Arlington Series Pt. 1

[DuckforcoveR]

I spent a good chunk of Veteran's Day reading Medal of Honor stories from the Korean War. My grandfather served in Korea (starting when he was 17 years old) and while I never got too many stories from him while he was still alive I learned much from my family after he passed. The stories I heard inspired me to do more digging into the "forgotten war" and that led me to a book called "The Coldest Winter" which details some absolutely mind-blowing feats of human willpower. Further inspired by the book I decided to make it a point to learn the names of every Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War (and I confess, I still have a ways to go) but I had a hard time staying on track while reading so many stories. What started out as a project for the Korean War led me to just exploring Arlington National Cemetery and the endless stories of sacrifice and honor that emanate from the rows. I thought it would be a neat idea to highlight them one after another in a new thread series.  

Rather than put these in one thread or one topic I will bounce them around from forum to forum depending on the subject matter. The first installment will be here in UFO's, Aliens, and Universal Questions as the person I will be highlighting has a special place in this community.




Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter


Some of you may know him by a different picture (one with a quote attached):



Yes, same guy    And this is his story.

Another early UFO organization, whose members were mostly military, was the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) founded by renowned physicist Thomas Townsend Brown in 1956. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter was one of NICAP’s more prominent advisors. In a letter to congress in 1960, he wrote: “Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.”

Introduction to Roscoe


Military Career:

He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland in 1919.

He served tours in naval intelligence, several as assistant naval attaché to France. As Executive Officer of the USS West Virginia (BB-48), he survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, and afterwards was officer in charge of intelligence on Chester W. Nimitz's Pacific Fleet staff.
Then Captain Hillenkoetter commanded the USS Missouri in 1946. [/url]

President Truman persuaded a reluctant Hillenkoetter, then a [url=http://military.wikia.com/wiki/Rear_admiral_(United_States)]rear admiral, to become Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and run the Central Intelligence Group (September 1947). Under the National Security Act of 1947 he was nominated and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as DCI, now in charge of the newly established Central Intelligence Agency (December 1947). At first, the U.S. State Department directed the new CIA's covert operations component, and George F. Kennan chose Frank Wisner to be its director. Hillenkoetter expressed doubt that the same agency could be effective at both covert action and intelligence analysis

Admiral Hillenkoetter returned to the fleet, commanding a cruiser division in the Korean War. He held two other commands before his retirement in 1957. 

Wiki


NICAP Work

The National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena was formed in 1956, with the organization's corporate charter being approved October 24.[14] Hillenkoetter was on NICAP's board of governors from about 1957 until 1962.[15] Donald E. Keyhoe, NICAP director and Hillenkoetter's Naval Academy classmate, wrote that Hillenkoetter wanted public disclosure of UFO evidence.[16] Perhaps Hillenkoetter's best-known statement on the subject was in 1960 in a letter to Congress, as reported in The New York Times: "Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense."

A quick bit about NICAP:

Though NICAP was a non-profit organization, the group faced financial collapse many times in its existence, due in no small part to business ineptitude among the group’s directors. Following a wave of nationally-publicized UFO incidents in the mid-1960s, NICAP's membership spiked dramatically, and only then did the organization become financially stable. However, following publication of the Condon Report in 1968, NICAP's membership declined sharply, and the organization again fell into long-term financial decline and disarray.

Despite these internal troubles, NICAP probably had the most visibility of any civilian American UFO group, and arguably had the most mainstream respectability; Jerome Clark writes that "for many middle-class Americans and others interested in UFOs but repelled by ufology’s fringe aspects, it served as a sober forum for UFO reporting, inquiry, investigation, and speculation".[1] NICAP advocated transparent scientific investigation of UFO sightings and was skeptical of "contactee" tales involving meetings with space visitors, the alien abduction phenomenon, and the like. The presence of several prominent military officials as members of NICAP brought a further measure of respectability for many observers.
Throughout its existence, NICAP argued that there was an organized governmental cover-up of UFO evidence. NICAP also pushed for governmental hearings regarding UFOs, with occasional success.[2]

Though any UFO-related group attracts a number of uncritical enthusiasts along with a small percentage of cranks, astronomer J. Allen Hynek cited NICAP and Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) as the two best civilian UFO groups of their time, consisting largely of sober, serious-minded people capable of valuable contributions to the subject.[3]
Until the mid-1960s, NICAP gave little attention to close encounters of the third kind (where animated beings are purportedly sighted in relation to a UFO). However, longtime NICAP member Richard H. Hall related privately that this position was "tactical and not doctrinaire."[4] In other words, NICAP did not necessarily dismiss occupant reports out of hand, but elected to focus on other aspects of the UFO phenomenon which would be perceived by mainstream observers as less outlandish. The attention given to the contactees of the 1950s (who typically claimed ongoing contact with benevolent "Space Brothers") was almost certainly a factor in NICAP’s reluctance to study UFO occupant reports too closely. But with the 1964 Lonnie Zamora UFO encounter — regarded by researchers as one of the most reliable UFO occupant reports — NICAP loosened its restrictions on studying UFO occupant reports.

NICAP Wiki

There is so much that is just fascinating with his beliefs when you stop to think about the information he was provided during his work at the CIA. I could spend months reading into him and his participation in NICAP alone. 

