Imagine Their Embarrassment!

Put yourself back in 1950, even if you weren't even born at the time, or like me, were barely a toddler. The atomic age had begun when the United States wiped out two towns in Japan in 1945 with a bomb created out of an esoteric element called uranium. Fear was rampant. What if OUR ENEMY built a similar bomb and used it to wipe us out? Our experts decided to stockpile the element for testing and future use, hopefully keeping it out of the hands of our enemy, who could be hiding under every bush, even hiding under our beds. The government created new rules about public access to secrets. Everything dealing with uranium and nuclear materials was "born restricted." It did not need to be stamped "classified"; it was inherently so. And in the midst of that, one geologist decided to hunt for the elusive element uranium in a place the experts had definitely determined it did not exist. Imagine their embarrassment when he not only found it there, but his discovery started a very noisy and public uranium boom.

"Uranium is an abundant element. Yet the quantities of this material which have been found in high-grade ores such as pitchblende are comparatively small. In the United States, where essentially no pitchblende deposits have been discovered, the most accessible supply of uranium is in the form of fairly low-grade carnotite ores. Consequently, a development of the carnotite fields in the Colorado Plateau is being organized by the Raw Material Division of the Atomic Energy Commission."

V. L. SAINE and K. B. BROWN, Declassified 1949 document, "STUDIES OF RECOVERY PROCESSES FOR WESTERN URANIUM BEARING ORES"

We know that the AEC had no interest in promoting the mining of ore in the San Juan Valley of southeastern Utah when the "uranium king" made his famous strike there. The experts had long since written it off as a non-viable source for nuclear material. (See above quote.) In the spring of 1951, however, twelve new claims were filed in the Lisbon Valley anticline in San Juan County, Utah about 35 miles south of the town of Moab and east of the breath-taking Monument Valley region. The miner who filed the claims was a Texan named Charles A. Steen, who was in search of uranium, and had become an object of ridicule by other miners at the time.

Lisbon Valley facing north

Those who believed in the Atomic Energy Commission experts, who had previously determined the area to be devoid of that now lucrative but dangerous element, called Steen's search for uranium in the San Juan region "Steen's Folly." They did not stop laughing until Steen had set up several corporations to raise just enough capital to dig a shaft to allow him to produce the pitchblende required to prove his claim. Not until he actually received a check in the millions did the laughter subside.

Even before Charlie Steen announced his discovery in the four corners region, Time magazine had reported in June 1950 that geologist Robert J. Wright of the Atomic Energy Commission, in a paper presented at a Los Angeles meeting of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, had admitted that:

several kinds of uranium ore are being mined in the U.S. on a large scale. More important for the nation's future, said Dr. Wright, are the traces of pitchblende, the richest uranium ore, that have been found. There is an excellent chance, he believes, that deeper drilling will uncover more. If these hopes fade, said Dr. Wright, the U.S. can turn to enormous reserves of oil shale and phosphate rock that carry small percentages of uranium. ["Uranium Optimism," Time, 0040781X, 06/19/1950, Vol. 55, Issue 25]

Dr. Wright, listed as a recipient of the formerly classified document excerpted at the top of this page, told those at the California meeting that The Atomic Energy Commission would soon be asking Congress for authority to launch a "multi-million dollar project for big-scale production of H-bomb explosives." The United Press (Yuma, Ariz. Sun-Advertiser June 15, 1950) also revealed that "informer sources said today the request probably will go to Congress in the next two weeks. They said the AEC will ask authority to commit at least $200,000,000 to the project."  Scientists would be using these funds to search for tritium, which AEC board member, Dr. Robert Fox Bacher explained, could "be produced in the same kind of piles now used at Hanford, Wash., to manufacture plutonium for atomic bombs." Another mineral, thorium (10 times as plentiful as uranium) could also be used to make U-233. Somebody, no doubt, expected to receive a big chunk of those government funds to produce the valuable ores. Little did they know at the time that the rules they generated would kick off a uranium boom in precisely the area they said was nonproductive.


