Harald Malmgren: real-world history vs. grandiose fantasy

By Douglas Dean Johnson

@ddeanjohnson on X and BlueSky

This article was originally published on May 20, 2025. It is an initial examination of certain public claims made by Harald B. Malmgren (1935-2025), one-time U.S. trade-representative-ambassador and big-time storyteller. Any substantive updates, corrections, or other revisions made after initial publication are noted in a chronological log at the end of this article. My gmail address is my full name, with periods between the names.

"Harald [Malmgren] is a hero who saved the world (and more than once)." – Jesse Michels, creator of American Alchemy Youtube channel, April 22, 2025

The portly, bushy-haired economist, brandishing his Oxford Ph.D, did have a certain charm, particularly while spinning stories that highlighted his own role in the matter at hand, and he most certainly had a powerful intellect. He also usually got what he wanted. His reputed powers of manipulation prompted one close friend to buy a copy of The Prince to understand why Malmgren was always being described as Machiavellian. – from the book Trade Warriors, by Steve Dryden (Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 164)

"In 1981, as the Historian for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, I was assigned to listen to and evaluate the classified Cuban Missile Crisis tapes in preparation for their eventual release. I heard all fifty-nine days of ExComm recordings, many other related tapes, and read hundreds of relevant documents. Harald Malmgren's name was never heard nor cited. Malmgren's claim to have been appointed as 'liaison between McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and JFK' is ludicrous. There is no such record at the JFK Library on tape or on paper." – Sheldon M. Stern, Ph.D., historian for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library from 1977 to 2000, author of Averting the Final Failure: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003), The Week the World Stood Still (2005), and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality (2012) (email to author).

"Sorry, I never heard of him [Harald Malmgren] and did not write about him in The Color of Truth." – Kai Bird, author of The Color of Truth, an acclaimed biography of McGeorge Bundy and his brother (May 3, 2025, email to author)

"I searched our databases, documents, and Sargent Shriver’s speeches, and found no references to Harald Malmgren....I should mention that I’ve personally looked through thousands of Sargent Shriver’s letters, and I can say that Mr. Shriver was very good at tracking and staying in touch with friends and colleagues throughout the years, but I could find no record of Malmgren." – Lucy Di Rosa, Ph.D., executive director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute (email to author)

On small paving stones of truth, the late Harald B. Malmgren (1935-2025) built lofty towers of grandiose fantasy.

In a journalistic investigation so far extending more than four months, I gathered numerous documents that discredit stories that Malmgren told in 2024-25– stories that have been widely circulated on YouTube, X, reddit and other social-media platforms, newspaper tabloids, UFO-oriented blogs, and NewsNation, a national news and opinion network owned by Nexstar Media Group.

Detailed FBI files declassified in May 2025 in response to my Freedom of Information Act requests contain incontrovertible evidence that Malmgren fabricated some of his principal 2024-25 claims about the jobs and authorities he held, and the activities he engaged in, during 1962-64. For example: the FBI files prove that Malmgren never held a security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, as he repeatedly claimed in posts on X and in interviews– a key component of his 2024-25 UFO-adventure tales.

Federal job applications and job histories signed and certified by Malmgren himself in 1963, 1964, 1967, and 1970 are among the other documents I obtained that provide compelling evidence that some of the widely circulated Malmgren stories were fabrications.

In his 2024-2025 stories, Malmgren claimed that in 1962 he was personally recruited by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, was immediately made a key personal aide ("whiz kid") to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and McNamara's personal liaison to the National Security Council. Malmgren said that as McNamara's personal agent, he directly faced off against USAF Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay at a critical moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an exchange that Malmgren promoters insist prevented a nuclear catastrophe. Malmgren said that he held a "Q" clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and that thus empowered, he personally investigated for President Kennedy a UFO knocked down by a U.S. nuclear test in October, 1962 and recovered in part by the AEC. [1][2]

All of those claims were fiction.

By the time of Malmgren's death on February 13, 2025, at the age of 89, Malmgren and his promoters had drawn a picture of an extraordinary individual who had been instrumental in multiple matters of world-shaking consequence over a span of generations. A long post on X by Jesse Michels, creator of the American Alchemy YouTube channel, posted April 22, 2025, distilled many elements of that narrative; I have reproduced that post in its entirely near the end of this article, as part of APPENDIX B. In it, Michels asserted, "Harald is a hero who saved the world (and more than once)."

Well, no, Harald didn't save the world--no, not even once. He did once do his part to save the Japanese whaling industry, for $100,000/year– but I digress.

In the real world, Harald Malmgren was a very much less consequential figure than he led Michels and some others to believe. A half-century ago, Malmgren was for a time a very significant player in one particular sphere of federal public policy: trade policy. After that, for decades he was a successful consultant and lobbyist, dealing with trade and other international economic issues. He also was associated during different periods with various think tanks, institutes, councils, and government advisory committees. He was a professor or lecturer at several universities, dealing with the same subjects.

And that is pretty much it. Malmgren was really not a "senior advisor" or any kind of advisor to any U.S. presidents, except on trade policy to Presidents Nixon and Ford. He was never an advisor or aide to President Kennedy. He was not a roving super-statesman or secret-mission ambassador, not a behind-the-scenes intergenerational power broker. He was not influential in the development of ballistic missile defense plans, nor an expert on nuclear strategy– indeed, his serious involvement in defense-related issues, as such, was fairly marginal and short-lived. He did not demonstrate (or, until recently, claim) any special training or competence in any field of science or engineering.

There are weighty reasons to be extremely skeptical of Malmgren's 2024-2025 representations that he had a close relationship with, and received extensive shocking revelations from, Richard Bissell, Jr., a famous figure in the history of the CIA.

Malmgren's explicit claim to have become a member of the Kennedy Family "inner circle" through a close association with President Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, was contradicted in communications to me from Shriver's son, Mark Kennedy Shriver; from the executive director of Shriver's foundation, Dr. Lucy di Rosa; and from Shriver's biography, Scott Stossel. And for the most part, this was the pattern I found wherever I went to check the more interesting Malmgren claims: Harald who?

Overall, it is a curious tale, for Harald Malmgren was generally regarded as a highly intelligent man– albeit also often perceived as egotistical and abrasive– and he had some substantial accomplishments in his chosen field (international economics, trade policy). Many men in their later years would have looked back on those genuine accomplishments with satisfaction. But for whatever reason, for Harald Malmgren his true history apparently was much less than what he felt he deserved to be remembered for. Some years ago he began to make up an alternative, much more exciting version of his life– stories in which he played a vastly more important role in world affairs than the mundane, respectable reality. Over time and with encouragement, those stories multiplied, and they grew ever more self-glorifying. With each new revelation, enthusiasts encouraged him to tell more. He proved more than willing to oblige.

HARALD MALMGREN AND UFO-ALIEN CLAIMS

It was only near the end of his life, in 2024, that Harald Malmgren for the first time embraced stories involving UFOs and aliens, and this brought him a substantial new audience. I have seen no evidence that Malmgren ever really possessed any special knowledge about UFOs or aliens. Indeed, he publicly cautioned as recently as August 2024 that he "cannot be treated as a source of confirmation of UAP info."

However, before long Malmgren apparently "read the room," and gave the "UFO Twitter" audience what it craved. Tweet by tweet, conversation by conversation, he "remembered" more and more. Before the end, he had dutifully "corroborated" a number of pre-existing stories related to UFOs and alien happenings. In his long X post of April 22, 2025 (shown in Apprendix C), Michels said that Harald's eldest daughter, Pippa Malmgren, "teased the truth from her father and helped him come forward with his critically important insights."

During late 2024 and early 2025, Malmgren attributed a panoply of UFO-alien-related revelations to renown early CIA official Richard Bissell (1909-1994). Those attributions have been proclaimed by some enthusiasts as "corroboration" of various UFO-alien stories, such as the claimed crash of a nonhuman craft in Italy in 1933 (Magenta crash), and the extended survival of an alien being associated with the Roswell Incident of 1947. But nothing is "corroborated" when a fabulist attaches himself to existing stories. We have not a word from the real Richard Bissell on any of these matters. The purported Bissell-Malmgren association is addressed in detail further down. [3]

I do not attempt to specifically address most of Malmgren's specific claims related to UFOs or aliens (other than a pre-existing theory that a UFO event happened during the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test of October 26, 1962, which I will discuss in detail a separate article). Since Malmgren engaged in gross fabrications about his jobs, authorities, and associations, it would be pure folly to place credence in any of his extraordinary claims. Any given UFO-alien account must stand or fall on other grounds.

THE ETHICS OF THE INQUIRY: VOICES OF THE DEAD

When I started this project in January 2025, I planned to seek an interview from Harald Malmgren before completing this article. However, Malmgren died on February 13, 2025. Since then, YouTube content producer Jesse Michels has posted several videos featuring the Malmgren tales, including a 3.8-hour video posted on YouTube on April 22, 2025, based largely on a long interview with Malmgren. At this writing on May 19, 2025, the video had garnered 660,000 views.

On April 24, 2025, Michels, upset that Wikipedia editors had removed some unsubstantiated claims from the encyclopedia's previously weakly sourced profile of Malmgren, said on X, "This man served his country for decades and just passed away. He can’t defend himself. It’s completely shameless."

I express no position here on the details of changes in Malmgren's Wikipedia profile (nor did I play any direct or indirect role in the Wikipedia revisions that upset Michels). But the premise of Michels' closing objection is palpably absurd. Harald Malmgren made multiple public assertions that, if true, would have the most profound public policy implications– among these, the claim that the U.S. government gained possession of nonhuman craft in 1933, 1962, and perhaps other times, with the unavoidable corollary that the government has lied about this to the public and their elected representatives for decades. Very important, if true. To imply that the basic credibility and credentials of the person making such claims should be shielded from scrutiny or vigorous challenge, merely because the claimant has died, is antithetical to fundamental requirements historical research and investigative journalism. It is also a laughably transparent attempt to deflect serious scrutiny of the unsubstantiated Malmgren claims that Michel and others are busily promoted to large audiences.

I would say this to Jesse Michels and other promoters of Malmgren's ahistorical claims: Harald Malmgren hijacked the personas of real people to serve as characters in his self-glorifying fantasy stories– Richard Bissell, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Curtis LeMay, and Sargent Shriver, among others. Each of these men "served his country for decades," at least by his own lights. Malmgren manufactured fan fiction about these men only long after they were dead – when they "can't defend" themselves against Malmgren's counterfeits. Malmgren put words into the mouths of these men that they never said, and imputed to them actions that they never took. Those fabrications were indefensible. They will not go unchallenged.

I plan to publish at least three additional articles related to the article that you are reading; each will be live-linked below when published:

-- Bluegill Triple Prime: Did a nuclear test knock down a nonhuman craft in 1962? The theory that the Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test of October 26, 1962 knocked down a nonhuman craft was developed and publicized a couple of years before Malmgren attached himself to any UFO stories. But did the UFO event itself really happen? This article will be an in-depth look at that question, incorporating some documents that I think have never previously been presented in association with the case.

-- Harald Malmgren saves the world: a fantasy set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since at least 2018, Malmgren told various versions of an ahistorical story in which, as the personal aide of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Malmgren faced down USAF Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the presence of top military generals, and (his admirers say) saved the world from nuclear war. This article will make the case that nothing resembling this episode ever occurred.

-- Harald Malmgren: White House UFO investigator? This article will take a closer look at Harald Malmgren's claim that as a key McNamara-White House-JFK aide, he investigated the knockdown and recovery of a nonhuman craft in 1962, that he touched pieces of it in the company of Lawrence Preston Gise, that the alien stuff spoke to him in his mind, and so forth.

