The JASON Group: national security science

The JASON Group is another good example of how ISGP has been able to effectively take away the mystery of previously "secret" groups.

JASON co-founder Sidney Drell with long-time Bechtel director and former secretary of state George Shultz, a good friend, and U.S. presidents Bush and Obama.

In 2005 this site published a list of virtually all historical JASON members, and based on their biographies pieced together a pretty coherent history. As happened with most other groups on this website, within a couple of months readers copied the names and basic information to Wikipedia, making it seem as if this information has been available forever. Links to ISGP, also in good fashion, were eventually removed from Wikipedia.

However, individuals that oversee the JASON Group appear to not have liked it that an unknown Dutchman pieced together the basic JASON Group story from readily available sources.

Shortly after the original ISGP article on the JASONs was published, this author ended up on the email list of a JASON member and received a PDF in which it was described how nuclear power plants could be protected from terrorist attacks. The reader can find the details in the FAQ of this site, but about a week later that email mysteriously disappeared again from my inbox. Also, a surprisingly high number of ISGP visitors from the Washington, D.C. area and a number of defense-related institutes have taken a specific interest in the JASON Group.

Thinking about the email in hindsight, it may not have been an accident or even a mild form of intimidation at all that I received it. I couldn't have been on their contact list, as there's never been any email correspondence between me and a member of the JASONs. I also didn't recognize the names on the email list. But the one thing this email did accomplish was turn me into a potential national security threat, making it perfectly legal to tap my phone, mail and email (which all three appear to have happened, although part of it might be related to Le Cercle).

Col. John Alexander (left) with Ron Pandolfi, both major manipulators of the UFO and New Age community. In 2008 Pandolfi, formerly on the CIA's National Intelligence Council, convened a JASON Group meeting for the Director of National Intelligence. As Jack Sarfatti, another such manipulator, wrote: "[This] could be used for "espionage" and breaking quantum cryptography security words. I am an informal "senior advisor" to Dr. Ronald Pandolfi, of the Science & Technology Directorate of the CIA and the MASINT [Measurement and Signature Intelligence] program. Indeed, I was Pandolfi's guest at a JASON meeting at General Atomics in June 2008 in La Jolla." [14] Col. Alexander is a regular key guest on Coast to Coast AM, with Sarfatti and numerous associates of Pandolfi also visiting. Maybe this is a start in explaining why the JASONs used Coast to Coast AM as a platform to give out their official history.

What also happened within a year of having put out the initial article and membership list of the JASONs was the publication of the first officially-sanctioned book about this group, written by science author Ann Finkbeiner. Apparently the book was aimed at the conspiracy community, as Finkbeiner was allowed to talk to a crowd of millions on conspiracy disinformation show Coast to Coast AM. I distinctly remember receiving an email reply from radio host Ian Punnett, thanking me for a list of penetrating questions related to the JASONs that he could ask Finkbeiner (which would have appealed greatly to his audience). However, during the two-hour interview Punnett didn't ask one single critical question. It was pretty mindblowing, considering almost 100 percent of Punnett's audience would want to know everything about the JASONs connections to secret flying saucer retrieval programs, men in black, and things along those lines. But nothing. Not one question. Not even to give Finkbeiner a chance to deny it. All she did was dictate the JASON Group's official history and off she went. In other words, everything the show was about, was given up that one night Finkbeiner was a guest. To this day it remains a curious episode to me, even for Coast to Coast AM.

The following article once was exclusively about the JASON Group, but today it has been expanded to include a discussion on the MITRE Corporation, which has overseen the JASON Group for decades. And as the reader will find out, when MITRE is discussed, also the network of defense corporations and intelligence agencies that it is part of has to be given attention.

In a nutshell, the JASON scholars are a select group of scientists who conduct studies for different parts of the U.S. government. The group is referred to as the JASON Defense Advisory Group or simply the JASON Group. Today their headquarters is located at the JASON Program Office at the MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit federally funded research and development company.

