jet engines. Its cabin was allegedly pressurized for high-altitude flights.
The Americans pressed Fritz Wendel for more. Could it hover? Not that Wendel knew. Did he know if groups could fly tightly together? Wendel said he had no idea. Were “high speed escapement methods” designed into the craft? Wendel wasn’t sure. Could the flying disc be remotely controlled? Yes, Wendel said he knew of radio-control experiments being conducted by Seimens and Halske at their electrical factory in Berlin. Army officers asked Wendel if he had heard of any hovering or near-hovering technologies. No. Did Wendel have any idea about the tactical purposes for such an aircraft? Wendel said he had no idea.
The next batch of solid information came from a rocket engineer named Walter Ziegler. During the war, Ziegler had worked at the car manufacturer Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW, which served as a front for advanced rocket-science research. There, Ziegler had been on a team tasked with developing advanced fighter jets powered by rockets. Ziegler relayed a chilling tale that gave investigators an important clue. One night, about a year after the war, in September of 1946, four hundred men from his former rocket group at BMW had been invited by Russian military officers to a fancy dinner. The rocket scientists were wined and dined and, after a few hours, taken home. Most were drunk. Several hours later, all four hundred of the men were woken up in the middle of the night by their Russian hosts and told they were going to be taking a trip. Why Ziegler wasn’t among them was not made clear. The Germans were told to bring their wives, their children, and whatever else they needed for a long trip. Mistresses and livestock were also fine. This was not a situation to which you could say no, Ziegler explained. The scientists and their families were transported by rail to a small town outside Moscow where they had remained ever since, forced to work on secret military projects in terrible conditions. According to Ziegler, it was at this top secret Russian facility, exact whereabouts unknown, that the German scientists were developing rockets and other advanced technologies under Russian supervision. These were Russia’s version of the American Paperclip scientists. It was very possible, Ziegler said, that the Horten brothers had been working for the Russians at the secret facility there.
For nine long months, CIC agents typed up memo after memo relating various theories about where the Horten brothers were, what their flying saucers might have been designed for, and what leads should or should not be pursued. And then, six months into the investigation, on March 12, 1948, along came abrupt news. The Horten brothers had been found. In a memo to the European command of the 970th CIC, Major Earl S. Browning Jr. explained. “The Horten Brothers have been located and interrogated by American Agencies,” Browning said. The Russians had likely found the blueprints of the flying wing after all. “It is Walter Horten’s opinion that the blueprints of the Horten IX may have been found by Russian troops at the Gotha Railroad Car Factory,” the memo read. But a second memo, entitled “Extracts on Horten, Walter,” explained a little more. Former Messerschmitt test pilot Fritz Wendel’s information about the Horten brothers’ wingless, tailless, saucerlike craft that had room for more than one crew member was confirmed. “Walter Horten’s opinion is that sufficient German types of flying wings existed in the developing or designing stages when the Russians occupied Germany, and these types may have enabled the Russians to produce the flying saucer.”
There is no mention of Reimar Horten, the second brother, in any of the hundreds of pages of documents released to Timothy Cooper as part of his Freedom of Information Act request — despite the fact that both brothers had been confirmed as located and interrogated. Nor is there any mention of what Reimar Horten did or did not say about the later-model Horten flying discs. But one memo mentioned “the Horten X” and another referred to “the Horten 13.” No further details have been provided, and a 2011 Freedom of Information Act request by the author met a dead end.
On May 12, 1948, the headquarters of European command sent the director of intelligence at the United States Forces in Austria a puzzling memo. “Walter Horten has admitted his contacts with the Russians,” it said. That was the last mention of the Horten brothers in the Army intelligence’s declassified record for Operation Harass.
Whatever else officially exists on the Horten brothers and their advanced flying saucer continues to be classified as of 2011, and the crash remains from Roswell quickly fell into the blackest regions of government. They would stay at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for approximately four years. From there, they would quietly be shipped out west to become intertwined with a secret facility out in the middle of the Nevada desert. No one but a handful of people would have any idea they were there.
Chapter Three: The Secret Base
It was a foggy evening in 1951 and Richard Mervin Bissell was sitting in his parlor in Washington, DC, when there was an unexpected knock at the door. There stood a man by the name of Frank Wisner. The two gentlemen had never met before but according to Bissell, Wisner was “very much part of our inner circle of people,” which included diplomats, statesmen, and spies. At the time, Bissell held the position of the executor of finance of the Marshall Plan, America’s landmark economic recovery plan to infuse postwar Europe with thirteen billion dollars in cash that began in 1948. Being executor of finance meant Bissell was the program’s top moneyman. All Bissell knew about Frank Wisner at the time was that he was a top-level civil servant with the new Central Intelligence Agency.
Wisner, a former Olympic competitor, had once been considered handsome. An Office of Strategic Services spy during the war, Wisner was rumored to be the paramour of Princess Caradja of Romania. Now, although not yet forty years old, Wisner had lost his hair, his physique, and his good looks to what would later be revealed as mental illness and alcoholism — but the true signs of his downfall were not yet clear. During the fireside chat in Richard Bissell’s Washington parlor, Bissell quickly learned that Frank Wisner was the man in charge of a division of the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC. At the time, not much was known about America’s intelligence agency because the CIA was only three and a half years old. As for the mysterious office called OPC, only a handful of people knew its true purpose. Bissell had heard in cocktail conversation that OPC was “engaged in the battle against Communism through covert means.” In reality, the bland-sounding Office of Policy Coordination was the power center for all of the Agency’s covert operations. All black and paramilitary operations ran through OPC. The office had been set up by the former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was also the nation’s first secretary of defense.
Seated beside the fire in the parlor that foggy evening in 1951, Wisner told Bissell that the OPC needed money. “He asked me to help finance the OPC’s covert operations by releasing a modest amount of funds generated by the Marshall Plan,” Bissell later explained. Mindful of the gray-area nature of Wisner’s request, Bissell asked for more details. Wisner declined, saying that he’d already said what he was allowed to say. But Wisner assured Bissell that Averell Harriman, the powerful statesman, financier, former ambassador to Moscow, and, most important, Bissell’s superior at the Marshall Plan, had approved the money request. “I could have confirmed Wisner’s story with [Harriman] if I had any doubts,” Bissell recalled. But he had no such doubts. And so, without hesitation, Richard Bissell agreed to siphon money from the Marshall Plan and divert it to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination. Largely unknown until now, this was how a significant portion of the CIA’s earliest covert black budgets came to be. Richard Bissell was the hidden hand.
Equally concerned about the nation’s needs in gathering intelligence was Colonel Richard Leghorn. For Leghorn, the mock nuclear naval battle called Operation Crossroads in 1946 had spurred him to action. Leghorn presented papers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff arguing that overflying the Soviet Union to learn about its military might was urgent business and not just something to consider down the line. He walked the halls of the Pentagon with his papers immediately after Crossroads in 1946, and again in 1948, but with no results. Then along came another war. The Korean War has often been called the forgotten war. In its simplest terms, it was a war between North Korea and South Korea, but it was also the first trial of technical strength and scientific prowess between two opposing teams of German-born scientists specializing in aviation. One group of Germans worked for America now, as Paperclip scientists, and the other group worked for the Soviet Union, and the jet-versus-jet dogfights in the skies above Korea were fights between American-made F-86 Sabres and Sovietmade MiG-15s, both of which had been designed by Germans who once worked for Adolf Hitler.
When war was declared against Korea, Colonel Leghorn was called back into active duty. As commander of the reconnaissance systems branch of the Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio, Leghorn was now in charge of planning missions for American pilots flying over denied territory in North Korea and Manchuria to