SPECIFIC HARALD MALMGREN CLAIMS EXAMINED IN THIS ARTICLE

Despite the length of this article, only a fraction of the documents that I have assembled are presented here. There are many dubious Malmgren claims that I have not touched. Perhaps there will be future article that address other specific claims (in additional to the three satellite articles already listed above), should that be necessary.

In this particular article I have elected to examine, in the light of pertinent documents and statements by subject matter experts, a selection of ten specific Harald Malmgren claims, listed immediately below, and denoted by companion numbered bullet points in the main text. The claims:

• 1. That Harald Malmgren, upon obtaining his doctorate from Oxford University in 1961, was such a singular star that Cornell University offered him a newly endowed chair in mathematics and engineering, thereby allowing him to skip starting out as a lowly "assistant professor," but rather "start at the top."
• 2. That Harald Malmgren "was one of the first people on Earth to break the four-minute mile, after Roger Bannister," and "could repeatedly break the four-minute mile in his 20s."
• 3. That McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to President Kennedy, called Malmgren in 1962 to recruit him to work as one of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's group of close associates, known informally but widely as the "whiz kids."
• 4. That Malmgren's real-world employment starting in July 1962 as an economics researcher and analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a Pentagon-affiliated private think tank, was merely "a paperwork formality," and that he was actually immediately empowered to serve as McNamara's personal liaison to Bundy and to the National Security Council, and spent his days working on missions of the highest sensitivity, such as calming down the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Malmgren said: "I was appointed liaison between McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and JFK– I mean, pretty critical job."
• 5. That in 1962, Malmgren held a "Q" clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, allowing him access to nuclear secrets, and empowering him to lead the White House investigation into the details of a October 1962 nonhuman-craft (UFO) knockdown and recovery.
• 6. That Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made Malmgren a leader in developing plans for a ballistic missile defense system, and that Malmgren's ideas were a major factor in the development of missile-defense thinking.
• 7. That Malmgren was an expert on nuclear issues, later closely associated on such matters with famous nuclear strategist Herman Kahn.
• 8. That Malmgren had a close relationship with Richard Bissell, Jr., one of the storied leaders of the early CIA, who imparted to Malmgren many amazing secrets of nonhuman visitation and other things.
• 9. That Malmgren was "part of the clan" and "an accepted inner-circle person" in the eminent Kennedy family, due to a close relationship with President Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, who "talked to me all the time."
• 10. That Malmgren was "senior advisor to four presidents."

A CHALLENGE TO MALMGREN-FANTASY DEFENDERS

As of the day before this article's initial publication on May 20, 2025, advocates for the ten Malmgren claims listed above have never published any substantial contemporary documentation that supports any one of the claims listed above, so far as I know. No contemporary government documents, no contemporary credible press accounts, no contemporary private correspondence– not so much as a Christmas party invitation from Richard Bissell.

By "contemporary documentation," I mean authenticated documents produced during the general time period that the remarkable associations or remarkable events are said to have taken place– let's say, generally, at least within 10 or 15 years of a purported event.

Some platforms (e.g., News Nation, the UK Daily Mail, a number of UFO-oriented YouTube channels, Christopher Sharp's Liberation Times blog, etc.) have so far transmitted Malmgren's extraordinary claims without any apparent significant factchecking, much less any searching historical scrutiny. YouTuber Jesse Michels, in particular, has built up Malmgren into a prodigy from childhood in multiple fields of human endeavor, sought out by various historical figures who recognized him as a extraordinary individual– not only those already mentioned, but also Karl Compton, Anatoly Dobrynin, Vladimir Putin, and others. It would be tiresome to catalog these unsubstantiated and mostly implausible claims of remarkable relationships and encounters, but I would eagerly scrutinize any perceived contemporary documentation on such matters that may come to any reader's attention. I challenge promoters of the Malmgren mythology to produce such documents, whether from Malmgren's personal archives or elsewhere.

KEY DOCUMENTS PROVIDED HERE

Among the most important primary documents that I have uncovered or assembled, referenced and embedded in this article, are the following:

• Malmgren FBI Papers: This PDF consists of 33 pages of FBI files declassified on May 9, 2025, in response to my Freedom of Information Act request. It includes two iterations of Standard Form 86 (Security Investigation Data for Sensitive Position), certified by Malmgren under penalty of law on January 28, 1970, and August 25, 1971, swearing under legal penalties to his security-clearance history, employment history, and education history (among other things). It also contains FBI reports dated February 26, 1970, and March 11, 1970, summarizing the findings of FBI field investigations undertaken in connection with Malmgren's trade-negotiation work, first with the State Department and then with the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations. Information in these documents disproves a number of Malmgren's 2024-25 key claims about his 1962-64 activities. In addition to the embedded PDF, I have also displayed as .jpg images eight key pages – the complete Standard Form 86, Security Investigation Data for Sensitive Position, submitted and certified by Harald Malmgren under penalties of law on August 25, 1971– in Appendix A to this article.

• Two iterations of U.S. Civil Service Standard Form 57, Application for Federal Employment, signed and certified by Harald Malmgren in 1963 and 1964. Standard Form 57 was a detailed general federal job application form. The applicant certified by his signature that "all of the statements made in this application are true, complete, and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief and are made in good faith," under a warning that a false answer could be grounds for prosecution under 18 U.S. Code Sec. 1001 (the False Statements Act). Malmgren filled out and signed this form twice, on March 24, 1963, and on October 8, 1964. I have embedded both of those documents below, with only Malmgren's Social Security number redacted.

• U.S. Civil Service Standard Form 161, "Executive Inventory Summary," 1967. This was a very detailed questionnaire in which certain higher-grade federal employees responded to numerous questions intended to create an overall profile of their areas of expertise, credentials, and interests, to help match up skill sets with jobs throughout the government. This document does not contain Malmgren's signature, but it is part of his Official Personnel File, was dated in what appears to be his hand on June 28, 1967, and is without doubt his authentic submission. I have embedded the entire document; only his Social Security number has been redacted.

• U.S. Civil Service Commission Standard Form 171, "Personal Qualifications Statement," 1970. This was a shorter form signed and certified by Harald Malmgren on January 29, 1970. I have included it because it is later than some of the other documents and contains information about his position, starting July 1969, as a Senior Fellow for the Overseas Development Council, a private organization.

THE TEN MALMGREN CLAIMS LISTED ABOVE, ADDRESSED IN NUMBERED ORDER

● 1. THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY "START AT THE TOP" CLAIM

In his January 2025 interview with Jesse Michels, Malmgren said this about the period immediately after he completed work on his doctorate at Oxford University.

Anyway, so going back to Oxford: I finished up there [in 1961]. And there was a bidding war, like an NBA or National Football League bidding on graduates. So MIT and Stanford and Harvard and some others, Princeton, offered me a post. And Cornell said, "We'll trump the others. We'll offer you a new chair, just endowed now. So you can bypass the normal process of seven years from your ‘assistant professor’ and ‘associate professor’ eventually. You can start at the top." So I said, "Okay. I accept." And I came to Cornell with Pippa's mother.

Malmgren's self-glorifying account of Cornell creating a full professorship for him to step into was demonstrably pure fiction.

The budgets for the Cornell Economics Department, approved by the Board of Trustees of Cornell University for 1961-62 and 1962-63, both show that Malmgren did not "start at the top" in the Cornell Economics department, but where you would expect – at the bottom. Both budgets listed Malmgren as holding the lowest rank (assistant professor), at a budgeted salary of $7,500 for the first year and $8,500 for the following year (if he had stayed), about half of the "at the top" salaries. (The designation of a bottom-tier teaching slot as "Evans Prof." was an entry-level slot that was not attached uniquely to Malmgren; it continued to be exist after his departure.) [4]

But Malmgren was not content merely to give himself a retroactive promotion in 2024-25. His lie appeared in an even more elaborate form in a stenographic profile titled “The Career of Dr. Harald Malmgren: Learning and Influencing America in Change,” written by his friend Robbin Laird, dated June 7, 2024.

At the start of his academic career Malmgren was appointed to the Galen Stone Joint Chair in Mathematical Economics in the Department of Engineering and in the College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, serving 1961-62... a new chair in mathematical economics was created for him. As Harald noted, "They asked me to take the chair. I did not have to be an assistant professor and progress that way."

Fascinating. So it was not just any endowed chair, but the Galen Stone endowed chair. Galen L. Stone (1862–1926) was an American financier and philanthropist. Now, here is a difficulty: There is not now, nor has there ever been, a Galen Stone chair at Cornell. But there is a famous Galen Stone endowed chair at Harvard University. It is the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade chair.

This Harvard chair has existed for about a century, and it has been occupied by some very prestigious international trade economists. Malmgren spent half a year at Harvard in 1958, when he was in his early 20s, and of course he later spent much of his life dealing with international trade. He never taught at Harvard– but in the fantasy past he created in his late years – the one he related to people like Robbin Laird and Jesse Michels– he just moved that famous chair to Cornell, and he placed himself it in.

I inquired of the archivist at Cornell and received this response: "I cannot find any connection between Galen L. Stone and Cornell University. The 1961-62 Announcement for the College of Engineering doesn't list Malmgren as faculty. That is an oddly specific claim, I can only assume they had Malmgren confused with someone else."

No, the only confusion occurs when people fail to distinguish between the historical Harald Malmgren and the "Walter Mitty" version of Malmgren who emerged in later years.

Revealingly, Malmgren's March 24, 1963 federal job application set forth none of the later fictional claims about Cornell: In 1963, he affirmed merely what the Cornell documents actually show: that he had been an "assistant professor" in the Cornell Department of Economics. Under "Description of Work," he wrote, "Teaching Economics (Industrial Organization and Economic Policy, Introductory Economics)." Malmgren wrote that he left Cornell after ten months for "Better job, higher pay, work in Washington, DC." (No mention of McGeorge Bundy.) The 1970 FBI report also lists Malmgren merely as an assistant professor at Cornell. It is a crime to lie to the FBI, but it is not a crime to lie to wide-eyed podcasters and content-producers.

Speaking of Cornell: The declassified file on the FBI's 1970 field investigation of Malmgren reveals mixed reviews from Malmgren's former colleagues in the Cornell Economics Department. There seemed to be general agreement that he was a good economist. However, from an interview conducted by the Bureau of Personal Investigations of the Civil Service Commission in 1965, in connection with Malmgren's STR work, the FBI quoted a decidedly mixed review from Frank H. Golay, the professor who chaired the Cornell Economics Department during Malmgren's year there.

He described Dr. Malmgren as a very successful teacher who enjoyed a good professional reputation. He added that Dr. Malmgren was efficient and thorough, and stated he was resourceful and responsible in planning and coordinating his work. He furnished favorable comments concerning Dr. Malmgren's character, loyalty, integrity, morals, and conduct. Dr. Golay reportedly furnished the following additional comments: "I would say that his capacity for administration is not extremely high, but as an economist his performance would be very successful. At times, he had difficulty in communicating with his contemporaries, as he has an arrogant nature. He was somewhat contemptuous of his colleagues, and tended to be pretentious of his capabilities. I would say that his performance amounted to approximately one-half of his claimed ability. However, I feel that he has the essential qualifications to perform his duties successfully."

Another Cornell economics professor, George Adams, "stated Dr. Malmgren was a vain and arrogant person who was disliked by his students at Cornell University. He advised he considered him to be a poor teacher. He said he would recommend Dr. Malmgren for a position of trust, but would not recommend him for a position in which he would be required to deal with people."

Interviews from people who had worked with Malmgren in Washington were also mixed. James E. Cross, secretary of the Institute for Defense Analysis, gave the FBI a uniformly positive review. Theodore R. Gates, Assistant Special Representative for Industry and Labor in the STR, said he had hired Malmgren in October 1964, regarded him as "extremely bright and a very hard worker who is dedicated and capable," but also "has a somewhat abrasive personality, in that he treats some individuals as inferiors and 'makes it clear' he desires to deal only with people in high positions."

