Showing posts with label Project Miraret. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Project Miraret. Show all posts

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Project Shamrock, Lydia Sleppy and the FBI


Back in August 1945, Project Shamrock was created to accumulate data entering or leaving the United States telegraphically. It was operated by the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) which used the resources of the Army Security Agency (ASA), Naval Security Group, and later the Air Force Security Service. The AFSA eventually evolved into the NSA. Project Shamrock was a sister project for Project Minaret which was a way to monitor the activities of individuals through electronic surveillance. In other words, the government using these two projects was monitoring communications into and out of the United States whether by corporate entities, individuals, and anyone or anything else they wished to listen to.

Just to make it all clear for what follows, the TELEX (TELegraph EXchange) system, which used a rotary dial system to connect to a typewriter was developed in 1935. A single long distance telephone line could carry up to 25 TELEX channels at such an incredibility slow rate that in today’s world we would be unable to comprehend something like that. It was about 0.5% baud which was considered fast at the time. These TELEXs were also subject to the monitoring of Project Shamrock.

At the time, all these gathered messages were provided to the FBI, later the CIA, and several other governmental agencies so that they could monitor what was going where and to whom. In other words, and contrary to what some have published, there was an unauthorized capability to monitor the teletype messages being sent out of Roswell by various government agencies in 1947. It was an illegal operation that ran for decades.

So, when an FBI agent told Kal Korff in the mid-1990s that the FBI had no capability to monitor the teletype messages, that agent was unaware of the historical precedent of Shamrock and Korff, who was not interested in looking any further, did not discover Shamrock, though it had been exposed by Congressional investigation in May 1975. His analysis was inaccurate and incorrect. The statements by the FBI agent were irrelevant because he knew nothing about Project Shamrock.

What all this means is that the FBI could have been monitoring the radio station teletypes in New Mexico… and you might well wonder why. Because of the atomic research going on there and because the 509th Bomb Group was a target of Soviet espionage because of who they were. Had the 509th been at some other base, the Soviets would have been interested in that base (which makes you wonder why the 509th was in New Mexico, close to that open border that would allow agents into New Mexico… why not put it in Kansas or Nebraska which would mean the agents would then have to travel a long way to see anything…).

So, when Lydia Sleppy said that her transmission of the story of the UFO crash was interrupted, it is possible that it happened. The technology existed to interrupt her, the technology to intercept the message existed and the project to read these messages was in place and had been for years. That it was an illegal operation made the secrecy of it even more important.

I will note here that the information about Shamrock tells us that the various agencies were given microfilm copies of all the relevant message traffic, which, for the most part were messages going out of, or coming into, the United States. But just because that was the way most of it operated doesn’t mean it was the only way it operated. The technology existed to monitor specific teletype machines and there is no reason to think there wasn’t a “real time” capability. That would have been of limited use because most of the data collected wouldn’t have been time sensitive. But that doesn’t mean that if such a critical circumstance was identified, they wouldn’t have been watching it more closely able to stop it if they believed it necessary.

None of this proves that the FBI, or anyone else, was watching Sleppy and her teletype in Albuquerque that closely. It only means that they could have, if they wanted, and given the timing and location, they just might have wanted.