Worth Its Weight in Gold

Several months before Charlie Steen confirmed in his own mind that he had discovered a huge reservoir of uranium in pitchblende and many months before he received his first check for it, the AEC announced a new pricing policy. Jesse C. Johnson, manager of the raw materials operations for the AEC reported to the Salt Lake Tribune's Sunday readers on January 14, 1951 the following pricing policy:

$2.50 to $3 per pound of U308 content, depending upon grade, delivered at mill. This price includes a development allowance of 50c per pound of U308 content. In addition a haulage allowance may be granted to defray part of the cost of moving the ore from mine to mill. Ore specifications will be established by each mill and ore which does not meet specifications will not be accepted. Metallurgical tests may also be required to determine acceptability.

pitchblende ore

The minimum U308 content for an acceptable ore may be from 0.10% to 0.30% U308, depending upon the type of ore. Payment may be made for other valuable constituents of the ore provided the receiving mill can recover them economically. In general, payment for these other constituents will be based upon their market value, less deductions to cover metallurgical losses and the cost of milling, transportation, smelting, refining and marketing. The new price policy for uranium will remain in effect until March 31, 1958, subject only to changes or modifications designed to benefit the producer and stimulate production for defense needs.

San Juan Oil Company

The San Juan Oil Company out of Bakersfield, California, had drilled for oil in the San Juan field even before the radium boom created when Madame Curie discovered its use in treating cancer in the 1910s. The oilmen may have even found a bit of carnotite there before the "radium boom" had dissipated, especially since better pitchblende ores were discovered in Canada and the colonial African empires of the Belgian Congo. It was these foreign sources used to build the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.

Then the West Rand Consolidated gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa began a plant to extract uranium in 1951 at Krugersdorp, and the United States sent Sen. Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-Iowa), vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy to join an international group inspecting the facilities in 1953.

The Senator had been in the news when his committee had to defend security measures imposed on nuclear materials prior to the summer of 1947. A United Press item (in the Ogden Standard-Examiner evening edition on July 9, 1947 reported what Hickenlooper told the Senate investigators looking into claims that government secrets on building atomic bombs had been stolen:

This theft ... occurred while the war department, was in charge of the country's $2,000,000,000 atomic energy plant..... Hickenlooper told the senate that the theft at Los Alamos was committed by two army sergeants who had been detailed to the project by the war department....The civilian atomic energy commission, he said, discovered the theft shortly after it took control of the atomic program from army hands on Jan. 1 this year. The theft was brought to the attention of the FBI at once and Hickenlooper added that "we believe they (the papers) were completely and fully recovered."

The theft occurred in March, 1946, 10 months before the civilian commission headed by David E. Lilienthal took over the program from the army. The FBI, he said, promptly located the two army men and from the FBI's evidence it was believed that the sergeants were "souvenir hunting," Hickenlooper said. Hickenlooper said that the FBI evidence indicated that the sergeants "did not allow any unauthorized persons access to these documents....His committee, Hickenlooper said, had been "zealous" in checking atomic energy commission security regulations, and the commission had cooperated with "promptness and dispatch" on suggestions for improving security practices."

After hearings in Congress about the theft were complete, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists August 1949 issue contained an article entitled "How Not To Investigate the Atomic Energy Commission," which depicted Hickenlooper in a role which could well have served as a model Inspector Clouseau of the later Pink Panther flicks.

South Africa's uranium production would come from the discarded tailings from the gold fields originally discovered by diamond miner Cecile John Rhodes at the turn of the 20th century. De Beers, Anglo-American, and Rio Tinto--and their successors (innocuously labeled "British capitalists") have had a virtual monopoly on strategic metals and diamonds in South Africa since those days, and their representatives sat on boards that made decisions about atomic energy, according to  news reports that advised Americans in 1949:

HOUSTON, TEXAS, SATURDAY AFTERNOON, NOVEMBER 12, 1949

New Uranium Source Seen

Washington.—The United States atomic energy commission disclosed that it is engaging in discussions which may result in acquisition of uranium—heart  material of the A-bomb—from the Union of South Africa.