However, the FBI received a highly positive recommendation from Harvard economics professor Thomas C. Schelling (1921-2016), who had taught Malmgren at Yale and had also been his associate at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Schelling characterized Malmgren as "a brilliant economist who is stable, productive, and responsible... 'first-rate' in every respect..." (Schelling's earlier September 1964 letter recommending Malmgren for a job in the STR is reproduced below in the section headed "Harald Malmgren during the Johnson Administration." Schelling went on to share the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics.)

The reader can read the FBI reports in total in the full PDF embedded in the "Key Documents Provided Here" section above.

● 2. MALMGREN AND THE FOUR-MINUTE MILE CLAIM

Near the end of the Jesse Michels video released on April 22, 2025, Michels said, "We even talked about the fact that Harald was one of the first people on Earth to break the four-minute mile, after Roger Bannister. Apparently Harald could repeatedly break the four-minute mile in his 20s."

Well, maybe so, maybe so. Yet I was not surprised when I did not find Malmgren's name on the chronological list of 732 Americans who had broken the four-minute mark as of December 2, 2023, maintained by Track & Field News. Nor does his name appear on a world-wide list of 1,755 "sub-4" athletes recorded as of June 6, 2022 by the National Union of Track Statisticians (NUTS) in the United Kingdom.

So, I would like to see some evidence. An old yellow clipping from a campus newspaper, perhaps...? A certificate from some recognized track and field association?

● 3. THE McGEORGE BUNDY RECRUITMENT CLAIM (1962)

In an 2024 interview conducted by his friend Robbin Laird, Malmgren said, "I got a personal call from the White House by McGeorge Bundy (National Security Advisor to President Kennedy) to invite me to come to work for the Administration as part of McNamara's team....In formal paper work I was hired to work at the Institute for Defense Analyses, but that was a formality as my assignments were to do official tasks for the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense on a variety of defense issues..." (From "The Career of Dr. Harald Malmgren: Learning and Influencing America in Change," by Robbin Laird, June 7, 2024, embedded below.

Laird's profile is useful in documenting some of Harald Malmgren's claims as of mid-2024, but otherwise of little use, since it amounts to mere stenography, pointing to no sources other than Harald and Pippa Malmgren, and Malmgren's original largely unsourced profile on Wikipedia.

In 2017, Malmgren told a writer for the Irish Times, “I was a superstar academic in those days. I was like being somebody who was the number one draft for the NFA. Of course, I did not think of myself that way but they decided they needed me.” (The Irish Times profile, another textbook example of stenography as "journalism," is embedded below.)

Malmgren asserted that on arrival in Washington, Secretary of Defense McNamara immediately assigned him to serve as McNamara's personal liaison to Bundy and the National Security Council. Malmgren told Jesse Michels in February 2025: "I was appointed liaison between McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and JFK– I mean, pretty critical job."

The President presides over the National Security Council. Bundy's formal title was "Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs," or what we now call the National Security Advisor. He ran the staff of the National Security Council, setting agendas, filtering options, and to a substantial degree controlling access to the President on national security issues. Thus, if a Secretary of Defense had a personal liaison to the National Security Council, that liaison would interact a lot with the National Security Advisor.

It is possible that Malmgren had some acquaintance with Bundy, who was dean of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University from 1953 until 1961. Malmgren attended Harvard for just one-half year (September 1958 to January 1959). (Claims sometimes encountered to a longer Harvard association are not supported in the documents.) However, I have failed to find any evidence that the two men actually had any personal connection. Bundy was not mentioned as a reference or otherwise on the federal job applications that Malmgren signed in 1963 and 1964. On the 1963 application, Malmgren said he left his position as an assistant professor at Cornell University in 1962 to get "better job, higher pay, work in Washington, DC." Notably, Malmgren did not write that he left Cornell because he had been personally asked to take a job in the Kennedy Administration by the President's National Security Advisor, although that certainly would have been quite a resume-enhancer.

Bundy's papers are archived at the JFK Presidential Library, a component of the National Archives and Records Administration. Some of them are still classified. At my request, professional archivists searched the library's extensive finding aids and correspondence indexes on the Bundy material. They found no references at all to Harald Malmgren.

Kai Bird authored a well-reviewed 2000 biography The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy—Brothers in Arms. (Bird later won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006 for coauthoring American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.) I emailed to Bird statements by Malmgren about his purported relationship with McGeorge Bundy. Bird replied, "Sorry, I never heard of him and did not write about him in the Color of Truth."

McGeorge Bundy authored Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, published in 1988. Although not an autobiography, the book contains a lot of information drawn from to Bundy's years as National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Malmgren's name appears nowhere in its 735 pages, including the index containing hundreds of names.

Those who continue to assert a Bundy-Malmgren connection are invited to produce contemporary documentation from any source, including Harald Malmgren's personal files.

● 4. McNAMARA CLAIMS: THAT MALMGREN'S JOB AT THE I.D.A. WAS JUST A "FORMALITY," THAT MALMGREN WAS A McNAMARA "WHIZ KID," THAT MALMGREN WAS DESIGNATED AS McNAMARA's LIAISON TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL, ETC.

After his arrival in Washington in July 1962, Malmgren was employed for three years as an economist (researcher, analyst) at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a private think tank that served as an analytical resource for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially (in that era) for the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG).

In 2024 Malmgren told his friend Robbin Laird that his IDA job as an economist was just "a paperwork formality," that he was really immediately assigned to the staff of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and that he was one of McNamara's "whiz kids" (the informal term widely applied to the team of close associates that McNamara brought with him into the Department of Defense, some longtime associates and some recruited after he accepted the post). Many of Malmgren's claims of remarkable encounters in 1962-63 flow from this foundational claim to a close personal association with McNamara. But the just-declassified 1970 FBI reports, and the federal job applications signed and certified by Harald Malmgren in March 1963 and October 1964, are damning testimony against the Malmgren claims of 2024-25.

In the fantasy tales, in the fall of 1962 young Malmgren is the personal representative of the Secretary of Defense to the National Security Council, keeping seasoned generals under control. He holds unlimited Q clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, and is handling matters of cosmic sensitivity for President Kennedy. In the fantasy, in November 1962 Malmgren is briefed by Lawrence Preston Gise at Los Alamos (a regional director for the Atomic Energy Commission), handling nonhuman debris, receiving telepathic messages in his mind from an alien material. Moreover, busy young Malmgren is tasked by Secretary McNamara with coming up with a viable plan to protect the U.S.A. from the new-fangled intercontinental ballistic missiles. Yes, in this script, young Malmgren really had his hands full! Surely, the 27-year-old economist, in the middle of all this excitement and ultra-important taskings, would not have wanted to be doing anything else in the world.

Yet, in March 1963, supposedly smack dab in the middle of all that, Malmgren filled out an application to try to get a side job as a part-time consultant in economics for the State Department. Under legal penalties, he certified his actual job responsibilities at the think-tank where he had been working since July, 1962: "Economic and strategic analysis of active defense; research on military aid and economic development, the balance of payments and foreign policy, etc."

There is really no mystery here. In the real world of 1962-63, Malmgren had nothing really to do with the President, the National Security Advisor, the National Security Council, or handling alien artifacts. He was crunching numbers at the IDA, for $17,400 per annum. Certainly, the IDA was a support-contractor for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)– but the OSD was even then a sizeable bureaucracy, employing something on the order of 1,000-2,000 people, the vast majority of whom probably never got within shouting distance of Secretary McNamara. When Malmgren on his January 29, 1970 "Personal Qualifications Statement" described his old job IDA as "Supervising studies on economic and strategic defense problems, for office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff," that was a fair capsule description of the nature of contract work done by IDA – but a far cry from an assertion of a personal relationship with, or personal tasking by, Secretary McNamara.

On the same form, under "Reason for Leaving," Malmgren succinctly answered, "Better job."

It is perfectly natural that an intelligent and ambitious young man, with growing family responsibilities, would want to move up. And move up he did, even while still at the IDA – he was smart, ambitious, a hard worker. By the time of his second federal job application in October 1964, he had gained supervisory responsibilities over the IDA Economics Group, and his IDA salary had been raised to $19,200. He was supplementing that salary by writing essays (on economics) for the New Republic ($1000/year) and lecturing at Georgetown University ($2000 a year). It sounds to me like the real Harald was pretty busy with all that, with little time left over for masterminding continental missile defense, overseeing White House investigations into an extraterrestrial presence, or receiving weekly briefings at Richard Bissell's home about the Knights of Malta and all the rest.

The most expansive description by Malmgren of his 1962-64 duties at the IDA that I found was in an Executive Inventory Record that he submitted in June, 1967. It properly reflected Malmgren's status as head of the IDA Economics Group at the end of his 39-month stint at the IDA. Notable on this extended survey of Malmgren's background and skillsets is the lack of any reference to the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, or the White House (or to any training or expertise in any field of science or engineering).

Six decades later, the IDA itself apparently had difficulty finding any records on Malmgren. After several weeks, the IDA Corporate Communications office finally wrote, "We can confirm Dr. Malmgren's employment as an IDA researcher from 1962-64," and conveyed lack of more detailed documentation.

By the latter half of 1964, if not earlier, Malmgren was clearly focused on moving into full-time government employment, using his Ph.D in economics. His eye settled on a vacancy for an economic analyst in the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations, the office called "STR." Further down in his article, in the section devoted to the Johnson Administration, I provide more detail on the process of vetting involved in Malmgren obtaining that position, a GS-17 slot.

"Whiz Kid"

The first instance in which I encountered Malmgren referring to himself as a "whiz kid" was a passing reference in 1990. The term "whiz kid" was coined to describe a group of men, mostly in their 30s, whom Robert McNamara brought in with him to help him reform the Department of Defense. There have been many books and scholarly papers written about Robert McNamara's tenure as Secretary of Defense and about his team of close associates. Since nobody was issued an official government ID that said "whiz kid," the claim "I was a whiz kid" is a bit slippery to refute. But I have yet to find a single book or paper covering McNamara's years as Secretary of Defense that even mentions Harald Malmgren (not counting very recent writings by enthusiasts who are merely repeating the unsupported Malmgren claims), including books written by bona fide McNamara "whiz kids."

For example: Two of the most prominent "whiz kids" were Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith. They co-authored a book titled How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969. It was originally published in 1971, and republished in 2005 by the RAND Corporation. The 2005 edition, embedded below, is 396 pages long. It contains extensive information drawn from the McNamara/whiz kid era, including abundant material on such issues as the development of missile defense systems. The name "Malmgren" appears nowhere in the book.

Another example: A book titled The McNamara Ascendency was published in 2006, written by three noted military historians. The volume covers in exhaustive detail the first three and one-half years of McNamara's 7-year tenure as Secretary of Defense. The work is 711 pages long. Malmgren's name appears nowhere.

It seems clear enough that Malmgren's tales of being assigned by McNamara to be "his guy" at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council were pure fabrication or delusion. The question remains, however, whether during Malmgren's real-world work at IDA, he had any substantial contact with McNamara. Malmgren surely would have had interactions with some political appointees at the Department of Defense, including a few "whiz kids," especially after moving up to head the IDA Economics Group during the latter part of his three-year stint at the IDA. But I would expect that those professional interactions would have been at a levels far below that of the Secretary of Defense.

