eye and a piece of
hardware prototype rolling out of a factory to show its potential for
the army brass. Only it was my job to keep it a secret while it was
developed.
“But there’s something else I want you to
do for me, Phil, ” General Trudeau continued as he put his
hand on top of the cabinet. “I’m going to have this
cabinet moved downstairs to your office. ”
The general had put me in an office on the second floor of the
outer ring directly under him. That way, as I would soon find out,
whenever he needed me in a hurry I could get upstairs and through the
back door before anybody even knew where I was.
“This has some special files, war material
you’ve never seen before, that I want to put under your
Foreign Technology responsibilities, ” he continued. My
specific assignment was to the Research & Development
Division’s Foreign Technology desk, what I thought would be a
pretty dry post because it mainly required me to keep up on the kinds
of weapons and research our allies were doing. Read the intelligence
reports, review films of weapons tests, debrief scientists and the
research people at universities on what their colleagues overseas were doing, and write up proposals for weapons the
army might need. It was important and it had its share of cloak and
dagger, but after what I’d been through in Rome chasing down
the Gestapo and SS officers the Nazis left behind and the Soviet NKVD
units masquerading themselves as Italian Communist partisans, it seemed
like a great opportunity to help General Trudeau keep some of the
army’s ideas out of the hands of the other military services.
But then I didn’t know what was inside that file cabinet.
The army generally categorized the types of weapons research
it was doing into two basic groups, domestic and foreign. There was the
research that sprang out of work going on in the United States and
research by people overseas. I knew I’d be keeping track of
what the French were doing with advanced helicopter design and whether
the British would be able to build a practical vertical takeoff and
landing fighter, something we’d given up on after World War
II. Then there was the German big gun, the V3, granddaughter of Big
Bertha that the Germans threatened Paris with during the First World
War. We’d found the barrel assemblies of the German artillery
pieces near Calais after we invaded Normandy and knew that the Nazis
were working on something that, like their jet engine fighter and new
Panzer tank, could
not because we were beaten on the battlefield but because we were
compromised from within. The Russian advisers fighting alongside the
North Koreans were given our plans even before they reached those of us
on Mac Arthur’s staff. And when we threw our host technology
into the field and into the air, the Soviets had already formulated
plans to capture it and take it back to Russia. When the time came to
talk peace at Panmunjom and negotiate a POW exchange, I knew where
those Americans were, ten miles north of the border, who
wouldn’t be coming home. And there were people right inside
our own government who let them stay there, in prison camps, where some
of them might be alive to this very day.
So General Trudeau gave me his very grim smile and said, as he
walked me toward the locked dark olive military file cabinet on the
wall of his private office, “I need you to cover my back,
Colonel. I need you to watch because what I’m going to do, I
can’t cover it myself. ”
Whatever Trudeau was planning, I knew he’d tell me
in his own time. And he’d tell me only what he thought I
needed to know when I needed it. For the immediate present, I was to be
his special assistant in R&D, one of the most sensitive
divisions in the whole Pentagon bureaucracy because that was where the
most classified plans of the scientists and weapons designers were
translated into the reality of defense contracts. R&D was the
interface between the gleam in someone’s eye and a piece of
hardware prototype rolling out of a factory to show its potential for
the army brass. Only it was my job to keep it a secret while it was
developed.
“But there’s something else I want you to
do for me, Phil, ” General Trudeau continued as he put his
hand on top of the cabinet. “I’m going to have this
cabinet moved downstairs to your office. ”
The general had put me in an office on the second floor of the
outer ring directly under him. That way, as I would soon find out,
whenever he needed me in a hurry I could get upstairs and through the
back door before anybody even knew where I was.
“This has some special files, war material
you’ve never seen before, that I want to put under your
Foreign Technology responsibilities, ” he continued. My
specific assignment was to the Research & Development
Division’s Foreign Technology desk, what I thought would be a
pretty dry post because it mainly required me to keep up on the kinds
of weapons and research our allies were doing. Read the intelligence
reports, review films of weapons tests, debrief scientists and the
research people at universities on what their colleagues overseas were doing, and write up proposals for weapons the
army might need. It was important and it had its share of cloak and
dagger, but after what I’d been through in Rome chasing down
the Gestapo and SS officers the Nazis left behind and the Soviet NKVD
units masquerading themselves as Italian Communist partisans, it seemed
like a great opportunity to help General Trudeau keep some of the
army’s ideas out of the hands of the other military services.
But then I didn’t know what was inside that file cabinet.
The army generally categorized the types of weapons research
it was doing into two basic groups, domestic and foreign. There was the
research that sprang out of work going on in the United States and
research by people overseas. I knew I’d be keeping track of
what the French were doing with advanced helicopter design and whether
the British would be able to build a practical vertical takeoff and
landing fighter, something we’d given up on after World War
II. Then there was the German big gun, the V3, granddaughter of Big
Bertha that the Germans threatened Paris with during the First World
War. We’d found the barrel assemblies of the German artillery
pieces near Calais after we invaded Normandy and knew that the Nazis
were working on something that, like their jet engine fighter and new
Panzer tank, could
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