JASON was founded in 1958-1959 by scientists as Sidney Drell, Kenneth Watson, John Wheeler, Charles Townes and Marvin Goldberger [1]. It was created as a special part-time division within the newly-established Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally-funded academic think tank that acted as a counterweight to research done by the different military branches, private corporations and the CIA - despite the fact that it is not unusual for the institute to be ran by a retired general or senior CIA officer. According to the official history of IDA:

To provide a bit more detail: In 1956, James R. Killian Jr., president of the MIT Corporation and a close associate of Vannevar Bush, suggested to Eisenhower that the country's best scientific talents should be brought together in an effort to break all Russian encryption systems. In response, Eisenhower appointed Bell Labs president of research, Dr. William O. Baker, as head of a commission to see what could be done with Killian's proposal. In February 1957, the Baker Commission announced its support for Killian and one of the responses of Eisenhower and his secretary of defense, Charles E. Wilson, was to ask Killian, as president of MIT, to set up the Institute for Defense Analyses, which was to be done in cooperation with such universities as Caltech, Columbia and Stanford. Vannevar Bush, who used to be vice president of MIT before the war, briefly returned to MIT to take the chairmanship, from 1957 to 1959.

Three leading JASONs have been important in countering JFK conspiracy claims: SETI co-founder Paul Horowitz, NRO co-founder Richard Garwin, and especially atom bomb dropper Luis Alvarez.

The purpose of IDA was to take over WSEG from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to supply it with new ideas and technology concepts. Killian became chairman of the board of trustees of IDA. Other early members of the think tank were Eric A. Walker, mainly associated with the Office of Naval Research, and later JASON scholar Charles H. Townes, who had recently co-invented the maser, the predecessor of the laser. Both became leading officers of IDA, just as General Maxwell D. Taylor, the CIA's Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and today, Suzanne Woolsey, wife of former CIA director James Woolsey (the latter three were presidents of IDA). Someone like Admiral Harry Train also became involved with IDA after his retirement, although only as an ordinary trustee. The official history of IDA continues as follows:

Although several subsidiary groups were created within IDA, it is almost certain that the newly created division to support the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA; later DARPA) was the JASON Group. ARPA appears on JASON documents under the heading 'Controlling Office Name' and JASON was created in the same 1958-1959 time period. IDA also talks about the mandate of the division expanding to perform studies for the DoD and such, which is also what happened with the JASON Group.

The above compilation of three different JASON studies shows how the organization it was part of changed over time. [4] In the late 1960s it was incorporated within IDA; in the late 1970s it had been moved to Stanford Research Institute International (SRI); and in the late 1980s the JASONs had become part of the MITRE Corporation. Most studies were commissioned by DARPA, but other contractors have been the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army Research Office, the NRO, and a few other organizations.

James Killian was the most central player in the creation of all these civilian research institutions under Eisenhower. He not only founded IDA in 1957, but also the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), and became chairman of both. In 1958, he established ARPA and as head of IDA, he approved the proposal to create the JASON Group. In 1958, Killian was also asked to create the Communications Research Division (CRD) within IDA, a Princeton-located top secret think tank for the NSA. Then, in 1959, Killian oversaw the creation of MITRE. He became a trustee of MITRE in 1960 and from 1967 to 1969 he was chairman of the board of trustees of this think tank, which was very similar to IDA and RAND. He remained on the board until 1982. In 1960, together with the earlier-mentioned William O. Baker and JASON scholars Richard Garwin and Sidney Drell, Killian was a co-founder of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that remained secret for about a decade - although its existence was only announced officially after the Cold War had ended. [5] Back in 1957, Vannevar Bush is said to have suggested Killian as the follow-up to defense secretary Charles E. Wilson, but Eisenhower selected Neil McElroy instead.