If Malmgren had actually done any tasks assigned by McNamara, even as a think-tank employee, one would expect to see McNamara's name somehow worked into Malmgren's federal job applications in 1963 and 1964, even if Malmgren had been constrained from describing details of his work. After all, McNamara was a very influential cabinet official, and he remained Secretary of Defense until February 29, 1968. But the highest-ranking Pentagon official mentioned on any of Malmgren's three job-application documents from this period (1963, 1964, and 1967) was Alain C. Enthoven, already mentioned above. Enthoven was at the time the deputy assistant secretary of defense (comptroller). A deputy assistant secretary is a position four levels below the Secretary of Defense. Still, Enthoven actually was a "whiz kid" personal associate of McNamara [5], and Enthoven apparently knew Malmgren well enough to authorize the use of Enthoven's name as a reference (both men were economists), although I would not make too much of that little courtesy.

One might speculate that young analyst Harald Malmgren met Robert McNamara at some point, shook his hand, maybe had a snapshot taken. But to date we have seen no evidence of even such a superficial encounter in 1962-64, much less the highly fanciful right-hand-man relationship Malmgren dreamed up decades later.

In later years, the paths of McNamara and Malmgren crossed a little bit, but I found no evidence of close association. From April 1, 1968 until June 30, 1981, McNamara was president of the World Bank, while Malmgren was engaged with international trade and resource issues as a consultant and in association with different private groups. Occasional contact would have been entirely unremarkable given the types of organizations that the two men were involved in. However, I found no specific evidence of direct contact other than Malmgren being listed twice in McNamara's phone log, in March and April of 1979.

Incidentally, in 2017, the last of the real McNamara "whiz kids" died at the age of 101. His name was Arjay Miller.

● 5. CLAIM THAT MALMGREN HELD A FROM THE ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION ("Q" CLEARANCE)

Going back to the 1940s, nuclear-related secrets have been largely governed by a system of classification that is somewhat segregated from the classification system applied to other military and intelligence matters. In 1962, nuke-related clearances were administered by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (nowadays, by the Department of Energy).

[As an excellent and highly readable history on this regulatory system, I highly recommend Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, by Alex Wellerstein (University of Chicago Press, 2021)]

In 2024 tweets, Malmgren repeatedly claimed that in 1962 he had an unrestricted Q clearance from the AEC. That claim was a lie, invented to serve as an element in his tale about investigating a UFO-knockdown on behalf of President Kennedy. He repeated the claim in interviews, including the early 2025 Jesse Michels interview, in which he said, "[T]hey gave me a blanket Q clearance. Q was for anything nuclear weapons."

These 2024-25 claims were pure fabrication on Malmgren's part. The Standard Form 86 that Malmgren submitted to the FBI on January 28, 1970 required him to list and certify, under legal penalties, all of his previous security clearance investigations. He mentioned none from the Atomic Energy Commission. It would have been inexplicably self-defeating for Malmgren to omit mention of such a high credential. Moreover, it also would have been a crime for Malmgren to have concealed such an obviously material fact. But I think we can be quite confident that 1970 Malmgren did not inexplicably lie on his 1970 Form 86. It was 2024-25 Malmgren who did the lying about the AEC "Q" clearance.

It is a crime to lie to the FBI, but it is not a crime to lie to podcasters or YouTube content creators.

In its final report on the 1970 field investigation, dated March 11, 1970, the FBI summarized Malmgren's complete history of security clearances, as shown in the extract below (the complete report is embedded under "Key Documents Provided Here"),

To summarize: I assert that the declassified 1970-71 FBI documents constitute definitive proof that Harald Malmgren was lying in 2024-2025 when he claimed he held a Q clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1962 (or at any time).

Because the AEC/Q clearance was a fan fiction invented for his new UFO-alien fan club in 2024, there also was also no mention of a Q clearance on Malmgren's signed and certified federal job applications in 1963 and 1963.

Before obtaining the 1970-71 Malmgren FBI reports, I had filed a FOIA that required the National Archives and Records Administration to search the archival files of the Atomic Energy Commission for anything related to Malmgren or to any security-clearance application from the Institute for Defense Analyses during the pertinent time period. If they had found something, perhaps I would have had to pursue a declassification process, but that was not necessary, because not surprisingly they came up empty handed.

According to the 1970 FBI report, the first "Top Secret" clearance that Malmgren received was granted "by the Inspector of Naval Material, which is now DISCO." (DISCO refers to the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, which by the time the FBI agent was writing in 1970 had become the centralized office for processing and adjudicating personnel and facility security clearances for defense contractors under the National Industrial Security Program.) The Inspector of Naval Material was a component of the Navy that worked with defense contractors. Keep in mind that Malmgren's real-world job was to do economic research and analysis for the Institute for Defense Analyses, a think-tank contractor for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Inspector of Naval Material (INM) was part of the U.S. Navy’s Material Inspection Service, established to oversee the quality and compliance of materials and equipment procured for naval use. But, I do not think that means that Malmgren's economic research or analysis for IDA would have been confined only to Navy contracts. Rather, IDA probably just had an existing arrangement with INM to process routine security clearance requests for any IDA staff that had to handle any sensitive material. But a much deeper level of investigative scrutiny would have been required by the Atomic Energy Commission before it would have issued a Q clearance, including review by the AEC’s Personnel Security Board.

● 6. CLAIMS THAT MALMGREN WAS MAJOR PLAYER ON MISSILE DEFENSE

In the Jesse Michels January 2025 interview, Malmgren said that immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put him in charge of a group "to devise the outlines of an anti-missile system, so we can start anticipating the future." Malmgren went on to say that when a UFO was knocked down during a nuclear test, "I [got] a report, because I'm in charge of this new project."

Malmgren made it crystal clear in 2024 X posts that he was not just one low-ranking guy on some missile-defense committee– no, McNamara had made the 27-year-old the leader of this high-priority effort. Malmgren tweeted: "...in 1963 when I was leader of costing the design & build of 1st antimissile defense system for the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff]," and, "I was provided highest level classifications to lead DOD work on nuclear weapons & anti-missile defense," and, "[I was] leader of anti-missile projector [sic, meant "project"] for JCS."

In an undated podcast conducted by Harald's eldest daughter Pippa Malmgren, apparently recorded in the latter part of 2024, Harald Malmgren said, "I was asked by McNamara: 'We need you to consider building a system to defend ourselves from Soviet missiles– we need an anti-ballistic missile system. So, I want you to work with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, direct them. I'm appointing you chief of the economics [inaudible word] section of this new idea.'"

In a tribute to her father posted on February 24, 2025 (embedded in Appendix C), Pippa Malmgren said:

Malmgren oversaw many missile tests in these roles, including the controversial Blue Gill Triple Prime test which prompted both President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson to urgently visit Los Alamos and the Sandia Labs in December 1962.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was asked to formulate a strategy for preventing another such crisis in future...He proposed an Anti-Ballistic Missile System, arguing that this strategy would force the Soviet Union to spend roughly seven times more than the US on defense than it would cost the US to develop the system. It seems doubtful at the time that such a system could be made to work, but, he argued that this did not matter because the Soviets would still be forced to spend to defend themselves against it. Later, Russian officials claimed they could never get any intelligence on this ABM system. It had not occurred to them that it did not actually exist.

I am not questioning the sincerity of Pippa Malmgren's beliefs expressed above, but the notion that the Department of Defense suddenly became seriously interested in missile defense only after the Cuban Missile Crisis is completely divergent from the historical record. In reality, the Department, and the various military services, had extensive research and development programs focused on ballistic missile defense problems for many years before Harald Malmgren arrived in Washington.

A historical paper published by the Institute for Defense Analyses in 2003 said:

Finally, after the shock of Sputnik [in 1957], Secretary of Defense [Neil] McElroy [1957-59] brought some order to the process. When he established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), he gave it responsibility for providing unified direction and management of the antimissile programs and outer-space projects, as well as nuclear test detection.– "Science and Technology in Development Environments– Industrial and Department of Defense Case Studies," Institute for Defense Analyses Paper P-3853, November 2003, page XI-3.

A footnote added: "When ARPA was established [in 1958] it was assigned three Presidential Initiatives: space, nuclear test detection, and missile defense."

"Ballistic Missile Defense: Evolution and Current Thinking," a paper prepared for a U.S. Senate committee by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) in July 1993 began with this sentence:

The United States has been concerned about having an adequate defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles since the Soviets successfully tested one in August 1957.

At the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, I encountered a draft of a lengthy memo from Secretary McNamara to President Kennedy, dated November 20, 1962 (just after the Cuban Missile Crisis), which alone provided ample evidence of that missile defense was a well-developed Pentagon preoccupation. The first page of the memo mentioned that Congress had appropriated $384 million for ballistic missile defense development for Fiscal Year 1963, which began on October 1, 1962– weeks before the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The question of missile defense came up during 1963 U.S. Senate debates on the 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty. Questioned about the matter by Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT) at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on August 21, 1963, Dr. Harold Brown, director of Defense Research and Engineering, made it clear that missile defense had been a focus of high-level discussion among top-level defense officials for years.

So then: Ballistic missile defense had been a major national security since 1957, a priority matter addressed in Presidential Initiatives, creation of new Department of Defense components, think-tank reviews, and expensive competing development projects between military services– but in Harald Malmgren's fantasy world, it was a new initiative placed in the hands of a 27-year-old economist with no visible expertise in weapons systems, missiles, engineering, or even much administration. The patent absurdity of this grandiose claim should be self-evident.

However, given the high priority that the Department of Defense already afforded missile-defense and the number of people already working on it, it is plausible that Malmgren would have become tangentially involved in aspects of this issue during his three-year stint at IDA (1962-1964), with respect to the number-crunching aspects. A history of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) published in 1979 said that by early 1961, WSEG and IDA personnel were already participating in an "OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] antimissile system research advisory council..." It is certainly possible that Malmgren could have been assigned some role in such an ongoing group, but he would have been a very junior member. The declassified 1970 FBI file shows that IDA procured a TOP SECRET security clearance for Malmgren from a Navy component responsible for working with hardware contractors (then called the Inspector of Naval Material), and this presumably would have allowed him to participate in certain aspects of such a contract, although not Restricted Data concerning technical details of nuclear weapons.

During the Reagan Administration (1981-88), perhaps the single most intense and extended defense-policy debate was over Reagan's push to develop a missile defense system ("Star Wars"). Despite Malmgren's 2024 claim to have personally been put in charge of developing such a plan a two decades earlier, I have found no trace of Malmgren either participating in or being consulted about this subject during the 1980s.

Indeed, I have found Malmgren's name nowhere in literature dealing with the history of missile defense, either in declassified papers from that era accessible at the National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park, Maryland, or in papers or books on the history of the subject. However, my search into the extensive literature on missile defense was far from exhaustive, and I invite others to dig further; I am pretty confident that they will come up empty-handed as well.

Incidentally, from January to April of 1963, the time period when Malmgren wanted us to believe he was in charge of developing a missile defense plan, The New Republic magazine published five essays by Malmgren– all about economic issues. The New Republic published another economics essay by Malmgren in March of 1964. On his 1964 federal job application, Malmgren explained that he supplemented his annual income by $1,000 by writing the New Republic essays.

7. CLAIM THAT MALMGREN WAS EXPERT ON NUCLEAR ISSUES, ASSOCIATED WITH NOTED NUCLEAR-WAR STATEGIST HERMAN KAHN ON THE SUBJECT, ETC.

Some of Harald Malmgren's promoters have presented him as some sort of lifelong expert on nuclear weapons and nuclear warfighting strategy. This is another example of a boulder of fantasy tottering on a pebble of reality. I encountered few instances, after his three years dealing with economics at the Institute for Defense Analyses (1962-64), in which Malmgren claimed or displayed any depth of expertise in any specifically defense-related matters, nuclear or otherwise.