The discussions, now going on in Johannesburg, South Africa, are an outgrowth of discovery over a year ago that uranium occurs as a minor element of gold ore found in certain sections of the South African Union. The AEC announcement said that representatives of Great Britain and South Africa are participating in the conferences.

Dr. John Kyle Gustafson

Inclusion of Great Britain in the meetings recalled still-current negotiations  between England and the United States for future division of the priceless uranium deposits in the Belgian Congo. The Congo deposits are the largest known in the world and are owned by companies controlled by British capital. Britain reportedly wants a larger share of the output, along with latest American atomic energy knowhow.

Transmittal of such data is at present forbidden by the atomic energy control act. AEC's raw materials operation director, Dr. J. K. Gustafson, is the American representative in the Johannesburg meetings. It was Gustafson who, in  September, 1948, announced discovery of the uranium element in South Africa's fabled gold, and said: "The intriguing prospect exists therefore of future by-product uranium from the great gold mining industry of the Union of South Africa."

When the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 was passed, along with it a new method of classifying data went into effect under executive regulations implementing secrecy and restricted status of the nuclear data, as set out in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science by Allen Kent and Harold Lancour:

President Eisenhower signed E.O. 10501 into law on November 5, 1953.

Hot Stocks in the 1950s

 MAY 25, 1954

Uranium Boom Hits

Salt Lake City Brokers

SALT LAKE CITY (AP)—A uranium boom swamped Salt Lake City brokerage firms yesterday, with an estimated five million shares of uranium stocks changing hands in over-the-counter trade—which accounts for most of the uranium stock business. Issues listed on the Salt Lake Stock Exchange also were active and made substantial price gains. E. N. Bagley, manager of the J. A. Hogle and Co.  office, attributed the brisk trade to demand that has been "building up for several days." He said "a lot of outside money," coming mostly from Texas, New York and California, boosted the volume and also the prices.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Steen family in 1952

THE OGDEN (UTAH) STANDARD-EXAMINER 

SUNDAY MORNING, JUNE 13, 1954

Old Hands Laughed at Charlie Steen's Ideas

On Uranium, but He Hit It Rich on Second Try

MOAB (AP) — Pockets are jingling on the Colorado Plateau today as miners, speculators, prospectors and a score of amateurs pour cash and sweat into a mushrooming uranium boom.

Mining men place the plateau, a desert area fanning out from the point where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico come together, just behind Africa and ahead of Canada in uranium production. But they'll tell you that despite rosy prospects and a booming industry, putting money into uranium is speculative at best.

If you want to invest, you deal with men who are optimists, who feel that lady luck is just around the corner. But uranium ore isn't everywhere on the plateau. A section of land next to one major new strike reportedly sold for one million dollars. But nobody has found uranium on it yet.

Money is being made here in two major ways: Actual mining, or getting into a development at the prospecting stage and later selling or leasing land where a strike has been discovered. 

He Made A Fortune 

Charlie Steen made his fortune the first way. Until he made his strike, Steen was just another youthful prospector with visions of wealth, tramping through the sagebrush and scrambling up and down gulches. He had theories about ore deposits, based on his training at the Texas College of Mines. Old-timers listened to them—and shook their heads, or chuckled derisively.

But Steen, a smallish 34-year-old  Texan, stuck to his ideas. He rented a shack for $15 a month—it was home for him, his wife and four young sons. On his second try for uranium, Steen made his strike. His mother had grubstaked him to $1,000 and early in 1951 he staked out a dozen claims in the big Indian country, 40 miles from here.

He got some more backing and managed to build a crude road into the area so drilling equipment could move in. The core drill first bit into rock July 3, 1952. Three days later Steen struck ore. "It was July 16 before we knew what we had," Steen says. 

Things Happen Fast 

Production finally got under way in December, 1952. The first ore was shipped to mills two days later. Since then things have happened fast to Steen. "With his mother, Mrs. Roselie Shumaker, he formed the Utex Exploration Co. Later they set up three more: The Mi Vida Mine, Inc.. Big Indian Mines, Inc., and Moab Drilling Co.

