My Time With the Malmgrens, Part 1: An "Atomic" Whiz Kid

Dr. Harald Malmgren's is a tale of two men. One a defense analyst on anti-ballistic missile policy who, by his own account, moved in high-level intelligence circles. The other a quiet U.S. trade ambassador and economist.

The first was his own. A man who said the CIA legend Richard Bissell had pulled him aside on Friday afternoons after work and told him secrets about otherworldly technology.¹ Who said Robert McNamara had put him in charge of designing America's first anti-missile system.² Who said he had stood in a Pentagon war room during the Cuban Missile Crisis and talked General Curtis LeMay down from a first strike.³ And at the end of his life, telling Jesse Michels that a UFO had been knocked out of the sky during a 1962 nuclear test, and that he had handled materials.⁴

The second came from Douglas Dean Johnson, who filed Freedom of Information Act requests, pulled Malmgren's certified federal job applications and his declassified FBI background file, and concluded that the grand story was mostly invention.⁵

Having met Dr. Malmgren and his daughters, spoken with him privately, and seen documentation Ryan Purkey of Unquestionably Skeptical shared with me for an article he has since published, I felt there was more to the story.⁶ Douglas Dean Johnson's article was also very clearly poorly researched, written to argue a side rather than get to the truth, and with clear bias. I run high-stakes cybersecurity investigations, where bias shapes findings and makes it easy to draw conclusions the evidence doesn't support. I believe Johnson has done that.

Sins of My Father

Growing up, my dad told me he had been in the Navy. Not just in the Navy, but a Navy SEAL.

I never questioned it, and it never really came up as I got older. Then, when I was around fifteen or sixteen, Aaron, still one of my closest friends today, told me he was signing up for the Marines. I don't remember exactly how we got there, but I mentioned that the Marines were a department of the Navy, and that my dad had been a SEAL.

I'll never forget his answer. He told me my aunt had told him my dad was never a SEAL, something my mom eventually confirmed. After that I started finding out how many of his other stories were the same. My grandfather was in the Navy and had met Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. My aunt was with him for the Kennedy meeting, when she was no more than four or five. You'd think she was a friend of the Kennedys the way she talked about them.

My dad was insecure about his own accomplishments. He wanted me to be proud of him, and I would have been either way. What it actually got me was egg on my face in front of a close friend. My aunt, more prone to exaggeration than to making things up, just wanted to be the life of the party. I tell this story because Dr. Malmgren's daughter Pippa may be in the same position, and if she is, I empathize with her in a way I think few can. Ultimately my dad's tall tales drove me away, and is part of what pushed me toward a life of skepticism. I don't take things I'm told at face value, especially the ones I want to be true. This topic has enough misinformation and disinformation without me adding to it.

You should know that my bias is toward writing positively about them. Harald and Pippa were both extremely kind to me, and it's natural not to want to be unkind in return. I recognize it, I've tried not to let it taint the investigation, and I've actively scrutinized my own findings.

This is not a point-by-point rebuttal of Johnson's articles, and I don't plan to address all of his claims. His portrait was extremely biased, and some of what it leaves out sits in the same files he obtained. I'm unsure what he was doing for four months, but it clearly wasn't learning about history or those involved.

This is an active research project for me, and the first in what will likely be a series on his life. Before this article, my knowledge of the time period was very surface level, and there's a great deal of interesting history in it. Since I was one of the few people who had actually met Harald prior to his death, I thought it would be worth getting more familiar with the era.

That said, it will take a while to get through the books relating to the era, and unfortunately my FOIA requests don't seem to have the same turnaround as Johnson's.

Close Encounter of the Personal Kind

My interaction with the Malmgrens came about completely unexpectedly. While I'd started working on my book, it was still early in the process. I'd only really done research, and I was still trying to build out my network. By that point, I hadn't made much headway getting people to do interviews. I had spoken with Christopher Mellon, and I'd only recently figured out that Logan, who I met at the first SOL Foundation, had been on the UAP Task Force. I hadn't really fully "committed" to writing the book yet. With the book still so far off, and my early interview requests usually met with silence, it was mostly just an idea in my head. I mention all this for reasons that'll matter later. During this stretch, a professional favor for a personal friend, something completely unrelated to the topic, led to the opportunity to interview Dr. Malmgren.

Nearly seven months before Jesse Michels published Presidential Advisor: "I Directly Handled UFO Material" (Ft. Harald Malmgren), I'd have the chance to speak with a man who, just weeks earlier, had claimed to have been briefed on "otherworld technologies" by Richard Bissell, one of the primary architects of the now infamous Area 51.⁸

My Time with Harald

When I met Dr. Malmgren, he agreed to speak with me as a favor to a mutual friend. At the time, there was little public information about who he was, and he was making claims about UFOs and UAP that were significant if true. Matthew Pines, a national security analyst, and others in the UAP community spoke to his stature.

I'd heard others repeat that he had advised multiple presidents. JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford among them.¹⁰ The formula was his own. His X bio at the time read "Advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford as well as many global leaders."¹¹ Yet I couldn't find much on him from before his public statements on the subject. Worse, my time with him was cut short. I had a flight to catch ahead of Hurricane Helene having just spoken at a cybersecurity conference in D.C.

I worried I wouldn't know enough to ask the right questions, and that even if I got him talking, I'd have to leave before the conversation went anywhere. And if it did go somewhere, how would I prove it? I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I met him at his home, with his daughter Erika, who is not in the public eye. As I came in, Dr. Malmgren appeared to be consulting on a Zoom call, though on what I'm not sure.

Harald's Own "Great Game"

There's a misconception about many of the prominent figures in the UFO and UAP world, the idea that they're chasing attention. For some, that's true. But I've found the opposite usually holds. The more credible the person, the more guarded they tend to be. Even if you do get them talking, you rarely get much past what they've already said publicly on a podcast, not until you've put in the time to earn their trust. Harald was no different.

On paper, I was the perfect "mark." An independent author writing a book on the topic, with no team of editors behind me, and at the time minimal connections that would have let me verify his claims. The kind of person Harald could have fed tall tales, used to talk up his own background, or steered toward a certain viewpoint or narrative off the record. It's a big part of why Lies Above stays on the public record, no new quotes in the book, no private details. I wanted to avoid this exact situation. And yet getting anything out of him on UAP was like pulling teeth.

If anything, Harald was more interested in asking me questions, especially about my day job as a cybersecurity researcher. I was impressed. For an eighty-nine-year-old, he had better security hygiene than some of the people I know in tech.¹² He was excited to show me he used a password manager and 2FA. He didn't just know to use them, but understood the why, right down to a threat model that, as he put it, "made things like that important."¹³

I wasn't a seasoned interviewer yet, and I've always preferred a candid back-and-forth to a formal sit-down. Talking cybersecurity loosened us both up and moved us toward what I'd actually come to ask him about, UFOs. By the end, it felt more like a retired intelligence professional, collecting intelligence on me.

Tag, That's It?

Ultimately, I couldn't get much out of Dr. Malmgren on UAP, beyond a much more modest version of the tag-along example he covered in his interview with Jesse Michels.¹⁶ I don't recall his exact wording on that, so to avoid misattributing anything to him, I'll only confirm that nothing he told me diverged from the tag-along story he gave Jesse, just less detail.

In the moment, he struck me like most senior former officials I'd spoken with, his cards close to his chest, careful not to reveal too much. It was only after watching that interview, and seeing how much Jesse drew out of him, that I started to wonder why. Maybe he had some arrangement with Jesse not to share certain details before the release (I do not think that was the case, though I haven't heard back from Jesse). Maybe he hadn't yet decided how much to disclose. Or maybe he just didn't feel comfortable enough with me to say more.

That's Some Catch that Catch-22

The flight home felt like the start of something. A former presidential advisor had just spent an afternoon with me and, despite being scant on detail, had told me something fairly incredible. If even a fraction of what surrounded his story held up, it would be one of the biggest stories I could imagine. I left buzzing, but I wasn't sure how I could use what we discussed for my book, if at all. I was also extremely aware that anything I was told could have been fabricated, and near impossible for me to prove.

He'd been lucid the entire conversation. He felt credible. I'll be honest about where that feeling came from, though, because it wasn't anything I'd confirmed yet. It came from the reputation others had built for him in public. It helped that I never felt he was trying to convince me of anything. He'd been careful, even modest.

Anything genuinely new he'd told me, my own rule kept out of the book. Besides, it was off the record. Anything already public, I could have found without ever boarding the plane. Conversations like this were more for framing my book and seeing for myself whether the person I spoke with felt credible.

My Dinner with Pippa

About two months after I met her father, I ran into Dr. Pippa Malmgren at the second SOL Foundation symposium, November 22 and 23, 2024, at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.¹⁸ She knew I was a new author. We went to dinner and talked off the record, about the presentations we'd both just watched, about the UAP subject in general, and about the work of writing a book. She'd published several of her own, and she spent part of the evening giving me practical, specific advice on how to improve my own.¹⁹ It was a generous thing to do for a stranger no one has heard of.

I bring her up for a reason. Her credibility and Harald's are tangled together, so what people decide about her colors how they see her father. Is she a serious figure in her own right?

