Close Encounters of the Government Kind... Walter Todd Zechel

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE GOVERNMENT KIND pt 4

"COVERT CIA OPERATIONS AGAINST UFOLOGY"

In January 1965, during another UFO flap, an agent from the CIA's Domestic Contact Service (DCS)
Washington,DC field office, Albert "Al" Coleman, visited the headquarters office of NICAP in suburban DC, then the
nation's largest and most influential civilian UFO study group. The purpose of Coleman's visit was to obtain UFO
sighting reports mailed into the group by its nationwide membership related
to the January 1965 UFO flap. Richard "Dick" Hall, who actually ran the
group day-to-day, although USMC-Ret. Major Donald Keyhoe was the fiery
director of the group as mostly an inspiring figure-head rather than an
administrator, agreed to cooperate with the CIA and turned over several
dozen sighting reports to Coleman. FOIA-released documents later confirmed the CIA was considering granting Hall
a security clearance and making him a full-time source on UFOs. However, the reports were later returned to NICAP
by mail with a thank you but no further comment.
An Annapolis grad and classmate of Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first CIA Director, Keyhoe was a constant
pain in the Air Force's butt. Ultimately, he wrote five best-selling books harping on his thesis that the USAF knew
UFOs were extraterrestrial spacecraft but covered it up to prevent public panic, plus he continually tried to bring
about Congressional hearings in which the USAF's handling of UFOs would be scrutinized, and NICAP board
members like the former CIA Director would testify.
The Air Force was between a rock and a hard place, what with the CIA having taken highly secret control of UFO
intelligence collections and analysis in early 1958, but the USAF being forced to pretend to be the sole U.S.
government agency involved with UFO studies. Getting flogged repeatedly by Keyhoe and NICAP caused the USAF
to complain bitterly behind the scenes to the CIA about the unfairness of it all.
The CIA's ultra-secret solution was to dispatch one of its most covert operatives to handle the problem: Joseph
Bryan,III, the founder in 1946 of the CIA's Psychological Warfare Staff and its original director. Bryan had been a
Navy Combat Intelligence Officer during WW II, serving aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. He joined the CIA's
forerunner in 1946, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), and remained one of the CIA's most covert operatives for
decades thereafter.
The scion of a Richmond, VA, publishing family, Bryan was an excellent writer and journalist, and had held major
publishing editorial positions prior to WW II. But he used his writing and journalism techniques throughout the
1950s, 60s and 70s, to advance the CIA's causes through psychological warfare, which often entailed heavy spin
doctoring in the Agency's behalf.

