Secret Journey to Planet Serpo (9 page)

A GRAND ADVENTURE

The appointed military-civilian selection committee debated for months about the criteria to be applied in choosing the team members. This was precious time lost. It was finally decided that all candidates must be military, but not necessarily from the Air Force. There were to be no civilian members of the team. They had to have chosen the military as a career, and had to have completed at least four years of service. This decision made a lot of sense. The mission required an ultrahigh level of personal and team discipline, since the team members would be facing enormous hardship, and they would have to rely on that discipline to handle the challenges. Furthermore, as previously discussed, Kennedy and the DIA were not absolutely certain that they would not be facing a possible threat from the Ebens, and they wanted people who could defend themselves, and could possibly even find a way to return to Earth by force, if it became necessary. The committee would be looking for individuals with special skills appropriate to their roles in the mission who had additionally been cross-trained in other needed skills. Also, they wanted some evidence that each team member had the ability to step into the shoes of another member, if necessary.

The team members had to be currently unmarried. Presumably, this requirement did not eliminate those previously married, but they could not have any children. Preference would be given to those who were themselves orphans. The goal was to select candidates with as few family ties as possible. Apparently, there was concern that family members might somehow learn of the program and might conceivably make public their worries about its safety. These twelve individuals would be entirely in the hands of another civilization on a planet in a distant star system, and the government had little or no leverage to ensure their safety. Their safety, of course, was highly problematic. This was a very dangerous mission, and the fate of the team was basically unpredictable. If they did all die, we would have no way of knowing whether it was accidental, so we could not retaliate against the Eben in our custody, nor would we want to anger an alien race that had the technology to invade the Earth! This was a delicate balance, but we had enough experience with the Ebens to feel confident that the team had a reasonable chance of survival and returning safely. We basically had learned to trust them, but this was to be the first time any human would be sent out into space beyond Earth's orbit. It was a grand adventure, really more appropriate to the realm of science fiction than to that of reality. But it was worth the risk. If they all or even some of them returned safely to Earth, we would have complete details about a civilization on a distant planet, which would be a window into the universe of incalculable value.

The call for volunteers was placed in military publications. Eventually, after some months, the final twelve—ten men and two women—were chosen. There were eight Air Force selectees, two Army and two Navy. Additionally, four alternates were picked. They would go through the same training as the main team, in case a trainee was eliminated or dropped out. These sixteen were the very best, and most likely to complete the mission successfully.

Relative to selection, the following quoted information came from someone in England who claimed to have been in MI6 (the British intelligence agency) and was involved in the program. It was sent to the website and was not disputed by Anonymous.

The advertisement which was sent out asked anyone interested in volunteering for a space program [to] apply. It was a semi-classified announcement. The disguise was that the USAF was selecting a special team to travel to the moon and these people must undergo special training and a special selection process. None of the military people trying out for this team knew the real mission. About 500 people applied and that narrowed down to about 160. But there was a problem. Some specialists required on this mission were missing. Besides, the requirement called for each team member to be single, never married, no children and if possible, orphans. The USAF had to go out and recruit two doctors and several other specialists.

SHEEP-DIPPED

The selection committee decided to completely dissolve the identities of all the team members, and to assign them three-digit numbers as their new identities. They wanted to sever all their existing connections to Earth, except those with the mission personnel, and that meant destroying traceable identities. Consequently, they were all “sheep-dipped.” According to an article in
Time
magazine on February 3, 2003, titled “The CIA's Secret Army,” by Douglas Waller, “If a soldier is assigned highly clandestine work, his records are changed to make it appear as if he resigned from the military or was given civilian status; the process is called sheep dipping, after the practice of bathing sheep before they are sheared.” This metaphor is slightly askew. It is really the shearing and not the dipping that applies here. Identities are sheared off like the wool of the sheep. One suggestion was that they all be listed as dead. That was debated and rejected. It was finally decided that they be shown on their official military records as “missing.” That seems like a very odd decision, since the “missing” category was really only appropriate in wartime when thousands of military personnel were listed as “missing in action.” In 1963, the Vietnam War had not yet begun. It wasn't clear how the military would be able to explain how twelve people could be “missing” in peacetime. How could members of the armed forces suddenly not show up for duty without being labeled as deserters? Stranger still was the decision to either destroy their military records or to place them in a secret storage facility. That meant that no investigator would ever even know that they had been in the military. This means that they could never question the “missing” designation anyway. All other records were to be collected and destroyed or placed in a vault, including Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax returns, medical records, and any other papers that showed that these twelve individuals had ever existed. That was really an impossible task since there were probably papers such as birth certificates, school and college records, and Social Security cards that may not have been retrievable by the military.

