The FBI and the Missing Tesla Papers Page 475

ness by the older generation, and by a few knowledgeable journalists such as Swezey and O'Neill; but basically he was little known by people born after the turn-of-the-century. It is interesting to note that even members of the FBI had no idea who Nikola Tesla was as memorandums referred to him as Nikola Tesla (3/29/1950) and Nikola Tesla (2/5/1951).

His ties to a communist home country, the suppression of his work by the FBI and various other federal government agencies and the fact that his Yugoslavian nephew, Sava Kosanovich, was more willing to handle his estate than his American nephew Nikola Trbojevich, supported a situation whereby honor and appreciation for the inventor could be found in Belgrade where he was a national hero but not in America, where he was just another forgotten personality.

With Joseph McCarthy attacking people tainted in any way with the communist world, little effort could be drummed up to support the creation of a Tesla museum in the States. In fact, it appears that due to the secrecy of the weaponry inventions, pressure was actually created in such a way to prevent the creation of an American memorial.

In an FBI memorandum (Ladd, 1/11/1943), orders were given to "take every precaution to preserve the secrecy of Tesla's inventions." The following day Ladd said, "the War Department was interested in the matter." In another note (2/5/1951) regarding Spanel's communist party "sympathies," another Mr. "X", a former agent who had contacted Joseph McCarthy, "resigned his job and requested...never to discuss the matter with him again [i.e., re: Spanel];...that he had a wife and family to consider. I [FBI agent William Wheelan] asked him if there wasn't some hope left and he said that 'the last hope was Congress'." Was this letter simply typical of the McCarthy hysteria that swept the country like a psychic blight, or was Mr. "X" referring to the need for Congress to act to preserve the Tesla papers but that unknown factions were putting pressure to keep them underground. Certainly, had a museum honoring the inventor been erected in the United States, he would not have been as obscure a figure as he is today.

It is interesting to note here that William Terbo, Tesla's grand nephew, who today is in his 50's and an honorary chairman of the Tesla Society, was not aware that his uncle had been such an important world figure until about the year 1974. He told me (12/1984) that the family had an autographed copy of the O'Neill biography, but he had never read