Like her father, Pippa served in government as an economist. American Banker, which profiled her in May 2001 while she was in the job, calls her "a special assistant to the President for economics policy" who "serves on the National Economic Council headed by chief White House economics adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey," and says she started that February.²⁰ When I mentioned that she worked in the Bush administration as an Economist, the cheap shot writes itself, because Bush's name is shorthand for a wrecked economy, and the 2008 crash is the first thing most people attach to it.

In reality, Pippa left the White House around 2002, roughly six years before the housing bubble burst.²¹ The tax cuts most associated with the deficits came in 2003, after she was gone.²² The homeownership push that fed the subprime machine ran from 2004.²³ Bear Stearns, Lehman, and TARP were all 2008.²⁴ Companies House brackets the tenure at both ends. She resigned her Canonbury Group directorship on February 15, 2001, the same month she started at the White House, and was appointed to it again on February 5, 2003.²⁵ She was long gone. Ellen Seidman held the same job in the Clinton administration for more than four years, then ran the Office of Thrift Supervision from 1997.²⁶

The philosophy didn't come after the fact. Pippa took her doctorate at the London School of Economics in 1991, with a thesis on economic statecraft written under Susan Strange, and spent the 1990s as a currency strategist at Bankers Trust and then in global strategy at UBS, paid to watch capital flows and imbalances for a living.²⁷ She's blunt about where the rest came from: "I had a German-style apprenticeship. My father taught me what he knew."²⁸ The way she reads an economy, through debt, capital flows, and the balance of power between states, was formed early, under Harald and on the trading floor.

Her 2015 book Signals and the work that followed read as a sustained argument against the very forces that produced the crash: easy money, understated inflation, and debt piled onto households and governments past the point they can carry.³⁰ She's the economist who popularized "shrinkflation," the idea that hidden inflation shows up first as a shrinking cereal box rather than a higher price.³¹ One credential in her UnHerd bio doesn't come from economics at all. She "has been a manufacturer of award-winning drones and autonomous robotics," which is her own bio line rather than a filing.³² None of that is a post-hoc rebrand. Pippa isn't overshadowed by her father. She built her own record with what he taught her.

When it came to our conversations, those were completely off the record. However, my impression of her was that, like her father, she is extremely intelligent. Not surprising considering her background. Pippa also had a way of seeing the world through other points of view, and of reading how another culture would see the same thing, striking enough that I recall complimenting her on it. Something that I appreciate especially so as a white guy. It seems like every time we talk she's in another part of the world, speaking on economics. Like Douglas Dean Johnson, I think Pippa sincerely believes her father's claims.³³ While our conversation was off the record, I can say at no point did I feel she was trying to spin grandiose tales, that she was bragging, or that she was trying to convince me of anything.

Pippa's Leaked Text Messages

In my interview on the Psicoactivo Podcast, Pavel Ibarra mentioned that some of Pippa's text messages had leaked, and that a member of the group chat left over them. That member was Klaus, co-host of Patterns Tell Stories, who had said:

I hadn't seen them before going on Pavel's podcast. The screenshots were published in a write-up on Project Preserve Destiny.³⁵ This one, from February 9, 2025, carries most of it.³⁶

She starts from a line, quoted in the chat, that AI is an "alien."³⁷ That alien is now "ripping through all the classified systems, tracking all the cash flows of the secret programs," and mapping what compartmentalization was built to obscure.³⁸ The White House, she writes, "now controls the most up to date version of Pegasus," which lets the AI reach even into private contractor financial data, and which Elon Musk, the new leaders of the intelligence community, and the White House will not advertise.³⁹ Pegasus is mercenary spyware built by Israel's NSO Group and sold to government clients, who have used it against journalists, lawyers, and politicians, including a Greek Member of the European Parliament hacked while sitting on the committee investigating Pegasus.⁴⁰ Citizen Lab's forensic work found it recording audio from the microphone, ambient room audio and encrypted calls alike, and taking pictures with the camera.⁴¹ End-to-end encryption doesn't matter at that point, because the spyware is reading the messages on the device after they're decrypted.

Despite these text messages, I do not think Pippa or Harald are a part of any sort of secret Thiel plot or psyop.

Everything she was reacting to was public when she typed it. Three days earlier, the Washington Post reported that DOGE was running sensitive Education Department data through AI tools on Microsoft's Azure.⁴² The day before her text, a federal judge blocked DOGE from Treasury's payment systems.⁴³ Both under Elon. Nine days earlier, WhatsApp notified roughly ninety users, journalists and civil society workers among them, that they had been targeted with Graphite, spyware made by the Israeli company Paragon, a firm Risky Business described days later as "recently bought by US interests for something like $900 million."⁴⁴

Paragon doesn't make Pegasus, but Pegasus is the name most people reach for when they mean mobile spyware. I did it myself, remembering that episode as being about Pegasus until I went to confirm it. (Though to cut myself some slack, it was nearly a year ago.)

Paragon is also a private company rather than a government agency, though it holds federal contracts. In September 2025 Patrick Gray named one of them. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a Paragon contract "worth about 2 million bucks," which he thinks was suspended after the controversy over Paragon's dealings with the Italian government.⁴⁵ Outside the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is very limited in scope, U.S. law mostly reaches spyware through wiretapping statutes. 18 U.S.C. § 2512 prohibits manufacturing, selling, or advertising any device whose design renders it "primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception" of wire, oral, or electronic communications, with an exception for government actors and the people under contract with them.⁴⁶ That is why NSO says it sells only to governments, and why MalwareTech, who famously stopped WannaCry, pleaded guilty to advertising an interception device under that statute alongside the Kronos banking trojan he wrote when he was younger.⁴⁷

In the industry, it was pretty well known that these tools would be used by the government. Seven weeks before her text, the same hosts had covered the acquisition itself:

The day after her text the same network gave Paragon a whole episode. Tom Uren, reading from the Financial Times, said the company "sought a list of allied nations that the US wouldn't object to seeing deploy Paragon's product, which is called graphite," and that "people with knowledge of the matter suggested 35 countries are on that list."⁴⁹ I can't imagine an economist like Dr. Pippa Malmgren not reading the Financial Times. I don't know that for sure.

Pegasus on a phone also doesn't get you what she is describing. Classified material doesn't live on phones, it lives on accredited systems in rooms where phones aren't allowed, so the spyware would be useful as initial access, a way onto a person rather than onto a network. If you were going to commit a crime at that scale, you would not pick the method that leaves forensic artifacts sitting on a consumer device. That is the method firms like iVerify (who I recommend by the way) and Citizen Lab catch, and then publish.⁵⁰

Nine months after her text, Gray was describing NSO's new American owners moving to get its sanctions lifted.

Read afterward, the texts land almost exactly like the essays Harald wrote in Robbin Laird's Assessing Global Change: Strategic Perspectives of Dr. Harald Malmgren, which I'm reading now.⁵² Had I not been in the middle of the book, I may not have noticed the similarity, and to me they read like a compressed version of his essays. The tanks swapped for malware and artificial intelligence. The Pegasus line is her own inference off the public record, drawn the way he often seemed to draw his.

The same show pointed at something else she wrote, in a segment listing figures in this topic drifting toward extremist Curtis Yarvin:

The post is Erebor, Erewhon, Stablecoins, Zizians and The Dark Enlightenment, published three weeks earlier.⁵⁴ I don't think it says what he thinks it says, however I understand why he read it that way even if he read past the title. Her account of the Dark Enlightenment is a long quotation from Ava Kofman's New Yorker profile of Yarvin, and none of it is flattering: "the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law," power handed to a chief executive who would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison "decivilized populations."⁵⁵ Her own images for it are dark ones, a "digital panopticon," and "a dark star but not necessarily the North Star that humanity is usually relying on to guide us to where we need to be."⁵⁶

What makes Klaus's reading easy is that she is plainly excited about the economics parts of the article. Erebor "aims to demolish the biggest banks in the market and create an entirely new Kingdom."⁵⁷ The strategy "looks set to work."⁵⁸ Old institutions are "set to be besieged" by the startups.⁵⁹ Then, in the same piece, that financial machinery is what "is enough to begin unleashing The Dark Enlightenment."⁶⁰ The enthusiasm is in her own voice and the condemnation is in someone else's. If you are skimming for a side, that is the side you will find.

I do not agree with her politics on this at all. But she is an economist, and tracking what moves economic policy is the job. I also understand why someone in her position would find it "exciting" to write about, because whatever either of us thinks of cryptocurrency, the impact is real: the UN Panel of Experts spent 2017 to 2023 investigating fifty-eight North Korean cyberattacks worth roughly $3 billion, and member states told the panel that illicit cyber operations fund a large share of North Korea's weapons programs.⁶¹ Ransomware and stolen crypto pay for missiles. That is an economic story no matter how you feel about the technology underneath it, and it's exactly the kind Harald would have covered.

I find Pippa's work to be a bit more openly partisan than her father, though my reading of her work thus far admittedly hasn't been very deep. Reading Harald, I often find myself assuming he holds a certain view, only to see him contradict it elsewhere in a different context, laying out the outcome in a matter-of-fact and authoritative way that captures the nuance of that specific situation rather than tracking a party line.

