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August 30 - September 6, 2024
when innovation and desperation meet, trouble will usually follow. If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation is the drunk uncle. The guy who calls only once a year, at 3 a.m. on your birthday, with the greatest idea anyone has ever had. No matter how hard you argue against the logic of his narrative, no matter how many flaws you find in his reasoning, he’s resolute. This will work. It has to—he’s a desperate man.
Every so often, we are surprised when one of these ideas actually pans out. The U-2 and SR-71 spy planes—some of the most innovative aircraft ever designed—were a result of American desperation to see inside the Soviet Union. Nuclear power, computers, the internet, modern textiles, personal encryption, even the process of how some of our food is grown were born out of a nation’s desperate fear to keep pace with an imposing rival.
Most history books are full of stories of things that happened; this is a history book full of stories behind things that didn’t happen.
The intent of historical actors can be (and I argue is) far more instructive and illuminating than focusing entirely on the outcome of their policies.
“Outcome history” is the traditional way of viewing historical events, but it leaves much to be desired. It has severe limitations, primarily because its lessons are predicated on things that cannot be accurately quantified: fate, luck, misfortune, whatever you want to call it. If the D-Day invasion of Normandy had failed because of a freak weather system, or a lucky shot from a German soldier that took out a key American leader on the beach (or any number of other misfortunate scenarios), would we think any less of Eisenhower’s plan? Using outcome-based history: yes. And therein lies the
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Counterfactuals can be a lot of fun—when you are hanging out with your friends and family, debating the “what ifs” of the Kennedy assassination, or the Civil War, or the Protestant Reformation, or the Star Wars prequels, or the 1986 World Series. (I forgive you, Bill Buckner. Mostly.) I’d be happy to join you all one day for a vigorous debate on historical counterfactuals,
perhaps over your favorite adult beverage or a bottle of Yoo-hoo. But they have no place here.
Instead, all of these stories should have you saying, “What w...
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In some cases, this gives us an unconventional perspective on familiar figures. You might never see historic figures such as John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, or even Carl Sagan the same way again.
The book is organized into four parts, each with its own theme, but all full of stories centered on the desperation that was the product of the sheer terror of World War II, or the ideological fervor and suspicion of the Cold War. In each case, the originators of these ideas truly believed their very existence was at stake. And their desperation led to some . . . interesting choices.
Part III spotlights some of the most inspired and innovative technology of World War II and the Cold War. No, not those. No, not those either. I’m talking about the really innovative stuff. The things so creative that they aren’t just “outside the box,” they are outside of the room, the building, the neighborhood, the city. Some of them were clearly ahead of their time. Some, we should hope, might never be in “their time.”
Finally, while my research for this book depended on serious research into primary and secondary source literature, archival resources, expert interviews, and broad-ranging scientific, intelligence, foreign policy, and national security policy perspectives, my primary reason for writing this book is to help you learn and have fun. And to have some fun myself. Because these stories are extraordinary.
fundamental fact of the Acoustic Kitty story: The CIA tried to make a covert listening device out of a housecat.
But what many people don’t realize is that MKULTRA was actually multiple programs—about 150—under the single umbrella of the code name, and many of these subprojects had nothing to do with biological toxins, chemicals, or psychedelic drugs.
The majority of the MKULTRA documents were (deliberately) destroyed decades ago, and unless someone kept a secret copy somewhere, we will never know the full extent
This is fifty small steps for a cat, but one giant leap for mankind.
But here’s what we do know from Marchetti’s version of the story. Only feet away from the safety of the curb, Acoustic Kitty was run over by a taxi. No promotion. No raise. No boat. No Harley. Just the indignity of having to scrape the still-sparking Acoustic Kitty off the pavement, before the Soviets—or worse, the Washington Post—find out what the CIA was up to.
Donovan kept it simple: “You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course,” he said. “Professor Moriarty is the man I want for my staff here at OSS. I think you’re it.”
A cat bomb, based on the undisputed premises that (a) cats always land on their feet and (b) hate water. The plan was to hang a poor kitty in a harness from the bottom of a bomb, with some kind of device that allowed said kitty’s movements to guide the bomb as it fell. If you dropped it in the vicinity of a naval target (such as a German battleship), then the cat’s natural instinct would be to think, “Holy hell, I’m falling into water. I hate water, so let’s try to land somewhere dry. Like that German battleship over yonder.” And then BOOM. Suicide kitty is a martyr to the cause.
Working from their quaintly old-fashioned—and completely ridiculous—views of gender stereotypes, Lovell and his team saw Hitler’s penchant for violent mood swings and poor emotional control as evidence that he was “definitely close to the male-female line.” The plan involved spiking his food with female hormones, to push him over the gender edge, making his mustache fall out and his voice turn soprano.
