Free The First Casualty by Gregg Loomis Page A

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    Federal Bureau of Investigation
    Re: Nikola Tesla
    File No. 2121-70
    TOP SECRET
    Date: October 21, 1941
    To: J. Edgar Hoover, Director
    From: Tim O’Flaherty, Director, Manhattan Field Office
    Interception of subject’s mail at the request of British Secret Service Bureau and authorized­ by secret Presidential Directive 42 indicate frequent mail contact with family members in the Independent State of Croatia. The director will recall this small country became a signatory to the Triparte Pact on 6 June of this year, thereby becoming a formal ally of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as well as Imperial Japan and a number of smaller countries, although Croatia has been considered a Nazi puppet state under the N.D.H. since the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April of this year.
    Since subject holds a number of patents of a scientific nature with possible military implications, the possibility exists of his family being used as hostages by the country’s pro-­Nazi government in an effort to obtain access to subject’s inventions for use as potential weapons. Subject’s nephew, Dari, has volunteered to join the 369 Reinforced Croatian Infantry, the troops Ante Pavelić, Croatia’s “leader,” has promised to send to aid in the German invasion of Russia. Whether this young man has done so out of a love of the Nazis or the long-lived Croatian hatred of Russia is unknown.
    The director will recall subject attempted to sell some sort of ray to the British military and succeeded in doing so to the U.S.S.R. for a reputed $25,000.
    So far, there is no evidence subject’s communications contain anything more significant than family news. Surveillance will continue.

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    Excerpts from Nikola Tesla: Genius or Mad Scientist
by Robert Hastings, PhD
    Tesla liked to retell the story of how, as a young man, he was taken ill at school in Carlsbad and hospitalized. The physicians, according to Tesla, were unable to cure his mysterious ailment. One day, a nurse handed him several publications, including several articles by the American writer and humorist Mark Twain. Tesla so enjoyed them that he effected a miraculous­ recovery. From that day forward, Mark Twain became someone Tesla wanted to meet. The fact that, historically, Twain had written little of note and nothing worth translating at the time of Tesla’s supposed illness never dissuaded him of his claim the writer had saved his life.
    In 1884, the scientist succeeded in meeting Twain through mutual acquaintances who were members of Manhattan’s Players Club. Though the two were never close friends, Twain was a frequent visitor to the lab at 48 East Houston Street, where the writer once observed, upon watching an experiment that involved twenty-foot electrical arcs and bolts of homemade lightning, “Thunder is impressive, but it’s lightning that does the work.”
    Later, Twain was to praise Tesla’s AC polyphase system as “the most valuable patent since the telephone.”
    Twain took great pleasure in standing on a platform above one of Tesla’s inventions, the mechanical oscillator, feeling it sway back and forth in response to electrical impulses­. On the first such experience, Tesla suggested his guest had ridden long enough and he should come down. Twain declined, saying he found the motion “invigorating” and “healthful.”
    Minutes later, he scrambled down, shouting, “Tesla, where is it?”
    He meant the toilet, of course, having learned what Tesla’s lab assistants had already painfully experienced: Riding the machine too long had a definite effect on the bowels.
    In 1896, Twain was traveling in Europe, keeping up a sporadic correspondence with the scientist. From Austria, he wrote a letter, which, in part, read, “Have you Austrian and English patents on that destructive terror you are inventing?” Twain had his own ideas as to peace and disarmament: