What links Roswell to the CIA?

On the surface, nothing links the two at all: the Roswell Incident happened at the start of July 1947, while the CIA was formed in September 1947. But… perhaps there’s something a bit deeper to be had here.

CIA Covert Operations

If – like me – you think that Roswell was entirely man-made (and not at all ‘alien’), then perhaps the historical pattern it matches will turn out to be where Agency X stumbles upon Agency Y’s black ops project. Regardless of whether you call this ‘interagency conflict‘, ‘compartmentalization failure‘, or a ‘rogue operation‘, this is something that happened many times during the second half of the 20th century:

• U-2 spy plane (1950s-1960s)
  • This was the CIA’s secret high-altitude reconaissance programme. The Agency withheld details from the public and some military authorities, and at times explained away reports as UFO sightings.
• MKULTRA / Operation Midnight Climax (1950s-1960s)
  • A CIA human-experimentation programme that used hospitals and other places without informed consent.
• Operation CHAOS/MHCHAOS (1967-1974)
  • The CIA’s covert domestic surveillance programme targeting US activists caused friction with the FBI and other agencies because the CIA concealed the programme’s scope and methods.
• Project Azorian / “Glomar Explorer” (1974)
  • The CIA’s covert project to retrieve Soviet submarine K-129 involved an elaborate cover story that kept the US Navy and its contractors largely in the dark.

Yes, these were all CIA covert operations. And I haven’t even mentioned the Church Committee (which revealed CIA plots/attempts to assassinate foreign leaders) or the Bay of Pigs (with its “plausible deniability”). And there were many others.

What I believe we see in the Roswell Incident – high-altitude science, human experimentation, elaborate cover stories, Cold War vibe, agency misdirection, etc – closely matched what the CIA did subsequently. So my argument is that, despite the timing difference, Roswell is most usefully viewed through a CIA ‘lens’.

But in the end, the CIA is just people – albeit scary people with a collectively broken moral compass who, viewed from the outside, have often proved hard to distinguish from terrorists. So: where did these people come from? What preceded the CIA?

1945-1947: After the war, but before the CIA

The US wartime body that most closely resembled the CIA was the Office of Strategic Services (1942-1945). This was a one-stop shop for sabotage, black propaganda, and guerilla operations, all carried out with ‘limited’ (i.e. sometimes entirely absent) ethical guardrails. There were similar intelligence apparatuses (apparati?) for the US Army (such as G-2 and Special Branch) and the US Navy (The Office of Naval Intelligence), but the OSS was arguably the biggest and baddest of them all. And, post-war, plenty in government were aware of its war-time excesses and really wanted it gone.

So, while the US government tried to work out how to transition from a hot war (OSS) to a Cold War (CIA), the period 1945-1947 ended up as something of an interregnum. I also believe, following Nick Redfern, that the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial (1946-1947) cast a heavy shadow over scientists’ ethical ‘footprint’ in this time. Yet Redfern’s readiness to blame ethical issues on ‘Paperclipped’ Nazi scientists seems a tad generous to me: American scientists of this period had no obvious oversupply of ethics.

Let’s Go Ethics Shopping

Two specific agencies I’ve been looking at that were active during 1945-1947 were the AEC (the Atomic Energy Commission, as famously lambasted by Tom Lehrer) and NEPA (Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft). Both had no shortage of ethical challenges in this period.

“The Old AEC”

Though the AEC was legally established in 1946, it didn’t actually start work until 1st January 1947. Initially, many of its responsibilities overlapped with the Manhattan Engineer District, which was what remained of the Manhattan Project after WWII. The MED was run by General Leslie Groves, who initially thought his job there was simply to “hold the line”, but then quickly realised that he needed to do rather more to keep it all from actually collapsing.

One controversial topic at the MED was human-subject radiation experiments (I believe historian Barton Bernstein covered this). To get these experiments greenlighted, MED officials did what I would call ‘ethics shopping‘ between the Army Surgeon General, the Manhattan District’s health physics division, the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, and (later) the AEC’s Division of Biology and Medicine. This involved constantly reframing their shady experiments either as a military necessity, as an industrial safety study, or as a classified national-security matter, until they found an agency who would let them get away with it. Basically: approvals agency won’t approve your dodgy experiment? Try a different one! (And another, and another.)

NEPA

Militarily, NEPA was a grand design to build high-altitude nuclear bombers able to stay airborne for long periods: the idea was to give the US an enduring edge in the emerging Cold War. This involved coordinating between the Manhattan District (and then the AEC), the Army and Navy Air Forces, plus various contractors (such as GE, Fairchild, Oak Ridge labs).

Historians of nuclear propulsion (e.g. Richard G. Hewlett & Francis Duncan) think that NEPA planners sometimes employed ‘bureaucratic maneuvering‘ to keep things moving despite ethical or framing difficulties. For example, when AEC reviewers had concerns about radiation-exposure protocols, officials rerouted those proposals to US AAF security. Similarly, when AEC-adjacent scientists proved to be stricter about ethical standards biological-effects studies, NEPA instead shifted them sideways to military medical labs. All of which is basically ethics shopping, of course.

Summary: Ethics is more than Brentwood

The CIA wasn’t just an agency (if not The Agency), it was also a state of mind, one that viewed ethics not as a project blocker but instead as merely a presentation issue. If you truly believed in the ideological Rightness and God-given Glory of the Perfect American State, even the pretence of justification was superfluous: your job was to do whatever it took. Which is, basically, the core recipe for unbridled terrorism that gave shape to the CIA.

These days, people like to deride the CIA for being filled with failsons, all eager to impress their surrogate abusive father-figure managers by unquestioningly doing whatever they are asked, however shady or wrong. However, in 1947 perhaps the reality was far, far worse: I can easily imagine the CIA initially filling its ranks with the ethics-free dregs of these interregnum years, with brutal, inhumane consequences.

So, my point here is not that Roswell was a CIA project (because it wasn’t): but rather that I think Roswell was planned and executed by exactly the same kind of ethics-lite state-obsessed zealots who before very long proudly slid their shoes under their shiny new CIA desks. My thesis: to understand Roswell, I think you should try to understand the CIA circa 1947, because both were dredged from the same toxic well. Feel free to disagree with this, of course. (But you’d be wrong.)