Most JASON studies have to do with the development of new cutting edge technology concepts for the electronic battlefield. The contractors evaluate the papers written by JASON members and then decide whether or not to do something with it. Many other studies have to do with the nuclear weapons arsenal. In the early 1990s, a couple of studies were done on climate change; in the mid 1990s studies started into the human genome; and still a couple of years later this science was combined with nanotechnology. Almost all studies are conducted to see if these technologies can be used to maintain a military advantage over whatever enemies the United States may have. Recent studies have also involved the concept of Homeland Security. A good example of this is the 2002-2003 study 'Biodetection Architectures'. Since a lot of JASONs are university professors, most studies are conducted in the summer months when students are on leave. It is believed that each year about 15 studies are conducted, half of them classified. A study can be done by as little as two or three JASON members to as many as 17 or 18.

In the JASON membership list you will find 11 Nobel prize winners, usually received for achievements in physics. The vast majority of JASONs have Ph.D.'s in this field although some have chosen to specialize in electrical engineering, mathematics, oceanography, chemistry or biological sciences. Generally, JASONs, especially the older ones, are very well rounded and can be involved in a wide variety of studies spanning multiple decades. One of its founders, Sidney Drell, was still active in 2003. Freeman Dyson is another member whose career with the JASONs spans four decades. Some other long-time members are Stanley Flatte, Richard Garwin, Curtis Callan and Alvin Despain. These were active since the 1970s or the early eighties and were still performing studies at the beginning of the 21th century. According to different sources, JASON consisted of about 45 to 50 members at any given time. Counting the members manually per decade in the membership list confirms that and seems to indicate the list is almost complete. Information about the 1960s remains scarce though, but the group started out with about 15 members and rapidly expanded. [6]

Most JASONs never played any significant role in politics. There are a few exceptions of course and these exceptions tend to be members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Of the 119 individuals in the membership list, only 11 are members of the CFR. These 11 are the ones who usually chair all kinds of national science committees, advise presidents on scientific matters, and work for a variety of large corporations. Non-CFR JASONs often have impressive biographies too, but they tend to focus on other things than Washington politics or Wall Street business.

Some of the more interesting JASONs

Even though there are not a whole lot, below you can find a short list of some of the more interesting individuals in the JASON Group. Take a look at the membership list for additional details.

As the JASONs have been operating under the wing of the MITRE Corporation since the late 1970s, it might be relevant to take a look at this (federally-funded) company also. It seems that the JASONs are not an insignificant part of MITRE, as annual reports of the company list only two staff members, one of them the "Director, JASON Program Office". Maybe this was to be expected, as both have James Killian as their founding father.

Overall the men and women who serve on the board of trustees of MITRE are much better connected than the average JASON. Quite a bit of overlap can be found with senior positions at the CIA, NSA, NRO and other defense corporations. A few trustees have also considerable political connections. Below the most interesting MITRE trustees of the past twenty years have been selected. These names have been lifted from the MITRE website and annual reports dating back to 1996, using Webarchive.

Overall it's possible to see that the MITRE trustees are on a different level than the average JASON Group member when it comes to the amount of connections they have. This also explains why in the whole period reviewed here only one member of the JASONs made it to MITRE's board of trustees: Murray Gell-Mann.

The most connected person within the MITRE corporation hasn't been named yet. That is former CIA director and defense secretary James R. Schlesinger, a trustee since 1985 (two years after Killian left) and chairman of the trustees from 1987 all the way to the present day. As ISGP's Superclass Index shows, Schlesinger is very much connected to both the absolute elite of the liberal and conservative/defense establishments, despite being only known as a conservative. Schlesinger shares boards with Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Peter Peterson, Richard Perle and other extremely connected persons within these two establishment. The institutes Schlesinger has been involved with:

2006, John Deutch and MITRE/JASON boss James Schlesinger, co-chairs of the CFR's U.S. Oil Dependency Task Force. Deutch starts out the meeting by referring to himself as the "very junior co-chair of this task force" and thanks Peter Peterson (Pilgrims) and Richard Haass of the CFR for organizing the meeting. Robert Hormats (Pilgrims) of Goldman Sachs and other CEOs are asking questions at the end of the meeting. Schlesinger: "In this we have a similar concern as the Chinese... it is clear that the Chinese believe that the peak in oil production worldwide will come somewhere around 2013." Luckily, that was without shale oil in mind.

