I was supposed to be in and out of Washington inside a couple of days. I stretched the schedule and bought myself another 24 hours.
If there were trace elements of a suppressed technology within the U.S. documents plundered from Nazi Germany, I figured they had to be buried in Lusty.
Chapter 6
It was still dark when I exchanged the warmth of the Holiday Inn for the damp chill of the predawn, heaved my bags into the back of the cab and hunkered down for the 30-minute ride across the river. I had around eight hours to sieve Lusty for evidence of a technology Cross maintained couldn't be substantiated.
The commuter traffic was jamming the bridges, the top of the Washington Monument scraping the overcast sky, as the taxi headed across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge and into a part of the nation's capital that only makes the news when the body counts from the drive-by shootings top three or four.
By the time I reported to the guard at the main gate, the wind had got up, lifting sheets of spray from a choppy confluence of gray wave caps where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers meet off Greenleaf Point. The spray snaked in rivulets this way and that in front of us as the cabdriver navigated the maze of open streets looking for the address I'd been given. It took him 15 precious minutes to find it.
The archive was tucked away in a forgotten corner of Boiling Air Force Base, home of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the USAF's Office of Special Investigations. It wasn't the sort of place you'd want to stroll or take the view.
Boiling was a large cordoned-off military district sandwiched between the black waters of the Potomac and the badland housing projects of Congress Heights and Washington Highlands. It also bordered the grounds of St. Elizabeth's — a hospital for the criminally insane, since renamed — where John Hinckley served time for his assassination attempt on President Reagan.
The reading room in the tiny Office of Air Force History was low-lit and windowless. True to her word, the senior archivist had placed a cup of coffee next to the warmed-up microfilm reader opposite the farthest row of metal book stacks. There was a clock on the wall above the door to her office. It was a little after seven-thirty. The air-conditioning had not yet kicked in and my breath mingled as condensation with the steam rising from the cup.
The documents were contained on several reels of microfilm and, like the reels at the main repository in Alabama, they were in bad condition. My business schedule allowed for one shot at a read-through. My plane left at 6:15 that night.
To help me cut to it, the archivist had offered to open the office early and said I was welcome to turn up any time after seven. Coffee was on the house.
Time was already short when I slapped the first reel into the microfilm reader and got to work.
Lusty opened with a condensed history, the opening paragraph of which began:
"At a medieval inn near Thumersbach near Berchtesgaden [Hitler's mountaintop retreat in Bavaria], early in May 1945, the German General Air Staff patiently awaited the outcome of surrender negotiations taking place in the north. They had arrived by car and plane during the past weeks, when the fall of Berlin was imminent, and had kept in contact with Admiral Doenitz at Flensburg. Through the interception of one of these messages, their location, which had previously been unknown, was discovered. Within 24 hours, Lieutenant Colonel O'Brien and his small party, representing the Exploitation Division of the Directorate of Intelligence, USAFE (United States Air Forces in Europe), had arrived, located the party and conducted the first of a series of discussions with General Koller, who was then in command."
Colonel O'Brien's men were the advance guard of 200 officers cho sen from HQ^Army Air Forces to oversee the USAAF tech-plunder operation and it was clear right from the start that they were in a race against time.
In the chaos of the collapsing Reich, many German scientists were dead, others had been captured by the Russians advancing from the east or the Americans, British and French in the west. Many were held in internment camps, but in a country brimming with former Reich slaveworkers and displaced citizenry — almost all of whom had to be filtered by the Allies for Nazi party members and war criminals — it was hard to know who was who or where.
But the vast majority were still at their factories and laboratories when the advance units of the USAAF plunder operation screeched up in their jeeps and half-tracks. With no orders to stop working, they had carried on at their workbenches, even though the armed forces of the high commands that had commissioned their work had either capitulated or been wiped off the map.
Many documents and blueprints were missing. German project managers would tell U.S. investigators that they had destroyed them under orders, but the USAAF officers quickly learned to apply some psychology of their own: men and women who had devoted years of commitment to technologies they considered vastly superior to those of their enemies were incapable of such vandalism. Most of the files existed, but had been hidden. Germany had already been divided by the Allies into zones of occupation; and many of the most technologically interesting German facilities — the underground V-l and V-2 production sites in the Harz mountains, for example — were in the designated Russian sector.
Before the zones were locked and sealed the missing documents had to be located and brought under American control.
By a process of detective work and, where that failed, by persuasion and coercion of the German scientists and program managers, boxes of blueprints and notes were pinpointed, then recovered from the bottom of lakes, as well as caves, farms, crypts, hospitals and mines.
O'Brien's team hit pay dirt early: their sleuthing led them from Thumersbach to an air raid shelter covered with earth in the side of a mountain close to the Austrian border. There they found files belonging to the l Gruppe/6 Abteilung, the German Air Ministry's intelligence directorate. These detailed all the Luftwaffe's latest air weapons, from the Me 262 jet fighter and the Me 163 rocket fighter to radars, air-to-air missiles and guided bombs. It also showed that the blueprints had recently been smuggled out of Germany in U-boat shipments to Japan.
Reading through the signals transmitted by Lusty field team officers to their superiors, I was hit by the sheer scale of the operation and the pressures endured by those who took part in it.
On April 22, 1945, two and a half weeks before the guns in Europe fell silent, additional recruits were needed to process the data. "It is planned to expand the activities of air technical intelligence tenfold, securing the most highly qualified specialist personnel available to the Army Air Forces," Brigadier General George C. McDonald, head of USAAF Intelligence, wrote that day.
The caliber of the technological spoils was indicated by the arrival in theater at the end ofthat month of a "special group of scientists" headed by Dr. Theodore von Karman, special consultant to the U.S. Army Air Forces' supreme command.
The hardware that awaited them was detailed on several pages of microfilmed documentation from McDonald's intelligence directorate. Among them were a jet-propelled helicopter "in fly able condition accompanied by a complete set of documents and detailed drawings"; the Lippisch P-16 tailless rocket-propelled research aircraft whose advanced construction indicated "possible operation at high Mach numbers in the vicinity of 1.85"; and the Horten Ho 229 twin-jet flying wing bomber.
Nothing comparable existed in the American inventory; or anywhere else, for that matter.