Cutler-Twining memo

The Cutler-Twining memo is a single-page memorandum dated 14 July 1954, attributed to Robert Cutler, Special Assistant to President Dwight D. Eisenhower for National Security Affairs, and addressed to U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan F. Twining. Its few lines reschedule a meeting of an "NSC/MJ-12 Special Studies Project," said to have been set for the White House on 16 July 1954 — the only one of the Majestic documents to surface from inside a federal archive rather than through an anonymous leak. Unlike the Eisenhower Briefing Document, which arrived on an anonymous roll of film in 1984, the Cutler-Twining memo was found in 1985 by William Moore and Jaime Shandera in a box of recently declassified National Security Council records at the National Archives, and its standing as an independent find made it briefly the strongest apparent corroboration of Majestic 12.

Discovery

Following a series of anonymous tips, Moore and Shandera searched the just-declassified boxes of Record Group 341 at the National Archives and, after several days, located the single sheet referring to the MJ-12 Special Studies Project in mid-1954. Because the memo was recovered from official custody rather than received in the mail, supporters initially presented it as the one MJ-12 paper with a verifiable chain of provenance.

Authenticity

The find was quickly challenged. Kevin D. Randle cited Ed Reese of the Military Reference Branch of the National Archives, who stated that the document had not been identified during any prior declassification review of the box in which it appeared, and noted that the memo bears a "Top Secret Restricted" marking — an impossible mixture of two distinct security classifications that did not co-exist under 1954 doctrine. The sheet was an unsigned carbon, with no registration or routing data of the kind a genuine National Security Council memorandum of the period would have carried. Philip J. Klass added that on 14 July 1954, the date the memo purports to have been written, Cutler was out of the country, touring military installations in Europe and North Africa.

Even researchers broadly sympathetic to the documents, including Jerome Clark and Mark Rodeghier, concluded that the Cutler-Twining memo had been "deliberately planted in the National Archives by person or persons unknown." Stanton Friedman, who defended much of the MJ-12 corpus, allowed that "whoever filmed the EBD and/or planted the CT was violating security," treating the absence of clean provenance as understandable rather than disqualifying.

See also

• Majestic 12
• Majestic documents
• Eisenhower Briefing Document
• Nathan Twining
• Robert Cutler
• National Security Council

References

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