Cracking the Nazi Enigma Code led to Nazi surrender, Project Paperclip, Top Secret MAGIC and, some say, even to a modern-day coup within NASA.
5/5/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
By the time you read this, you will already have heard much about - and may have seen - the new film U-571, which torpedoed its way to the top of the theatrical movie charts right after its launch, submerging all competition with about 20 million in gross receipts on opening weekend. It won.t surprise readers of FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD to learn that I was at the premiere the night of April 17th. But it may surprise you to learn that I.ve uncovered secret significance in a World War II submarine film that help us plow through the rough seas which led to the major changes in America after the war. The ripples from the race to crack the Nazi Enigma Code lead to the door of the National Security Agency and the CIA - and even have reverberations in the accident (some call it sabotage) that befell lunar flight APOLLO 13, the subject of another blockbuster film from Universal Pictures.
The U-571 premiere took place in Westwood, Los Angeles. Upon entering the theater, my first question was whether the Navy guards, standing motionless in the theater lobby, were actors in costume, hired as set dressing for the occasion, or whether they were genuine. As I studied the large submarine model prop that was on display for the premiere, I exchanged a few words with one of the "extras" in a Navy uniform, and quickly discovered that he and his colleagues were not SAG people in costumes. They were from a naval base in San Diego. They were assigned to the premiere because the Secretary of the Navy was delighted with the film and eager to provide whatever moral support necessary for a seaworthy launch.
I could understand why. U-571 swells the heart with old-time apple pie patriotism. It shows incredible courage, determination, and loyalty during the struggle against the Nazis, in a stunningly successful mission. Some critics praised the production, but belittled the story. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times (who rather liked the film) stated, nevertheless, that it was "undernourished in terms of dialogue and character development." But above all, what is important about the film is the very nature of the secret mission. The Navy men, played by Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Jack Noseworthy, Derk Cheetwood, Jon Bon Jovi, Erik Palladino, and Harvey Keitel, were assigned to capture a Nazi-encoding machine on board the U-571. With that encryption machine in hand, the Allies would be able to crack the Nazi Enigma Code. The advantage that this knowledge would yield in warfare would be incalculable. The enemy's secret transmissions would then become transparent.
U-571 ends where the struggle to crack the Nazi code is about to begin. If there were to be a sequel, it would inevitably have to span the second half of the 20th century, because the series of events that followed the cracking of Enigma ripple right through to the present day. In that sense, the mission of the men aboard U-571 had a result that re-shaped America. We can debate whether the establishment of what we.ve come to call our .National Security State. was for good or for evil, but it is a fact that things changed dramatically after the war. Here.s some of the aftermath that the film leads up to, but does not explore:
James Bamford's epic book, The Puzzle Palace, describes the founding of the ultra-secret "National Security Agency," or NSA (so secret that until recently, it was illegal to mention its name, even in Congressional testimony!). The beginnings of the NSA (still termed by some "No Such Agency"), as well as the transformation of the wartime OSS into the CIA, were to be found in the exploits of William Friedman. It was the "brilliant" William Friedman who cracked both the Nazi Enigma Code and the Japanese secret wartime code. Friedman and his code-breakers were operating under a secret banner known as MAGIC, and it was MAGIC that was later transformed into the National Security Agency.
The code name MAGIC is one that should instantly raise the eyebrows of all who studied the UFO enigma. Ignore for a moment the scoffers who claim the notorious MJ-12 documents (purported briefing documents for President Eisenhower about the UFO crash at Roswell) were fakes. MJ-12 in those documents was an abbreviation of MAJIC-12. Thus, the term that sounds like MAJIC (whether spelled MAGIC or MAJIC) shows up both in connection with the cracking of the Nazi code and in the 1952 documents purported to outline the crash recovery of an alien vehicle at Roswell in 1947. Whether the term MJ-12, MAJIC-12, or MAJESTIC-12 was chosen by document hoaxers who were sophisticated about the significance of MAGIC in intelligence circles, or whether it is a real code name of a real UFO-connected government group, is a significant question. The matter is unresolved, but as you'll discover at www.majesticdocuments.com, the issue is at the forefront of ufological questions today. The reason is that many ORIGINAL documents bearing the MAJIC-12 identification have been leaked into the hands of private researchers who are putting those documents to forensic tests. We.re not talking about just a few pages, we.re talking about reams. This is either one of the most elaborate hoaxes since the Hitler diaries, or it is the unearthing of a mother lode of treasures that are half a century old and have finally just seen the light of day.