After his work at the CIA came to an end because of some pretty damning intelligence blunders he focused on his passion - defending the US from attack (an attack not coming from the Soviets). A true patriot.

Hillenkoetter served during a very turbulent time for the nation and the newly established CIA. During 1947-49, the Soviets were extending their control over eastern Europe and Mao Tse-tung’s Communist revolution was underway in China. These events increased the demand for intelligence gathering and analysis.

In March 1948, the US Military Governor of Germany, Lt. Gen. Lucius Clay, sent a cable noting a perceived change in Soviet attitude and expressing the fear that war with the Soviet Union could come suddenly. The Clay cable generated a crisis atmosphere in Washington, and DCI Hillenkoetter established an ad hoc, interagency committee to prepare estimates of Communist capabilities and likely actions. Although CIG and CIA had already prepared a number of estimates, this marked the first time that the estimative process was a true interagency effort.

Two years later, in the spring of 1950, President Truman and U.S. government were stunned by North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. The events in Korea contributed to Hillenkoetter’s departure from CIA.

After his three years as DCI, Hillenkoetter returned to the Navy, commanding a cruiser division in the Korean War. He was promoted to Vice Admiral and served as Inspector General of the Navy before his retirement in 1957

CIA bio on Adm. Hillenkoetter:
CIA Bio


So to end the inaugural Arlington Series today I leave you with a map. A map to find a true American Patriot and a founding father of the UFO movement. Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, rest in peace good sir.

• Birth 8 May 1897 Saint Louis, St. Louis County, Missouri, USA
  
• Death 18 Jun 1982 New York, New York County (Manhattan), New York, USA
  
• Burial Arlington National Cemetery Arlington, Arlington County, Virginia, USA
  
• Plot Section 6, Site 5813-C-1
  
• Memorial ID 29618466
  

Vice Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency, died Friday night at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was 85 years old and had lived in Weehawken, N.@J., since his retirement from the Navy in 1958.

After his C.I.A. service, Admiral Hillenkoetter served as commander of a Navy task force in the Korean War. Capt. Joshua L. Goldberg of the Navy, the former Third Naval District chaplain, said yesterday that the admiral was ''a symbol of what an American should be.'' He said the admiral, while a Naval attache to the Vichy Government of France in 1940 and 1941, had worked with the French underground and helped men hunted by the Germans to escape to safety.
''He was modest, and people who served under him just loved him,'' Captain Goldberg said. A former C.I.A. official, Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, has recalled him as ''an able officer, an enjoyable person.'' Wounded at Pearl Harbor
Admiral Hillenkoetter was wounded in the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the battleship West Virginia, of which he was executive officer, was sunk. He organized an intelligence network for Adm. Chester W. Nimitz and commanded a destroyer in Pacific combat during the war.
He later served as the Navy's director of planning and control in Washington and was awarded the Legion of Merit. After the war, he commanded the battleship Missouri on a good-will cruise to the Mediterranean, and commanded the Navy Yard in Brooklyn and the Third Naval District.
The C.I.A. was established by Congress in September 1947 as a successor to the World War II Office of Special Services and the peacetime Central Intelligence Group. Rear Adm. Sidney W. Souers, the first director of the Central Intelligence Group, was succeeded by Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg of the Air Force and then by Admiral Hillenkoetter, who was appointed by President Truman on May 1, 1947.
After the C.I.A. was established, Admiral Hillenkoetter served as the director until he was succeeded by Gen. Walter Bedell Smith of the Army in October 1950. Covert Operations Authorized
Soon after Congress formed the C.I.A., the National Security Council adopted a directive on Dec. 19, 1947, ordering ''covert activities'' to oppose Communist and leftist parties in Italy's forthcoming parliamentary elections.
Despite an opinion from the counsel for the C.I.A. that his agency had no such power legally, Admiral Hillenkoetter authorized money to be provided to Italy's centrist political parties, which remained in power.
The security council on June 10, 1948, ordered further covert programs to counter Soviet efforts, specifying that, if detected, they could be disavowed by the United States. Included were ''propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.'' Aided South Korean Troops
After North Korean forces invaded South Korea in June 1950, the admiral asked to be returned to sea duty. From November 1950 until September 1951 he commanded the heavy cruiser St. Paul and a task force that provided cover for South Korean forces advancing up the eastern coast, for their retreat before Chinese Communist invaders, and for the landing at Inchon of forces led by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.
Admiral Hillenkoetter was born in St. Louis, Mo., May 8, 1897. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1919 after having served with the Atlantic fleet in World War I. He later carried out intelligence assignments in France, Spain and Portugal before World War II.
After his retirement from the Navy, Admiral Hillenkoetter served as chief executive officer of the American Banner Line, which operating to Belgium and the Netherlands in 1958 and 1959. In 1962 he joined a New York construction company, Hegeman-Harris, as vice chairman.
He is survived by his wife, the former Jane Clark, and a daughter, Jane Saar. Burial will be at Arlington National Cemetery at 11 A.M. Thursday. 

Find a Grave
NY Times Obituary

[Mystic Wanderer]

Very interesting topic and well done Sir.    First I've heard of these men.  

[guohua]

@"DuckforcoveR" 
Absolutely, Fantastic stories.
thank You.