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National Security Act was at that time under debate in Congress.
    The best friend of the Central Intelligence idea in those days was General Hoyt Vandenberg, soon to become commanding general of the United States Air Force. But he wanted the CIA on his own terms, as a military toy, not as an independent civilian agency.
    An old Socialist and gentleman named Norman Thomas once said, "Where the secrets start, the republic stops." We were ignorant and proud men and we did not believe that. Had he known what he was helping to create, Vandenberg would never have done it. He was a great man, and I love him still.
    The Central Intelligence Group was populated from three or four different directions. OSS people. FBI people.
    Military intelligence people. A prescription for chaos, but it worked fairly well. We were united in our desire to turn back communism. Well, perhaps a few of us were a little more cynical - but for the most part, we were united.
    Flying disks were the merest diversion, and my intelligence estimate was expected to be the work of an afternoon. The disks had started appearing in numbers only in June, and nobody viewed the matter very seriously.
    During the war a little work on the question had been done by the Army Air Force. So we already had a dossier of unsolved mysteries and unusual phenomena, collected on an ad hoc basis when Army Air Force Intelligence was assessing the "foo-fighter" phenomenon toward the end of the war. We had concluded in 1946 that the "foo-fighters" were some sort of unknown phenomenon "possibly under intelligent control."
    They represented a form of chaos, the intrusion of a powerful and provocative unknown into human affairs. I will not lie about it: The AAF was telling us that there was something going on, but they had no idea what to make of it.
    I had worked through the July Fourth holiday, which I viewed as a minor sort of a tragedy.
    I would have enjoyed spending my Fourth banging around the Snake Pit at the Mayflower Hotel looking for unescorted chorines, or crawling the Statler-Carlton circuit in search of a party.
    Since the war I'd been uncomfortable with anything but the most casual relationships. I had nightmares about a French operative named Sophie, and about the North African I also lost, Jamshid, who was little more than a child. Often I would wake up in tears, but be unable to remember which of them had broken my sleep.
    I disliked myself pretty thoroughly, because I thought I had been a less than brilliant spymaster, and I had wasted their lives.
    I assumed that Admiral Hillenkoetter, who had just replaced Vandenberg as CIG director, realized these things about me. He knew that I felt useless on the French desk even though French politics was what I knew best.
    As I worked on my intelligence estimate I found a peculiar pattern hidden in the old reports, and I did not like that pattern at all. If I was right about it, then the disks were far more dangerous than we had ever imagined.
    So much for a few days' lark: the facts began to bother me.
    What the hell was going on? Were they Russian, or some sort of Nazi or Jap secret weapon hidden until now?
    They certainly appeared to be damned dangerous.
    As the nights wore on, my olive-drab gooseneck lump would attract more than its share of June bugs, moths and mosquitoes, until I would be sitting there at midnight in a cloud of darting insects and billowing cigarette smoke.
    It was immediately clear that there would be no purpose served in repeating the assessment that the Army Air Force's intelligence unit had already provided about the "foo-fighters." We needed to go deeper than to simply say that they might be under intelligent control.
    If my suspicions were even directionally correct, we had to find out what was going on and find out fast, because we were at war. We were being invaded.
    My method of gathering information was much less simple and straightforward than what the AAF had done, which was to view gun-camera