The unraveling of the Enigma Code taught us much about the nature of secrecy, as practiced by the Nazi adversaries. So profound was the respect of the U.S. government for the brilliance of its German enemy that a massive undertaking to bring Nazi intelligence apparatus and Nazi scientists to America began. The order to bring these Germans to the U.S. to work for our side was signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff even before the official German surrender. This effort was initially called Operation Overcast. Most interestingly, the name of the effort was changed to Project Paperclip on July 20, 1945.
Call it coincidence or call it synchronicity, but the date July 20th keeps showing up at key moments of U.S. history. Some would say that there are no .accidents. in history, and with that in mind, consider that July 20th, 1969, was the date of the first lunar landing, when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. Consider that it was on July 20th, 1976, exactly seven years later, that the Viking spacecraft touched down on Mars and sent back the first pictures from the Martian surface. (This was the same expedition that resulted in the initial photos of .The Face on Mars. which had been taken from Mars orbit). Richard Hoagland (www.enterprisemission.com) has traced the importance of the July 20th date in secret societies and rituals that can be noted all the way back to the days of worship of Isis and Horus in ancient Egypt. He would argue that the choice of the July 20th date for these events has been intentional, reminding us that most of our national leaders have had ties both to the Freemasons, and other secret societies. He believes that those in power often send .secret signals. to a select, privileged and powerful group by the choice of dates for major events. In this regard, we might recall that Buzz Aldrin brought the Freemason flag to the moon, and afterwards delivered it to the leaders of Freemasonry in Washington, D.C.
At the close of the war, the Allies took over what remained of Hitler.s Gestapo and intelligence network. Project Paperclip was so-named because the photos of the former Nazis, who were being admitted to the U.S., were paper-clipped to their files. James Bamford.s The Puzzle Palace traces how, beginning with German scientists such as Werner von Braun, these former Nazi .assets. were amalgamated into what became the CIA and NSA. Few Americans would question just how much credit is due to German scientists, working in secrecy in post-war America, for the progress of U.S. advances in rocketry and space research. The lingering question that many find upsetting is the extent to which .Nazi intelligence. was incorporated into U.S. intelligence agencies in post-War America - and whether what was incorporated was more than information, but something so fundamental it secretly changed the .character. of America in some inimical way.
If, in fact, the officially arranged incorporation of former Nazis into the U.S. intelligence network ended up reshaping intelligence strategy in a manner that ultimately undermines American ideals, some feel that NASA did not escape a similar influence.
Hoagland, for one, laments that NASA, which Eisenhower founded (and JFK vastly expanded) as an "open and public" space program - a program dedicated to sharing its discoveries with all humankind - may have turned into another kind of organization along the way. Extreme secrecy in space research was supposed to occur only in military space programs. In its pure conception, NASA was to be neither military nor enshrouded in secrecy. It was never intended to be a "captive" of America's intelligence network, including the CIA and NSA. It was dedicated to the principal that space exploration, as exemplified by NASA, was primarily to be for the benefit of all humankind and for the advancement of knowledge, wherever the research and discoveries might lead.
Hoagland has a very controversial theory that all of that may have changed thirty years ago, at the time of the disaster aboard lunar mission Apollo 13. That was the moment Hoagland cites as the time of a possible "coup" within NASA, in which the secret intelligence network (which he implies operated under metaphysical Nazi inspiration) finally "took control" in an attempt to end the rest of the Apollo Program. Hoagland argues that, contrary to the popularly believed "failure" en route to the moon, Apollo 13 actually may have been sabotaged in a "metaphysical power play.. He postulates that .dark forces. in the intelligence community deliberately staged the "accident" at exactly 55 hours, 54 minutes and 53 seconds into the key numbered lunar flight. He notes that the purported "explosion" of an oxygen tank aboard the spacecraft took place on April 13th, which he finds quite bizarre, because the mission itself was deliberately launched just days before at precisely 13:13 GMT. Hoagland interprets this as an "inside code" for an extremely crucial event in the "metaphysical history" of both the Freemasons and the Nazis - the arrest of the Knights Templar, on October 13th, 1307.