Bryan's partner in the Windsor operation was Time-Life reporter/editor/editorial board member Charles J. V.
Murphy, also a covert CIA operative of the Psychological Warfare Staff who utilized the same USAF/Secretary of the
Air Force's office cover. While in Europe the two ultra-secret CIA agents claimed to be attached to the Commanding
General of NATO's staff in Belgium. However, they weren't really spying on the Windsors, just using their
connections to meet influential European writers, editors and publishers and feed them CIA spin-doctored material
they hoped to get published overseas.
But Bryan's approach to Keyhoe had an even more sinister purpose: to ultimately neutralize him and NICAP and get
them off the Air Force's back. Bryan's first step in this regard was to secure Keyhoe's trust by allowing him to
release a statement in which Bryan was quoted as saying something like 'UFOS are extraterrestrial devices, either
manned or remotely controlled or both. The Air Force is withholding information on UFOs. This policy is dangerous.'
Wow! One can almost hear Keyhoe chortling: "You've made my day!" Here was a prestigious Air Force Colonel
condemning the USAF in no uncertain terms, plus supporting the same thesis as Keyhoe's five best-selling books. It
probably took Keyhoe less than a minute to grab the bait, hook, line and sinker. Shortly, Bryan was invited to serve
on NICAP's prestigious Board of Governors, which already included retired U. S. Generals, Admirals and even a
former CIA Director. Now everything was in place for Bryan to work his covert magic.
Bryan's penetration of NICAP may have been assisted by a mystery man named G. Stuart Nixon, a slippery guy who
worked his way into NICAP's leadership structure. Nixon refused all this author's efforts to interview him about his
NICAP work back in 1977/78, when I first researched the covert CIA destruction of NICAP story, and he continues to
refuse all attempts to get him to explain his strange activities with NICAP to this day. By all appearances and
conduct, Nixon appears to have been a covert CIA penetration of NICAP as well as Bryan. In fact, an examination of
Nixon's daily logs while he ran NICAP, which I had the opportunity to do after NICAP's files were spirited away from
storage by some sharp ex-NICAPers, documented he met frequently with Bryan and other people I knew to be
covert CIA operatives, like Fred Durant. It is also documented Nixon assembled a UFO photo display while at
NICAP, about which he claimed all UFO photos were hoaxes!
In any case, Bryan, the only Board member to take an interest in NICAP's day-to-day activities, by 1969 had worked
his way into the position of Chairman of NICAP's ruling Executive Committee. In December 1969, shortly before the
horrible Condon Report dismissing UFOs and calling for the Air Force
to close Project Blue Book was publicly released--which Keyhoe would have
loudly denounced from his NICAP directorship platform had he still been
there--Bryan convened an Executive Committee meeting in which he denounced
Keyhoe as "inept" and called for his immediate dismissal. The Executive
Committee, hand-picked by Bryan, instantly accepted and down came Keyhoe,
NICAP and all.
[It took another 15 years for NICAP to wither and die a slow death.]
Aiding and abetting this 'crime against humanity' was Stuart Nixon,
who became Keyhoe's replacement until he brought in Jack Acuff, a man with a
background of secret government-related management positions and whom while
serving as NICAP's director continued to perform covert counterintelligence
operations against the Soviet Union's KGB in behalf of the FBI. Acuff dismantled
NICAP's nationwide UFO investigating and reporting network, and turned it into a
passive recipient of UFO reports sent in by loyal members, instead of NICAP
being on the forefront of the fight against UFO secrecy and misinformation.With
Keyhoe gone, NICAP was stripped of its heart and guts, and what was left wasn't
worth saving. Thanks of course to the diabolical covert operations of the CIA,
operations which allowed the Air Force to extricate itself from an impossible
position whereby it had to appear to be responsible for UFO investigations while
in the meantime the CIA was secretly in charge of the whole thing.
The CIA's covert operations against UFOlogy were successful probably even beyond its wildest dreams. To this
day, UFOlogical hucksters, hoaxers and gadflys don't even suspect that it has been the CIA in control all along, and
they postulate and perpetuate mythical control groups like "MJ-12" and the like. In fact, the mythical "MJ-12", the
creation of a professed/confessed disinformationist, has become a UFOlogical 'accepted fact,' and take it from
there. Meanwhile, the CIA must be chuckling up its sleeve and rejoicing with glee as they observe how greatly they
got off the hook--and took the U.S. Air Force with them!
-30-
Copyright (c) 2006
W. Todd Zechel
P.O. Box 117
Prairie du Sac, WI 53578-0117
Next in Close Encounters of the Government Kind, pt 5
"Hiding the Real Evidence"

***Bryan told this author in a recorded 1977 telephone interview, during which he admitted for the first time he had
been a covert CIA operative, that the reason he joined NICAP was because he thought "...the government was
turning its back on UFOs, ignoring it," in response to my question of why he joined. A lie and a complete
contradiction of what he had allowed Keyhoe to quote him as claiming. Bryan's son, the writer C.B.D. Bryan,
claimed in an interview with an associate of mine that Bryan's family was ashamed of his late father's UFO beliefs.
Yet the younger Bryan later published a book favorable to UFO abduction accounts. Apparently, complete
contradiction runs in the family.
WTZ