Disinformation » Cold War

Connecticut’s Cold War Secret

majestic — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:19:26 +0000

For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret. And though they worked long hours under intense deadlines, sometimes missing family holidays and anniversaries, they could tell no one — not even their wives and children — what they did.

They were engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors — “real cloak-and-dagger guys,” says Fred Marra, 78, with a hearty laugh…

[continues at AP via Fox News]

Two Icons, Two Deaths, Two Worlds: The Media Simplified Them Both

Danny Schechter — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:31:00 +0000

The world has said goodbye to two leaders who were worlds apart. One was a widely celebrated anti-communist, the other a widely despised communist. However, both the lives and thoughts of the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel, and North Korea’s Kim Jung-il were given short shrift.

The playwright turned President Havel who parlayed human rights activism into becoming Czechoslovakia‘s post-Communist President was a leader for the pro-democracy Charter 77 Movement, not just a Red-hating politician on a power trip.

Yet, the press praised him more for what he opposed than what he believed. The people who loved him adored him for both.

One report: “Thousands of silent mourners have accompanied the body of Vaclav Havel through central Prague as the Czech Republic began three days of national mourning for the icon of the Velvet Revolution.

About 10,000 mourners mostly in black, some carrying Czech or Slovak flags, joined a solemn procession taking the former president’s coffin from a church through narrow cobbled streets to Prague Castle, the seat of Czech presidents, on Wednesday.”

Havel was an intellectual, a non-violent revolutionary who also presided over the break up of his country into two: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

When his era ended, amidst deep economic problems, his country opted to turn right abandoning his humanistic sensibility by moving to the pro-American right and embracing aggressive capitalism.

Vaclav Klaus, his rigid “free market”-promoting adversary, was often hyper-critical when Havel was alive, but is now more charitable in his death, saying:

“Vaclav Havel’s life mirrors a large section of the 20th century: the war, the seizing of power by the communists, the thaw of the 1960s, the fall of communism, the building of the new democracy, the partition of the nation and its integration into European and global bodies.”

On Friday, there will be a procession of Western leaders showboating at his funeral including Bill and Hillary Clinton and leaders from Europe and Eastern Europe. Since his ascendancy to power, the Czech market was opened wide to western investment and military sales.

Havel had closer relations with American cultural figures including Frank Zappa and poet Alan Ginsberg than the neo-cons in Washington.

Not every Czech was enamored with him either, for other reasons, as expressed by “Smoker X” on the Hyperspace website:

“If he knew what was gonna come, he would never do it. The things he promised he would do for Czechoslovakia never happened. I lived under the dictatorship as you call it in Czechoslovakia and I say that people were much happier then. The system was pro-people; this system we live now is against people and pro a few rich bastards.

Socialism was not perfect but capitalism is pure evil.

The things you say about Havel are things you heard from tv or newspaper. He did not liberate people in Czechoslovakia, he put them in prison. I would go back to socialism tomorrow if it was possible. you have no idea how good it was to live free, free from stress, hunger. always helped when needed, always guaranteed with work and free health care and education and good education.”

David Warren refutes media cliches about him in the Ottawa Citizen:

“Reading and re-reading Havel, since his death, I am struck by his acute grasp of the emptiness and capitulation of that Enlightenment. Soviet Communism embodied it in perhaps its most extreme form, but as Havel realized, western “capitalism” and “libertarianism” are also premised on Enlightenment tenets: that man constructs meaning for himself, and is answerable to himself, only; that what cannot be precisely defined, quantified, and legislated is “irrational,” and “irrelevant” to public life.”

Havel was embraced by the West only as a a cold-war anti-communist symbol. The nuances of his philosophy and social critique were ignored.

This is not a view you see reported in the Western media.

A world away, there were millions in tears to mourn the passing of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il. Few Western leaders have expressed condolences even though South Korea and Japan had the compassion to do so.

The Chicago Tribune reports, “North Korea claimed Kim’s death generated a series of spectacular natural phenomena, creating a mysterious glow atop a revered mountain, cracking a sheet of ice on a lake with a loud roar and inspiring a crane to circle a statue of the nation’s founder before perching in a tree and drooping its head in sorrow.”

If he was revered at home with these exaggerated powers, he was just as demonized one-dimensionally abroad. In death as in life, he was presented only as the two-bit dictator of “the Hermit Kingdom”—insult, insult–who wore elevator shoes and had a big collection of western movies. How many times have you heard that! That’s about all we heard endlessly.