Steen branched out into merchandising and banking and is prominent in a syndicate planning a new uranium mill to be built here. It will be the largest in the United States when completed. He's also in on a housing development, has an interest in an airport and is leveling and above Moab for a new home. Steen's fabulous mine, which he calls, with feeling, the "Mi-Vida" (my life) is turning out some 7,000 tons of high-grade ore every month. He envisions the day, not too far in the future, when it will yield 1,000 tons a day.

Causes Grief For
But the m i n e has brought Steen more harassment than happiness. "It was a lot of fun finding it," he says. "But I've had grief ever since." Steen has become a controversial figure here—mostly because of envy. And he is constantly badgered with potential backers and buyers. "I can't walk down the street without two or three people talking to me about one thing or another," he says. "A lot of their ideas are good ones, but I could use up 10 million dollars If I tried all of them."

In his neat, paneled office here, Steen tries to keep his fingers on his various enterprises. He keeps in touch by short wave radio with his mine and the planes he has flying around the area. He sees 39 to 40 people a day, darting from conference to conference and making frequent trips to a mining laboratory he maintains. 

Mechanical Operation
Steen considers mining "a mechanical operation." The actual recovery of ore bores him, and a lot of experienced miners think thousands of dollars are slipping through his fingers because of some of the methods at "Mi Vida."

Neither Steen nor the Atomic Energy Commission will agree to that. Both feel he knows what he's doing. It was a year after the strike, Steen says, "before I did any good financially." Money—in six figure amounts —goes through his hands every month. Only about 10 per cent of it stays with Steen.

"I'm getting enough to live on —damned well," he says. He refers to Uncle Sam as "my silent partner" because of taxes. "I don't think anyone in uranium has a bigger stake than I have," Steen argues earnestly. "I'm mining and paying most of it out in taxes. I could have sold and taken advantage of capital gains."

He Won't Sell Mine
But Steen makes it clear that Mi Vida "is not for sale for a million dollars, or 10 million or 150 million. I'll sell anything else I own, if the price is right, but not the mine."

While they're waiting for their new home to be built, Steen, his wife, "M.L." and their sons Mark, 4; Charles, 7; Andy, 5; and John, 8, live in a comfortable house here. He likes inexpensive shirts and trousers, and looks anything but a mining baron as he sits nervously in his office, clean shaven, bespectacled and serious. Most uranium men say Steen's case is something of an exception; more cash is being made trading claims and floating companies than from actual digging of ore and selling it to government-licensed buyers. 

Companies Being Formed
Mining and allied companies, they point out, are being organized by the dozen and assorted stocks are finding their way to the public. You can buy some of them for a dollar a share, or a dime, or even a penny. Demand is good. Many investments come from people who want either to make a quick profit or who want the thrill of being in on one of the great booms of our time. In a few years, some of this stock will be worth a lot of money. Other shares will be only worthless pieces of paper to recall faded dreams. More money is coming in from big business, looking for investments to cut immediate tax bills. It's a loose financial situation and a lot of reliable uranium men are worried about it. They caution prospective investors to go slowly.

Men like Steen are operating against a background of great tax pressures and the big promoter. Successful miners and prospectors are selling out to companies, many of them newly formed, because of the heavy burden of federal taxes. This gives the promoter a big chance. In a legitimate enterprise, the promoter plays a useful and necessary role. But there are complaints here that some promotions are running wild.

There's a story that one promoter asked to buy a few claims to get a couple of shipments of ore out of it so he could sell stock on the strength of the shipments. But the men who are striking it rich in uranium are, for the most part, plowing a lot of their earnings back into the industry. Because of expansion, many of them still owe money to banks, but it doesn't seem to bother them.

Many like the attitude of Steen. A geologist by training and a prospector at heart, Steen looks wistfully at the hills and says: "We've only scratched the potential of the Colorado Plateau."

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUGUST 3, 1954
Utah County, Utah DAILY HERALD

Restaurant Habitues Trade In Utah Uranium Securities

By MURRAY M. MOLER

United Press Staff Correspondent

Boys in the back room?

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (UP)—When they see what the boys in the back room will have at a certain men's restaurant here, it's probably uranium stock, not food. The back room at the "Grabeteria" used to be adorned with pictures of bathing beauties. But it's been turned into a brokerage office, and where the pin ups used to hang you find lists of stock offerings.