The purpose of all this strict depersonalization is obscure. Very possibly, the committee wanted to prevent the writing of articles and books when the team members returned to Earth and were released to civilian life. The security oath alone should have accomplished that goal. But they weren't taking any chances. By eliminating their credentials, the military made it easy to disavow such writings. They wanted the full report of the space travelers to remain under lock and key for as long as they chose. There could have been a justifiable security reason for this at the time, but now, in retrospect, it seems a great shame that these twelve courageous space pioneers must forever remain in the dark halls of historical anonymity. The final makeup of the team with their new three-digit identities is as follows:

In one of his e-mails, Anonymous answers some questions regarding the Serpo material that were sent in. One question relates to the selection process and offers some additional insight. Following is the question and answer:

Another question pertained to the team makeup. Why were only 2 females taken? If one considers the monumental problem associated with picking a team of 12 people, where each person must be totally erased from the military system—no family ties, no spouses, and no children—one can see the difficulty that the selection group had. The selection group picked the best team members from a limited pool of military people. The original selection group picked 158 people. The final 12 were selected from that number. If you consider the psychological, medical, and other tests that had to be administered, the final 12 were the best qualified from the original number. Why they chose 2 females was never written. Apparently, those two females were the best qualified in their individual specialty: a doctor and a linguist.

THE FARM

The primary training for the mission took place at Camp Peary, Virginia, on the York River near Williamsburg. This is the not-so-secret main CIA training location popularly known as “The Farm,” but officially referred to as the Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity (AFETA). The project was assigned its own training complex within the larger facility, where it could impose its own secrecy and security within the already highly secure CIA system. So it was necessary to go through two levels of screening to gain access to the team training location. Camp Peary was the home training site for the team, but they were also trained at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, Ellsworth Air Force Base outside of Rapid City, South Dakota, and Dow Air Force Base in Bangor, Maine. They were given high-altitude astronaut training at Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City, Florida. Anonymous says that they were also sent to unidentified locations in Mexico and Chile for special training.

Camp Peary was a logical choice for training the team, primarily because it was self-contained and it was ultrasecure. Since it was operated by the Defense Department, it was really a military base under the nominal control of the U.S. Navy. It was named after famed naval explorer Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary, who in 1909 was the first man to reach the North Pole. Self-containment was important to the planners of the mission. They didn't want the team to make any connections outside their training facility where they might inadvertently drop a hint or reference to their mission. Camp Peary already had pleasant homes and apartments, recreational facilities, and retail establishments for the CIA trainees that were easily adaptable for the team. Since it was previously a Virginia state forestry and game preserve, the camp residents could even enjoy hunting on the nine-thousand-acre, heavily wooded reservation in whatever spare time they were given. Secrecy and self-containment had always been the major virtues of this facility throughout its history. During World War II, it was the main training camp for the Navy Seabees, and then it was used to house those German prisoners of war, mainly officers, who were supposed to have been killed in action, but had actually been rescued by the Navy. Consequently, the German High Command thought they were dead and couldn't give away any information. The prisoners could live normal lives securely at Camp Peary while they were being interrogated. Eventually, most became naturalized American citizens. The Navy gave the reservation back to Virginia in 1946, but then took it over again in 1951.

The purpose of CIA training at the Farm is to imbue deskbound intelligence operatives with the paramilitary skills they would need in enemy territories. Here, the keenly academic types are “toughened up” and made into pseudo-soldiers. This kind of James Bond commando training was resumed after 9/11 by George W. Bush after a long era of blunders by CIA paramilitary operatives in foreign countries who were in the Special Operations Group (SOG). Waller says in his
Time
article, “Until fairly recently, the CIA, in an effort to clean up a reputation sullied by botched overseas coups and imperial assassination attempts, had shied away from getting its hands dirty. Until about five years ago [1998], it focused instead on gathering intelligence that could be used by other parts of the government. Before that, traditional CIA officers, often working under cover as U.S. diplomats, got most of their secrets from the embassy cocktail circuit or by bribing foreign officials. Most did not even have weapons training.” Now, says Waller, “At Camp Peary, new SOG recruits also hone their paramilitary skills, like sharpshooting with various kinds of weapons, setting up landing zones in remote areas for agency aircraft and attacking enemy sites with a small force.” This rebuilding of the Special Operations Group by CIA Director George Tenet required a makeover of the facilities and capabilities of Camp Peary starting in 2001. By the mid-1960s, there had been some improvements as a result of the lessons learned in the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961. But those facilities were still rather primitive when the Serpo team was in training at the camp between 1963 and 1965.

Navy Seabees in training at Camp Peary, 1943