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I still don’t know if I can
legally tell you this. It happened a long time ago. Hell, I’ve been retired
from the Air Force for over 20 years, and this happened five or six years before
that. But it was so highly classified at the time, I still don’t know if it
has been declassified. It would probably be a good idea if you didn’t spread
it around, sort of keep it quiet, you know.
At the time, mid-seventies,
height of the Cold War, I was stationed at the headquarters of the United States
Air Forces in Europe at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. As military assignments
go, it was pretty good: most of the conveniences plus great opportunities for
travel and cultural experiences. We could take off from Ramstein in almost any
direction and hit four or five countries in a few hours. We did that a few
times, hit France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria,
Italy, and even tiny Liechtenstein. But that’s not what this story is about.
This is about something that
happened on the job. I was a Master Sergeant, on the promotion list for Senior
Master Sergeant at the time and Noncommissioned Officer in Charge of the
Intelligence Directorate at the headquarters. In retrospect, though I didn’t
realize it at the time, I guess my first inkling that something was wrong came
on the Sunday night before we were to begin our big targets revision. This was
the most important project in all my time at the headquarters. Our Targets
Division was going to oversee and administer the selection and documentation of
all new air targets in the Communist areas of Eastern Europe. This was sort of
the air war plan for Europe. It was so important that I didn’t want any little
thing to interfere with its beginning; so, on that Sunday night, I decided to go
into the office to be sure we had all the supplies we’d need to begin the
massive project. My wife, Erika, was used to my going out at strange hours
because of all the exercises, alerts, and recalls that jerked us around any time
of the day or night. This time, as I left our quarters in the housing area, I
just told her I’d be back in about an hour.
My neighbor across the
stairwell, MSgt John Mathis, was in front of the building getting some fresh
air. “Hey, Al,” he said, “Where you heading on a Sunday evening, the
club?”
“Oh, no, Johnny, you know
Erika doesn’t allow me to go there alone. She’s afraid all those drunken
GI’s will be a bad influence on me,” I said. “We’ve got a big project
starting tomorrow, so I’m just going to the COIC to be sure we’re ready for
it.”
“The COIC?” he said.
“What’s a COIC?”
“The Combat Operations
Intelligence Center,” I said. “That’s where I work.”
“Oh, that’s the big new
bunker they dug over behind the headquarters building, isn’t it? I didn’t
know you worked there.”
“Well, we’re not
supposed to advertise the fact, but yeah, that’s where I work.”
“What do you do?” he
asked.
I gave him the raised
eyebrow, I-can’t-believe-you’re-asking-me-that look and said, “We’re
really not supposed to advertise that. But it’s mostly routine, boring
intelligence work.”
“Whatever that is,” he
said. I think he worked in the Motor Pool or someplace like that.
“Hey, I’ve gotta go,”
I said. “Don’t want to get back too late and upset Erika more than she is
already. I’ll see you later.”
After you circled the fences
and the floodlights, you still had to walk down a long concrete sidewalk through
a tunnel to get to the entrance of the COIC. Right inside the door was a counter
behind which was a Security Policeman. They had a specially trained crew that
rotated shifts in the COIC, so I had seen the guy on duty a hundred times
before. And he’d seen me a hundred times, too, but I flashed my access badge
at him anyway and he said, “Good evening, Sgt Duncan” as he pushed the
buzzer that released the inner door and allowed me to enter the COIC proper.
Except for the security lights, it was mostly dark inside. It was quiet, too.
The 24-hour watch crews were on duty in the lower bunker, so there was no sign
of life on this level. I made my way up to the second level where the
Intelligence Directorate was located.
As soon as I opened the
outer door, I realized there was someone in the office. The overhead lights were
out, but there was a small desk lamp on in the targets area back near the vault.
I made my way carefully and quietly toward that light. First Lieutenant
Johnathan Bird, one of our junior oficers, was hunched over a sheaf of papers on
the desk of the Targets NCOIC, Technical Sergeant Edwin McElroy. My first
thought was What in the hell is Bird doing here this time of night? It
was hard enough to keep him around during the day when he was supposed to be
here. Out loud, I asked, “What in the hell are you doing here this time of
night, Sir?”
Lt. Bird jerked his eyes up
from the papers and stared at me. Obviously, he had not heard me enter the
office. “Oh, hi, Sgt Duncan,” he said. “I just stopped by to get a running
start on the targets update tomorrow.”