A recent example of her writing on the same issues she mentions in the leaked texts is Digital Dragnet and Regime Change: Warsh is Replacing the Kleptocrats with Compute.⁶²

TL;DR: Dr. Pippa Malmgren is very kind, and she writes constantly on the topics she mentioned in the texts. I don't believe she has any regular communication with Thiel or Elon, and despite disagreeing with her politics fairly strongly, she doesn't seem to participate in the "culture war," and I have a hard time imagining her knowingly supporting a worldview like Curtis Yarvin's. She's just as genuine and friendly as she appears on Jesse's podcast.

Since those conversations, the interview with Jesse Michels linked above has been released, as well as the Douglas Dean Johnson pieces, which get basic historic facts and framing wrong, while holding a clear bias against Dr. Malmgren.⁶³ With my book wrapped up, I wanted to know more about the context of the time, and the people that surrounded Harald. Not setting out to try and prove or disprove his claims, the most controversial of which are likely close to unprovable. Rather, who were some of the people, groups, and organizations he seemed to associate with? What kind of backgrounds did they have? What I found in most cases contradicted what Johnson's article lays out.

The Best and the Brightest, McNamara and his "Whiz Kids"

In his own telling, Harald was one of McNamara's Whiz Kids.⁶⁴ McNamara had a circle of bright young men around him at the Pentagon, and that was about the whole of what I knew about the Whiz Kids.

The group started at Ford, not the Pentagon. In 1946 the company was losing money at an alarming rate, and a twenty-eight-year-old Henry Ford II needed help he didn't have.⁶⁵ He hired a group of ten former Army Air Forces officers who had run statistical control for the air war, because their old commander, Tex Thornton, would only sell them as a package: "all ten, or nothing."⁶⁶ They came out of wartime statistical control, not out of the car business.⁶⁷ What they knew was how to measure things and follow the numbers, and they used it to drag Ford's books into the modern world and help save the company.⁶⁸ The old heads first mocked them as "Quiz Kids," for their youth and all the questions they asked.⁶⁹ They rebranded themselves the "Whiz Kids."⁷⁰ One of the ten was a young statistician named Robert McNamara.⁷¹

Fifteen years later McNamara carried that same faith in numbers into the Pentagon. When Kennedy made him Secretary of Defense in 1961, he filled the building with economists, physicists, and operations researchers, most of them recruited out of the RAND Corporation, an Air Force think tank in Santa Monica.⁷² Charles Hitch had run RAND's economics division, and came in as Comptroller.⁷³ Alain Enthoven and Henry Rowen came from RAND too.⁷⁴ The press, reaching for a label, dusted off McNamara's old Ford nickname, and in 1962 Time pinned "Whiz Kids" on the new Pentagon crowd.⁷⁵

Time singled out five.⁷⁶ Alain Enthoven, thirty-one, ran systems analysis and was, the magazine later decided, "by far the whizziest" of them.⁷⁷ Harold Brown, thirty-four, a physicist who had finished a Columbia doctorate at twenty-one, ran defense research and engineering and would go on to be Secretary of the Air Force and then Secretary of Defense.⁷⁸ Henry Rowen, thirty-six, ran policy planning.⁷⁹ Merton Peck, thirty-six, did systems analysis under Enthoven.⁸⁰ Adam Yarmolinsky, older than the rest, was the group's "elder statesman."⁸¹ Enthoven and Peck both worked inside the Comptroller's shop, and above it sat Charles Hitch.⁸²

As far as I can tell, however, there was never an official list. No office, no roster, no appointment letter, and no ID card ever said "Whiz Kid" on it.⁸³ The same Time piece noted that while the ranks were "proliferating," only five "stand out."⁸⁴ Membership was a matter of journalistic judgment, nothing more.

The label even stretched to men who held no Pentagon post at all. William Kaufmann, the RAND and MIT strategist who helped shape McNamara's nuclear doctrine, was routinely called a Whiz Kid while serving only as an outside consultant.⁸⁵ The Pentagon's own official history calls him "a McNamara consultant and key adviser on strategic matters," and gives him the initial draft of the speech McNamara delivered to the North Atlantic Council in Athens on May 5, 1962, the one that spelled out counterforce for the allies.⁸⁶ Kaufmann put his own role lower than that. The same history records that he saw himself chiefly as the explicator of counterforce, and that he named Hitch, Rowen, and Enthoven as the men who actually influenced McNamara.⁸⁷ An outside consultant who disclaimed the influence still got the label.

Paul Nitze ran International Security Affairs, a Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary. The Department's own historians rule him out anyway:

What the famous ones had in common was not a title but a type. They were young, they were brilliant, and they believed defense was a problem you solved with economics.

That last point was McNamara's military philosophy. He ran the Pentagon as an economics problem, weighing every weapon and every force by cost against effectiveness, the approach his analysts had brought from RAND and set down in Charles Hitch and Roland McKean's 1960 book The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age.⁸⁹ Their budgeting system rebuilt the entire department around that logic, and the title of the memoir two of the Whiz Kids later wrote, How Much Is Enough?, was the doctrine.⁹⁰ Enthoven spelled the doctrine out for the Naval War College on June 6, 1963:

If you wanted to belong in McNamara's Pentagon, the credential that counted was not a uniform. It was the ability to do defense economics. Which is where Harald's record gets interesting, because on paper he fit the profile almost too well.

Malmgren was twenty-seven when he started at IDA in July 1962, younger than any of Time's five.⁹²

The timing overlaps. His certified federal job applications and his declassified FBI file show him consulting part-time from March to July of 1962 for RAND, the same pipeline that produced Hitch, Enthoven, and Rowen, before he moved full-time that July to the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Pentagon's in-house think tank.⁹³ He held the clearances such work required: a Secret clearance from the Air Force in 1962, tied to his RAND consultancy, and a Top Secret from the Navy granted as he joined IDA.⁹⁴ He stayed until late 1964.⁹⁵ McNamara was Secretary of Defense the entire time.

The work fit too. At IDA he was, by his own signed applications, an "Economist" and then "Head, Economics Group." His March 1963 form calls the work "economic and strategic analysis of active defense." The October 1964 form has him supervising "some 20 economists and a dozen research assistants." And when he filled out another one in 1970, the same job had become supervising studies for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.⁹⁶ A 1967 civil service form lists "systems analysis" among the IDA duties, the exact discipline the Whiz Kids were famous for.⁹⁷ He filled that form out himself, and it copies his 1964 application word for word, with the phrase added at the end. It's on none of his other personnel forms, not 1963, not 1964, not 1970. Block 9(b) of the same item asks what the job took. He wrote: "Establishing good working relations with senior military advisers and experienced consultants; selling results of analytical studies to civilian and military Defense Department officials; selling research proposals to other Government agencies."⁹⁸ Johnson published that block. What he took from it was "the lack of any reference to the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, or the White House."⁹⁹

Malmgren also had a real connection to the group. On his 1963 job application he listed Alain Enthoven, one of Time's five Whiz Kids, as a personal reference.¹⁰⁰ Johnson doesn't deny it. He calls it "that little courtesy," and footnotes Fred Kaplan.

Enthoven was a deputy assistant secretary, below the rank in Kaplan's own sentence. Kaplan sources nothing for it. What his interview list does show is three sittings with Enthoven, in 1980 and 1981. Johnson's "little courtesy" rests on a sentence with nothing behind it.

The label was in print about him in 1990. That year the Center for Public Integrity published America's Frontline Trade Officials, Charles Lewis's study of trade officials who sold access after leaving government. Malmgren is one of the case studies. His biography is on page 105.

Johnson found the same sentence. Lewis "could only have received this claim from Malmgren, either during the interview or in printed literature, and it is by far the earliest example I have found of Malmgren misappropriating the 'whiz kids' label."¹⁰³ Thirty-four years before the X posts started.¹⁰⁴ I also disagree with Johnson, as anyone that learns about the 'Whiz Kids' or knew their work, could come to that conclusion on their own with basic due diligence on the person they were interviewing based on demonstrable history. Young, at IDA under McNamara, doing defense economics. That was the type. No need for it to come from Malmgren.