These are less shapely than beauty queens, but just as exciting.

It's all part of the boom in "penny" uranium shares that has been sweeping Salt Lake City, the focal point of uranium production in the vast Colorado Plateau of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada.

At the Grabeteria you can order your coffee and doughnuts and take your change as a few shares of your favorite company. Hanging on the wall beside the menu is a list of 39, uranium companies offering shares from as little as two cents up to $1.62. Thousands of Salt Lake City residents have dug into their savings to buy stock. They are warned by federal and state stock exchange officials that their investments are extremely risky, but trading has boomed. 

As many as seven million shares have been sold in a single day. Most of the companies have never produced any uranium. They own mining claims in various parts of the Colorado Plateau, and it's yet to be seen whether their parcels of windswept land contain anything but rocks and rattlesnakes. The uranium which Uncle Sam is buying for atomic bombs and their nuclear projects is produced mostly by old, established companies whose stock is not for sale on the open market.

Even the more conservative stock brokers who take a dim view of the recent feverish buying and selling, admit uranium holds a terrific potential for the Colorado Plateau. They say a lot depends on the future use of uranium as a fuel for generating electric power. "It's just a question of separating the cats from the mink," one expert said.

Turning Gold into Uranium and Vice Versa

Yellow Mud

South Africa's Prime Minister Daniel Malan pressed a stubby finger to a small gold button one day last week and touched off a $112 million uranium industry. There had been hints that South Africa was in the atomic business, but this was the first firm news that the country was producing uranium on a scale that is expected to net $84 million a year. 

Back in 1945 the late Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts phoned Calvin Stowe McLean, president of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines: 

"Is it true that there's uranium in our gold mines?" 

McLean told Smuts: "Yes, but it is of no commercial value." 

Said Smuts (who knew about the Manhattan Project): "I want to know how much there is and how we can get it out." 

General Smuts in uniform: Canada, So. Africa, UK, NZ and Aus. Prime Ministers

From this conversation grew a plan to combine uranium production with gold production (both from the same ore). In his Atomic Energy Act, Smuts put a clamp (20 years in prison, $15,000 fine) on all discussion of the project, so that South African newspapers did not dare even reprint articles from overseas newspapers. The area chosen for the development was the West Rand Consolidated gold mine on the Witwatersrand field near Johannesburg. 

After removal of the gold by the cyanide process, the tailings (i.e., waste) are treated by a secret chemical process to produce uranium oxide, which in its exportable form looks just like yellow mud. The project will extend to all other Rand mines, which will jointly share a giant uranium refinery. Chief buyer of South African uranium oxide will be the U.S., with Britain, which put up some of the capital, making purchases on a smaller scale. Said Prime Minister Malan: "It must give satisfaction to our partners in America and Britain that this valuable source of power is in the safekeeping of South Africa." 

[Source: Time Magazine  10/20/1952, Vol. 60 Issue 17, p42, 1p]

Although the first nuclear weapon was built on American soil, it was not without a great deal of help from men from other countries, and the uranium used in those first devastating bombs was all derived from sources in Canada and the Belgian Congo. Although uranium had been detected in gold tailings at the Witwatersrand gold mines as early as 1921, South Africans ignored its significance until in 1944, according to an article by C.S. McLean and T.K. Prentice on the history of uranium mining in South Africa:

an American geologist, Weston Bourret, visited the Witwatersrand when on his way to Madagascar, and he submitted a secret report to the United States Government on the occurrence of uraninite in amalgamation barrel residue. This led Dr. G. W. Bain, Professor of Geology at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and consultant to the United States atomic bomb undertaking, the Manhattan Project, to make a radiometric examination of two specimens of Witwatersrand ore in his possession, which confirmed the presence of radioactive minerals in these ores. He made a secret report to the combined American and British Authorities and, as a result, these two Governments approached the South African Government in 1945 about the possibility of extracting uranium from Witwatersrand gold ores. At the same time, Dr. Bain and Dr. C. F. Davidson, Chief Geologist of the Atomic Energy Division of the Geological Survey of Britain, visited South Africa. The first quantitative assessment of the uranium potentialities of the Witwatersrand goldfield in the light of modern requirements was made by these two men and Dr. Davidson's report in October, 1945, to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London ended with these significant words: "Present evidence appears to indicate that the Rand may be one of the largest low-grade uranium fields in the world." The findings of Bain and Davidson indicated that the uranium in Witwatersrand ores was many times more plentiful than gold.