I didn’t know Bird was
involved in the update. I didn’t believe the senior officers would trust Bird
to be involved in a project that important. “I didn’t know you were involved
in the update, Sir,” I said.
"Well, officially, I’m not.
Not yet,” said Bird. “But it’s a big job, so I figure they may need me
before it’s all over. I just want to be as ready as I can.”
“You don’t even have
access to the vault, do you?” I asked, knowing full well that he didn’t
because I was the Top Secret Control Officer and monitored all access to the
vault and the target folders it contained.
“No,” he said, “not
yet. But I think they may have to push through access for me when the workload
gets too much for the other officers to handle.”
“In the meantime, it looks
bad for you to be here alone in the middle of the night,” I said.
“Hell, Sgt, you’re here
alone in the middle of the night, so what’s the difference?” scoffed Bird.
“Well, Lt., the difference
is that I am involved in the targets update, and I am the TSCO, so I’ve got a
reason to be here. As far as I can tell, you don’t.”
“Okay, I’ll leave
then,” said Bird. “But listen, if you think it looks bad for me to be here,
maybe it would be better if you didn’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t want anyone
to get the wrong idea.”
“I’ll think it over,
Lt., and if I can’t think of any reason anyone needs to know, I won’t tell
them. In the meantime, it probably would be better if you did leave.”
After the lieutenant left, I
still felt a little uneasy about his being there, so I looked through the papers
on Sgt McElroy’s desk, the papers Bird had been engrossed in. They were
unclassified memos concerning the targets update, mechanics and scheduling,
nothing very sensitive. It was appropriate that McElroy had them since he was
NCOIC of the targeting unit, but I didn’t think he would normally have them
out on his desk.
I checked the vault door.
There was no indication that it had been opened. The forms that certified its
openings and closings were properly completed right up until its closing on
Friday evening and a couple of checks by the Security Police since then.
Finally, I looked in the supply cabinet to ensure that the materials for the
targets update were on hand, and I left, too.
On my way out, I asked the
Security Policeman on duty how long Lt. Bird had been in the building. “I
don’t know, Sarge,” he said. “I came on at eight, and he didn’t come in
after that; so he must have already been inside.” I looked at my watch. It
appeared that Bird had been there for at least a couple of hours. I didn’t
know what he had been doing that long, but it had to involve more than just the
papers I’d seen.
I arrived early the next
morning and headed back to the targets unit. I wanted to be sure that Sgt
McElroy and the rest of the targets crew were ready for the update. As I neared
McElroy’s area, I realized that Lt. Bird was already there. It was unusual for
him to be in the office earlier than he had to. It appeared that he was engaged
in a very intense and animated conversation with Sgt McElroy, leaning over the
desk and gesturing wildly. Neither man had seen me, so I drew back a little and
listened intently to see if I could determine what Bird was talking about. I
couldn’t hear, but the expression on McElroy’s face seemed to indicate that
it was deadly serious. McElroy glanced at his watch and this time I heard what
he said. “Look, Lieutenant,” he said, “Sgt Duncan’s going to be here any
minute. It might look suspicious if you’re back here again. You’d better go
up front.” Bird shrugged and walked away.
I backed up a couple of
steps and then moved forward, trying to look like I’d just arrived. “Good
morning, Lieutenant,” I said as I met Bird at the edge of the targets area.
The update began with our
Director, Colonel Adams, and our senior officers evaluating the military targets
in each country in the Soviet bloc to determine which would be best to strike
from the air if we went to war against these countries. As the officers selected
the targets, they passed the information to Sgt McElroy, and he and his crew
began working on the target folders that would be used to attack the targets.
They prepared strip maps that would lead the strike aircraft in and assembled
the satellite and humint photos that would allow the aircrews to recognize the
target when they arrived. All the pertinent intelligence information on each
target was entered in the target folder in its own file location to give the
striking aircraft the best chance to destroy or incapacitate it when the time
came. As the airmen completed the folder on a specific target and applied the
security markings, they passed the folder to Sgt McElroy who did a quick quality
review and filed the folder in the vault. All the folders would later undergo a
more formal, more stringent quality control review from a joint committee of
intelligence, operations, aircrew, and command personnel.