What does this information tell us about the JASON Group? It tells us that whatever secrets the JASONs keep, that these secrets are shared with the MITRE trustees and undoubtedly with its chairman, James Schlesinger. And at that point you have immediately landed at the top of the CIA and the Pentagon.

It appears that MITRE never sponsored the AFIO or the OSS Society, but other corporations have, primarily SAIC and Lockheed Martin, as well as General Atomics, General Dynamics, TRW and Motorola. [12]

One thing that might be interesting to analyze at this point is how deep CIA officers other than Schlesinger are involved in various defense and technology corporations. It might be especially interesting to be on the lookout for corporations that have been helping to finance Schlesinger's AFIO and OSS Society: primarily SAIC and Lockheed Martin, but also General Atomics, General Dynamics, TRW and Motorola. Connections between high level CIA officers and relatively controversial firms as Wackenhut and E-Systems (taken over by Raytheon) are also of special interest. We will primarily be looking at CIA directors, deputy directors and executive directors. Names marked with an * have additional information added, because their biographies aren't listed anywhere else on this site.

Discussed above have been a total of 15 persons who were high level CIA officers, with a few of them only having had high level CIA connections. Put together, these persons have represented the following high technology institutes and defense corporations (the Carlyle Group has been added for its considerable ties to the defense industry and strong CIA connections. Several companies/institutes potentially linked to MKULTRA type activies have also been added):

It appears that there are almost no companies or institutes that are completely dominated by ranking members of the CIA over a period of 10-15 years or more. MITRE does seem to be a bit of an exception and even in that case we can't really say if this has been a coincidence or not. It's perfectly possible that the next trustee chairman will have no identifiable links to the intelligence community or will only be in this position for a relatively brief period. In all other cases it cannot be demonstrated that CIA officers have played a dominant or overseeing role in these companies. Carlyle, Neurogen and the Virginia Neurological Institute might be exceptions, but these really aren't defense corporations. In case of SAIC, which has probably the most obvious CIA connections, the CIA-linked board members were not chairmen or CEOs. As to what this means, there are various possibilities:

1. Retired CIA officers have been involved with, but have no significant influence over these defense corporations and run little to no special projects through them.
2. Key leaders of the defense industry occasionally cooperate with the CIA and its need for secret projects, but do this only when they feel like it.
3. Key leaders of the defense industry are fully cooperating with the CIA with or without having been recruited as members. They allow senior CIA officers to run special projects through their companies.
4. Many more trustees, directors, CEOs and chairmen belong to the CIA than we are aware of, leading to the same conclusion as point 3, that the CIA uses these companies as it sees fit.

To summarize, we haven't really been getting much wiser. All that can be said is that the CIA has much closer ties to defense corporations than the liberal establishment surrounding the State Department and the New York banking institutions. Basically the 15 CIA officers mentioned above - taken together - have stronger links to the defense industry than the roughly 1,600 Pilgrims Society members of which ISGP has put together biographies until this point. That says something. It says that unless something changed in the past 30 years (the last full Pilgrims Society list dates to 1980), high technology and the defense industry remain the domain of the CIA and the Pentagon - not of the liberal eastern establishment running the CFR, Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission.

However, as has been established in the introduction article on this website, CIA directors and some other senior CIA officers virtually always have liberal establishment ties through various businesses and private institutes as the Atlantic Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. James Schlesinger of MITRE is one very important example of that. Frank Carlucci, Robert Gates, James Woolsey and John Deutch are some of the others. Norman Augustine of Lockheed Martin also has major connections to the liberal establishment, with a small handful of former officers of the company appearing in the Pilgrims Society. Various Pilgrims have also been on the board of General Dynamics. Among them was General Bernard Rogers, a Rhodes Scholar.