In an article titled "Dr. Harald Malmgren Passed," dated February 24, 2025, Harald's daughter Pippa Malmgren wrote:

Malmgren later traveled and lectured with Herman Kahn (noted physicist an author of On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable) in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He wrote several classified papers on thermonuclear war defenses, and U.S. anti-missile technologies, and an unclassified paper on battlefield deployment of forces on the NATO central front, "A Forward-Pause Defense for Europe," Orbis (University of Pennsylvania), Fall, 1964. This article on the history and contemporary relevance of static/fixed vs. mobile/fluid defense strategies generated much attention in the U.S. Military and was reprinted in Military Review, the Professional Journal of the U.S. Army, in May 1965.

I have embedded the Military Review article below. It is the only work authored by Malmgren that I found so far that focused primarily on military, defense, or weapons matters. In the short essay, Malmgren discussed different theories about the point at which tactical ("small") nuclear weapons would be employed to resist a Soviet invasion of western Europe. The presentation is at a high level of generality, neither claiming nor giving evidence of any special technical expertise pertaining to nuclear weapons, either strategic or tactical. It would probably have earned an upperclassman an A or at least a B if turned in as a term paper at a military academy, but as evidence of high-level expertise in nuclear strategy it is pretty weak tea. The Army editors mentioned only Malmgren's role with the trade negotiation office, not any Department of Defense credential.

As to famed nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, and the assertion that Kahn and Malmgren gave lectures together: I would like to see some evidence. I would expect that the two men were acquainted. On a 1976 vita submitted to the U.S. Senate, Malmgren said he was at that time a fellow of the Hudson Institute, which was a private think tank founded by Kahn, headquartered in New York. However, Malmgren was an economist for that organization. I found no evidence that Malmgren had any involvement whatever in the extensive nuclear-related work for which Kahn was most widely known.

Consider: In that same year, 1976, the Hudson Institute published a book co-authored by Kahn and Lewis A. Dunn titled Trends in nuclear proliferation, 1975-1995 : projections, problems, and policy options. The book featured contributions by nine named writers in addition to the two main co-authors. The book was 277 pages long and contained a bibliography of 48 pages. Malmgren's name did not appear anywhere, although by his own testimony he was directly affiliated with the Hudson Institute at that time.

A year later, in 1977, the Hudson Institute produced an 89-page report for the Office of Technology Assessment (a support component of Congress) titled Routes to Nuclear Weapons: Aspects of Purchase or Theft. Despite the fact that the report dealt in substantial part with economic incentives that would allow bad actors to acquire nuclear weapons, Malmgren name was again absent. In short, it does not appear that Kahn or his colleagues at the Hudson Institute looked to Malmgren for any type of expertise on nuclear-weapons issues, even while he held a direct institutional affiliation with the Hudson Institute.

While I note that Pippa Malmgren believes that her father "wrote several classified papers on thermonuclear war," I personally do not believe that he authored any classified papers on nuclear matters. I think this was likely another of Harald's fabrications. Harald Malmgren's 2024-25 claim to have held a "Q" clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission was a demonstrable lie, as as proved by the Standard Form 86 that he submitted to the FBI in 1971, and by the FBI's report, as discussed under bullet point #5 above. If anyone produces any contemporary documentation to support the claim that Harald Malmgren authored even a single classified paper on any defense issue (as opposed to his much later bona fide work on trade-policy issues, some of which may still be classified), I will be happy to file Mandatory Declassification Review petitions seeking declassification of those hypothetical nuke-related papers.

In his long Malmgren video released April 22, 2025, YouTube content producer Jesse Michels painted Harald Malmgren as a scientific prodigy from an early age, able to articulate exotic concepts of physics at age 14, and so forth. But no real evidence was provided in the video of any demonstrated competence or any advanced training in any field of science or engineering. Viewers were shown glimpses of some booklets on atomic subjects that Malmgren apparently sent off for when he was a kid– weak evidence of precocious aptitude in science.

After graduation from high school, Malmgren did attend for one year (Sept. 1953 to June 1954) the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which was a leading institution for undergraduate training engineers and scientists, and it has been said that he studied physics during that year– probably true. But after one year he transferred to Yale University and majored in economics, which is also what he studied at Oxford. In the certified applications that Malmgren submitted for federal employment purposes in 1963, 1964, and 1967, there is no evidence of formal training in any field of science or engineering, nor any claim to expertise in such areas.

As previously mentioned, in 1967 Harald Malmgren submitted a very detailed "Executive Inventory Record," U.S. Civil Service Commission Standard Form 161, which is embedded above in the section headed "Some Key Documents." The form required Malmgren to assign "occupational codes" that corresponded to the type of responsibilities that each past job entailed; Malmgren entered codes dealing with economics, and with teaching. After that, a separate question asked, "If you feel that some occupational or functional areas in which you are competent has not been represented in the coded information for any [past] position, use the space at the top of page 6 for entering the supplemental information." Malmgren entered codes 0130 and 0131, denoting competence in international political developments, diplomatic relations, and economic policy. He did not enter any codes dealing with any field of science or engineering.

● 8. CLAIMS THAT RICHARD BISSELL HAD A LONG, CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH MALMGREN AND IMPARTED SECRETS TO MALMGREN

Of the little paving stones of truth in Malmgren's account, the most useful to his tale-telling was probably the fact that he did have some limited professional contact with Richard Bissell, Jr., at least for a little while.

In his Michel interview, Malmgren said:

So a few months after this series of episodes – missile crisis, [trips to] Los Alamos– Richard Bissell called me up and said, “I'd like to spend some time talking to you. Maybe Friday afternoons after work would be good.” I said, sure. I knew who he was. He was Deputy Director of CIA, and he was in the news a lot because he had been the one who helped Skunkworks develop the U-2... he said, “I've talked to everyone around you. You are one of the Whiz Kids. But I was told you were the youngest, because you came in a little bit after the others, and also that most of them are four or five years older. But you were the star in terms of agility and ability to work with the top-level people without friction.” In other words, you weren’t an obnoxious smart ass. So he said, “You're almost certainly on a curve where you'll continue to be at that level. So there are things you need to know.” And then he went into quite a bit, but it was not only about what we still were calling “UFOs” at that time, but it was about CIA operations worldwide...

Bissell had long been among the top officers of the CIA, but President Kennedy eased him out after the disastrous CIA-orchestrated invasion of Cuba in 1961 (the "Bay of Pigs"). Bissell's departure from the CIA was effective March 1, 1962– nearly a year before the imaginary conversation related by Malmgren. At the time specified in Malmgren's story, in the real world Bissell was the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), Malmgren's employer.

Thus, the two men really were at least a little acquainted. On his March 1963 federal job application, Malmgren listed Bissell as one of five references, for which Malmgren presumably would have received Bissell's permission– but notably, Bissell was not listed on Malmgren's October 1964 job application, nor in material he submitted to the White House personnel office at about the same time, nor in the security-clearance material that Malmgren submitted to the FBI in 1970 and 1971.

In his best-selling book The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA (1995, 2006), Evan Thomas wrote:

IDA's offices were in the Pentagon area occupied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We were just soldiers without uniforms," said Norman Christeller, IDA's general manager. "When Bissell came in, he immediately got into a fight with the generals in weapons systems analysis who wanted IDA to the Pentagon's bidding. Bissell wanted IDA to be independent....Bissell finally won a philosophical battle. IDA was moved out of the Pentagon and became more independent. (p. 314)

In Malmgren's fantasy world, however, the same Richard Bissell who fought to make the IDA more independent, also paid the salary of a 27-year-old new-hire economist and then allowed him to use IDA as a cover so that he could spend his days performing the most sensitive tasks as a personal agent of the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Advisor.

When Richard Bissell left the IDA in 1964, the IDA retained most of his files from his years there. However, Bissell's extensive personal papers were donated to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. I asked the archivists there if the collection contained any documents mentioning Harald Malmgren. Supervisory Archivist Jim Ginther, Ph.D., found one calendar entry indicating that Bissell had met personally with Malmgren, soon after Malmgren was hired, possibly a "welcome to IDA" meeting. There were two other instances in which Malmgren was part of groups of staff that met with Bissell.

● 9. MALMGREN'S CLAIM TO HAVE BEEN "AN ACCEPTED INNER-CIRCLE PERSON" IN THE KENNEDY FAMILY, VIA SARGENT SHRIVER

In the Jesse Michels interview, this exchange occurred: 

Jesse Michels: But did you ever speak to JFK about UFOs directly?

Harald Malmgren: No, no. My interaction with JFK and Bobby was very limited. But I was somehow part of the clan, because Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law, was the go-between. He talked to me all the time. Sargent Shriver proposed me for, I don't know, several different jobs, and I declined each one. But I was an accepted inner-circle person.

Sargent Shriver (1915-2011) was the husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-2009), sister to President Kennedy. Shriver held a succession of important government posts, including founding director of the Peace Corps and ambassador to France. He was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1972.

I sent Malmgren's claim to Sargent Shriver's son Mark Kennedy Shriver, who responded, "I don’t know this gentleman at all." [6] He referred the question also to Lucy Di Rosa, Ph.D., executive director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute, adding, "If Lucy doesn’t know of him, then I would think it’s completely fabricated."

Dr. Lucy Di Rosa responded to my inquiry: 

I searched our databases, documents, and Sargent Shriver’s speeches, and found no references to Harald Malmgren. He is not mentioned in Scott Stossel’s biography, either, which is a comprehensive source. should mention that I’ve personally looked through thousands of Sargent Shriver’s letters, and I can say that Mr. Shriver was very good at tracking and staying in touch with friends and colleagues throughout the years, but I could find no record of Malmgren. I could find no material connection between Malmgren and Sargent Shriver, nor any support of Malmgren’s claims. 

Scott Stossel, who is national editor of The Atlantic magazine and wrote the well-received biography, Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver (2004, 2011), responded: "For what it's worth, I have no recollection of Sargent Shriver mentioning Malmgren, nor do I recall coming across his name in all of my journeys through various archives." (email, May 17, 2025)

● 10. MALMGREN'S ACTUAL JOBS WERE A FAR CRY FROM THE CLAIM "SENIOR ADVISOR TO FOUR PRESIDENTS"

Harald Malmgren billed himself in his X profile and elsewhere as "an advisor to four presidents..." In his authorized obituary in a Virginia newspaper, it said, "He served as a senior advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford." The "senior advisor" formulation also found in the stenographic on-line profile of Malmgren written in mid-2024 by his friend Robbin Laird, and in other places.

But Harald Malmgren was not "a senior advisor to four presidents." He was a senior person in a narrow, specialized area of federal government activity – trade policy – under two presidents, Nixon and Ford (and he was never the top man even in trade-policy). Earlier, under President Johnson, Malmgren was an aide to the men who actually were the trade-policy advisors to the President.

There is nothing in the available public evidence to suggest that Malmgren had any role in advising even Nixon or Ford on any other subject, much less went on high-stakes secret missions for any presidents.

I have found no evidence that Malmgren was ever in any sense an advisor to President Kennedy.

It is easy to find writings or citations to writings by Malmgren dealing with trade policy, international resource issues, and the like, especially from the mid-1960s into the 1990s. But I have yet to find his name in the text or index of even the most detailed books on such subjects as the Kennedy White House, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Sargent Shriver, the Cuban Missile Crisis, missile defense, nuclear strategy, or Richard Bissell. Nor does his name come up in any pertinent way, if at all, in searches of massive document archives devoted to such subjects and individuals.

Harald Malmgren during the Kennedy Administration (1961-63)

As already discussed, it is well documented what Harald Malmgren was actually doing during the Kennedy Administration– and it did not involve personal interactions with or tasking by Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, or President Kennedy. Starting in July 1962, he was working as an economist (researcher, analyst) at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a Pentagon contractor. Initially he had no supervisory responsibilities, but before the end of his three-year stint with IDA, he was head of the IDA Economics Group– a component of the Economics and Political Division, itself a small part of the think tank. On his 1963 and 1964 federal job applications, his job responsibilities were described in prosaic terms.