If did not have a few nuclear bombs, he would have likely been overthrown years ago. Despite the constant characterizations of him as bizarre and a maniac, State Department officials who accompanied Madeline Albright on a visit there told the New York Times how impressed they were with his strategic thinking and how well informed he was.

The West saw him, through the lens of our media, only as the embodiment of a hateful communism, stereotyping him an enemy to be feared.

Like Havel, his views were simplified, but in another direction.

He was pictured as Dr. Evil in a James Bond Movie—ironically, he had collected them all–and his country was the poster child of George Bush’s overhyped “Axis of Evil.” In the end, Bush did not prevail in his attack on him.

In a news world of black and whites, he was long blamed for every problem in the country. Yes, the people there are poor, suffer from famine and underdevelopment. They do need help, but refuse it at the expense of their independence and Juche ideology.

Have we already forgotten the many decades when South Korea had a U.S.- backed dictator who had collaborated with the Japanese war machine? He was hated by “his” people who protested for years against him, even as the Pentagon backed him and western investors profited from the economy.

The oxymoron of Western “intelligence” was caught napping when Kim died. Fears of his son—the “grand successor”—launching a war turned out to be bogus. (Remember all the reports of the U.S. and South Korea “on alert?”)

Within a few days, we learned that his power will be shared with the country’s bureaucratic military establishment. Kim #3 is on a tight leash.

The transition there went smoothly proving once again how little our media knows about the country and its history of defeating Japanese invaders and an American “police action” (with Chinese help) under the umbrella of the UN.

In our official cold war narrative, that war was blamed solely on a North Korean invasion on June 25, 1950.

In those years, the legendary journalist I.F. Stone refuted Washington’s fabricated Korea War propaganda.

Since then, historians like the University of Chicago’s Bruce Cumings have shown how the North Koreans were provoked and the conflict’s causes were complex. The North Koreans are said to have lost a million people in that war, but the country survived.

The people there may not have the “rights” we think we do, but they certainly seem to support their government and system even as human rights abuses are legion and dissidents expose Pyonyang’s policies.

So, there is more, much more, to both the stories of both Kim and Havel, two men with opposing political orientations, but whose views and roles have been simplified and distorted for myth-making political purposes in our “objective” media.

Danny Schechter writes about Occupy Wall Street on Al Jazeera, Progressive Radio Network other outlets and his News Dissector blog. He is a documentary filmmaker and author whose work can be found at Plunder the Crime Of Our Time. Please email comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

The Power of The Powerless (Video)

imkaan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:19:49 +0000

Václav Havel died on Sunday, ironically while the U.S. news media is focused on Kim il-Jong’s death. Here’s an excerpt from a documentary that may be of interest:

Buy A House Atop A Cold War Missile Silo

JacobSloan — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:00:47 +0000

Via Best Places To Live In NY, a home for sale for $1.76 million in the mountains of upstate New York offers the perfect retreat for the collapse of civilization:

It might be the closest you can come to having a secret lair. A home in the Adirondacks is for sale – that from the outside looks like a traditional mountain retreat. But underneath is a cold war-era missile silo that would make Dr. Evil drool.

Duck And Cover: The Citizen Kane Of PSAs

JacobSloan — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:49:02 +0000

Few films, let alone ones running under ten minutes, have been as frequently referenced, reproduced and satirized as Duck and Cover, yet it is never regarded seriously. Conelrad gives this key piece of cinematic history the treatment it deserves:

We have spent the last two years thoroughly researching DUCK AND COVER’s production history as well as its initial public reception in 1952. Interviews were conducted with living participants involved in the making of the film as well as surviving family members of those key players who had passed away.

Just how did the term “Duck and Cover” become universal shorthand for the paranoid excesses of the Cold War and for every geo-political panic attack since? The film is, after all, the Citizen Kane of American civil defense motion pictures. Clips from this movie are used almost every time a news piece is produced on the 1950’s or the Cold War. It struck us as odd that so little was known about the origins of a work that has had such a reverberating impact on the culture.

In many ways DUCK AND COVER is the perfect synthesis of the competing themes of the 1950’s: Fear and prosperity. In the context of the Cold War’s epic struggle between communism and capitalism, it seems oddly appropriate that the American government turned to private industry to help sell survival to an anxious population.

