Jim, Maybe you know that the FBI offers about 256 pages of docouments related to Nikola Tesla on its FOIA Web site: HTTP://www.fbi.gov/foipa/hisfigs.htm#tesla They are in two large PDF files of 4.8MB and 5.8MB. In case you've not seen them here's a brief: None of the papers are by Tesla himself, and most relate to various inquiries about Tesla's "missing papers," based on O'Neil's book claim that the FBI confiscated Tesla's papers and effects shortly after his death. The FBI claims that it was the Alien Property Office which had Tesla's effects and that the FBI had not been involved. Several focus on Tesla's famous "Death Ray" of the 1940s, with requests for access to the scientific papers on it, or warn of its possible use by foreign enemies. To most the FBI sends a standard disavowal. However, one is of interest: a Feb 1981 inquiry by the Defense Department which stated in a then-classified paragraph: "(C) We believe that certain of Tesla's papers may contain basic principles which would be of considerable value to ongoing research within the DoD." The FBI answers that it never had Tesla's papers but reports that a review of those at the Alien Property Office by an MIT scientific team found that none of the papers contained significant scientific information of national security interest. Yet, the FBI goes on, the Alien Property Office told the FBI in the 1950s that in the only recorded visit to the Tesla archive in January 1943 (shortly after Tesla's death) an unidentified "Federal authority" microfilmed numerous papers, film whose whereabouts the FBI knows nothing. There's a bit more about electronic research at Wright Paterson AFB. And a DoD thank you letter on behalf of Dr. S. L. Zeiburg, Deputy Undersecretary (Strategic and Space Systems). A once-secret 1983 series investigated a claim that Margaret Cheney's biography of Tesla, "Tesla: Man Out of Time," points to national security threats based on allegations of Soviet development of his experiments using papers possibly obtained through his nephew, Sava Kosanovic, a high Yugoslav official. Many pages of Cheney's book marked at threatening passages on the "missing papers" are in the file.
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John Young