The 1970-71 FBI field investigation reports (embedded in total under "Key Documents") also paint a pretty consistent picture of what Malmgren was actually doing during his IDA years– and it was not running secret missions for the President, Secretary of Defense, or National Security Advisor.

Despite the consistent record found in the official documents cited above, I embarked on a search of many weeks to try to find some documentary trace of Harald Malmgren in the archives of the Kennedy White House (including the National Security Council), Joint Chiefs of Staff (including the Weapons System Evaluation Group), or archives related to Robert McNamara, including documents relating to missile defense. This included multiple trips to the National Archives facility at College Park, Maryland; trips to the Library of Congress and National Archives facilities in Washington, D.C.; numerous communications with archivists at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and with Sheldon Stern, former chief historian at the Kennedy Presidential Library; and searches of several other large archives. I found absolutely nothing in any government archives or other source, or in the archives personal papers of any of the famous people Malmgren mentioned in his stories, to support Malmgren's claims that he was attached to McNamara or the National Security Council, or that he worked in any capacity with President Kennedy or the Kennedy White House. The few references to Malmgren that I found in any of those places provided no support at all for his stories about 1962-63.

The bulk of the files from President Kennedy's White House are archived at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Many of the records are digitized, and for others, there are at least indexes that are digitally searchable. A electronic search of the National Security Archive, covering many thousands of documents, found only two hits on Malmgren's name– both dealing with economics matters years after Kennedy's death, neither related to any White House role.

For purposes of comparison, the name "Alain Enthoven," an economist who in 1962 was a 32-year-old deputy assistant secretary of defense and one of McNamara's real "whiz kids" (and who was listed as a reference by Malmgren on a 1963 job application), elicited 54 hits, including internal White House documents pertinent to the big national security issues of the day.

The Kennedy Library's on-line resources also include the White House Name Index, a voluminous listing of names of people from whom communications were received, or to whom communications were sent, during the Kennedy years. A search by a Library archivist found only a single document– a letter from Malmgren (still studying at Oxford in England) to "President J. Kennedy," which is reproduced in End Note [7]. The letter contained Malmgren's observations regarding British press reports about the activities of a senior State Department official in Africa; there is nothing in the letter to indicate any personal acquaintance between Malmgren and Kennedy, nor did the White House correspondence file contain any indication that Malmgren had received a reply.

With the help of a professional archivist, I dove far deeper into the Kennedy Library records than the search tool could reach, including eyeball review of certain pertinent files, and paying for digitization of certain relevant paper files– none of which proved to contain any trace of Harald Malmgren.

I even paid the fee to have some folders of documents digitized, including three folders of documents by Godfrey T. McHugh, the White House military aide who was in charge of organizing the December 1962 presidential tour of the "nuclear" sites – SAC headquarters, Los Alamos, and Sandia. Malmgren in 2024-2025 claimed this trip was the result of the knockdown of a nonhuman craft during the October 26, 1962 Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test, the investigation of which he had led from his purported White House perch. I will discuss this particular Malmgren tale in more detail in a separate article, "Harald Malmgren: White House UFO investigator?" For purposes here, suffice to say that Malmgren's name appeared on no distribution list or other document in McHugh's extensive file (or in the declassified White House files dealing with the ongoing Project Dominic series of nuclear weapons tests).

Going back to Malmgren's first federal job application, from March 1963: On the first part of the application, the general Civil Service application (Standard Form 57), Malmgren was required to list three references "who have definite knowledge of your qualifications and fitness for the position for which you are applying." Malmgren listed a professor at Harvard, the director of the Office of International Finance at the State Department, and James E. King, an IDA division director. The attached State Department Supplement to Standard Form 57 required five references, so Malmgren added a Pentagon comptroller (an economist) and Richard Bissell, the IDA president. Unmentioned were the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, or anybody at all associated with the National Security Council or the White House.

As to "Description of work," Malmgren wrote, "Economic and strategic analysis of active defense; research on military aid and economic development, the balance of payments and foreign policy, etc." I have little doubt that this was an accurate summary of young Malmgren's duties. The 1963 job application does not intersect with Malmgren's fantasy world of 2024, in which he portrayed himself as an whiz-kid working tasked personally by the Secretary of Defense to handle matters of the highest possible gravity, sensitivity, and complexity – reigning in warhawk generals, managing the unexpected recovering of a nonhuman craft, and his other 2024 tweet-fantasies.

Just before the end of the Kennedy Administration, Malmgren secured his first sliver of direct employment by the federal government: the Bureau of Economic Affairs in the State Department hired him as an "international economist p consultant," on a pay-per-day basis ("WAE" meaning "while actually employed"), effective October 29, 1963, involving an estimated 10 days work over the period of a year. Malmgren remained simultaneously employed at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Thus, Malmgren was technically a part-time federal employee for less than one month during the Kennedy Administration (President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963).

This consultant arrangement may have been the extremely slender basis for a statement in an Appleton, Wisconsin newspaper, March 13, 1974, reporting on a Malmgren speech to the National Farmers Union. The article said, without attribution (but likely based on information from Malmgren): "Malmgren presently is engaged in international trade negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades. Earlier he worked under President John F. Kennedy to negotiate a similar series of trade negotiations." [italics added for emphasis][8]

While there is a sense in which every employee of the federal Executive Branch might be said to "work under the President," to characterize Malmgren as an "advisor to President Kennedy" on the basis of the 1963 gig as a part-time agency technical consultant would be beyond ludicrous.

Harald Malmgren during the Johnson Administration (1963-1968)

In 2017, Malmgren told a writer for the Irish Times that President Lyndon Johnson "hired Malmgren as a senior aide because Harald was not partisan." Quoting Malmgren: "He [Johnson] said to me: You don't take sides. You are a fix-it kind of person."

Really, it is big stretch to characterize Malmgren as an "aide" to President Johnson, certainly wrong to describe him as a "senior aide," and unlikely that President Johnson personally played any role in hiring Malmgren for his first full-time federal job.

As mentioned earlier, by the latter half of 1964, Malmgren was definitely ready to move on from the IDA. He wanted to get into an important position in the government dealing with economic policy, with room for advancement. Even while working full-time at IDA he had been doing some by-hour consulting for the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations (STR), a component of the sprawling Executive Office of the President; now, his eye fell on an open position for a full-time economist in that office.

(The head of the office, the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations, was the country's chief negotiator of international trade agreements, and since 1975 sits as a member of the Cabinet. Then and now part of the sizeable bureaucracy known as the Executive Office of the President, the trade entity is now called the Office of the United States Trade Representative, USTR.)

To get this kind of job required vetting by White House Personnel Appointment Office, which was directed during the Johnson Administration by John W. Macy, Jr. The material Malmgren sent to Macy's office in August 1964 contained no hint that Malmgren had ever been involved with Secretary of Defense McNamara or National Security Advisor Bundy– curious omissions indeed if Malmgren actually had such associations, especially since McNamara and Bundy still served in those same offices under President Johnson in the fall of 1964. But then, it is plain for all who have eyes to see that Malmgren dreamed up those lofty associations decades later.

It is also notable that in his 1964 job applications, Malmgren did not mention Richard Bissell among his references, although Bissell remained as president of the IDA until September 1964. Bissell had been listed by Malmgren as a reference on his March 1963 federal job application.

In any event, archival files convey that in late 1964 Malmgren was definitely ready to move on from the IDA.

The White House personnel file records that the White House interviewer (initials "JBC") had received a negative recommendation regarding Malmgren from IDA Assistant to the President Steve Enke, but the interviewer found Malmgren's explanation satisfactory.

Malmgren got the job – he was hired to work in the Office of the Special Trade Representative as an "economic policy advisor" in October, 1964, at the GS-16 grade, with a salary of $20,000/year. This was a good step up for the real-world Malmgren– but it certainly would have been a huge step down if Malmgren had actually previously been serving as the Secretary of Defense's all-purpose Q-cleared troubleshooter, missile-defense expert, and secret-mission agent for presidents, as he was to claim in 2024-25.

It is quite unlikely that President Johnson personally had anything to do with this hire far down in the bowels of the Executive Office of the President (EOP). Then and now EOP is a sizeable bureaucracy that various essentially unrelated components, the combined staff of which may have been roughly on the order of 1800 people in 1964.

Indeed, I found nothing to suggest that Malmgren, as a GS-16 and later a GS-17 in the STR, would have had any interactions with President Johnson. However, according to the authoritative 1995 book Trade Warriors: USTR and the American Crusade for Free Trade (Oxford University Press, 1995), by journalist Steve Dryden, Malmgren did on at least one notable occasion quickly generate rosy extrapolations of ongoing trade negotiations, which his boss, Christian Herter (the trade representative, the actual "advisor to the President" on trade issues) then presented to President Johnson, who approved them for official use.

In the Executive Inventory Record that he submitted on June 28, 1967, Malmgren described his duties at that time in the STR, which included, he said, representing the office "in interagency committees at Deputy Assistant Secretary level." That is a level at least three levels below cabinet-level interagency meetings, and therefore at least four levels below the President.

However, on his "Personal Qualifications Statement" of January 29, 1970, certified a half-year after he left STR, Malmgren described his final job responsibilities at STR somewhat more expansively: "In charge of all international operations of the President's trade office; supervisor of activities of interagency committees chaired by the office; delegation leader for U.S. in GATT, U.N. and OECD meetings on trade; responsible for relations with American farm groups and certain industries. Member Exec. Committee, Cabinet Balance of Payments Committee; covered certain legislative matters."

Based on a "Recommendation for Performance Recognition" signed by Acting STR William M. Roth on September 21, 1966, did indeed shoulder responsibilities beyond those that would would usually expect from a GS-16. Roth wrote, "He reports directly to the Special Representative [Roth] and the Deputy Special Representative and his technical decisions are unreviewed and his policy recommendations are directly taken into account in the decisions of the Special Representative (not normally delegated to a GS-16)...In dealing with other Government agencies, he represents STR at the Deputy Assistant and Assistant Secretary level." This was an impressive testimonial from Malmgren's boss for the work of the 31-year-old Malmgren– but in my view, there is nothing here that justifies the 2024 claim that Malmgren was an "advisor to," much less "senior advisor to," President Johnson. He was an advisor to the Special Trade Representative.

Four months after writing that performance recommendation, Roth recommended on similar grounds that Malmgren be promoted to the GS-17, which was done.

Thus, these documents, as well as information in Steve Dryden's 1995 book Trade Warriors, all indicate that Malmgren was energetic and effective in carrying out the work of the STR.

However, in my judgment there is nothing in this record to render plausible, for example, a story told by Malmgren in one late 2024 interview, in which President Johnson in December 1964 chose him for an ultra hush-hush, off-the-books trip to carry a secret message to the prime minister of Japan and bring back the secret answer. "Don't tell the embassy, don't tell people in your own agency," Malmgren is ordered, in the Malmgren telling. I consider it quite unlikely that President Johnson would have tasked a 29-year-old new-hire to act as a secret-agent diplomat. Rather, it seems a very on-brand kind of tale from the octogenarian Malmgren.

Many of the files of the Johnson White House now reside at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. Possibly pertinent: Archivists there sent me a "National Security File Name File," a list of "Presidential aides, Senators and former Presidents who were involved in national security issues." There are 55 names on this "Name File." Malmgren's name is not on the list. The document is embedded below.