Tinker, Tailor, Economist, Spy

On a federal job application he signed on March 24, 1963, Harald listed Richard Bissell as one of five references.¹⁰⁵ That fact comes from Johnson, who adds that Malmgren "presumably would have received Bissell's permission," and who is careful to note that Bissell doesn't appear on the October 1964 application, in what Malmgren sent the White House personnel office around the same time, or in the security material Malmgren gave the FBI in 1970 and 1971.¹⁰⁶ All of that is fair, and Johnson's own summary of it is that "the two men really were at least a little acquainted."¹⁰⁷ What it still leaves is a junior economist two rungs down the org chart putting the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses on a certified federal form as a reference, in the same months Harald says the Friday afternoons started. Johnson makes much of Bissell having left the CIA thirteen months earlier.¹⁰⁸ He had. He was also back inside Headquarters on October 12, 1965, giving a SECRET/BYEMAN talk to the Agency's reconnaissance personnel, telling them the gathering was "the clearest sort of evidence of a major and very important change for the better that has occurred since I left."¹⁰⁹

Johnson names Bissell dozens of times across the two articles where he appears, and almost always characterizes him by rank or post.¹¹⁰ Previously a deputy director of the CIA.¹¹¹ Storied CIA/IDA leader.¹¹² The boss of Malmgren's boss, James E. Cross.¹¹³ He never once mentions that Bissell was a professional economist.¹¹⁴ Per the Agency's own biographic sheet attached to that 1965 speech, Bissell took a Yale BA in 1932 and a Yale PhD in 1939, taught economics at Yale as an instructor and then assistant professor from 1934 to 1942, and taught it at MIT until 1948.¹¹⁵ Harald took his own economics degree at the same school twenty-five years later.¹¹⁶ Johnson's reporting from the FBI file supplies the third link himself, that Thomas Schelling "had taught Malmgren at Yale and had also been his associate at the Institute for Defense Analyses."¹¹⁷ The case that the association was slight rests on the org chart, Bissell's absence from the later paperwork, and Johnson's word for it, "brief and probably slight."¹¹⁸

Johnson reports that the Eisenhower Library's supervisory archivist found one calendar entry indicating Bissell had met personally with Malmgren, soon after Malmgren was hired, possibly a "welcome to IDA" meeting, plus two occasions when Malmgren was part of a group that met him.¹¹⁹

Where the CIA was actually finding people in exactly those years is documented in the Agency's own internal history of its Junior Officer Training Program.¹²⁰ In 1959, 25 percent of the trainees came from Ivy League schools and another 10 percent from what the history itself calls "quasi-ivy-league" ones.¹²¹ The Inspector General flagged the "tendency to place more emphasis on recruiting in Eastern universities" in a 1956 survey, and recommended greater effort in the far-west and mid-west. The 1960 report "again mentioned the ivy-league dominance and again recommended that it be corrected."¹²² The program chief's defense was logistics, that there were more recruiters near the Eastern seaboard and "greater interest in international studies" there than in other regions.¹²³

Economists were a named category. An internal account of the program's first twelve years records the change that speeded up candidate processing: "The most significant improvement in processing candidates came when JOT's were placed in the same 'hard-to-get' category as economists and scientists."¹²⁴ The same account says the specialists mostly went in by another door. "It was easier for recruitment to sell a candidate to almost any substantive division than to JOTP. Files of economists were sent directly to ORR, scientists to OSI, business admins to Log and so on."¹²⁴ ORR was the Office of Research and Reports, the economic-intelligence shop on the analytic side.

That intake wasn't spread evenly across the Agency either. From late 1953 through 1965, the same history states, the program "became a major source of young officers for DDP assignment with as many as 80 percent of the graduates going into the Clandestine Services." It was renamed Career Training in April 1965, a change the history says "had no effect whatever on the program itself." A report to the Director forwarded on March 29, 1968 still called it "the principal source of DD/P junior officers," an important source for administration, "incidental" for the intelligence directorate and "irrelevant" for science and technology.¹²⁵ DD/P is the Deputy Director for Plans, whose directorate ran the clandestine service, and Bissell had the job until February 1962.¹²⁶

Harald graduated from Yale in 1957, majoring in Economics.¹²⁸ Bissell's Yale doctorate, in 1939, was in economics too.

Harald's own account of the IDA job is that it wasn't really the job.

Jesse Michels, in a January 2026 interview, on Harald's diary:

On that March 1963 form Harald listed some seriously prominent individuals as references. James E. King Jr., entered on the application as a Defense Analyst in the International Studies Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses, was one of them. Prof. Thomas Schelling of Harvard's Center for International Affairs. Alain Enthoven, one of Time's five Whiz Kids. Dr. Benjamin Caplan, Director of the Office of International Finance at the State Department. And Richard Bissell, the former CIA Deputy Director for Plans, and by March 1963 the institute's president.¹³¹ Two declassified 1979 Agency documents put a James E. King at Headquarters as Coordinator for Academic Relations in the National Foreign Assessment Center, the office that managed the Agency's dealings with universities.¹³²

I'll say what I think, and then what I can't show.

I have a cleaner hypothesis. Malmgren's job application for the State Department role, the one he signed on March 24, 1963, was for a CIA cover position. Johnson's bias prevented him from considering why references may differ on a resume, and that you should tailor your resume for the job that you want.

The other objection is that Bissell fought to move IDA out of the Pentagon.¹³³ He did, and the paperwork shows it. On June 18, 1962, a month before Harald started, Bissell wrote to Robert Loftis, Director of Administrative Services at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, proposing revisions to IDA's contract. IDA's own history of WSEG says the Bell Report prompted them, and that they were meant to make IDA a supplier of services rather than of personnel.

Winning a fight for institutional distance from the Joint Chiefs says nothing at all about distance from the Agency he had just left, and would go on to brief, consult for, and defend in public for three decades. I'd be willing to wager a man like that, looking at a well-qualified candidate for the Clandestine Services, would still want him working for the Agency. A policy about where IDA sat has no bearing on one hire. Especially if no one was supposed to know about it. If anything it made IDA a cleaner platform, and Bissell is the last man who would have needed that explained to him.

Bissell was "employed as Consultant concurrently with the Ford Foundation and Mutual Security Agency, as well as ONE/CIA, 1952-54."¹³⁵ ONE was the Office of National Estimates. Harald came to IDA from RAND in July 1962.¹³⁶ Bissell came to IDA's presidency the same month and held it until September 1964.¹³⁷ Jesse Michels says Bissell is all over Harald's diary, with the images recently released in Ryan Purkey's new article.¹³⁸

The March 1963 form asked for people "who have definite knowledge of your qualifications and fitness for the position for which you are applying," and four of the five have strong defense backgrounds or ties to the intelligence community. Those four point at defense work, or at access to high-profile international figures, or at the man who had run the CIA's clandestine service. The fifth points at the office he was applying to:

• James E. King, a first-rank limited-war and nuclear-strategy theorist, and known to work with and mentor Malmgren on Defense and Nuclear strategy. Sixteen years later, two declassified Agency documents put a James E. King at Headquarters as Coordinator for Academic Relations in the National Foreign Assessment Center, the office handling the Agency's dealings with universities¹³²
• Professor Thomas Schelling, the Harvard economist whose The Strategy of Conflict turned game theory on deterrence and bargaining, and who in February 1963, the month before Malmgren signed the form, chaired the Arms Control Panel of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board¹³⁹, during a time known to have been biased toward recruiting clandestine officers from Ivy League universities. Twenty-one years later, in November 1984, CIA listed him as a Panel Member of the Director of Central Intelligence's Military-Economic Advisory Panel¹³⁹
• Richard Bissell, the former Deputy Director for Plans over clandestine services, and IDA's president at the time Harald worked for them, entered on the form as "President, IDA; Economist"
• Alain Enthoven, one of the original and most well known Whiz Kids, entered on the form as "Depty.Asst.Secy of Defense (Comptroller), Pentagon" and "Govt. official; Economist"
• Dr. Benjamin Caplan, Director of the Office of International Finance at the State Department, the one reference already inside the department he was applying to

In April 1961, King went to a conference in Bologna with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., President Kennedy's Special Assistant.¹⁴⁰ Afterward he worked through the senior leadership of Italy alongside the American Chargé.¹⁴¹ President Gronchi.¹⁴² Prime Minister Fanfani.¹⁴³ Aldo Moro, who ran the Christian Democrats.¹⁴⁴ Pietro Nenni, who ran the Socialists, for forty minutes.¹⁴⁵ He sent his report to Walt Rostow at the National Security Council on May 3.¹⁴⁶ The State Department's own published record says how he was regarded, in one sentence.

The volume's index of persons lists him as "King, James E., senior analyst, Institute for Defense Analysis, 1961."¹⁴⁸

Schelling did more than sit on a form. On September 24, 1964, on Harvard Center for International Affairs letterhead, he wrote to William M. Capron at the Bureau of the Budget, in the Executive Office of the President.

Schelling hedges it twice. He does not recall whether Malmgren's name came up, and he only believes the job was in intelligence. Johnson published the letter, and in his own text he calls it "Schelling's earlier September 1964 letter recommending Malmgren for a job in the STR."¹⁵⁰ It is addressed to the Bureau of the Budget and it never mentions the trade office.

Nine months before that March 1963 form, Walt Rostow was setting up a panel on the strategic nuclear balance of 1970 to 1975. On June 20, 1962, on Department of State letterhead as the Counselor, he wrote to John McCone at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Malmgren had started at IDA on July 23, 1962, eight months before applying to the State Department. The State Department then took him on as a consultant in October 1963, and he stayed at IDA, employed at both at the same time.¹⁵² The Optional Form 29 he certified on June 4, 1964 lays out the arrangement in the government's own categories. Dept. of State/Bureau of Economic Affairs, 10/29/63 to 10/28/64, "special Government employee," ten days of service estimated for the year. Under non-federal employment, one line: "Institute for Defense Analyses (Research), Wash. D.C., Head, Economics Group." Under other federal employment he wrote NONE.¹⁵³

This, I believe, was the start of his cover with the CIA.

Bissell told a closed Council on Foreign Relations session in January 1968 what he thought the Agency most needed to fix.

Later in the same session:

In November 1974:

You'll note his next set of references is for a different position. Johnson describes him there as "a candidate for a GS-16 slot as an economist in the Office of the Special Trade Representative, which he got in late 1964."¹⁵⁷

The form is signed 8 Oct 64 and it asks for three.¹⁵⁸ Schelling again. Caplan again. In King's slot, Dr. Francis M. Bator, address "Executive Offices of the President, Washington, DC," occupation "Economist." There is no State Department supplement this time, so the absence of Bissell and Enthoven is partly the form asking for three names instead of five.