Another plan called for arming Chinese call girls with poisons or toxins to use against high-ranking Japanese officers who utilized their services. Simple enough, right? The catch was that the poison’s delivery system needed to be just about invisible, since these women didn’t have the means to conceal anything in what they were(n’t) wearing. Odds are, you can probably figure on your own how they solved that problem . . . And then the weapon, which was based on the highly lethal botulism toxin (fun fact: so is Botox!) was successfully smuggled into Japanese-occupied China. But nothing
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The perfect covert action takes place when your target doesn’t even know he was the victim of an attack. When he assumes natural causes were the result of his bad fortune. When he isn’t looking for someone to blame. Someone to punish. Someone to kill.
Stanley Lovell’s mission was to execute the perfect covert action: a germ warfare attack against the Germans in North Africa without their knowing what hit them. This was more than a desire to be sneaky. It was important to the Allies to maintain the moral high ground in the war, and to prevent the Germans from retaliating with their own biological attack.
The chemical attractant was apparently so powerful it would wake North African flies out of hibernation. It’s like the sweet aroma of a local bakery, a newborn baby, or freshly cut grass—but with poop.
And if you’re planning a trip to the Philippines, you might run into the giant flying fox bat and its six-foot wingspan. Good luck sleeping after that.
In essence, just because they could do it didn’t mean it was a good idea, especially given the timeliness of winning a war threatening the very notion of democracy.
At a different point in the speech, he was more succinct: “When you strike at the morale of a people or an army you strike at the deciding factor, because it is the strength of their will that determines the length of wars, the measure of resistance, and the day of final collapse.”
The term “false flag” comes from the days when pirates stalked the high seas. If a pirate ship wanted to sneak up on and attack another ship, it raised the national flag of the victim ship to pretend to be its ally. A clever ruse that left the victim ship nearly defenseless against the pirate onslaught as they realized far too late that their friend was in reality a mangy scallywag buccaneer.
Lorenz was (understandably) one unhappy woman. She traveled to the United States, where the U.S. government quickly recruited her to return to Cuba and take her revenge. She was given two botulism-laced pills to use against her lover. But when she saw him again, Castro knew why she was there. He took his gun out of his holster, handed it to her, and said, “No one can kill me. No one. Ever.”
Marita’s love/lust for Fidel was rekindled. She dumped the poison pills and the two fell into bed together. When they were done, Castro left, and Lorenz returned to the United States. You just can’t make this stuff up.
The six minutes of the Tohoku earthquake actually shifted the Earth on its axis of rotation, and shortened the length of a day by about a microsecond. Japan’s main island, Honshu, moved eastward by eight feet, and about 250 miles of Honshu’s northern coastline dropped by two feet. Tremors were felt as far away as Norway, North America, and Antarctica. The earthquake even produced an infrasonic (lower frequencies than humans can hear) rumble that was so loud it was detected by a satellite in space.
You don’t mess around with science. You do it the right way, or you
don’t do it at all. There’s a process, and it’s a process that has worked well for centuries. Even when you think you already know the answer to a question, when you absolutely know how an experiment is going to turn out—you still do the damn experiment. You never really know until you empirically know.
In 2006, an Egyptian weekly reported that a combination of secret American and Israeli undersea nuclear testing in the Indian Ocean caused the earthquake that triggered the 2004 tsunami. Then, in 2015, an Israeli military tabloid published an article warning that Iran, if allowed to develop a nuclear weapons capability, could detonate a bomb in the Mediterranean and wipe out all of Israel with a massive tsunami. Yes, both of these articles were from fringe publications, where conspiracy theories thrive and nonsense ideas are celebrated. The nuttier the better.
The Tohoku tsunami released about 9.3 million megatons of energy, more than 150,000 times as much as the Tsar Bomba—or any of the modern nuclear weapons Russia’s submarine drone could carry.
Other people have . . . different . . . coping mechanisms. Just prior to the landfall of Hurricane Irma in September 2017, a Facebook “event” page was created calling for Florida gun owners to shoot at the hurricane in an attempt to either weaken it or change its course. The page exclaimed: “YO SO THIS GOOFY LOOKING WINDY HEADASS NAME IRMA SAID THEY PULLING UP ON US, LETS SHOW IRMA THAT WE SHOOT FIRST” [multiple emojis redacted].
But if Leonard Reiffel is correct, Carl Sagan should have been known more for his unauthorized disclosure of classified nuclear secrets. Sagan seems to have included his role in the project on his application for an academic scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959—just after the cancellation of the program.
But you never know. If the neighborhood stray cat suddenly takes an unnatural interest in your private conversations, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