The FCDA was never afforded a large budget to pursue its education mandate so it used whatever avenues it could to cheaply maximize the distribution of the civil defense message. Two of these avenues were the public school system and the educational film market. Public school administrators were cooperative, even eager, to embody President Truman’s slogan “Education is our first line of defense.” Toward that end and beginning in 1950, public (and many private) schools—particularly in obvious target cities—began regular air raid drills sometimes known as “cover” or “sneak attack” drills. In such exercises the teacher would, without warning, yell “Drop!” and the students would kneel next to or under their desks with their hands clutched around the back of their necks.

nother step many school districts took during this period was to provide identification tags (i.e. dog tags) to school children to wear so that in the event of an attack their bodies could be identified more easily. Dog tags were the preferred method of identifying pupils because the other ID options that were considered like tattooing had negative connotations or, in the case of fingerprinting, elicited privacy concerns. Moreover, metal tags were thought to be the smarter alternative because metal was decidedly more “permanent” than human flesh. With such bizarre debates and practices shaping the childhood memories of the baby boomer generation is it any wonder there was a counter culture in the 1960’s?

Read the rest at Conelrad.

Congressman Paul Ryan Hands Cold War Victory to the Ruskies

Liam McGonagle — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:31:48 +0000

Well, there it is folks. Plain as day: Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap to Ruin” austerity program sh*tcanned the U.S. Spaceshuttle program and left us dependent upon the charity of ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin.

No you wouldn’t hear much about that from the Fox News(tm) Politburo. Seems that we have to rely on our Aussie cousins to get the scoop.

It’s true. Now without an independent space program of our own, we’ll be at the tender mercies of the apparatchiks in Moscow to support our telecommunications satellite infrastructure.

Now I don’t have definitive proof yet that Paul Ryan is a sleeper agent for Uncle Vanya, but all signs point to yes. In debt ceiling talks this week his lot are trying to force American-born grandmothers to give up their cat food money in order to support the vodka habits of his Wall Street buddies like Frenchman “Fabulous” Fab Torre.

More proof that the Truth often hurts, from the Dystopia Diaries

Nuclear Apocalypse Animation That Scared Ed Sullivan Audiences Still Scares Today

Pelliciari — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 03:00:02 +0000

io9 and CONELRAD Adjacent detail a broadcast of the Ed Sullivan Show that “scared the hell out of kids” when a short animation was aired on 27 May 1956. Peter and Joan Foldes’ cartoon, A Short Vision, depicts a nuclear apocalypse, showing the faces of men and animals melting off, the audience off guard when Sullivan shared no warning but this introduction:

“Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers – I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated – but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called ‘A Short Vision’ in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner.”

Cold War USAF Considered Space-Based Atomic Warship (Video)

Haystack — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:32:48 +0000

One of the secret projects discussed in Annie Jacobson’s new Area 51 book is Project Orion, an ambitious 1950’s-1960’s era attempt to develop a nuclear fission-propelled spacecraft capable of interplanetary travel. Like many of the Cold War aeronautics projects developed at Area 51 and related test sites, it was way ahead of its time. According to Jacobs, however, when ARPA and the USAF took over the project, they had a far more Strangelovian vision in mind:

“From high above Earth, a USS Orion could be used to launch attacks against enemy targets using nuclear missiles. Thanks to Orion’s nuclear-propulsion technology, the spaceship could make extremely fast defensive maneuvers, avoiding any Russian nuclear missiles that might come its way…For a period of time during the early 1960’s the Air Force believed Orion was going to be invincible. ‘Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth!” declared General Thomas S. Power of the Strategic Air Command.” [Jacobson, p. 305]

In this fascinating TED lecture George Dyson, son of Freeman Dyson, shares his special knowledge of the project. Not much information about Project Orion’s proposed weaponization has reached the web, but pay special attention to what he says at around 3:30-3:50…

Roswell ‘Was Soviet Plot to Create U.S. Panic’

ralph — Wed, 18 May 2011 18:28:07 +0000

This is even stranger to me than the famous “it’s aliens!” conspiracy theory we all know and love. Thomas Harding writes in the Telegraph:

Devotees of science fiction have been convinced for decades that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert of New Mexico – and that the American government covered up the recovery of extraterrestrial bodies. The so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 spawned conspiracy theories by the score.

