Marc Seifer and the Unsolved Mysteries of Nikola Tesla Page 10

as early as 1915 in the New York Times because he was desperate to save the tower and felt that if he could impress Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. Navy and even President Woodrow Wilson in the viability of his tower, they might come to his rescue. Unfortunately they did not, and indeed the tower was destroyed in 1917 by the posh hotel and Tesla’s great plans were destroyed at that same time as well.

Macy: On page 191, you write, “Given that there are numerous FBI and OAP memos from colonels and brigadier generals from Wright-Patterson discussing Tesla’s files, their constant denials and the simple fact that the OAP has never released the particle beam paper, even though their documents state overtly that this paper was in their possession, supports the contention that aspects of Tesla’s work, even to this day, are top secret.” What were you able to track down about the history of that paper?

Seifer: It really all stems from Bergstresser, whose military record I cover in depth in Wizard at War. Without any doubt, Bergstresser got this coveted top secret particle beam weapon paper and gave it to military intelligence. Through FOIA I was able to track the trail of this paper in particular to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and to Bloyce Fitzgerald who was working for the National Defense Research Council (NDRC), which was really another name for the secret weapons development branch of the U.S. military headed up by Vannevar Bush, former Dean of MIT physics department and co-founder of the Raytheon Corporation.

Macy: You note that after Tesla died, Vannevar Bush, then head of NDRC which included the ultra secret Manhattan Project, appointed John G. Trump to study Tesla’s papers. Trump, who was a professor of physics from MIT going back to when Bush was Dean, concluded that there was no military use for this coveted paper because the scheme was unworkable. You write that this position was supported by Bush but opposed by other higher-ups in military intelligence.

Seifer: Exactly. Trump’s position was that all of Tesla’s estate should be handed over to Sava Kosanovic, Tesla’s nephew who coincidentally was the ambassador from Yugoslavia, but that move was opposed by Bloyce Fitzgerald, who was actually working for Vannevar Bush’s NDRC while he was a private in the Army.

Bergstresser, on the other hand, at this time was stationed in Southeast Asia fighting against the Japanese, but Fitzgerald was stationed in Washington, DC, able to freely go to both MIT where three professors were involved in the study of rapid fire weapons for the military, and also to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Fitzgerald was desperate to block the transference of the papers to the Soviet controlled state of Yugoslavia. At that time, he met with Colonel Parrott, who later became a higher up in the CIA, and General L.C. Craigie from Wright-Patterson, who happened to also be the first military person to fly a jet plane. This, like the Manhattan Project, was top secret work, and Craigie was high profile, in a sense the Chuck Yeager or John Glenn of his day, but only to the inner circle who knew that we were developing a jet fighter plane.

What I uncovered was a definite split in military intelligence. One group headed by John G. Trump, and most likely Vannevar Bush, dismissed Tesla’s work as a good try but unworkable, and another group headed by Bloyce Fitzgerald and General L.C. Craigie wanted very much to understand the details to Tesla’s so-called “death ray.” I also discovered that J. Edgar Hoover was interested as well in that device, but when he wrote to Vannevar Bush about it, Bush dismissed the idea.

Macy: Do you think it was a split, or doesn’t it seem quite possible Trump and Bush were interested in the technology and this was a cover-up? As you write on page 208, two weeks after Tesla’s death, “on January 26 and 27, 1943, the official examination of Tesla’s effects was undertaken by MIT professor John G. Trump along with a Navy photographer, a stenographer and Willis George, a counterintelligence agent and safe cracker associated with both Naval Intelligence and the OSS.”

Seifer: I do not believe that Trump and Bush were involved in a cover-up. Trump had a superb resume working at MIT with Robert Van de Graaff, involved in microwave transmission, X-rays, directed beams of electrons and particle accelerators. He spent a long weekend going over Tesla’s top secret death ray paper and concluded that there was “no significant value to this country” of the information therein and literally staked his reputation on this conclusion. As I discuss in the book, Vannevar Bush and the other scientists simply took Trump at his word, but I also point out where Trump erred. For instance, although Trump reported that Tesla had a particle beam weapon, he states that Tesla was attempting to shoot electrons out of the barrel of this open-ended vacuum tube. That was simply not true. Trump also errs in the amount of voltage Tesla calculates would be needed to operate his death ray. This was another major error surmised by Trump. There had already been a disdain against Tesla by a number of scientists, and that might have colored Trump’s vision. At the same time, as everyone in the inner circle knew, the real threat was the atomic bomb, so it was much easier to accept Trump’s conclusions and put all their eggs into the work at Los Alamos.

With regards to Willis George, he was working for Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS. Quite simply, Donovan wanted to know what was going on with the Tesla papers and if a safe needed to be cracked or a locked trunk needed to be picked, Willis George was the man to do it. So I do not think it was a cover-up. Trump dismissed Tesla’s invention and the people that hired him, particularly Vannevar Bush, accepted his findings at face value without studying this key paper for himself. However, as I mentioned, another faction headed by Bloyce Fitzgerald and General L.C. Craigie had a very different view and for those reasons, Tesla’s affects were kept in their possession for the next decade, the end result being, in my assessment, that the particle beam weapon paper remained a top secret paper studied by the military, and that today’s U.S. Navy rail gun is a direct outcropping based on essentials from this technology.

Macy: How so?

Seifer: Tesla’s idea was basically to have very small, almost microscopic particles of tungsten be propelled out the barrel of the gun using the property of electronic propulsion, that