I believe this was an actual economics related job, replacing the defense officials with those that have an economics and trade background. In history those that specialize in trade specifically have been popular due to the fact that trade ties often open up before political ones. On State Department cover, here is John Marks in 1974:

Twenty-two years later, HPSCI's IC21 staff study:

Malmgren's application says he was doing economic and strategic analysis of active defense.

A NOC by design is supposed to be unprovable. A State Department resume for a part time job, carrying references from defense and intelligence officials, one of them the man who had run clandestine operations himself. What I can say is that if you were building this, you would build it out of these parts.

Douglas Dean Johnson: "Real-World History vs. Grandiose Fantasy"

My work in cybersecurity showed me just how much bias can distort an investigation, especially when it comes to attribution. Johnson's articles have some really wonderful examples of the same problem. Johnson wanted to know whether Richard Bissell ever said anything about UFOs.¹⁶¹ He asked the Eisenhower Presidential Library, and he published what came back.¹⁶²

He's careful there. He tells you the null result isn't surprising, and he tells you the collection is thin on Bissell's CIA years.¹⁶⁴ Then he uses it anyway. The Library however publishes a finding aid for the Bissell Correspondence Series.¹⁶⁵ Under the folder Reading File: 1987-1992:

Bissell wrote about the Majestic 12 documents twice in 1987, said they looked authentic, then took it back two months later.¹⁶⁷ Where he landed doesn't matter to the search. The question was whether Bissell had "expressed opinions or knowledge about UFOs or flying saucers," and a man who writes two letters about MJ-12 has expressed an opinion.¹⁶⁸

MJ-12 is a famous set of documents that seem to have a mix of both real and disinformation, with some of the documents having profound implications if ever conclusively confirmed as authentic.¹⁶⁹ The folder entry describes two letters about MJ-12 and never uses the words "UFO" or "flying saucer." Ask whether Bissell ever expressed opinions or knowledge about UFOs or flying saucers, and this entry doesn't come back.

According to Malmgren, Bissell told him, "You're almost certainly on a curve where you'll continue to be at that level. So there are things you need to know." Then, in Malmgren's telling, "he went into quite a bit, but it was not only about what we still were calling 'UFOs' at that time, but it was about CIA operations worldwide. . ."¹⁷⁰

One of the points highlighted by Johnson, "That Malmgren had a close relationship with Richard Bissell, Jr., one of the storied leaders of the early CIA, who imparted to Malmgren many amazing secrets of nonhuman visitation and other things." essentially implying that a high-level retired public official like Bissell telling Malmgren a topic rumored to be more secret than nuclear weapons¹⁷¹ is ludicrous. I have a different, although anecdotal perspective on this. I have no clearance, no working relationship or personal relationship that I'd be allowed to list on a resume, and wrote a book publicly on the topic, continuing to write the occasional article. Yet I get officials of the same caliber or higher telling me similar stories. Give them a bottle of whiskey, the working relationship, and the clearances he did hold, I could absolutely see this being the case, especially as it being an informal discussion by Malmgren's description.

Malmgren's role was for an estimated ten days. Ten days. That was the annual estimate on a one-year appointment, and the FBI's own file records the consultancy running October 1963 to August 1966, with the clearance terminating the same month.¹⁷³ As shown, it is my opinion that slot was Malmgren's application for his cover role. Ten days doable to me, especially if the president of the organization I work for and my colleagues are recommending me for the position. After all, for a cover role to work, you do need an actual day job.

I think Johnson's perspective on the Whiz Kids is completely wrong.

Two problems. By Johnson's own standard of evidence, K. Wayne Smith was not a prominent Whiz Kid.¹⁷⁵ And the book fails that same test on the men who were.

The name started at Ford, where McNamara was one of ten officers hired in 1946 to fix the company's books.¹⁷⁶ In 1962 Time pinned it on the Pentagon crowd and singled out five:¹⁷⁷

• Alain C. Enthoven
• Harold Brown
• Henry S. Rowen
• Merton Joseph Peck
• Adam Yarmolinsky

Enthoven wrote the book.¹⁷⁸ Of the other original four, Adam Yarmolinsky, the group's "elder statesman," is not in it at all.¹⁷⁹ Harold Brown and Henry Rowen each appear once.¹⁸⁰ Merton Peck appears twice, once in the acknowledgments and once in a citation note.¹⁸¹ Several more men on the retrospective roster are also absent entirely.¹⁸²

Four mentions between the four of them.

The only place I could find K. Wayne Smith called a Whiz Kid is a blurb reprinted on the opening pages of the later RAND edition of the cited book, and it is about him and Enthoven together:¹⁸³

That review is the only source I could find calling K. Wayne Smith a Whiz Kid. So in January 1966 the Systems Analysis roster is printed in full and one of Johnson's two most prominent Whiz Kids isn't on it.¹⁸⁵ He was an Army officer teaching social science at West Point.¹⁸⁶ He wouldn't come to the Pentagon until four years after Malmgren. Johnson's test is that the name "Malmgren" appears nowhere in the book, and that there is virtually no reference to Malmgren as a Whiz Kid. He admits there was no formal list, and the definition he does give is loose: the men "whom Robert McNamara brought in with him to help him reform the Department of Defense." On the type the label actually described, I think Malmgren's background fits more closely than K. Wayne Smith's, and Smith is the man Johnson calls one of the most prominent Whiz Kids.¹⁸⁷ For the record, I think Smith was a Whiz Kid. I built the case against him to show what happens when Johnson's standard gets pointed at one of his own examples.

Reading the book, I hit a name I knew and couldn't place. Stephen Enke. He sits fourth in a list of Systems Analysis colleagues.¹⁸⁸ On Harald's certified 1963 federal job application, signed under penalty of law, his immediate supervisor at IDA is "Dr. Stephen Enke," title "Acting Director, Economics Group."¹⁸⁹

Four Levels Below

The heading is Johnson's. Enthoven, he notes, was "the deputy assistant secretary of defense (comptroller)," and "a deputy assistant secretary is a position four levels below the Secretary of Defense." His next sentence: "Still, Enthoven actually was a 'whiz kid' personal associate of McNamara."¹⁹¹

The Pentagon's own history of McNamara's first three years, the one that ruled Paul Nitze out as too old, says in the same passage that McNamara "had insisted on being able to install his own team at Defense, a privilege not granted other senior cabinet members," and that out of that team he "also selected a cadre of civilian specialists and professionals, among them a bright young group dubbed the 'Whiz Kids,' who clustered mostly in the newly created Office of Systems Analysis." Then:

Enthoven and Smith describe the office this way:

For example, How Much Is Enough? has a chapter called "Why Independent Analysts?" It is the same book Johnson searched for Malmgren's name, and it is Enthoven and Smith explaining what the Systems Analysis office was for.¹⁹³ Their answer is that the civilian analysts were useful precisely because nothing about the military hierarchy applied to them:

Twenty-two pages earlier, same chapter, the book reproduces the charter that made Systems Analysis a separate office under an Assistant Secretary of Defense in 1965. Then this.

On page 100 they say what the analysts did with that freedom.

Army officers had been pushing an airmobile concept and getting nowhere through their own chain. Two memorandums dated April 19, 1962 went to the Secretary of the Army over McNamara's signature, ordering a re-examination of Army aviation, and the second names nine men who should run the review, from Lt. Gen. Hamilton H. Howze down to Mr. Edward H. Heinemann. The Howze Board came out of those memorandums. The 11th Air Assault Division came out of the Howze Board, and the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) came out of that.

Harald's 1967 Executive Inventory Record lists "systems analysis" among his duties at IDA and the Secretary of Defense was Robert McNamara.

The freedom they are describing belonged to McNamara's own staff. Later in the same chapter Enthoven and Smith separate that staff from the outside think tanks the Services and the JCS maintain, RAND and the Center for Naval Analyses and the Research Analysis Corporation, which they say "tend to take on the philosophical coloration of their sponsoring organization." Policing those studies was part of what the Systems Analysis office was for. IDA is that kind of institution, and it never appears in the book.

The analysts were young civilian economists with no rank at all. Enthoven was thirty in 1961, running one of two directorates inside the comptroller's office under a deputy assistant secretary named Hugh McCullough.¹⁹⁸ Richard Zeckhauser arrived the following summer straight out of Harvard College.¹⁹⁹ "At that point there were 11 people in the office; I was the most junior."²⁰⁰ His first assignment was the size of the Air Force. "There were about 900,000 people in the Air Force and the question was should it be 900,000 or 890,000, or 880,000. I was supposed to figure it out."²⁰¹ They ended at 890,000.²⁰²

Johnson grants that Malmgren "surely would have had interactions with some political appointees at the Department of Defense, including a few 'whiz kids,'" and expects those interactions "would have been at a level far below that of the Secretary of Defense."²⁰³ The officers who were actually there spent the decade complaining about the reverse.

Late in 1961 Admiral George W. Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations, asked General Lemnitzer to arrange a special meeting with McNamara and the Joint Chiefs. Anderson told the Joint History Office about it seventeen years later, and Poole wrote it down.