Possibly the only defense corporation that used to be controlled by interests connected to the liberal establishment, at least for a period, has been Raytheon. Charles Francis Adams, IV, a member of the Pilgrims Society, was a director of Raytheon from 1938 to 1942. He then headed the company from 1948 to 1972 as president and chairman and stayed on the board until 1997 - two years before his death. The primary founder of Raytheon has been defense scientist Vannevar Bush, who, through his presidency of the Carnegie Institution 1939-1955 and work financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, had considerable liberal/Pilgrims establishment ties. Today this liberal establishment connection is potentially continued through directors as Admiral Vernon Clark (director Rolls Royce; at Business Executives for National Security with Henry Kissinger, Maurice Greenberg, as well as former CIA/FBI chief William Webster) and former CIA director John Deutch (deeply concerned about sustainable development; long-time associate of Warren Buffett, Vernon Jordan, Katharine Graham, Cyrus Vance, Robert McNamara at the Urban Institute).

James R. Killian, so very important in setting up the national security system during the Eisenhower administration. Key player in setting up the Institute for Defense Analyses, the President's Science Advisory Committee, DARPA, a Princeton-located think tank for the NSA, MITRE and the NRO. He was a MITRE trustee and a board member of the Office of Defense Mobilization. He could also be found at MIT and Tulane and was a close associate of Vannevar Bush.

Interestingly, we already met Vannevar Bush as the close associate of Eisenhower's important science advisor, James Killian, a key player in setting up the Institute for Defense Analyses, the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), DARPA, a Princeton-located think tank for the NSA, MITRE and the NRO - all during the Eisenhower years of 1952-1960.

The idea one gets is that Truman and Eisenhower wanted the country's most sensitive secrets in civilian hands and not with the military or defense corporations. The same would be true of most other presidents. It appears that Vannevar Bush and James Killian were deeply involved in setting up a national security structure with ultimate control by the secretary of defense and the president. During World War II Bush ran the National Defense Research Council (NDRC), as well as its follow-up, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). These groups controlled the deepest scientific secrets of the U.S. government, including the Manhattan Project under which the atomic bomb was developed.

Post-war civilian scientists oversaw the Research and Development Board, the Caltech-controlled Sandia National Laboratories, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Research Council, the position of president's science advisor and undoubtedly a few other research bodies. In 1951 all these groups came to be represented in the new scientific advisory committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, headed by Charles E. Wilson, a former General Electric executive and Eisenhower's future defense secretary. The purpose of the office was to oversee "top secret research in all the sciences, including atomic." During the first three years of its existence it was an extremely influential body of the U.S. government, completely dedicated to making available raw materials and technical know-how for the war in Korea while at the same time preventing an economic collapse in the United States. Once again Killian was serving on the committee, together with J. Robert Oppenheimer, future Rockefeller University president Detlev Bronk (Pilgrims), Harvard president James Conant (Pilgrims) and half a dozen other individuals. Caltech, Princeton and Columbia were represented as well. [13]

The primary founder of the committee, Dr. Oliver E. Buckley, was a member of the general advisory committee of the Atomic Energy Agency and was the president's science advisor in 1951-1952, a position he had taken over from Vannevar Bush. Buckley had been president of Bell Labs from 1940 to 1950 and was chairman from 1950 to 1952. The company was owned by American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), whose board Bush joined in 1947 and remained on until 1962. Bell Labs itself had been the only corporation that was part of the OSRD during World War II. In 1949 it had been given control over Sandia National Laboratories, which, until that point, had been ran by a reluctant Caltech. Bell Labs controlled Sandia until 1993, when Lockheed Martin took over responsibility.

In 1957 Killian reorganized the scientific advisory committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization into the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) and became its first chairman. PSAC has been replaced by various bodies since the Nixon administration. Killian's position as assistant to the president for science and technology still exists today. From 1981 to 1985 the position was held by George Keyworth II, later of the Center for Security Policy; Jack Gibbons held it for five years under the Clinton administration; and today's presidential science advisor is John Holdren - just to name a few.

