“Released? No. Take him back to his people. I’ll be in touch. This is a delicate matter. One can’t be hasty.”
The general peered at the portly man, clicked his heels together and saluted smartly.
Churchill gathered his coat and hat and without looking back slowly walked out of the War Rooms for the last time.
JULY 10, 1947
H arry Truman looked small behind his enormous Oval Office desk. He was neat as a pin, his blue and white striped tie carefully knotted, his smoke-gray summer-weight suit fully buttoned, black wing-tips polished to a high gloss, every strand of thinning hair perfectly combed down.
Midway through his first term, the war was behind him. Not since Lincoln had a new President undergone such a trial by fire. The vagaries of history had catapulted him into an inconceivable position. No one, himself included, would have bet a plugged nickel that this plain, rather undistinguished man, would have ever risen to the White House. Not when he was selling silk shirts at Truman amp; Jacobson in downtown Kansas City twenty-five years earlier; not when he was a Jackson County judge, a pawn of boss Pendergast’s Democratic machine; not when he was a U.S. Senator from Missouri, still a patronage puppet; not even when FDR picked him to be his running mate, a shocking compromise forged in the hot sticky back rooms of the 1944 Chicago convention.
But eighty-two days into his vice presidency Truman was summoned urgently to the White House to be informed that Roosevelt was dead. Overnight he was obligated to pick up the reins from a man to whom he had hardly spoken during the first three months of the term. He had been persona non grata in FDR’s inner circle. He had been kept out of the loop of war planning. He had never heard of the Manhattan Project. “Boys, pray for me now,” he told a gaggle of waiting reporters, and he’d meant it. Within four months the ex-haberdasher would authorize the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By 1947 he had settled into the hard business of governing a new superpower in a chaotic world, but his methodical, decisive style was serving him well and he had hit his stride. The issues had come fast and furious- rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan, founding the United Nations, fighting communism with his National Security Act, jump-starting the domestic social agenda with his Fair Deal. I can do this job, he assured himself. Damn it, I’m up to this. Then something from way out of left field landed on his agenda. It was lying before him on his uncluttered desk next to his famous plaque, THE BUCK STOPS HERE.
The manila folder was marked in red letters: PROJECT VECTIS-ACCESS: ULTRA.
Truman recalled the phone call he had received from London five months earlier, one of those vivid events that would remain permanently and exquisitely etched in memory. He remembered what he was wearing that day, the apple he was eating, what he was thinking the moments before and after the call from Winston Churchill.
“I’m pleased to hear your voice,” he had said. “What a surprise!”
“Hello, Mr. President. I hope you are well.”
“Never been better. What can I do for you?”
Despite the static on the transatlantic line, Truman could hear the constriction in Churchill’s voice. “Mr. President, you can do a great deal. We have an extraordinary situation.”
“I’ll certainly help if I can. Is this an official call?”
“It is. I’ve been pulled in. There’s a small island off our south coast, the Isle of Wight.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“A team of archaeologists has found something there that is frankly too hot for us to handle. The discovery is vitally important but we are concerned we simply don’t have the capacity to deal with it in our postwar condition. We can’t take the risk of fumbling it. At best it would be a national distraction, at worst a national catastrophe.”
Truman could imagine Churchill sitting there, leaning into the telephone, his large frame indistinct in a haze of cigar smoke. “Why don’t you tell me what it is your fellows found?”
The unflappable little President listened, his pen poised to jot some notes. After a short while he let the pen fall away unused and began nervously drumming the desk with his free fingers. Suddenly his tie felt too tight and the job felt too big. He had reckoned that the atomic bomb was his trial of fire. Now it seemed like a warm-up to something larger.
Besides the President of the United States, only six other men in the government had Ultra Clearance, a security designation so guarded that its very name was Top Secret. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, had known of the Manhattan Project in its heyday, but only a half dozen were privy to Project Vectis. The only member of Truman’s cabinet to have Ultra Clearance was James Forrestal. Truman liked Forrestal well enough personally, but he trusted him absolutely. This was a fellow, like him, who had been a businessman before committing to public service. He had been FDR’s Secretary of the Navy, and Truman kept him on in that role.
Forrestal was a cold, demanding workaholic who shared the President’s rabid anti-Communist views. Truman had been grooming him for a higher calling. In time Forrestal would assume a newly created position in government, Secretary of Defense, and Project Vectis would stay with him, all-consuming.
Truman cracked the folder’s crimson wax seal, an ancient but effective privacy tool. Inside was a memo written by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, another Ultra insider whom Truman would shortly name to be the first director in a new agency to be called the CIA. Truman read the memo then reached inside and removed a loose bundle of newspaper clippings.
Roswell Daily Record: RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION; and the following day: GEN. RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER. Sacramento Bee: ARMY REVEALS IT HAS FLYING DISC FOUND ON RANCH IN NEW MEXICO. There were a few dozen other national AP and UP stories along the same lines.
Alia jacta est, Truman thought, recalling his boyhood Latin. Caesar crossed the Rubicon declaring “the die is cast,” and altered the course of history by defying the Senate and entering Rome with his legions. Truman uncapped his fountain pen and wrote a brief message to Hillenkoetter on a clean sheet of White House stationery. He placed his letter and the other papers back into the folder and retrieved his quaint brass sealing wax kit from the top right desk drawer. He flicked a Zippo, lit the wick of a small jar of kerosene, and began to slowly melt a stick of wax, drip by drip, onto the cardboard until there was a bloodred puddle. The die was cast.
On June 24, 1947, a private pilot flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State reported saucer-shaped objects flying erratically at great speed. Within days hundreds of people across the country had their own sightings and newspapers were awash with flying saucers. The pump was primed for Roswell.
Ten days later, on Independence Day during a fierce thunderstorm, the night sky over Roswell, New Mexico, was lit by a flaming blue object that fell to the earth north of town. Those who saw it swore it wasn’t lightning- nothing like it.
The following morning, Mack Brazel, the foreman of the J.B. Foster Ranch, a sprawling sheep farm about seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell, was driving a flock to its watering hole when he discovered a large field scattered with pieces of metal, foil, and rubber. The debris was so dense in places that the sheep refused to traverse the pasture and had to be herded around the site.
Brazel, a sober man with weather-beaten skin, did a quick look-see and convinced himself this was not like the foil weather balloons he had found in the past. This was something much more substantial. On further inspection he spotted a crisscross of tire tracks leading up to and away from the debris field. Jeep treads, he thought. Who the hell has been on my land? He collected a few fragments of metal and finished his herding. Later that evening he called the Chavez County sheriff, George Wilcox, and told him matter-offactly, “George, you know all this talk about flying discs? Well, I think I got one splattered all over my land.”
Wilcox was well-acquainted with Brazel and knew he wasn’t a crank. If that’s what Mack said, well, by God, he was going to take it seriously. He placed a call to the local army airfield, USAAF Roswell, the 509th Bomb Group, and got the base commander on the horn. Colonel William Blanchard, in turn, mobilized his two top intelligence officers, Jesse Marcel and Sheridan Cavitt, to head out to the ranch the next morning. Then he transmitted a message up the line to his superior officer at the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, Brigadier General Roger Ramey,