General Thomas D. White, a former Air Force Chief of Staff, wrote in 1963:

Enthoven and Smith say another former Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis LeMay, "echoed these sentiments" five years later in the preface to his own book.²⁰⁶ The military profession "has been invaded by pundits who set themselves up as popular oracles on military strategy," those "defense intellectuals" "go unchallenged simply because the experienced professional active duty officers are officially prohibited from entering into public debate," and "the end result is that the military is often saddled with unprofessional strategies."²⁰⁷

Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover told a House appropriations subcommittee the same thing in May 1968.²⁰⁸ The analysts "have little or no scientific training or technical expertise," their studies "read more like the rules of a game of classroom logic than like a prognosis of real events in the real world," and "we are unwise to put the fate of the United States into their inexperienced hands."²⁰⁹ Enthoven and Smith print all three and then answer them. "Arguments against civilian participation in the strategy and force planning process on the grounds of a lack of training and experience will not stand up to close scrutiny. (Indeed, our experience has been that it is often the civilian analysts who have studied in detail and mastered the military aspects of problems under consideration.)"²¹⁰ The Saturday Evening Post and the subcommittee hearing show a Chief of Staff and a Vice Admiral complaining in public that young civilians with no military background were being listened to.

In 1961, a thirty-year-old Daniel Ellsberg was a RAND consultant with no Pentagon rank at all, drafting questions for Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric about the general war plans Eisenhower had left behind.²¹¹ They went out on May 9 as a two-part memorandum over Gilpatric's name, which the Joint Chiefs cabled to the field commanders, Top Secret.²¹²

The Joint Chiefs answered within a day or two.²¹⁴ McNamara had already invited the man who wrote the question, Daniel Ellsberg, to lunch.²¹⁵

So was Dr. Harald Malmgren a "Whiz Kid"? I think there's quite a bit of evidence to support it, and he fits the profile almost too well. As Johnson points out, there is no official record. What there is sits on the forms and files Johnson published. A part-time RAND consultancy in 1962. A personal reference from a whiz kid in Enthoven. Systems analysis among his documented duties at IDA. That is on paper, not just on Malmgren's word. And my own experience with him was that he was incredibly smart. When comparing this to K. Wayne Smith, I think Malmgren fits the mold much better.

No Reason to Lie

Johnson's case on the Q clearance is that the Standard Form 86 was sworn under legal penalty, so leaving one off it "would have been inexplicably self-defeating" and "also would have been a crime." Disclosing it could be treated as mishandling classified information. I covered this in my article on whistleblower protections.²¹⁷ The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 was necessary because CIA sexual assault victims were told that revealing the location of the assault or the real names involved would make them "guilty of mishandling classified information," and were instructed to make false statements to law enforcement.²¹⁸ Nine months after it passed, at an internal CIA town hall, the agency's own chief operating officer admitted officers were still unsure how to report a crime without breaking the law.²¹⁹

The CIA is supposed to keep an FBI agent embedded in its Office of Security for exactly these cases, as the Yale Law & Policy Review documented. Jane Doe, a senior officer who came forward in the months after Rachel Cuda's allegations, says the office either couldn't or wouldn't give her that contact, and handed her the FBI's open, nonsecure phone number instead. Both the Office of Security and the Office of General Counsel then warned her that naming her assailant to law enforcement would get her clearance revoked for mishandling classified information. Her attorney intervened, the CIA agreed she could give the name to local law enforcement, and three days after she made the report the agency had authorized, OGC told her she had mishandled classified information by making it.

Johnson follows this topic closely, and it comes up constantly that even members of the congressional oversight committees with the appropriate clearances aren't legally allowed to know what exists, with some in the field going so far as to say they would lie to Congress if necessary. John Kiriakou, who I wrote about in that same article, went to prison over the CIA's torture program, punished not for the torture but for talking about it.²²⁰

Johnson's own appendix has an example of how incomplete that paperwork can be. He includes a letter sent to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 21, 1972, while Malmgren's nomination as Deputy Special Representative for Trade Negotiations was pending.²²¹

It is four sentences. It advises the committee "as to the status of Mr. Malmgren's security clearance," names a State Department full field investigation in 1963, and ends "He has been granted Top Secret clearance." The FBI file Johnson published records two clearances the letter never mentions: an Air Force Secret in 1962 for the RAND work, and a Navy Top Secret granted July 9, 1962 that ran until August 31, 1967.²²²

A 1972 letter about a trade nomination has no reason to reach back to a Navy clearance that ended four years and seven months earlier. Its third sentence names the FBI's 1970 update anyway, and that report is the one carrying the Clearances page. A document about a man's security clearance can leave out clearances he held, and this one left out two.

Johnson's own exhibit has the same hole in it. Question 27 of the Standard Form 86 asks whether the signer has, to his knowledge, "ever been the subject of a full field or background personal investigation by any agency of the federal government," and if so for "(1) the name of the investigating agency (2) the approximate date of investigation, and (3) the level of security clearance granted, if known." Malmgren's attachment to the January 28, 1970 form names three. The Institute for Defense Analyses (Navy Department) in 1962, the State Department in 1963, the Executive Office of the President in 1964 and 1969. His attachment to the August 25, 1971 form names four, adding the President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization in January 1970. Neither names the Air Force.

Johnson describes that form as a list of "all of his previous security clearance investigations." It is a list of investigations, not a list of clearances, and the FBI's own report puts a clearance on the record that neither list carries.²²³

The Top Secret the State Department granted after that 1963 investigation came with a printed limit. Johnson reproduces the notification in his own appendix.

Top Secret bought him nothing on the atomic side by itself. That took a second approval from a different office, and the form says so in capitals. Johnson says the same thing in his own voice, that nuclear secrets are "governed by a system of classification that is somewhat segregated from the classification system applied to other military and intelligence matters." A document reporting that a man holds Top Secret is not a document that would report a Q.²²⁴

There is also no single organization that tracks security clearances, least of all for unacknowledged special access programs.²²⁵ The government's own annual count of the cleared population is produced by querying three repositories owned by three different agencies and then deleting the duplicates. The closest thing the Intelligence Community has to an authoritative list is permitted by its own guidance to omit "classes of personnel exempted due to specific mission concerns" and to record specific people under pseudonym.²²⁶ On August 19, 2026, after Johnson appealed an initial refusal, the NNSA's Office of Defense Nuclear Security reported that it had searched its personnel security tracking system, its electronic repositories, and paper clearance records for calendar year 1962, under combinations of Harold, Harald, Bernard, and Malmgren, along with all 1962 Atomic Energy Commission records pertaining to Q clearances.²²⁷

Section 143 of the Atomic Energy Act is what an empty AEC file does not rule out. In the text that was law in October 1962, the certification that put a Defense contractor's employee in front of Restricted Data came from the Defense side, not from the Commission.

That is not a Q clearance. It is duty-limited, it turns on a named Defense official's certification and it could explain the empty file. A man cleared that way leaves nothing in the Commission's personnel security records, which is where NNSA and the National Archives looked.²²⁸

Johnson's reason for expecting a thicker file is the investigation.

Congress had taken the second investigation out ten months before Malmgren started at IDA. Public Law 87-206, signed September 6, 1961, added a subsection c. to section 145: "In lieu of the investigation and report to be made by the Civil Service Commission pursuant to subsection b. of this section, the Commission may accept an investigation and report on the character, associations, and loyalty of an individual made by another Government agency which conducts personnel security investigations, provided that a security clearance has been granted to such individual by another Government agency based on such investigation and report." Malmgren had his Navy Top Secret on a background investigation. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy printed the case that prompted the change.

In fairness, section 145 c. removes the second investigation and nothing else. The Commission still had to determine that access "will not endanger the common defense and security," and a determination is a record. It doesn't explain an empty file. Section 143 might.

Ryan Purkey's research article on Dr. Malmgren shows fairly strong evidence to the contrary, that he more likely than not held a Q clearance.²³⁰

"Gentlemen, You Can't Fight in Here! This Is the War Room!"

The books and the government's own histories describe an October 1962 that looks almost nothing like the one I read in Johnson's articles. I went looking for a way to test whether a junior analyst could have stood in one of those rooms without leaving a trace, assuming the answer would be no.

The paperwork is far worse at settling that question than I assumed.

A State Department record of the meeting on October 19 lists eighteen names under PARTICIPANTS.²³² Its second paragraph: "Then ensued a military photographic intelligence briefing on installations in Cuba, presented by a CIA representative (Arthur Lundahl)." Lundahl is not one of the eighteen. Four days later John McCone's memorandum of the Executive Committee meeting of October 23 opens with eleven people listed under the word PRESENT.²³³ Its first numbered item then reports that "Lundahl displayed the most recent photographs and a map showing 97 per cent coverage of the island."²³⁴ Arthur Lundahl is not one of the eleven.

Six days later White House photographer Cecil Stoughton took a single frame of the same committee in session, and the Kennedy Library's record of it indexes eighteen people, among them Bromley Smith.²³⁵ The summary record of that meeting names Smith as its author only.²³⁶ It never names him as someone in the room. Walter Poole's official history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff records in a footnote that "Vice Chiefs and Operations Deputies often attended as well," and the surviving notes for October 18 open a session with "JCS meeting at 1400, attended by Operations Deputies" and then name none of them.²³⁷ In that same October 23 memorandum, Maxwell Taylor agreed to take up and confirm a CIA request that its representatives be stationed "with JCS planning staff and in the Flag Plot and in the JCS War Room."²³⁸ The memo does not name them.