It seems that certainly in the past these scientists did have access to the deepest secrets of the United States. This is probably most clear in case of nuclear energy. Do these government scientists still today have insight in all black programs? Hard to say. The days of FDR and Truman, whom were not the biggest friends of the Eastern Establishment nor the Conservative Military Establishment, are long gone. Remember how FDR introduced the New Deal and was continually at risk of being overthrown by the afore-mentioned elites.

The problem today is that there exists a civilian network of former heads of the CIA, the State Department and the Defense Department, working together with major foundations, corporations and universities that largely seems to be calling the shots when it comes to long term foreign and even domestic policy. At the same time the CIA elements of this private network seem to have a lot of sway with defense corporations, as has just been demonstrated. Presidents and vice presidents are largely picked and approved of by this network before they can put themselves up for election. Otherwise, the media will simply ignore them. So, really how "independent" are these government scientists? Whether the president or this permanent network puts them in charge of any clandestine government programs hardly seems to make much difference. And where are these programs ran from? A defense corporation? Lockheed-controlled Sandia base? Or maybe a military facility under the control of the secretary of defense? In the end, does it really matter?

Some of the leading JASON scholars have major ties to this permanent network and have even been hired as "hitmen" to help cover up the JFK assassination, the Israeli nuke program, or Gulf War Syndrome. Also when we look at the top national security scientists of times past, such as Vannevar Bush, James Killian or Detlev Bronk, in later years these men were associated with Merck, the Rockefeller University for Medical Research and Tulane, the first two reportedly linked to biological weapons research for USAMRIID under MKNAOMI and in case of Tulane there have been accusations of involvement in MKULTRA-related research. Also looking at ISGP's Superclass Index, there are not many scientists to be found here. JASON co-founder Sidney Drell doesn't make it in the top 100. A number of DOD scientists do, but overall we would have to conclude that scientists are always in the employ of the exact same "Powers That Be" as described in every other article of ISGP. Look at the 2013 Edward Snowden affair. Whether one looks at the leadership of the NSA, defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, or members of the Senate Intelligence Committee whom Snowden complained weren't properly informed, they're all friends and associates, with most of them listed in ISGP's Superclass Index.

If we look at the different levels of secrecy that exist for certain programs in the United States, it's best to look at the chart above. I personally have a hard time believing that any president, any president-appointed scientific body, or any corporation is able to hide any secrets from the private network just discussed, certainly in the long term. They may keep secrets from each other for various reasons, but overall I doubt any secret programs escape the attention of the "400" of the Superclass Index. The present heads of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department suddenly conspiring with the president to not keep their best friends, sponsors and mentors, with whom they still interact in a network of NGOs, out of the loop? Doubt it. Quiet complaints may come from Congress and even the Senate that they are not being kept properly informed about (Unacknowledged) Special Access Programs, but certainly after the Snowden Affair one gets the impression that they don't really want to. I didn't see key members of the Senate and Congressional intelligence committees stick up for Snowden, so one has to conclude that they're all "establishment", far removed from "the people".

As for the JASONs, go through the historical membership list and the reader will find that most of them do not have any significant background in the military, in intelligence or as engineers and directors of defense corporations. Only when one looks a level above the JASONs, at the board of the MITRE Corporation in this case, it is possible to find extensive links to these defense corporations, as well as the CIA, NSA, ONI and NRO. And only CIA directors and a few of their deputies seem to have a chance to make it all the way to secretary of defense in Washington, D.C. or national security advisor (but not secretary of state). It is ultimately these people who call the shots and maybe should be paid the most attention to. That's not to say that professors from leading universities couldn't have been brought into some of the most sensitive private research projects in the country, alongside their Pentagon colleagues, but specific evidence for this is lacking. I give the same advise as always: keep your eyes on the "400" of the Superclass Index. A couple leading scientists are to be found here, but they'll always have someone above them who appears higher in the same index.

Additional references