LeMay got all three wishes. Three years later, after he was promoted to commander of Strategic Air Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would raise the number of bombs that could be used in a first strike against the Soviets from 30 to 133. LeMay was also one of the most powerful advocates of the creation of a new and thousand-timesbigger nuclear bomb, called the hydrogen bomb, the plans of which were being spearheaded by Dr. Edward Teller. Over the next forty-four years, seventy thousand nuclear weapons would be produced by the United States. LeMay was definitely not interested in spy planes or overhead. Spy planes didn’t have guns and they couldn’t carry weapons. Military might was the way to keep ahead of the enemy in the atomic age. That was the way to win wars.
Halfway across the world, in Moscow, in a military fortress called the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin saw what was going on at Operation Crossroads but with an altogether different set of eyes. First excluded from but then invited to the Navy’s nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, the Soviet Union had two representatives observing, one physicist and one spy. The physicist was with the Radium Institute, and the spy was a member of the MBD, the Ministry of State Security, which was the precursor to the KGB. The cover story for the spy was that he was a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda.
To Joseph Stalin, the atomic tests at Bikini were America’s way of signaling to the rest of the world that the nation was not done using nuclear bombs. It also confirmed for the already paranoid Stalin that the Americans were ready to deceive him, just as Adolf Hitler had four years earlier when Stalin agreed to a nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany and then was double-crossed in a deadly sneak attack.
Unknown to the Americans, as Stalin watched Crossroads he did so with confidence, knowing that his own nuclear program was well advanced. In just five months, the Soviet Union’s first chain-reacting atomic pile would go critical, paving the way for Russia’s first atomic bomb. But what has never before been disclosed is that Joseph Stalin was developing another secret weapon for his arsenal, separate from the atomic bomb. It was almost straight from the radio hoax War of the Worlds — something that could sow terror in the hearts of the fearful imperialists and send panic-stricken Americans running into the streets.
Ten months passed. It was nighttime on the Rio Grande, May 29, 1947, and Army scientists, engineers, and technicians at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico were anxiously putting the final touches on their own American secret weapon, called Hermes. The twenty-five-foot-long, three-thousand-pound rocket had originally been named V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe 2, which means “vengeance” in German. But Hermes sounded less spiteful — Hermes being the ancient Greek messenger of the gods.
The actual rocket that now stood on Test Stand 33 had belonged to Adolf Hitler just a little more than two years before. It had come off the same German slave-labor production lines as the rockets that the Third Reich had used to terrorize the people of London, Antwerp, and Paris during the war. The U.S. Army had confiscated nearly two hundred V-2s from inside Peenemьnde, Germany’s rocket manufacturing plant, and shipped them to White Sands beginning the first month after the war. Under a parallel, even more secret project called Operation Paperclip — the complete details of which remain classified as of 2011—118 captured German rocket scientists were given new lives and careers and brought to the missile range. Hundreds of others would follow.
Two of these German scientists were now readying Hermes for its test launch. One, Wernher Von Braun, had invented this rocket, which was the world’s first ballistic missile, or flying bomb. And the second scientist, Dr. Ernst Steinhoff, had designed the V-2 rocket’s brain. That spring night in 1947, the V-2 lifted up off the pad, rising slowly at first, with Von Braun and Steinhoff watching intently. Hermes consumed more than a thousand pounds of rocket fuel in its first 2.5 seconds as it elevated to fifty feet. The next fifty feet were much easier, as were the hundred feet after that. The rocket gained speed, and the laws of physics kicked in: anything can fly if you make it move fast enough. Hermes was now fully aloft, climbing quickly into the night sky and headed for the upper atmosphere. At least that was the plan. Just a few moments later, the winged missile suddenly and unexpectedly reversed course. Instead of heading north to the uninhabited terrain inside the two-million-square-acre White Sands Proving Ground, the rocket began heading south toward downtown El Paso, Texas.