This same basic story was later told by General Leslie R. Groves in his autobiography, Now It Can Be Told.

The covert nature of the cooperative effort among the Allies during those war years is revealed by Stephen Dorril in his book about the British equivalent of the CIA--
MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service--in which he recounts that the Combined Development Trust, code-named "Murray Hill Project," was in charge of "allocating scarce and vital uranium ores," and was often referred to by insiders as the "insecticide committee."

British Banker Sir Charles J. Hambro was appointed to represent the project on behalf of Britain, having already been knighted in 1941 for outstanding service in obtaining war materials. A director of the Bank of England, he was sent to Washington, D.C. as the head of the British raw materials mission, succeeding Sir Clive Baillieu, in January 1944. One goal in the spring of 1945 was to find and confiscate the uranium ore (over a thousand tons) the Germans had seized from Belgium in the early days of the war and had removed it to an area deep in the Russian Zone, Strassfurt. Not only did Hambro and his men recoup this ore, as Dorril says in MI6, he and his associates found a nest of German bomb-making scientists dubbed "Hitler's Uranium Club"--giving them a "heaven-sent opportunity for Britain to get back into the atomic intelligence game." (p. 139)

Excerpt from MI6 by Stephen Dorril, p. 139

The "Farm Hall Transcripts" were never declassified until recent years, and these transcripts appear to reveal how little the German scientists captured and housed near Cambridge, England really knew.

Getting Back on Track

A little update is in order, just so you don't think the windmills that Quixotic Joust has been chasing, besides flapping their arms, are jumping around as well. There is, in fact, some method to our madness.

The phase of research now being pursued began with the intention of determining who the Morris D. Jaffe connected to LBJ really was and what he was up to. During that initial effort, QJ found that Jaffe owned a uranium company with headquarters in Dallas. While investigating that tidbit, QJ discovered that D. Harold Byrd also owned a uranium company operating in Utah, which was sold to Canadians with strong ties to Israel at a time when Israel was building its own nuclear weapon. That fact led to connections between one of the associates of the Byrd uranium company's buyers, Bryan Newkirk, and Permindex associate and Bobby Kennedy nemesis Roy Cohn.

Since Roy Cohn was mentioned significantly in the Torbitt Document, QJ then determined to learn more about its author, David Copeland, writing under the alias of Torbitt. That research was interesting but seemingly a dead end, requiring QJ to backtrack a few steps and pick up a new trail. That brings us up to date and explains the reason for this new tack.

Hopefully, that at least partially explains the reason for QJ's fascination with the fictional book by Chinle Miller shown below, recently read by this writer on Kindle. Uranium Daughter was recently featured and proved to be an excellent read, as well as providing insight into the American lands within the uranium boom of the 1950's. But more history is in order and available, thanks to Raye C. Ringholz:

***

Raye C. Ringholz in Utah History Encyclopedia

Prior to World War I, radium mining dwindled but a new bonanza was identified in the tailings dumps of the mines. When it was determined that the discarded vanadium added to molten steel would greatly increase the tensile strength and elasticity of the metal, Utah's vanadium industry flourished. One of the dominant figures in the resultant boom was Howard Balsley of Moab, who sold carnotite ores to Vitro Chemical Corporation of Pittsburgh for medicaments and luminous paint.

It wasn't until twenty-five years later, as a result of the atomic age and subsequent arms race of the Cold War, that uranium, previously considered a waste product of the vanadium mines, came into demand as a key element for nuclear weaponry. In the beginning, almost 90 percent of the United States' uranium supply was imported from the Belgian Congo and Canada. But scanty amounts being filtered from abandoned radium and vanadium dumps on the Colorado Plateau gave promise of an untapped domestic source. The Manhattan Project of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, charged with development of an atom bomb to end the war, instituted a covert program to mine uranium from the vanadium dumps and sent geologists to scour the region in search of new lodes.

With the end of World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission replaced the Manhattan Project and launched the first federally-sponsored mineral rush in history. The AEC constructed roads into the back country, promised $10,000 bonuses for new lodes of high-grade ore, guaranteed minimum prices and paid up to $50 per ton on 0.3 percent ore, constructed mills, helped with haulage expenses and posted geologic data on promising areas tracked by federal geologists using airborne scinillometers and other sophisticated radiation detection instruments.

The Four Corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, suddenly teemed with prospectors in the greatest ore search since the gold fever days of the previous century. Amateurs and experts, alike, followed AEC guidelines and used radiation detectors called Geiger counters to test promising sandstone formations for uranium deposits. Concentrating on exposed outcroppings along canyon rims, they searched primarily for the grayish Salt Wash member of the Morrison formation. When a likely claim was located, they used diamond drills to core test holes to determine if mineable ore was present.

I've begun to suspect that the author, Chinle Miller, was a pseudonym used by someone who knows more about the history than she feels free to state as fact, much as David Copeland was afraid to use his real name when talking about Division Five, the enforcement unit from the FBI which worked to control uranium products as early as the 1930's when the Tennessee Valley Authority was created. Oversight originally fell under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers and only after the Manhattan Project ushered in the atomic age on Japan did the Feds create the above-top-secret Atomic Energy Commission, then connected to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. All these details led me to inquire about the beginnings of this uranium boom in the Four Corners area in the 1950s, and about Charles Augustus Steen, the Uranium King.

Steen aka Utex sells to Atlas in 1962.

 Steen did well for a time, but then the AEC turned off the spigot, and the Steen family plummeted.

Click to englarge

This is a lot of information to absorb at one sitting. Stay tuned for the next installment.

Update on David Copeland

After catching a brief glimpse into the life of the Torbitt Document's alleged author, David G. Copeland in a previous post, we now turn to the document itself, written under an alias as early as 1970, describing the "cabal" which worked together to kill President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

In the "About the Author" section of the Torbitt Document, Copeland told us that he prosecuted criminal cases during 1949, 1950, and part of 1951, but the only details he furnished were that this occurred:

"in the southwestern part of the United States ...  where professional Mexican assassins have been used to commit political murder. He has also participated in the trial of cases in the southwest involving gunrunning activities through Mexico to Cuba, both before Castro was successful and after Castro succeeded and became the subject of overthrow by gunrunners from the southwest."

To the above, he added:

Close relatives of the gambling syndicate members have used the legal services of Torbitt in complicated cases involving tracing of financial dealings of organized crime in Texas and their foreign connecting links."

Certain other tidbits of information we have learned without help from his book. For example, a son, Kippie, born in Waco during his first marriage, died before his third birthday in 1953. Between then and January 1960, when he married Jayne Baker, a divorce occurred.

About Copeland, however, through newspapers we learn that in 1962 as head of the campaign for liberal candidate Don H. Yarborough (no relation to the U.S. Senator, Ralph Yarborough), he organized a group called Texans for a Two-Party Texas following the primary elections, attempting to force conservative Democrats into the Republican Party. This group would unwittingly make it possible for George H.W. Bush to be elected as a Congressman in Texas.


Copeland knew, or thought he knew, facts proving that LBJ and Governor John B. Connally had been involved in the murder of President Kennedy, and he campaigned repeatedly after 1963 for their more liberal opponents, in 1968 calling LBJ's war on poverty a political gimmick.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The cogent questions, phrased in Watergate-ese, are: What did Copeland know, and how did he know it? Was he told by an insider, or did he simply make conclusions based on a combination of stories he heard and his own research?

We know from our research into his background that Copeland was married to Aline, a teacher, while living in Fort Worth (Tarrant County) in 1946, according to this page from the City Directory that year:

Click image to enlarge.