Another crude way to get a general sense of Malmgren's peripheral placement in the Johnson Administration's apparatus is through the search tool for the entire digital component of the archives at the LBJ Presidential Library, which produces zero hits for "Malmgren." For purposes of comparison, the same search tool produced 356 hits for the name "Bator" – Francis Michel Bator, an economist who really did serve as an advisor to Johnson on national security and economic issues (and whom Malmgren listed as a reference on his October 1964 federal job application).

When William M. Roth prepared to leave the position of top trade representative in 1968, he privately recommended three individuals as candidates for appointment as deputy trade representatives (ambassador-rank slots, a big step up from the GS-17 slot then held by Malmgren). Roth's private memo dated April 18, 1968, strongly recommended two candidates; he listed Malmgren only as a third choice, noting: "Harald Malmgren is presently Assistant Special Representative for both agricultural and financial policy. He is a highly trained economist and a particularly fine negotiator. He is bright, ambitious, and undoubtedly has a fine future before him. He is also younger and perhaps less mature than the other two men."

Roth left the trade representative position January 20, 1969, and was succeeded by Carl J. Gilbert. Malmgren and Gilbert reportedly soon had a falling out. Malmgren resigned his GS-17 position and set up a consulting firm, "Malmgren, Inc." However, before too long Malmgren would return to full-time government employment, and at a higher level.

Harald Malmgren during the Nixon Administration (January 1969-August 1974)

The term "senior advisor" can truthfully be attached to Malmgren with respect to two presidents – President Nixon, and after Nixon's resignation (August 1974) to President Ford– but only in the highly specialized area of trade policy.

Malmgren had maintained some sort of consulting role with STR, and he came back into the office with an elevated role after William D. Eberle took over as trade representative in 1971. In his 1995 book Trade Warriors, Dryden devoted several pages to Malmgren's rise during this period.

[Malmgren] had worked in STR under Herter and Roth but left the office after a falling-out with Carl Gilbert. Some of the STR veterans, who found Malmgren too self-important and not much of a team player, wished he would stay away from the office for good. That was unlikely. The portly, bushy-haired economist, brandishing his Oxford Ph.D, did have a certain charm, particularly while spinning stories that highlighted his own role in the matter at hand, and he most certainly had a powerful intellect. He also usually got what he wanted. His reputed powers of manipulation prompted one close friend to buy a copy of The Prince to understand why Malmgren was always being described as Machiavellian. (p. 164) [9]

By the end of 1970, Malmgren was helping [deputy trade representative] William Pearce with his lobbying in London, and, it seemed, advising half the Nixon administration and Congress on trade policy. He also worked with Eberle on a trade study for the Committee on Economic Development, and so when Eberle came to Washington, Malmgren was already at his side. Eberle moved into a town house near Malmgren's home in Georgetown and Malmgren became a frequent after-hours visitor to the STR office. It came as little surprise early in 1972 when Eberle picked Malmgren, who was then only thirty-six years old, as his second deputy. (p. 164) [10]

President Kennedy by executive order in June 1963 had created two spots for Deputy Trade Representative, with the rank of "ambassador" attached to each, meaning among other things that Senate confirmation would be required. It was for one of these deputy slots that Eberle picked Malmgren. It is not at all clear that President Nixon would have been involved in Eberle's decision regarding his deputy, but of course it was Nixon who formally nominated Malmgren and sent his name to the U.S. Senate on April 4, 1972.

I have examined the entire file on Malmgren's 1972 nomination assembled by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and later submitted for archiving by the National Archives and Records Administration. Under committee rules, that file was sealed for 50 years, a period that ended in 2022. There is nothing whatever in the 1972 Senate file to support Malmgren's 2024-2025 claims that he had previously been associated with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the National Security Council, McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy, or the Kennedy White House. The vita that Malmgren submitted to the Foreign Relations Committee, displayed below, mentions his job as a economist with the non-governmental Institute for Defense Analyses, but makes no reference to missile defense, nuclear weapons, or any other weapons-related subjects.

Again: It should be self-evident that if Harald Malmgren had actually worked for top-level officials and government components a decade earlier, while he was still in his 20s, those impressive associations would have been mentioned in his subsequent vitas (and job applications), even though he would have been bound to keep some details of his work secret. After all, those associations and assignments would have been far more impressive than the respectable positions that Malmgren did list.

Chairman Fulbright objects to "ambassador," but not to Malmgren

The only apparent controversy surrounding Malmgren's 1972 nomination was that the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR), and apparently the majority on his committee, objected to a Deputy Trade Representative holding the rank of "ambassador." Indeed, when Fulbright brought the nomination to the floor, he devoted 10 out of 12 paragraphs of his speech to explaining that the committee thought that the rank "ambassador" should be reserved for the nation's representatives to other countries. Fulbright even warned that the committee would be disinclined to approve any further nominations that attached the rank to other types of positions. Fulbright added, however, that this was no reflection on Malmgren, whom he deemed "well qualified" for the job. The Senate confirmed Malmgren without objection on May 8, 1972.

This should be underscored: the three-year period beginning May 8, 1972, in which Malmgren was one of the top three government officials concerned specifically with trade issues, represented the lifetime pinnacle of Harald Malmgren's rank in the federal government.

It is certainly accurate to describe Malmgren as a "senior advisor" to President Nixon, but only in the limited sphere of federal trade policy. There are a sizeable number of documents in the Nixon Presidential Library archives, newspaper archives, and other sources pertaining to Malmgren's activities as a U.S. representative in trade negotiations in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. But I found no records from the Nixon Administration to lend any support to the notion that Malmgren was advising Nixon, directly or indirectly, on anything other than trade policy.

From 1972-75, Malmgren was the on-site point person in important trade negotiations. In that capacity he was quoted from time to time in the press, occasionally engendering some controversy.

Harald Malmgren during the Ford Administration (August 1974-January 1977)

Facing impeachment by the House of Representatives, President Nixon resigned on August 8, 1973, and Gerald Ford became president.

Malmgren was not among the Nixon holdovers who were quickly purged by Ford. On the other hand, the readily available evidence suggests that Malmgren was pretty low in the Ford White House pecking order.

On December 18, 1974, Ford's press secretary issued a four-page release announcing the re-organization of the White House staff, along with a 37-page directory to the key people in the Executive Office of the President, with short bios of some aides. Harald Malmgren was mentioned once in these 41 pages– his phone number was included in the staff directory– but they spelled his name wrong ("Harold" instead of "Harald"). Neither Malmgren nor even his boss were included among the 20-plus named persons or positions whom the release said would "work directly with the President."

To give the reader fuller context, I have displayed the key pages of the December 18, 1974 release; the entire 41-page document is embedded as a PDF file.

In December 1974, Malmgren's boss and patron, Special Representative for Trade William Eberle, resigned. According Steve Dryden's in his 1995 book Trade Warriors, Malmgren campaigned hard to be nominated by Ford as the Special Trade Representative, a position that had just been elevated to a cabinet rank position by enactment of the 1974 Trade Act.

One of those on the list, Eberle's deputy, Harald Malmgren, really wanted the job, and he had friends on Capitol Hill. He also had some strong endorsements downtown, including one from the vice president of U.S. Steel, William Whyte, a Washington lobbyist with very good connections to the Ford administration. But Malmgren had acquired a reputation for abrasiveness, among other things, and besides, he was a Democrat, so the search committee passed him by. (Dryden, p. 188)

After Ford nominated Frederick B. Dent (a former textile executive) to the cabinet-level job that Malmgren had sought, Malmgren resigned, effective February 19, 1975, citing several factors including financial need. By this point in his life, Malmgren had three children. [A thank-you letter from President Ford appears in Appendix C.]

LIFE IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR (1975 on)

As already noted, the highest rank Malmgren ever held in the federal government was the Deputy Special Trade Representative slot, from 1972-75. Once President Ford had passed him over for promotion to the top spot, he left government. After that, he became a consultant, lobbyist, think-tank guy, teacher of college courses, and the like, and so he remained for the rest of his career.

On July 28, 1976, Malmgren testified before a subcommittee of the Committee on International Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives on the topic of "Congress and Foreign Policy." As in 1972, he again submitted a vita, which was published in the hearing record; again, that vita made no mention of any previous work for the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, or the Kennedy White House. This vita did note, "From 1962 to 1964 he was Head of the Economics Group of the Institute for Defense Analyses, supervising research in defense strategy, weapons systems, and political-military affairs." The references to "defense strategy [and] weapons systems" had not appeared on his 1972 vita. But nowhere else in the 1976 vita was there any mention of military or defense matters; everything else dealt with his extensive experience and writing "on economic policy and internal political and economic problems." Nor did I see any direct or indirect allusions to any special expertise or experience dealing with weapons systems in his written testimony, verbal testimony, or written answers to follow up questions.

The 1976 vita also said, "He has been a consultant in recent years to the U.S. Senate (Senator Abraham Ribicoff and the Senate Committee on Finance...") Malmgren was employed on Ribicoff's staff to work issues relating to trade and taxes, ending in June 1976.

Malmgren and an associate ventured into the realm of professional consulting and lobbying, through the firm Malmgren Inc. This turned out to be a highly lucrative enterprise for Malmgren. After President Carter was elected in the November 1976 presidential election, he had difficulty finding someone to fill the trade representative position. According to a report in the Washington Post, after two top candidates were eliminated, Malmgren was seriously considered, but removed himself from the running.

Four or five others, mostly trade experts, were considered for the job. One of them, business consultant Harold [sic] Malmgren, might have had it if he had been willing to give up his lucrative private consulting firm, but he wasn't...[Malmgren is a] former deputy special trade representative and a man with influential friends in labor, industry and Congress. Only Malmgren survived the selection process, but– recently divorced and anxious to make a success of his new consulting business– Malmgren wasn't interested. ("Politics of Trade Post," by Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post, March 12, 1977)

An April 1978 a memo that Malmgren and his lobbying partner sent out in soliciting lobbying clients (at $200,000 per) on legislation dealing with taxing Americans abroad, citing their Ribicoff connection, was portrayed in a harsh light in the Washington Post, spinning off several unflattering wire service articles that ran in numerous newspapers nationwide. The memo was strongly repudiated by Senator Ribicoff. I did not come across the controversial memo itself, but based on the newspaper stories, the fuss and publicity seemed excessive for what appears to have been no more than an unartfully worded claim of specialized lobbying expertise by Malmgren and his partner--hardly the stuff of grave scandal.

SCRUTINY FROM THE CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY (1990)

In 1990, veteran journalist Charles Lewis founded a new nonprofit organization named the Center for Public Integrity (CPI). CPI's first public report was titled "Office of the United States Trade Representative: America's Frontline Trade Officials." The 201-page report presented a case that many high-level U.S. trade officials cashed-in after leaving the government, charging large fees to advocate for foreign corporations and foreign nations regarding policies that they had helped shape while within the government. The report contained a short vita of Harald Malmgren (presumably provided by Malmgren), and quoted at some length from an interview that Lewis or other CPI staff conducted with Malmgren.

There are a number of eyebrow-raisers in the CPI report, among these, a passage in which Malmgren defended his actions with respect to representing certain foreign interests, including the Japanese Whaling Association for $100,000/year.

The Malmgren-relevant pages from the CPI report, and also the entire report, are both embedded below as separate PDF files. I also display the report's Malmgren profile and interview summary in graphic form below.

Lewis also used Malmgren as a case-study in what he regarded as objectionable post-employment influence peddling, in testimony before the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on March 5, 1993, during a public hearing on proposed legislation to revise post-employment rules for some Executive and Legislative Branch employees.

One aspect of the CPI monograph that I found to be particular interest was a single sentence in the Malmgren bio: "In 1962, he came to Washington as one of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's 'Whiz Kids,' working for the Institute for Defense Analysis." Lewis could only have received this claim from Malmgren, either during the interview or in printed literature, and it is by far the earliest example I have found of Malmgren misappropriating the "whiz kids" label. I tried to obtain a copy of Lewis' original recording of the interview, but so far that effort has been unsuccessful.