But now, sadly for UFO spotters, a new book offers an entirely man-made — and some would say even more bizarre — explanation, featuring two of the greatest villains of 20th century history: the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr Joseph Mengele.

During a powerful storm in July, 1947, an object crashed near a rancher’s home in Roswell, New Mexico.

Roswell army air base initially said that a “flying disc” had come down, but hours later, as government scientists arrived in the area, it was stated instead that a weather balloon had crashed.

Britain’s Stylishly Mod Secret Underground City

JacobSloan — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:42:41 +0000

How To Be A Retronaut has an arresting set of images of Burlington, the 35-acre “Cold War City” lying twelve stories beneath Wiltshire, England. Built during the 1950s, it was to be home to the prime minister and a few thousand others in the event of nuclear apocalypse. With record players, rotary phones, and Singer sewing machines folding out from enclosures in the walls, it makes the prospect of a post-disaster future seems quite charming:

It was equipped with the second largest telephone exchange in Britain and a BBC studio from where the prime minister could make broadcasts to what remained of the nation. 100,000 lamps that lit its streets and guided the way to a pub modeled on the Red Lion in Whitehall. The bunker’s very existence was meant to be top secret until it was decommissioned in 2004.

Government To Declassify Historical Images From Spy Satellites

JacobSloan — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:46:54 +0000

The public will at last get a glimpse at our government’s secretive, Cold War-era version of Google Earth. Secrecy News reports:

Millions of feet of film of historical imagery from intelligence satellites may be declassified this year, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) said.

“The NGA is anticipating the potential declassification of significant amounts of film-based imagery… in 2011,” according to an NGA announcement that solicited contractor interest in converting the declassified film into digital format.

For planning purposes, the NGA told potential contractors to assume the need to digitize “approximately 4 million linear feet of film up to approximately 7 inches in width.” The imagery is “stored on 500 foot spools, with many frames up to several feet in length.” A nominal start date of October 1, 2011 was specified for the digitization project.

The declassification of historical intelligence satellite imagery has been largely dormant for many years. President Clinton’s 1995 executive order 12951 promised a periodic review of classified imagery “with the objective of making available to the public as much imagery as possible consistent with the interests of national defense and foreign policy.” In particular, a review of obsolete film-return systems, such as the KH-8 GAMBIT and the KH-9 HEXAGON, was to be completed within five years. This was not done, or produced no results if it was done.

Suburban Sprawl: A Government Tactic Against Nuclear Annihilation And Natural Disaster

JacobSloan — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:11:48 +0000

In the aftermath of last month’s devastation, Japanese leaders have called on urban planners to make Japan decentralized and lower density so as to be less vulnerable. It wouldn’t be the first time that sprawl has been employed as a strategy against societal annihilation; during the Cold War, American planners pushed for suburbanization as a defense against nuclear disaster. BLDGBLOG enlightens:

At the height of the Cold War, the sprawling, decentralized suburban landscape of the United States was seen by many military planners as a form of spatial self-defense. As historian David Krugler explains in This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War, “urban dispersal” was viewed as a defensive military tactic, one that would greatly increase the nation’s chance of survival in the event of nuclear attack.

Specially formatted residential landscapes such as “cluster cities” were thus proposed, “each with a maximum population of 50,000.” These smaller satellite cities would not only reshape the civilian landscape of the United States, they would make its citizens, its industrial base, and its infrastructure much harder to target.

“This might seem the stuff of Cold War science fiction,” Krugler writes, “but after World War II, many urban and civil defense planners believed cluster cities, also called dispersal, should be the future of the American metropolis.”

Krugler points out that this suburban dispersal was not always advised in the name of military strategy: “Many urban planners believed dispersal could spur slum clearance, diminish industrial pollution, and produce parks. Not only would dispersal shield America’s cities, it would save them from problems of their own making.”

However, the idea that urban dispersal might be useful only as a protective tactic against the horrors of aerial bombardment overlooks other threats, including earthquakes and tsunamis.

Earlier this week, Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan was advised “to decentralize Japan” out of fear of “Tokyo annihilation danger.” Indeed, we read, the recent 9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and partial nuclear meltdown at Fukushima together suggest that “the nation must reduce the role of its capital city to avert an even greater catastrophe.”

Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years … (Video)

vulcan — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 07:38:00 +0000

Charles Q. Choi writes for National Geographic News:

Even a regional nuclear war could spark “unprecedented” global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models. Widespread famine and disease would likely follow, experts speculate.