McCone wrote the Committee up again after it met at six that evening, the meeting where the President signed the quarantine proclamation. His whole record of who was in the room is one phrase: "All members present plus Counsel for Defense Department."²³⁹ A man sat through that meeting and the Director of Central Intelligence entered him as a job title.

Three days later the Committee met again at ten in the morning. McCone's memorandum enters the whole room under one heading, IN ATTENDANCE: "All members plus Governor Stevenson and Mr. McCloy".²⁴⁰ McGeorge Bundy's record of action for that same meeting runs to nine numbered items and carries no attendance list at all.²⁴¹

Two meetings on October 16 are barely in the record at all. The State Department's own note at the head of that transcript has Rusk, Ball, Martin, U. Alexis Johnson, Bohlen, Thompson, and Stevenson meeting to discuss Cuba that afternoon, and many of the men at the evening meeting going on to the State Department afterward until about eleven that night. Of the first: "No record of these discussions has been found but they are cited in Rusk's Appointment Book." Of the second: "No other record of these discussions has been found."²⁴³

The record also has gaps the participants put there themselves. There were no formal minutes of the Executive Committee's first four meetings, and Bromley Smith began keeping them with the fifth, on October 25.²⁴⁴ The tape of the October 23 meeting has a hole in it because the President appears to have switched the recorder off and then switched it back on.²⁴⁵ The microphone at the evening meeting on October 16 kept running after the meeting broke up, and the transcript credits two speaking turns to "Cleaning man."²⁴⁶ It credits another 135 to "Speaker ?". The Joint Chiefs taped and transcribed their own meetings and then destroyed the tapes and the transcripts in the 1970s, after the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to hand his over, and what survives is Walter Poole's handwritten notes from 1976, typed up in 1993.²⁴⁷ The notes for October 19 are printed with "[illegible in the original]" standing in for words nobody could read.²⁴⁸ They are also missing a line Poole's own history prints. At the 0900 meeting that morning, after the intelligence briefing, Lieutenant General David Burchinal, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for plans and programs and not a member of the Joint Chiefs, interjected "God! What are we waiting for?" Poole's footnote:²⁴⁹

Poole did it again at the end of the same chapter, summing up how each of the Chiefs had performed. This time the man he quotes is the Air Force Chief of Staff.

The footnote to that sentence, on page 339: "In 1976, W. S. Poole read but did not record these remarks in the JCS Minutes."

The other problem isn't documentary. A memoir or an oral history that never mentions a junior man is not a record that excludes him, and I have a hard time believing anyone's recall is good enough to make it one. Sheldon Stern was the Kennedy Library's historian and the first person outside the Executive Committee to hear the tapes. He lists Robert Kennedy's account of Dean Rusk's attendance among the claims in Thirteen Days that the recordings contradict, and puts Rusk at nineteen of the twenty recorded meetings.²⁵² I can't produce the names of everyone I sat in a room with fifteen years ago, and I worked beside some of them nearly every day.

Two years after the crisis the Kennedy Library sat Adam Yarmolinsky down with Daniel Ellsberg. His first answer on Cuba was that he did not know what he could contribute, that he had heard about it from McNamara the morning after the discovery was made. Ellsberg asked whether McNamara had discussed that week's deliberations with him.

"Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy"

Douglas Dean Johnson grants the first-strike advocacy himself. He writes that "during the period of approximately 1949-1955, there is credible evidence that LeMay, internally within the military, argued for a policy of a 'preventive' nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union," and that this backdrop provides "no support at all" for the position Malmgren describes seven years later.²⁵⁴ Then he narrows it. Those views "did not gain broad military support and were never formally proposed to civilian authorities."²⁵⁵ LeMay was famously known as Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay after he had stripped his B-29s of guns and sent them in low over Japan in 1945, and his own command's report on the March raid over Tokyo counted 15.8 square miles of the city destroyed.²⁵⁶

Set that against what the words meant in 1962.

Three different things get flattened into "first strike," and Johnson is the one that flattens them. Preventive war is starting a war now because the balance will be worse later. Pre-emption is striking an attack you believe is already coming. First use is using nuclear weapons first in a war someone else started, to stop a conventional attack you cannot stop any other way. Johnson is right that the United States rejected preventive war. It rejected it in writing, in the same paper that made first use national policy.

NSC 5906/1, the Basic National Security Policy approved in August 1959, says both. Paragraph 27: "The United States and its allies must reject the concept of preventive war or acts intended to provoke war." Paragraph 12: "It is the policy of the United States to place main, but not sole, reliance on nuclear weapons . . . and to use them when required to meet the nation's war objectives." Paragraph 20: "the United States should reaffirm that its nuclear weapons will be used, as necessary, to defend Free World interests."²⁵⁷

Kennedy did not replace that paper. He rescinded it on January 17, 1963, three months after the missile crisis.²⁵⁸ It was however the approved basic national security policy of the United States for every day of October 1962.

NATO's operative strategic concept said it more plainly. MC 14/2, approved in 1957 and not superseded until the end of 1967, was in force through both the Berlin and Cuban crises: "we must be prepared to take the initiative in their use," and NATO defense "depends upon an immediate exploitation of our nuclear capability, whether or not the Soviets employ nuclear weapons." The Joint Chiefs' own official history puts it without hedging. Under MC 14/2, "NATO would respond with nuclear weapons, regardless of whether the Soviets did so, in all situations except incursion, infiltration, or local hostile action."²⁵⁹

A year before the crisis Kennedy signed the escalation sequence himself. His October 20, 1961 guidance to Norstad on Berlin sets out four steps. The fourth is the nuclear one: "If, despite Allied use of substantial non-nuclear forces, the Soviets continue to encroach upon our vital interests, then the Allies should use nuclear weapons," running from a demonstration shot through tactical use to "General Nuclear war."²⁶⁰

And five months before the missile crisis, McNamara told the North Atlantic Council in closed session what the arithmetic actually was.

Every one of those documents is an argument for going first less often. The Athens speech is a plea for conventional forces. McNamara calls a demonstration shot "a next-to-last option we cannot dismiss" and says he hesitates to predict what it would cost politically. MC 14/2 carves incursions and infiltrations out of nuclear response entirely. That is the point. The administration working hardest to get out from under first use still had it as declared policy, still wrote it into the President's own signed guidance as the last rung, and still told the alliance in classified session that the West would probably be the one to go first.

Nobody has to "smuggle" first use into 1962. It was the policy.

Thirteen months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the commander of the Strategic Air Command told the President what he believed.

That is General Thomas Power, and he was answering the President's questions rather than volunteering a demand. General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Taylor were sitting there.²⁶³ LeMay is in the same memorandum on a different fight, and not in the room for it. Kennedy directs Taylor to find out why Power and LeMay disagreed about what could be done. Power told the meeting that American cameras had usable coverage of only ten percent of the Soviet Union, and Lemnitzer and Taylor contested the figure.²⁶⁴

The paper underneath that meeting came out of the White House. Two weeks earlier a National Security Council staffer named Carl Kaysen sent Taylor thirty-one pages arguing that SIOP-62, the standing war plan, was the wrong instrument for a Berlin crisis, because its scale guaranteed Soviet retaliation against American and European cities.²⁶⁵ He proposed something smaller.

Taylor forwarded it to Lemnitzer the next day on White House letterhead and asked the Joint Chiefs to evaluate it.²⁶⁷ Kennedy read a summary.²⁶⁸ On September 19 Taylor handed Lemnitzer a list of the President's questions about the war plan, and William Burr, who got the file declassified and published it, writes that "undoubtedly influenced by Kaysen's report, Kennedy also asked questions about the feasibility of a limited first strike."²⁶⁹ Lemnitzer answered on October 11 defending the plan he had, and made no complaint about the first-strike proposal itself.²⁷⁰ In September 1961 it was written down by a civilian, routed to the Chiefs by the President's own military representative, put to the Chairman as a presidential question, and answered.

His own expert supplies the rest.

Zelikow calls the story fanciful at the start of that paragraph and a colorful invention at the end. In between, he describes plans in place in 1962 under which, if a strike on the U.S. seemed imminent, SAC would very much have wished to conduct a massive preemptive attack.

Three days before the alert the Chiefs went to the White House. Johnson quotes President Kennedy from that meeting, on what a nuclear exchange would mean. "You're talking about the destruction of a country."²⁷² Curtis LeMay was in the same room.

He is arguing against the blockade and for conventional action on Cuba. Johnson concedes that much, and his own expert says so in the same article.²⁷⁴

On the morning of October 22 it was Curtis LeMay who asked the Joint Chiefs for a worldwide DEFCON 3 and for SAC alone at DEFCON 2, and those were the two requests the Chiefs would not approve themselves.²⁷⁵ McNamara took the first and held the second for the President, who decided it the following night.²⁷⁶ At ten the next morning, as the quarantine came into effect, General Thomas Power ordered SAC to DEFCON 2. About six hours earlier, SAC headquarters had sent every unit its guidance for the new posture. "The emphasis was upon covertly attaining the maximum state of readiness."²⁷⁷ An hour later he used the Primary Alerting System to address his forces, and on his own initiative sent the message in the clear.²⁷⁸ He wanted the Soviets to hear it, and they did. The order had been approved up the chain to the President. The decision to send it unencrypted had not.

