The Cloud Atlas

Gurley walked us away from the building-he was concerned about eavesdropping; I was concerned about a fight-and then turned me around, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, “Before we begin, Sergeant, let us be absolutely clear on one point. What you learned yesterday is extremely secret. You are to tell no one. If you do-” Now, it would have been clear enough for Gurley to draw a finger across his own throat. But, as always, he'd devised better. Whether it was improvised or practiced, I can't say, but this is what he did: he put a thumb to my neck, just to the left of my carotid artery. And then he slowly drew his thumbnail across-carotid, esophagus, jugular- before lifting it, before I quite knew how to react, before I'd started breathing once more. He smiled. “There, now,” he said. “It might just be better to pretend-and this may not be too difficult to do-that you learned nothing, not a single thing.”

He was right. That would not be difficult at all, because this was Alaska.

During the war, the entirety of Alaska was declared of strategic importance. Press censorship was so tight, soldiers returning Outside sometimes weakly joked that their whole horrific Alaskan experience may have taken place in their imaginations. They'd been to this strange and wild place, after all; many of them never saw the enemy (nor the sun). Once they were home, they discovered that no one had heard or read a single word about what they'd done. Daily dispatches from the South Pacific appeared in the press, but the Alaska news blackout was almost total. Maybe nothing had happened there at all.

And if Americans thought that, if the enemy thought that, it was fine with Gurley. He fought his war on two fronts, as he now explained. On one side were the Japanese, their balloons, and the prevailing winds. On the other side, the American press and public, whom he feared and loathed even more. The greatest danger these balloons posed, Gurley insisted repeatedly, was not that they would kill a few civilians or set ablaze a few acres, but rather that they would be discovered by the wrong sort of people-in particular, members of the press, who would inevitably sensationalize the issue. And why not? Japanese bombs were raining down on North America almost daily now, and not many Americans-though surely more than Gurley's supposed fifty-knew what was happening.

Although there had been a few brief mentions of the balloons in the New York Times and elsewhere early on in the campaign, very little was known about the balloons at the time, and officials had quickly moved to smother any further coverage. Gurley told me his superiors had initially proposed sending out a general bulletin to editors nationwide, alerting them to the story, and then demanding that they not cover the story. Report any information they uncovered to the Army, but publish nothing.

As it happens, just such a blanket agreement was later struck. But when I told Gurley that this sounded like a sensible plan, his reply was quick.

“The best way to keep a secret is to tell as many people as possible?” Gurley said. I tensed for a fist or foot to come flying. “Tell as many journalists?” he pressed. “We all have a job,” he said. “Our job is to beat the enemy to a bloody pulp. Their job is to sell papers.” I stared at the ground. “So newsmen can choose. They can either be on our side or the enemy's.” Gurley had concocted his own response plan for balloon sightings. Get a recovery team there as quickly as possible and collect or destroy any piece of evidence that the balloon had arrived. If the initial spotters or witnesses were military, the follow-up was easy. Gurley ordered their silence and made job-specific threats to ensure it.

If the witnesses were civilian, the job became a little more involved. Depending on what they had seen-or thought they had seen-Gurley would either order their silence (and call on them to consider that silence a patriotic duty) or, more often, he would tell them the balloon was a U.S. Army weather balloon that had gone awry. He wouldn't go into details, or make the balloon's mission seem secret at all, figuring that the more he downplayed its importance, the less likely the witness would be to spread the news.

But now, Gurley's plan-indeed, his whole mission-was in jeopardy. He had been summoned to San Francisco by his superiors to discuss the progress of balloon interdiction efforts. Or rather, the decline of such efforts. Early on, the numbers of balloons spotted had climbed steadily, week after week. Then they had stabilized, and recently, had begun to decline. The question now was whether to scale back American efforts to track and recover balloons. After all, resources were needed elsewhere, especially as U.S. forces drew ever closer to Japan. Instead of soldiers, the U.S. would now rely on local authorities and private citizens to find and report balloons. The press ban would be lifted; a general alert would be issued.