During the Cold War a nuclear exchange between superpowers—such as the one feared for years between the United States and the former Soviet Union—was predicted to cause a “nuclear winter.”

In that scenario hundreds of nuclear explosions spark huge fires, whose smoke, dust, and ash blot out the sun for weeks amid a backdrop of dangerous radiation levels. Much of humanity eventually dies of starvation and disease.

The Military’s Long-Lost Nuclear Apocalypse Film

JacobSloan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:11:50 +0000

The National Security Archive has the The Power of Decision posted in its entirety, making it available for public viewing for the first time ever. Produced in 1956-57 by the U.S. Air Force, it is perhaps the only government film depicting what the descent into nuclear holocaust would be like, a grim future in which “nobody wins a nuclear war because both sides are sure to suffer terrible damage,” yet, “success” (i.e. the United States’ prevailing with only some millions of casualties) is possible. It’s not entirely clear why this was made — perhaps to prepare military officers for confronting a nightmarish scenario:

A Quick Journey Through 1970s Apocalypticism

JacobSloan — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:17:56 +0000

Paleofuture Blog, which look at predictions and visions of the future as previous generations imagined it, has a video feature examining the colorful weirdness of apocalyptic doom-and-gloom in the 1970s. In that decade, frightening documentaries such as Future Shock and The Late Great Planet Earth caught the zeitgeist by foretelling the fast-approaching destruction of humanity at the hands of overpopulation, dehumanizing technology, Communism, ancient prophecies, and natural devastation. Viewing these works today, they are a reminder that the world probably isn’t going to end, and we’ll make it through to tomorrow.

Pictures From The Secret STASI Archives

JacobSloan — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:12:39 +0000

German artist Simon Menner has a bundle of photos taken by East Germany’s secret police during Cold War. Offering a glimpse into the small absurdities of life as a Communist spy, included are snap shots of suspicious household objects, agents modeling their “normal civilian” disguises, and West German spies who knew they were themselves being spied on, et cetera:

East Germany, until it ceased to exist in 1989/90, had one of the most advanced surveillance system ever in operation, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Department of State Security) or STASI. In terms of number of agents per capita it even outranked the Russian KGB by far.

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was decided that most of its archive should be made accessible to the public and for historic research. Even though the access is restricted, this was very much in contrast to what most of the other nations of the former Eastern Block did. One has to keep in mind that this is a full scale secret service such as the CIA whose archives are now open for research.

I approached the public agency that is now responsible for the care of these incredibly vast archives with a proposal for a project and I was granted the opportunity to have some images reproduced for my use as an artist.

Many of these images might appear absurd or even funny. But it is very important to understand the intention behind them. It was a extremely repressive system that caused terror through its secret service. There is also something in these images that really frightens me. Some of them are very open for interpretation. Take the coffee maker for instance. It is a West German product and therefore it could be seen as a sign for contacts to western agents or it could be seen as a gift by relatives in the west. The difference was merely a decade spent in jail or not. I believe it shows somewhat the general limitations of surveillance.

The images of men in costumes were taken during a seminar for STASI agents on how to dress up. It might look ridiculous indeed but it shows how they thought someone appears inconspicuously.

Maybe the weirdest thing I came across so far – and I had no idea that something like this might exist – are the images of spies taking pictures of spies. Some small units within the Allied Forces were theoretically free to move within all of Germany. This was seen by both sides (east and west) as a wonderful opportunity for espionage. Whenever a small group of soldiers drove in their car through East Germany STASI agents tried to follow them. Both sides were fully aware that the other side was fully aware of their presence and this is exactly what these images show. An endless circle or awareness. I believe this is a wonderful allegory for the Cold War. Currently I am researching whether some of their counterparts still exist in western archives.

No Secret Here: The CIA Will Put A Spell On You

aaroncynic — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:12:50 +0000

Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:

While the fiery debates surrounding Wikileaks continue to move from content of cables to personal dramas surrounding founder Julian Assange, hyperbolic accusations of “high tech terrorism” and promises of retribution, the website Cryptome continues to publish its own archives of suppressed information. On Christmas, Cryptome released two documents from the mid-1950’s which briefly highlight the CIA’s interest in using hypnotism as a covert weapon (via Mother Jones) in the cold war against Communism.