During all this activity, I
busied myself in a liaison, coordination, troubleshooting capacity drifting back
and forth among the participants making sure that everyone had what they needed,
that everybody was on the same page, and that things were going smoothly. In my
wanderings, I couldn’t help but notice that Lt. Bird seemed overly interested
in what was going on in the targets area. He asked several of the officers if he
could help and loitered in the area until I reminded the director that he
wasn’t cleared for the level of information being processed. “Yeah, Lt.
Bird, why don’t you go work on this week’s current intelligence briefing,”
Col Adams said, and Bird went reluctantly back to his own desk.
A little later, I spotted
him again in the targets area, talking to Sgt McElroy. This time there was no
sense of urgency, it just appeared to be a casual conversation. Nevertheless, I
reminded Bird again that he wasn’t supposed to be there. “Hell, Sarge,” he
said, “I was just trying to boost the morale of the enlisted troops,” but he
moved back to his desk again.
The target update process
continued all that week. Lt. Bird continued to hang on the edge of the
proceedings, like he wanted to get involved or wanted to find out what was going
on. Late on the second day, I chanced upon another heated exchange between him
and Sgt McElroy. I was relaying a couple of target selections from the officers
and arrived in the area unexpectedly just as McElroy was saying, “. . . going
to make somebody suspicious.” He saw me and cut it short, instead greeting me
a little too loudly, “Hey, Sgt Duncan, what you got for me?”
“I’ve got a couple more
targets, but I don‘t think I can give them to you right now,” I said,
looking pointedly at Lt. Bird.
Bird said, “I’m going,
I’m going,” and left.
“That guy seems to be
hanging around a lot, Mac,” I said.
“Yeah, I think he just
wants to help.”
“Well, an intelligence
officer ought to know to stay away from need-to-know material that he‘s not
cleared for. I’m going to count on you to keep him away from here. Okay?”
“Okay, Sgt Duncan, I’ll
keep him away.”
I’m sure Sgt McElroy told
Lt Bird what I’d said, because he seemed to have an axe to grind with me. The
next morning we arrived at the outside door of the building at the same time. I
reached to open the door, but Lt. Bird was in a confrontational mood. “Don’t
you salute officers anymore, Sgt Duncan?” he asked.
“I was just trying to open
the door for you, Sir,” I said.
“Well, before you do that,
I think you owe me a salute, Sergeant,” he said coldly.
I released the door, stepped
back a step, and snapped up the sharpest salute I could manage. He returned it,
and I opened the door, walked through, and closed it behind me.
But at least he didn’t
hang around the targets area anymore. I was still concerned that what I had seen
and heard already meant that I needed to do something. I just didn’t know
exactly what. On the third day of the targets revision, I went to Col Adams’
office and told him about my concerns.
“So what do you think is
going on, Sgt Duncan?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Sir,” I
said. “I just think that there’s enough suspicious activity that we need to
check it out in case it’s something serious. The stuff we’re working on now,
the targets update, is red hot. The information we’re working with is super
sensitive. Sgt McElroy is right in the middle of it, and Lt. Bird is buzzing
around him like a bee around honey. I don’t know what that means, but I just
wouldn’t want this to turn out to be one of those cases where somebody should
have known something was going on and did nothing about it.”
That seemed to strike a
nerve. “Yeah, well, I sure as hell don’t want that to happen either,” said
Col Adams. “I think most GI’s are so instilled with doing what’s best for
our country, with patriotism, that we can‘t believe that there may be some
among us who don‘t feel that way. I guess we’re easy marks in that respect.
But in this case, I think it’s a lot better for us to take the chance of being
wrong and embarrassing ourselves than it is to take the chance that we’re
right and do nothing about it. That said, what do you think we should do?”
Hell, I was hoping
you’d tell me, Colonel, I
thought. But I also realized with some satisfaction that good officers usually
rely on their senior NCO’s for advice in unfamiliar situations like this.
“Do you think it’s too early to call in the OSI?” I asked. The Office of
Special Investigations was the Air Force equivalent of the FBI, and I knew
they’d be involved sooner or later.
Col Adams said, “You know,
I’m a little scared to call them in too early, but I’m a helluva lot more
scared to call them in too late. At the very least, they can probably help us
figure out what needs to be done. I’ll call their commander and set up a
meeting. In the meantime, let’s keep this just between you and me.”
©2004 StoriesByEmail.com
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