He was a student, perhaps in law school at Texas Wesleyan School of Law, which was located a few blocks from their residence. Seven miles to the west was the bomber-making plant where Aline had worked during the war before obtaining her teaching position at the junior high school. Nevertheless, he says in his self-published manuscript that he had a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. The manuscript also claimed to be "an enlargement of a working paper furnished to Torbitt by two agents -- one with the Customs Department and the other with the Narcotics Bureau. This is wholly at odds with what Jim Marrs claimed in his book about who Copeland's federal sources were.

The Fort Worth Bomber Plant

In attempting to discover who the two agents were, we have gone back through Copeland's life to review where he was at certain times in order to determine with whom he was in contact. For example, the plant where Aline Copeland worked while her husband was a student would become an important tool leading up to the NASA space program.

Tarrant Field Airdrome originated in 1941 and became Fort Worth Army Air Field on January 2, 1942. The site of the base was originally selected in 1941 as a Consolidated Vultee factory for the production of B-24 bombers. A separate contract was let for a landing field, Tarrant Field, to be built to support the aircraft factory. The construction of an air force base on the east side of Tarrant Field was authorized after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tarrant Field Airdrome was assigned to the Army Air Forces Flying Training Command in July 1942.

The base became one of the first B-24 transition schools to begin operation. After more than 4,000 students were trained in B-24s at the base, its mission was changed to B-24 transition because of the nearness to the Consolidated factory. In 1945 the mission was changed from B-24 to B-29 aircraft training. The base was assigned to the newly formed Strategic Air Command in March of 1946.

Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation was formed by a merger of Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, founded by Reuben H. Fleet in 1923 in Buffalo, New York, and Vultee Aircraft, a California airplane builder. [The timeline of corporations is set out at the Aerospace Legacy Foundation website.] In Texas it operated a mile-long facility, known locally as the Bomber Plant, built in 1942 on 563 acres on the west side of what is now Carswell Air Force Base at Fort Worth. The company used the site to fulfill contracts for planes it had no room to build at its San Diego factory and produced more than 3,000 B-24s, as well as C-87 cargo planes there.

Vultee Aircraft, based in Downey, California, had acquired the assets of Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, which had been dissolved in bankruptcy, and became Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, commonly known as Convair for short. Between 1942 and 1948 the Vultee Field division of Convair was awarded government contracts that gave it a step ahead in designing long-range missile weapons systems for the military. Project MX-774 would study a subsonic, jet engine cruise missile and a rocket-powered supersonic ballistic missile.

Vultee's engineers in California focused on the ballistic missile concept, taking data about the German V-2 rocket with plans to build a guided missile that would carry power equipment allowing it to travel outside the atmosphere of the earth--described as a "streamlined" version of the German V-2. The Downey/San Diego plant, which was designated North American Aviation by 1949, was headquarters for the Fort Worth plant, where Copeland's first wife Aline had been employed during the war years. A 1952 classified document, released in 2009, indicates that beginning in December 1948 the North American Aviation plant in Downey had been working on a project to construct a low power research reactor "to produce plutonium at low cost." In some of the reports of the file, reference was made to a thorium converter reactor, graphite-moderated reactors and the Hanford Cooperative Program. Persons in charge on various reports included G. M. Inman, T. Fahrner, E. E. Motta, R. L. Stoker, C. Malmstrom, H. P. Yockey, R.L. Carter, W.E. Parkins, C. Starr and others, many if not all part of the Manhattan Project headed by Robert Oppenheimer.

We do know that Aline Copeland returned to Waco before her second marriage and that she was apparently working at James Connally AFB, a bombardier and navigator flight training center between 1951 and 1962--the most likely place for Aline to have met and marry an Air Force officer who had been a prisoner of war in Germany during WWII.  An officer by that same name was Communications Officer for the 601st Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at the radar work site, "Gunpost," in Rothwesten, Germany in 1959. Nothing could be found on where Aline and Campbell met, or on whether that Major Campbell was in fact married to an exceptionally attractive German woman named Erika Horn, mentioned at the 601st ACWS website.

If anyone has any other information about how all these details came together, please comment below.