The Chiefs taped their own meetings that month and destroyed the tapes and the transcripts in the 1970s.²⁷⁹ What survives is the handwritten notes Poole made in 1976, typed up in 1993. He went on to write the Joint Chiefs' own official history.²⁸⁰ In the debrief that begins at half past six on the evening of Saturday, October 27, hours after a surface-to-air missile killed Major Rudolf Anderson over Cuba and on the same day LeMay had pushed to execute OPLAN 312 followed by the invasion plan, Taylor asks the Chiefs a narrower question.²⁸¹ LeMay answers as CSAF, Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

Those are the notes Johnson reprints as his Appendix A.²⁸³ He never quotes that exchange.²⁸⁴

Five days later, at two in the afternoon on November 1, General Earle Wheeler brought the Chiefs guidance the President had given the day before.²⁸⁵ Kennedy wanted the Cuba operation big enough to move fast, and was willing to thin the forces held back for Berlin to get it.

The man talking about authorizing tactical weapons in Europe is the President. Taylor, the Chairman, is the one who disagrees.

Robert McNamara described the end of October 1962 to Errol Morris in 2003.

The last three sentences are civilian Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself. What LeMay is quoted saying is about invading Cuba. What the Secretary of Defense says he believed is about the Soviet Union, and about timing.

McNamara spent thirty years finding out how close it had come. In January 1992, at a conference in Havana chaired by Castro, he learned that 162 nuclear warheads had been on the island during the crisis, 90 of them tactical.²⁸⁸ He put three questions to Castro: did you know they were there, would you have recommended their use if the U.S. attacked, and what would have happened to Cuba.

It ran on the wire in 1989. Reporting a Moscow conference on the crisis, the Associated Press moved the story on January 30 under the headline "Castro urged Soviets to hit U.S. with nuclear bombs in '62 crisis."²⁹⁰

Nikita Khrushchev's own account came out twenty months later. He had dictated his memoirs in the late 1960s under house arrest at Petrovo-Dalneye, his family held part of the recordings back for fear he had been too candid, and Time acquired them in 1989. The Associated Press printed the passage on September 24, 1990.

Khrushchev puts the suggestion after intelligence reports told the Kremlin that an American invasion of Cuba was unavoidable.²⁹¹ Castro released a letter in November 1990 that put his own recommendation at the point of a United States invasion to occupy the island.²⁹² The two of them disagree about which it was.

The argument Johnson leans on hardest is that none of this could have stayed quiet. If any military leader had urged a first strike during the crisis, he writes, "it would have become known immediately to the President and other top civilian leaders," and "it also would have become common knowledge and very widely discussed during the ensuing decades."²⁹³ He is right that the crisis has been discussed for decades. McNamara went on camera about it himself. (I suggest watching The Fog of War, it's great.)

Carl Kaysen's memorandum is the counterexample. Kaysen was on the National Security Council staff, and on September 5, 1961, with Khrushchev's December deadline on West Berlin still standing and the wall three weeks old, he wrote to General Maxwell Taylor, the President's Military Representative, that SIOP-62 would kill 54 percent of the Soviet population and destroy 82 percent of its buildings by floor space, then asked whether that was "really an appropriate next step" to the repulse of a three-division attack across the German border. He wanted a different plan. Taylor put a summary of it in front of Kennedy on September 19. The National Security Archive published it on September 25, 2001, forty years later, still excised and still under appeal at the Defense Department, in the briefing book it posted to accompany Fred Kaplan's Atlantic article on the episode.²⁹⁴ Johnson cites Kaplan in both articles, always The Wizards of Armageddon.²⁹⁵ Berlin appears in neither.²⁹⁶

Ten and a half months after the crisis, on September 12, 1963, the National Security Council met to hear the Net Evaluation Subcommittee's annual report on what a nuclear exchange would cost. Taylor presented it and introduced General Leon Johnson, who took the President's questions. McNamara told the room that "under no circumstances" had he been able to get American casualties under 30 million, and that in the many studies done for him he had not found a situation in which pre-empting would be advantageous.²⁹⁷ The record of the discussion is not a transcript. It is notes taken by members of the subcommittee.

He never says who told him. McGeorge Bundy, in the same discussion, called the report itself "one state secret which has been well kept."²⁹⁹

By the definition at the top of this section that is not pre-emption. Nobody believed an attack was coming. Getting the advantage by going first because the balance will be worse later is preventive war.

Pride and Prejudice

Johnson found a defense paper Harald wrote, and graded it. Bias and emotion so clouded his judgment that it seems clear he's searched to win an argument rather than to find the truth. Something all too common among the modern skeptic movement that I've criticized in the past.

He embedded the paper underneath that paragraph so readers could check him.³⁰¹ What he embedded is the May 1965 Military Review printing, which is a digest.³⁰² The article ran first in Orbis in the fall of 1964, and the Army editors cut the opening footnote when they condensed it.³⁰³

Here is the footnote the editors of the reprint cut.³⁰⁴

The Department of Defense credential he says is missing sits in the sentence the Army cut. So is King, whose unpublished IDA paper of February 13, 1964, is the second footnote of the piece Johnson graded, and whom Johnson introduces in a different part of the same article as an IDA division director.³⁰⁶ Albert Wohlstetter had named King alongside Kissinger as a leading limited-war writer six years before that.³⁰⁷

It is also not the only defense byline. On January 11, 1964, nine months before Orbis, The New Republic ran "Europe and American Defense," Malmgren's review of Alastair Buchan and Philip Windsor's Arms and Stability in Europe. The opening column is his own argument rather than the book's. Both superpowers now hold missile forces neither side can destroy in a first strike, so using those weapons even for European defense is "less credible than ever." His conclusion: "It follows that the need for Europe as a strategic base for American defense has disappeared." On the Multilateral Force, the Kennedy administration's plan for shared nuclear control inside NATO, he calls the book's description of it fair, "a device that provides the appearance of European participation in American strategic decisions without the reality."

Four pages later the issue's "Notes on Contributors" runs one line about him. "Harald Malmgren is an economist at the Institute for Defense Analyses."³⁰⁸

The grade is worth a second look too. Military Review is the professional journal of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Its masthead says it exists for military thought on doctrine at the division level and above.³⁰⁹ Johnson's joke is that the piece reads like an upperclassman's term paper at a military academy. The Army reprinted it for the officers to learn from. Robbin Laird's collection of Harald's essays opens with three appreciations, each on its own page.

• An American perspective from Michael W. Wynne, the 21st Secretary of the United States Air Force.
• A European perspective from Lieutenant General (Retired) Pasquale Preziosa, the former chief of the Italian Air Force.
• An Australian perspective from Air Vice-Marshal John Blackburn AO (Retd), once Deputy Chief of the Royal Australian Air Force.³¹⁰

Three countries, three careers spent in defense, and not one of them reads Harald the way Johnson does.

Enthoven and Smith, in the book Johnson searched for Malmgren's name, take up the same comparison.

On the next page they write that "while there has been some recent improvement in this regard, even our most highly trained officers, the graduates of the four-year military academies, still receive very little instruction in planning or analyzing strategy and force requirements," and that "what instruction they do receive along these lines is based largely on the works of civilians." Then they name the civilians. "Military professionals are among the most infrequent contributors to the basic literature on military strategy and defense policy. Most such contributors are civilians: Bernard Brodie, Paul Hammond, Malcolm Hoag, Samuel Huntington, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Schelling, Albert Wohlstetter, to name only a few." Schelling taught Harald at Yale and put his name in front of the Bureau of the Budget. Albert Wohlstetter is the one who had named James King alongside Kissinger as a leading limited-war writer.

Johnson describes his own work as "a journalistic investigation so far extending more than four months."³¹² In the same article he wrote down the standard he was measuring everyone else against.

I agree with the standard. It's the one I've tried to hold this piece to. It is also the standard his own article fails, on documents he went and got himself.

Then there's the register. "Wide-eyed podcasters and content-producers." "Stenography as 'journalism.'" "Palpably absurd." "Laughably transparent." "I challenge promoters of the Malmgren mythology to produce such documents."³¹⁴

I can't see inside his head, and his articles don't let me guess. Here is what they do let me say. Every one of his errors runs the same way. Not one of them lands in Harald's favor. Carelessness is random, and over four months some of it should have fallen the other direction.

Closing

Johnson graded one of Malmgren's defense papers a B, maybe an A, right before tearing into it. I won't return the favor with a grade of my own. A grade compresses everything down to one symbol. The actual finding is bigger than a symbol. Every error in four months of research broke the same direction. Not one of them favored Harald.

I could tell you what I think that means. I'd rather you go count it yourself, because Johnson published the documents himself, and what you find is checkable in a way my opinion of him never will be.

If someone with no stake in Malmgren's story works through the same documents and reaches a different answer, I want to hear about it. That's the test this whole piece has been running. I'd like to see it survive one more round, this time pointed at me.