Legends, Hoaxes and the Big Lie: Libéérez les six!

The six young Army spies who deserted their post at the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade so that they could chase after the Anti-Christ were in heap big trouble. While many felt sure that they wouldn’t receive the death penalty for desertion, there was little doubt that they, in fact, deserted with no plans of coming back. Moreover, a court-martial would find them guilty, and at the very least give them many years of hard-time at Leavenworth. So, as a result of their quest to find demonic evil, they were destined for hell on Earth.

At least they would have, had a guardian angel not intervened.

On, or about 22 July 1990, someone sent a teletype directly to the Army. For good measure, they CC’ed the message to AP, UPI, ABC, NBC, and CBS. The press did not report the teletype’s existence to the public for about three weeks, but local affiliates, especially in Florida, shared its contents with other media, as WEAR’s (Pensacola) Mark Curtis did with the Gulf Breeze Sentinel. The message read:

U.S. ARMY:

FREE THE GULF BREEZE SIX. WE HAVE THE MISSING PLANS, THE BOX OF 500+ PHOTOS AND THE PLANS YOU WANT BACK. HERE IS PROOF WITH CLOSE-UPS CUT OUT. NEXT WE SEND THE CLOSEUPS AND THEN EVERYTHING UNLESS THEY ARE RELEASED.

ANSWER CODE AUGSBB3CM [caps original]

The proof, referred to in the teletype, consisted of a couple of standard UFO pics, which the stations additionally received. Shortly after the receipt of the terse missive, US Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) decided to take up the Gulf Breeze Six’ cause publicly. Ostensibly, as a result of his intervention, the Army dropped the case against the GB6, and released them immediately on 25 July 1990, three days after the mystery transmission. As reported on 26 July 1990 in the Northwest Florida Daily News, Army spokesperson Maj. Ron Mazzia suggested that they could receive “non-judicial” punishments instead, which could have meant anything from a reduction in rank to a docking of wages. But instead of punishments of the judicial or non-judicial type, the Army decided to discharge them with full military honors three days later.

You read that right. Unfortunately, for the GB6, Gen. Colin Powell objected to the leniency, so the Army reconsidered, and lowered their discharge status. Nonetheless, the Pentagon declined to discipline them in any other way.

Perhaps in return for their freedom, the Gulf Breeze Six took to the airwaves, granting interviews in which they said that the whole apocalyptic, anti-Christ thing was all a big misunderstanding. There was no End of the World cult, in Augsburg or anywhere else. They simply ditched their top-secret detail, at the risk of death and the certainly of a long prison sentence, to hang out with a friend of theirs. As Vallee said, “Of course, if you are ready to believe that Mr. Ed [Walters] was actually abducted by little gray aliens, then you might as well believe that six intelligence specialists will go AWOL just to see a friend across the ocean.”

The Army explained that it dropped the charges because they found no evidence that the Six had engaged in espionage against the United States. While that’s probably true, the charge was not espionage, but rather desertion, which in itself is quite serious (just ask Pvt. Slovik’s family). Given the public heat from Senator Dole, and the confidential, cryptic pressure from this anonymous teletype, the Army doesn’t appear to have dropped the charges as much as they backed off of them.

If we attribute the cryptic teletype as a contributing factor in the release of the Gulf Breeze Six, then it would constitute, in spy parlance,‘graymail’: i.e., the threat of releasing classified information unless certain actions take place. This used to happen in court cases, where spies would get caught for an unrelated, but serious, offense, and try to pressure the CIA, DIA or some other acronym to bail them out by threatening to spill the beans. This practice ended in 1980 when Congress passed the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), which denied a spy’s attorneys classified information for use in mounting a defense.

The type of graymail likely practiced here, however, would have been a direct threat from someone who had the wherewithal to carry it out. Jacques Vallee, in his assessment of the Gulf Breeze UFO Saga, hypothesized that the mysterious character string, “AUGSBB3CM,” at the end of the teletype might have actually been an encoded message to the Army that the sender somehow outranked the military, who had better play ball or else:

The existence of the strange message raises an interesting possibility. Could it be that the deserters did not simply hold top-secret clearances, but were also cleared for CRYPTO, giving them access to critical encoded security material? Was the alphanumeric code in the signature a hint of an actual cipher demonstrating the identity or the level of the access of the sender?

One could speculate that Senator Dole’s clout alone helped save the day for the Gulf Breeze Six. But that, in itself is odd. After all, as a young military officer during World War II, Dole became permanently disabled when a German machine gun ripped his arm to shreds. One has to wonder, given his ordeal, why the Senator would have bothered to gain the release of six slackers who couldn’t even hack a peacetime army. Let’s face it, there had been tons of army deserters between WWII and 1990. One would have difficulty explaining why Sen. Dole would have specifically taken an interest in these six, unless he genuinely believed that they were acting in accordance with their mission.

One could also posit that The End of the World members left behind in Augsberg were the ones responsible for sending the threatening telex. After all, they could have had CRYPTO clearance, and they could have very well have classified information coming out of their pores, enough to have threatened graymail. Moreover, they could have conceivably had access to any scary codes that could make the Army turn tail and run. But what flies into the teeth of such a proposition is the likelihood that such a ruse wouldn’t work. After all, the military doesn’t run by the same rules as general society. If police know that a crime could have been committed by someone on, say, a specific street, they can’t round up everyone on the street, guilty and innocent alike, and then sort out the culprits from the victims. Yet, the Army could have confined every single person in the 701st to the brig or quarters either immediately, or after the release of the Gulf Breeze Six, identified the guilty party, and prosecuted them at some other time. In other words, graymail of that type would have backfired, for Uncle Sam would hardly have taken such a threat lying down.

It’s more likely that the NSA, the spy network for which the Gulf Breeze Six worked, might have sent the teletype. They would have the necessary knowledge, access and muscle to get the Army to change its mind. Furthermore, they would hardly fear reprisal. If that were true, that could only mean that the defection of the Gulf Breeze Six didn’t happen because of some whippy-dippy spiritual belief in UFOs and anti-Christs, but because they were doing the job someone ordered them to do. So that makes one wonder what they were really doing there.