It began promisingly enough, although the territory itself was more than familiar. By Chapter 3, the author, Christopher Simpson, an American, had got his teeth into his country's recruitment program of German scientists after the war — an operation that had started under the code name "Overcast." As early as July 1945, barely two months after the end of the war in Europe, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff gave its authorization for Overcast to commence. Its job was to "exploit… chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity" America wanted to use in the continuing war against the Japanese and in the gathering Cold War against the Soviet Union. Under the top secret project, the JCS directed that 350 specialists, mainly from Germany and Austria, should be brought immediately to the United States. Among the Germans who came to the U.S. at this time were rocket specialists like von Braun and his boss, Army General Walter Dornberger.
I did as I always did with books that held details of Germany's wartime technology effort: I flicked to the index and looked for references to Kammler. More often than not, Kammler never rated a mention, such was the ease with which he had blended into the bland backdrop of the Nazi administrative machine. Here, in Blowback, however, Kammler did score a single entry, but only in the context of his relationship with Dornberger at the Nordhausen underground V-2 plant. An arrangement was struck, the book stated, in which the SS, under Kammler, assumed the day-to-day administration of Nordhausen, leaving Dornberger in charge of the rocket technology and the V-2's production schedules.
By 1946, the Pentagon's Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency wanted to recruit even more former Nazi scientists in the gathering standoff against the Russians, but because U.S. immigration laws forbade entry into the U.S. of any former Nazi Party officials, President Truman was forced to authorize a more extensive effort than Overcast, code-named Paperclip, on condition that it was kept secret and that only "nominal" Nazis — opportunistic party members who had not committed any war crimes — were to be allowed into the country.
I read on, but the rest of the chapter told me nothing I didn't already know. Simpson's research was excellent, but it was marred by the fact I'd previously read Tom Bower's compelling work, The Paperclip Conspiracy. From this, I'd gleaned as much as I needed to absorb about Paperclip: that by September 1947 it had officially been canceled, but in actuality had been replaced by a new "denial program"; one so secret that Truman himself was unaware it existed. Paperclip continued as a "deep black" program (as it would be described today), recruiting its last scientist in the mid-1950s. Through Paperclip, hundreds, if not thousands of former Nazi engineers, many of them with highly undesirable backgrounds, were permitted entry to the United States and employed on cutting-edge defense and aerospace projects, not the least of which was NASA's moon program.
I pressed on, but from Chapter 4 onward, Simpson's book took a new turn, describing the CIA's recruitment of former Nazi intelligence agents, the spy networks they set in place against the Soviet Union, and the State Department's elaborate efforts to cover up its wholesale recruitment of these people.
I laid the book down and took a pull of my drink. When Simpson had written Blowback in the late 1980s, I could see it had been hard-hitting, revelatory stuff. But I couldn't see why Marckus had gone to such lengths to persuade me to read it.
I continued to wonder about this long after I landed in Los Angeles and arrived at my hotel. But given the time difference between California and the U.K., it was too late to call Marckus and by the following morning, as I journeyed up the coast to Santa Barbara, the scene of several appointments with a number of defense electronics companies that day, my mind was preoccupied with other things.
After Santa Barbara, I headed inland to Bakersfield, met up with Amelia Lopez and proceeded to the site where the F-117A Stealth Fighter had crashed in 1986, two years before it was unveiled. That the security surrounding the plane had remained in place after the crash was mainly down to the fast footwork of special Air Force crash-recovery teams, whose policy included sieving the earth up to a thousand yards from the crash site for pieces, then scattering bits of a '60s-vintage Voodoo fighter prior to their departure to throw the curious off the scent.
To me, Bakersfield said two things. It said that the black world would stop at nothing to prevent America's "quantum leap technologies" from spilling into the public domain until its bright young colonels were satisfied nothing more could be gained by holding the lid of secrecy in place. And two, in scattering bits of Voodoo, an aircraft that hadn't been flown actively for years, it wasn't averse to sending a signal.
When restrictions on the site were lifted, aircraft enthusiasts went into the hills and picked over the site to see if they could find any evidence that for the first time would point to the reality of the Stealth Fighter's existence. When they brought back little pieces of aircraft and had them analyzed, they knew exactly who'd been yanking the chain. The pieces of Voodoo were the telltale flourish that anonymous artists leave to denote the authorship of their work to cognoscenti of their talent.
It was in the canyon where the Stealth Fighter had gone down that I saw the book again in a flickering moment of clarity. When Amelia Lopez and I were clambering back across the rocks to our cars, the picture steadied and I knew why Marckus had wanted me to read it. The book was the key to everything, not least Marckus' role in all this. His fatalism, humor, cynicism and cunning clicked neatly into place. It was so simple yet overwhelming it almost took my breath away.
Fort Worth owes its very existence to the military, which in 1849 established a small outpost on the Clear Fork of the Trinity River some 30 miles to the west of Dallas.
A quarter of a century later, the coming of the railroad turned what until then had been little more than a cluster of tents and wooden huts into the biggest cattle railhead west of Chicago, a status it retained until shortly after World War Two.
By the 1940s, Fort Worth had begun to profit from other industries aside from cattle and oil, and as you drive out of the city, heading west, it is impossible not to notice Air Force Plant No. 4, a low building a mile long that rises from the Texas plains like an enormous rock escarpment.
Plant 4 had been set up during World War Two to manufacture the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. In 1944, when output reached its peak, the plant was turning out almost ten aircraft a day; a feat of mass manufacturing that would never be equaled again.
Today, Plant 4 produces the Lockheed Martin F-16 at just a handful of aircraft per month. Lockheed Martin inherited the F-16 program from General Dynamics, whose aircraft and missile businesses were purchased by what was then simply the Lockheed company in the early 1990s.
GD had, in turn, acquired the Fort Worth operation from Convair, with which it merged in 1954. During World War Two, Convair was known as Consolidated Vultee Aircraft. Originally centered on San Diego, Convair, together with the USAAF, decided to set up the B-24 production line about as far from the Pacific as you could get, as a precaution against bombing by the Japanese.