The first document, titled “The Military Application of Hypntism (sic),” details two “practical applications” for hypnotism. The first would be using a subject as a courier. A hypothetical colonel would be given a message in deep hypnosis, would have no memory of being hypnotized, the nature or contents of the message. When the hypothetical colonel reached the intended recipient of the message, its recipient would retrieve it via another hypnosis session. The second application would be used on a subject to “establish in them through the use of hypnotism the condition of split personality.” Unconsciously, the hypnotized would remain loyal to the red, white and blue – but on the outside, the subject would be redder than Lenin’s ghost. The author of the document claims “I can, demonstrate all my particular contentions to the satisfaction of the government agencies and request the opportunity to do so.” The author also suggests that Russian literature on the subject of hypnosis is hard to acquire.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

Japanese Artist Maps History of the World’s Nuclear Explosions (1945–1998)

ralph — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:53:17 +0000

Over 2,000 detonations! Really informative. Duncan Geere writes on Wired.com (UK):

A Japanese artist named Isao Hashimoto has created a series of works about nuclear weapons. One is titled “1945—1998″ and shows a history of the world’s nuclear explosions.

Over the course of fourteen and a half minutes, every single one of the 2,053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are is plotted on a map.

After a couple of minutes or so, however, once the USSR and Britain entered the nuclear club, the tests really start to build up, reaching a peak of nearly 140 in 1962, and remaining well over 40 each year until the mid-80s.

It’s a compelling insight into the history of humanity’s greatest destructive force, especially when you remember that only two nuclear explosions have ever been detonated offensively, both in 1945. Since then, despite more than 2,000 other tests and billions of dollars having been spent on their development, no nuclear warheads have been used in anger.

The Mystery Of Cursed French Bread (A Secret CIA Experiment?)

ralph — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 09:53:48 +0000

Ted Goodman on PhyOrg recounts the strange events of August 16, 1951, when dozens of villagers in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were struck with unexplainable and horrifying hallucinations of fire and snakes and beasts of all kinds, from, what was described as by villagers, eating le pain maudit (”cursed bread”).

Recently on Russia Today, Hank Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, suggests this incident was part of a CIA-funded experiment on foreign soil with LSD. According to Albarelli, five hundred people were affected by the “experiment” — resulting in forty people being taken to a nearby psychiatric institute and at least three suicides.

Albarelli specifically discusses this incident at around 5:10 into this video, and relates it to the work of Frank Olson, the subject of his book.

The U.S. and Soviet Union Considered Detonating Nuclear Bombs on the Moon

Russ Kick — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:51:38 +0000

With all the hubub about NASA blowing up the Moon last October, I thought disinfo.com readers would like to know the U.S. (and the Commies!) had it in mind all along.

Here’s another chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on me, check out: The Memory Hole.

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You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is an unused scene from Dr. Strangelove, but the United States and the Soviet Union have seriously considered exploding atomic bombs on the Moon.

It was the late 1950s, and the Cold War was extremely chilly. Someone in the US government got the bright idea of nuking the Moon, and in 1958 the Air Force Special Weapons Center spearheaded the project (labeled A119, “A Study of Lunar Research Flights”).

The idea was to shock and awe the Soviet Union, and everybody else, with a massive display of American nuclear might. What better demonstration than an atomic explosion on our closest celestial neighbor? According to the project’s reports, the flash would’ve been visible to the naked eye on Earth. (It’s been suggested that another motivation may have been to use the Moon as a test range, thus avoiding the problems with irradiating our home planet.)

Carl Sagan was among the scientists lending his intellectual muscle to this hare-brained scheme. The project’s leader was physicist Leonard Reiffel, who said: “I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on earth.”

When a reporter for Reuters asked him what had happened to Project A119, Reiffel replied, “After the final report in early- to mid-1959, it simply went away, as things sometimes do in the world of classified activities.”

Astoundingly, this wasn’t the only time that a nuclear strike on the Moon was contemplated. Science reporter Keay Davidson reveals that “in 1956, W.W. Kellogg of RAND Corporation considered the possibility of launching an atomic bomb to the Moon.” In 1957, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory put forth Project Red Socks, the first serious proposal to send spacecraft to the Moon. One of its lesser suggestions was to nuke the Moon in order to send lunar rocks hurtling back to Earth, where they could be collected and studied. The following year, the leading American astronomer of the time, Gerard Kuiper, coauthored a memo which considered the scientific advantages of nuking the Moon. The creator of the hydrogen bomb, physicist Edward Teller, similarly mused about dropping atomic bombs on the Moon in order to study the seismic waves they would create.