In his in-depth and worthwhile 1995 book Trade Warriors, journalist Steve Dryden suggested that Malmgren was something of a "trail blazer" in leveraging a previous government position relating to trade policy into a lucrative lobbying-consultant livelihood.

Japanese TV makers paid Malmgren $300,000--at that time quite a sum of money for such work--to try to stop the ITC investigation and other cases, and to help them in the negotiations over the import quota deal. Did they get their money's worth?...The legacy of Malmgren's role lay less in the outcome of the TV case than in the path he blazed for a new caste of would-be influence peddlers. Trade lawyers were making good money in the 1970s but Malmgren's $300,000 fee, for what was essentially three months of work, showed how even non-lawyers could cash in on the growing number of controversies in the trade field. In the future, "graduates" of STR and other former U.S. officials could hardly ignore how willing the Japanese were to spend enormous sums of money on anyone who claimed to have clout inside the U.S. government. Whether these payments would corrupt the policy process, tilt it, or just enrich those who sold their services remained to be seen. (pp. 216-218)

The EC Commission was so concerned about the shape of the Tokyo Round legislation that early in 1979 it retained former deputy trade representative Harald Malmgren, at the rate of $175 per hour, for advice on how to influence the process. Malmgren's report to the Justice Department, required under the foreign agents registration statute, details almost forty contacts between Malmgren and his partner, and...top STR officials. But as in the Japanese television case, it doesn't appear that Malmgren had much effect on the shape of the legislation, given the complaints from importers. (p. 251)

FADING FROM VIEW

Through the 1980s at least, Malmgren was occasionally quoted in the New York Times as "a Washington trade consultant," always on trade-related issues, but by the turn of the century those quotes had faded away. Also during the 1980s, Malmgren was associated with the Trade Policy Research Centre in London. The organization is now defunct, but apparently was influential on trade matters during that era.

The first reference I came across to Malmgren speaking publicly about a purported connection to Pentagon activity related to the Cuban Missile Crisis was a notice for a talk he gave to a boarding school in Virginia in 2012.

In 2017 Harald Malmgren re-emerged on a more public stage in a somewhat unusual venue– the Kilkenomics festival in Ireland, billed as an event melding economics with comedy. This was perhaps an appropriate venue, considering what was to follow in ensuing years.

During that visit Harald and his eldest daughter, Pippa, were the subject of a flattering profile in the Irish Times, for which the wide-eyed writer apparently swallowed whole a litany of unsubstantiated Harald Malmgren claims.

A year later, Harald and Pippa again appeared at the festival. This time the organizers posted on YouTube an eight-minute excerpt from an on-stage interview with Harald, in which he told a version of his Cuban Missile Crisis War Room tale. I will discuss this interview further in the separate article "Harald Malmgren saves the world: a fantasy set during the Cuban Missile Crisis." A PDF transcript is embedded below.

It was not until Harald Malmgren started telling UFO stories in 2024, however, that he drew a degree of attention that he probably had not experienced for quite awhile.

I think he liked it.

END NOTES

[1] Malmgren's accounts regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis and a UFO knockdown in 1962 came to the attention of many through his posts on X (formerly Twitter) starting in the summer of 2024, and conveyed through other means as well, including personal meetings with various UFO researchers and "influencers." At the time of Harald Malmgren's death, he had about 85,000 followers on X (@Halsrethink); the X account remained live as of May 19, 2025. His daughter Pippa Malmgren, who has accepted and promoted some of Malmgren's more remarkable claims, currently has about 72,000 followers on X (@DrPippaM). She is also active on Substack and various other platforms.

[2] The nuclear test referred to was named Bluegill Triple Prime. Malmgren claimed that the Navy originally refused to give even the White House information about the UFO that had been knocked from the sky by the blast. Malmgren made a number of murky and fragmentary claims about these events. He said that he had personally went to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANA) and met with Lawrence Preston Gise, who allowed him to handle UFO debris that spoke to Malmgren in his mind. He said that a trip by Kennedy to LANA (which occurred on December 7, 1962) was for the secret purpose of allowing Kennedy to be briefed on the recovery of alien material in the October incident. In the Jesse Michels video released April 22, 2025, there was a passing reference to Malmgren's purported trip occurring two weeks before the Kennedy trip, but to my knowledge no actual date has been stated, much less any evidence produced for such a trip by Malmgren.

[3] Eisenhower Library Supervisory Archivist Jim Ginther found nothing in the Bissell archives indicating that Bissell had expressed opinions or knowledge about UFOs or flying saucers (not surprising no matter what you think the CIA knows about UFOs). However, the library archive contains few records from Bissell's many years at the CIA.

I certainly do not know what, if anything, Richard Bissell thought or knew about UFOs, but I highly doubt that he ever discussed the subject with Malmgren. octogenarian Malmgren likely thought that his brief and probably slight association with Bissell via the IDA provided a plausible springboard to make his fake Bissell into an oracle of "corroboration" for one or another popular UFO story. He might have overdone it, however, by claiming that Bissell told him that an alien survived a UFO crash at Roswell and actually gave humans the tip on how to zap alien craft with X-rays, or that alien debris spoke to him telepathically. One problem with habitually fabricating grandiose, self-admiring stories to easily impressed listeners is that their enthusiastic gullibility may cause the storyteller to keep upping the ante. I have seen it before. There are sizeable element of the "ufological community" that nurtures and rewards liars, the more extravagant the better.

[4] Malmgren began work at Cornell in August 1961, and the faculty list for that fall attached to his name only his B.A. from Yale. For some reason, it appears that his Oxford doctorate actually was not awarded until February, 1962 (the date now footnoted by Wikipedia, referencing an Oxford document that cannot be accessed.) Anyway, in the 1962-63 catalog he was listed as "Harald B. Malmgren, D. Phil.," denoting the Oxford equivalent of a Ph.D.

[5] From Fred Kaplan's book The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), page 254: "Enthoven and McNamara got along splendidly, seeing each other nearly every day, an honor that McNamara bestowed to no other Pentagon official below the rank of assistant secretary." Enthoven was a deputy assistant secretary.

[6] Mark Kennedy Shriver authored an acclaimed memoir of his relationship with his father, titled A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver (Henry Holt, 2012).

[7] A good deal of Malmgren's initial credibility among some people interested in UFOs may be attributed to his association with the rank of "ambassador." While I have been unable to find an authoritative master list, extrapolating from available records, it appears that the number of persons who have held the rank of "ambassador" since 1960 exceeds 4,000. The title alone does not warrant any particular assumptions regarding credibility nor great deference. Indeed, in a letter sent from Oxford University to "President J. Kennedy" on February 25, 1961, Malmgren himself sharply denigrated the activity of Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Mennen Williams, whom President Kennedy had appointed as envoy to Africa, although Williams' rank exceeded that of an ambassador to a single nation. Malmgren judged Williams to have "made a spectacle of himself" and displayed "sheer diplomatic incompetence." This harsh assessment of a U.S. diplomat is the only documented communication from Malmgren to Kennedy. The White House correspondence file contains no indication that Malmgren received a reply. The letter is reproduced below, along with the newspaper clipping that Malmgren attached.

[8] Notwithstanding all my research, I had overlooked this article in the Appleton (WI) Post-Crescent (March 13, 1974), about Malmgren's speech to the National Farmers Union, until I saw it on a list of old news clips related to Malmgren that were posted on reddit/ufos by user MKULTRA_Escapee on May 16, 2025. Hat tip to researcher MK!

[9] Harald Malmgren strategically struck a self-effacing pose in this December 22, 2024 exchange on X, as seen below – but it does not square with the descriptions of his mid-life personality found in some FBI field interviews and in Steve Dryden's 1995 book Trade Warriors, or with the self-glorifying character of the stories that he made up later in life.

[10] William Pearce resigned on January 5, 1974, in part, Steve Dryden wrote in Trade Warriors, because he "was discouraged by the poisonous mood in the capital engendered by the Watergate scandal." Dryden added: "Pearce also may have been weary of Malmgren, who had a habit of sticking his nose into everything, including Pearce's trade-bill activities. The two men were quite a contrast: Pearce, a stolid lawyer, devout Catholic, and family man; Malmgren, something of an intellectual swinger, separated from his wife, and living with a girlfriend." (p. 176)

APPENDIX A: STANDARD FORM 86, SECURITY INVESTIGATION DATA FOR SENSITIVE POSITION, SIGNED AND CERTIFIED BY HARALD MALMGREN ON AUGUST 25, 1971

Presented below are images of the complete Standard Form 86, Security Investigation Data for Sensitive Position, submitted and certified under penalties of law by Harald Malmgren on August 25, 1971, including Malmgren's typed answer to Question 27, requiring a list of past background investigation "by any agency of the federal government." This is extracted from the full 33 pages of FBI documents that were declassified and released to me under a FOIA request; the complete PDF is embedded above in the section headed "Key Documents Provided Here."

APPENDIX B – SOME ADDITIONAL HARALD MALMGREN SECURITY-CLEARANCE DOCUMENTS

Harald Malmgren's federal Official Personnel File (OPF) contained three documents pertaining to his security clearances issued or reaffirmed in 1963, 1964, 1970, and 1972. These all pertain only to Malmgren's work with the State Department and then the Office of the Special Trade Representative, as an actual federal government employee. The recently declassified 1970 FBI reports are of far greater interest, because they explicitly required a look-back on all of Malmgren's previous security clearances before he went to the work for the federal government– proving that his 2024-25 claim to have held an Atomic Energy Commission clearance was a lie.

• "Department of State: Notification of Security Clearance: Final Clearance." In connection with his increasing involvement in federal trade policy, Malmgren received this "Top Secret" clearance, after an FBI field investigation, on October 7, 1963.

• Memorandum from Personnel Security Branch, General Services Administration, December 1, 1964, reaffirming Malmgren's "Top Secret" clearance in connection with his work with the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations.

• Letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from the acting general counsel of the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations, dated April 21, 1972, summarizing Malmgren's security-clearance history. The summary mentions no clearance prior to the one granted in October, 1963. This letter was submitted in connection with the nomination of Malmgren to serve as Deputy Special Representative for Trade Negotiations, with the rank of "Ambassador."

APPENDIX C: SOME FAVORABLE COMMENTARIES ABOUT HARALD MALMGREN

"Dr. Harald Malmgren Passed," by Pippa Malmgren. Substack, February 24, 2025. Reposted by SLDInfo.com, https://sldinfo.com/2025/02/dr-harald-malmgren-passed/

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My investigation has involved many interactions (both direct and remote) with professional archivists within numerous components of the National Archives and Records Administration, including the Special Access section, the Legislative Archives section, the National Personnel Records Center, the Still Pictures department, and the presidential libraries of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. I have also been assisted by personnel at various components of the Library of Congress, which allowed me to also gain access to some very large document archives held by various private institutions. I thank all of these people collectively for their patience and helpfulness, especially in those instances in which we were diligently searching for what I was pretty sure was not there.

I thank Tom Rogan of The Washington Examiner for his encouragement and assistance in posing questions to the current management of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

None of those who advised or assisted me are responsible in any degree for any of my interpretations, opinions, characterizations, or conclusions.

LOG OF SUBSTANTIVE REVISIONS TO THIS ARTICLE SINCE IT WAS PUBLISHED ON MAY 20, 2025, AT 6 AM EDT

(1) May 20, 2025: In the initial description of the Malmgren FBI papers, I wrote that the 33-page was declassified on May 24, 2025. The correct date is May 9, 2025.