Dr. Steinhoff was watching the missile’s trajectory through a telescope from an observation post one mile south of the launchpad, and having personally designed the V-2 rocket-guidance controls back when he worked for Adolf Hitler, Dr. Steinhoff was the one best equipped to recognize errors in the test. In the event that Steinhoff detected an errant launch, he would notify Army engineers, who would immediately cut the fuel to the rocket’s motors via remote control, allowing it to crash safely inside the missile range. But Dr. Steinhoff said nothing as the misguided V-2 arced over El Paso and headed for Mexico. Minutes later, the rocket crash-landed into the Tepeyac Cemetery, three miles south of Juбrez, a heavily populated city of 120,000. The violent blast shook virtually every building in El Paso and Juбrez, terrifying citizens of both cities, who “swamped newspaper offices, police headquarters and radio stations with anxious telephone inquiries.” The missile left a crater that was fifty feet wide and twentyfour feet deep. It was a miracle no one was killed.
Army officials rushed to Juбrez to smooth over the event while Mexican soldiers were dispatched to guard the crater’s rim. The mission, the men, and the rocket were all classified top secret; no one could know specific details about any of this. Investigators silenced Mexican officials by cleaning up the large, bowl-shaped cavity and paying for damages. But back at White Sands, reparations were not so easily made. Allegations of sabotage by the German scientists who were in charge of the top secret project overwhelmed the workload of the intelligence officers at White Sands. Attitudes toward the former Third Reich scientists who were now working for the United States tended to fall into two distinct categories at the time. There was the letbygones-be-bygones approach, an attitude summed up by the Army officer in charge of Operation Paperclip, Bosquet Wev, who stated that to preoccupy oneself with “picayune details” about German scientists’ past actions was “beating a dead Nazi horse.” The logic behind this thinking was that a disbanded Third Reich presented no future harm to America but a burgeoning Soviet military certainly did — and if the Germans were working for us, they couldn’t be working for them.
Others disagreed — including Albert Einstein. Five months before the Juбrez crash, Einstein and the newly formed Federation of American Scientists appealed to President Truman: “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous… Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.” For Einstein, making deals with war criminals was undemocratic as well as dangerous.
While the public debate went on, internal investigations began. And the rocket work at White Sands continued. The German scientists had been testing V-2s there for fourteen months, and while investigations of the Juбrez rocket crash were under way, three more missiles fired from Test Stand 33 crash-landed outside the restricted facility: one near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and another near Las Cruces, New Mexico. A third went down outside Juбrez, Mexico, again. The German scientists blamed the near tragedies on old V-2 components. Seawater had corroded some of the parts during the original boat trip from Germany. But in top secret written reports, Army intelligence officers were building a case that would lay blame on the German scientists. The War Department intelligence unit that kept tabs on the German scientists had designated some of the Germans at the base as “under suspicion of being potential security risks.” When not working, the men were confined to a six-acre section of the base. The officers’ club was off-limits to all the Germans, including the rocket team’s leaders, Steinhoff and Von Braun. It was in this atmosphere of failed tests and mistrust that an extraordinary event happened — one that, at first glance, seemed totally unrelated to the missile launches.
During the first week of July 1947, U.S. Signal Corps engineers began tracking two objects with remarkable flying capabilities moving across the southwestern United States. What made the aircraft extraordinary was that, although they flew in a traditional, forward-moving motion, the craft — whatever they were — began to hover sporadically before continuing to fly on. This kind of technology was beyond any aerodynamic capabilities the U.S. Air Force had in development in the summer of 1947. When multiple sources began reporting the same data, it became clear that the radar wasn’t showing phantom returns, or electronic ghosts, but something real. Kirtland Army Air Force Base, just north of the White Sands Proving Ground, tracked the flying craft into its near vicinity. The commanding officer there ordered a decorated World War II pilot named Kenny Chandler into a fighter jet to locate and chase the unidentified flying craft. This fact has never before been disclosed.
Chandler never visually spotted what he’d been sent to look for. But within hours of Chandler’s sweep of the skies, one of the flying objects crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Immediately, the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or JCS, took command and control and recovered the airframe and some propulsion equipment, including the crashed craft’s power plant, or energy source. The recovered craft looked nothing like a conventional aircraft. The vehicle had no tail and it had no wings. The fuselage was round, and there was a dome mounted on the top. In secret Army intelligence memos declassified in 1994, it would be referred to as a “flying disc.” Most alarming was a