The Soviet Union got in on the act, also in the late 1950s. Project E-4 would’ve used a probe armed with an A-bomb to blast the Moon, apparently as a display of one-upmanship. The idea reached the stage of a full-scale model but was aborted for fear of the probe falling back to Earth.

References: Barnett, Antony. “US Planned One Big Nuclear Blast for Mankind.” Observer (London), 14 May 2000. • Davidson, Keay. Carl Sagan: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999. • Ulivi, Paolo. “Nuke the Moon!” Grand Tour Planetary Exploration Page, 13 Oct 2002. • Zabarenko, Deborah. “Moon Bomb?” Reuters News Agency, 17 May 2000. • Zheleznyakov, Aleksandr. “The E-4 Project: Exploding a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon.” • Enciklopediya Kosmonavtika

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Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days
under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

Not So Intelligent Intelligence: Four CIA Flops

ralph — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:52:55 +0000

Funny yet historically intriguing essay from Molly Mann on divine caroline. I really thought the Acoustic Kitty was BS, guess not:

Most of us don’t know much about what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actually does. Without some degree of mystery, after all, it can’t carry out its purpose to covertly collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals for American policymakers. So when we do learn anything about a specific CIA program, it’s usually after the fact, and usually because it was a big enough failure to garner media attention. With the understanding that all details about the agency’s dealings are sketchy, unconfirmed, and, well, secret, here are four of the twentieth century’s biggest CIA flops.

1. Operation Acoustic Kitty: The Cold War era of the 1960s was the CIA’s heyday. Americans were so worried about what the Communists were doing and whether they had nuclear weapons that we would have done just about anything to find out.

And the secret agents, glorified in spy novels and movies, who did get the dirt on the Reds were our heroes. The CIA’s carte blanche in chasing Communists led to rumors of some pretty bizarre ideas, like Operation Acoustic Kitty, which supposedly ran from 1961 to 1967, and involved the CIA’s surgically implanting cats with audio equipment to use them as bugging devices.

Though the basic idea for the plot — that a cat would go unnoticed and could easily eavesdrop on Soviet conversations — was certainly innovative, former CIA officer Victor Marchetti recalls many problems with Acoustic Kitty:

They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that. Finally, they’re ready. They took it out to a park bench and said, ‘Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else — not the birds, no cat or dog — just those two guys!’

Read more from Molly Mann on divine caroline

Learn How to Spike a Drink the CIA Way

Raymond — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:34:13 +0000

From The Independent:

Forget poison-tipped umbrellas and exploding cigars. At the height of the Cold War, the CIA issued its top spooks with a more prosaic piece of equipment: a beginner’s guide to magic, educating them in the old-fashioned arts of conjuring and sleight-of-hand.

The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception was written in 1953 by a well-known performer called John Mulholland. It included tips for hiding objects up your sleeve, spiking someone’s drink (while pretending to light a cigarette) and communicating with colleagues by tying your shoelaces in a special way.

In 1973, as the Cold War showed signs of thawing, the CIA ordered every copy of the “top secret” document to be destroyed. But one managed to escape the agency’s paper shredders and was recently unearthed, in mysterious circumstances, by the espionage historian H Keith Melton and Robert Wallace, an author and former CIA staffer.

[Read more at The Independent]

…

Did David Hasselhoff End the Cold War?

ralph — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:26:29 +0000

With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today, I found this story from the BBC in 2004 kinda funny. This headline also seemed to inspire the title of a book from a great publisher in the UK, Icon Books. If you don’t take Icon’s or the BBC’s word for it, watch the Hoff in action at the wall below (or better yet, the music video for “Looking for Freedom”):

Barely a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the city that had been divided by politics for more than 40 years was united in song. And leading the chorus of several hundred thousand voices was a man hitherto known to the rest of the world for driving a talking car.

David Hasselhoff, star of the hit 80s TV series Knight Rider, is renowned in celebrity-obsessed circles for being Big In Germany; not only as an actor, but as a purveyor of soft rock anthems. For that seminal concert, on New Year’s Eve 1989, Hasselhoff stood atop of the partly-demolished wall and belted out a tune called “Looking for Freedom.” (Continued on BBC News)