Though some of Hoagland's critics have accused him of flights of fancy and extreme paranoia, reasonable people have an obligation to consider the lineage of NASA's power elite. That would include the lineage of NASA's cohort, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has been the engineering headquarters behind so many unmanned space flights. Both NASA and JPL have strong links to the National Security Agency, which in turn (as you'll recall) was founded from the MAGIC team of William Friedman who cracked the Nazi Enigma code. Lou Allen, who headed JPL for many years (and was a strong colleague of the late Dr. Carl Sagan in the Planetary Society), had been head of the National Security Agency. Daniel Goldin, who currently heads NASA, has a background from TRW, where he worked on many "Black Budget" projects of secret military origin. Recently, Goldin made a startling revelation - that JPL falls under the jurisdiction of the JPL Oversight Committee based at Caltech, and that Admiral Bobby Ray Inman is the head of that oversight Committee. This is utterly new and startling information. Like Lou Allen, Admiral Inman also served for awhile as head of the National Security Agency. Most interestingly, about a decade ago, there were a series of bizarre reports from one Robert Oeschler, describing his interviews with Admiral Inman in which very strong hints were dropped by Inman about UFO reality, and the reality of a group that controls UFO-related information, much like MJ-12. Those reports warrant rereading today in light of the recently revealed connection between Admiral Inman and JPL, in the aftermath of several apparent JPL failures in Mars missions.
In a theory that could topple the history of the space program as we think we know it, Hoagland proposes that at least some of those supposedly .failed. missions, going back to the Mars Observer, were actually successful. Unfortunately, the public was told otherwise, specifically so that critical data involving extraterrestrial artifacts would not have to be publicly revealed. He states that America's master spies are now the ones "pulling the strings." The tragedy, as he puts it, is that NASA has lost the freedom and independence and openness of its original grand vision and mission. In the eyes of those who are concerned about a possible conspiratorial course of events in the space program, "truth" and "honesty" in NASA became yet another casualty of the bullets that ended the JFK Presidency.
This is all much food for thought, and I was chewing it over as I headed for the premiere party of U-571 at the Crystal Ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, immediately after the screening. Excitement was in the air over what was expected to be a great success. Congratulatory remarks were heard everywhere about Jonathan Mostow, director of U-571, who was following up his 1997 debut in the little seen film, .Breakdown.. How many others, I wondered, might be thinking any of the thoughts that had been flooding my mind? Was anyone else grappling with the fact that the little box with the code machine floating on a raft at sea at the end of the movie was, essentially, the new beginning for contemporary American history?
Enigma was decoded and we won World War II. For that, all Americans are eternally grateful. But are we eternally grateful for the aftermath? Are we a stronger nation today for having the intelligence network we do? Or for having a marriage of military and industry that President Eisenhower cautioned us about more than four decades ago, when he warned of the powerful .military industrial complex. that wanted to seize control of and redefine the mission of America? Do we have a stronger space program by having our .public. space agency run by the same men who have spent half a lifetime keeping the secrets of .Black Budget. military space programs, some of whom have been Directors of the NSA?
I don.t have the answers, but would like to have the peace of mind of knowing that I.m not the only one posing the questions. From Washington and the Establishment media, rarely if ever are any of these issues acknowledged or addressed. It.s all quiet in those halls of power, like it was with those Navy men aboard the captured U-571, who tried to be so quiet they couldn.t even hear themselves breathe as depth charges burst all around them.
This is AlienZoo.s Hollywood correspondent, surfacing for air at last, after seeing the great submarine film that joins company in cinema history with .Das Boot,. .Run Silent, Run Deep. and .The Enemy Below.. Log on at this site again next Friday, as we continue our search for THE TRUTH in the land of cinema and dreams.