Isegoria

”If I had stayed in the East,” Napoleon said to General Gourgaud on St Helena, “I would have founded an empire, like Alexander.” Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life) Napoleon’s preparations for his campaign in Egypt:

The Ottoman Turks had conquered Egypt in 1517 and still officially ruled it, but de facto control had been long wrested from them by the Mamluks, a military caste originally from Georgia in the Caucasus. Their twenty-four beys (warlord princes) were unpopular among ordinary Egyptians for the high taxes they imposed, and were considered foreigners. After the Revolution, the idea of invading Egypt had appealed both to French radical idealists for its promise of extending liberty to a people oppressed by foreign tyrants, and to more calculating strategists such as Carnot and Talleyrand, who wanted to counter British influence in the eastern Mediterranean.

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Between his secret appointment to command the Army of Egypt on March 5, 1798 and the date set for the expedition to set sail, May 19, there were fewer than eleven weeks for Napoleon to organize and equip the entire enterprise, yet somehow he also managed to attend eight lectures on science at the Institut.

As part of a misinformation campaign he spoke openly in the salons about the holiday he hoped to take in Germany with Josephine, Monge, Berthier and Marmont. To further the ruse, he was officially reconfirmed as commander of the Army of England, based at Brest.

Napoleon described Egypt as ‘the geographical key to the world’. His strategic aim was to damage British trade in the region and replace it with French; at very least he hoped to stretch the Royal Navy by forcing it to protect the mouths of the Mediterranean and Red Sea and trade routes to India and America simultaneously.

The Royal Navy, which had lost Corsica as a base in 1796, would be further constrained if the French fleet could operate from the near-impregnable harbour of Malta. ‘Why should we not seize the island of Malta?’ he had written to Talleyrand in September 1797. ‘It would further threaten British naval superiority.’ He told the Directory that ‘This little island is worth any price to us.’

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His ultimate ambition — or fantasy — may be gauged by his demand for English maps of Bengal and the Ganges from the war ministry, and his request to be accompanied by Citizen Piveron, the former envoy to Britain’s greatest enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, ‘the Tiger of Mysore’.

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As it transpired he had relatively little difficulty in raising the 8 million francs the expedition would cost, through ‘contributions’ extorted by Berthier in Rome, Joubert in Holland and Brune in Switzerland.

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The cavalry was to be under the command of the Haitian-born General Davy de la Pailleterie, known as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, whose father was a French nobleman and whose mother was of Afro-Caribbean descent, hence the nickname ‘Schwarzer Teufel’ (black devil) which the Austrians had given him when he prevented them from re-crossing the Adige in January 1797.

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Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.

With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him.

He also included Herodotus for his — largely fantastical — description of Egypt. (Years later he would state that he believed ‘Man was formed by the heat of the sun acting upon mud. Herodotus tells us that the slime of the Nile changed into rats, and that they could be seen in the process of formation.’

Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest. To that end he took 167 geographers, botanists, chemists, antiquaries, engineers, historians, printers, astronomers, zoologists, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, Orientalists, mathematicians, economists, journalists, civil engineers and balloonists — the so-called savants, most of whom were members of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts — whose work he hoped would give the enterprise a significance beyond the military.

He failed in his hopes to persuade a professional poet to accompany him, but he did enlist the fifty-one-year-old novelist, artist and polymath Vivant Denon, who made more than two hundred sketches during his travels. Under their leaders Monge and Berthollet, the savants included some of the most distinguished men of the day: the mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier (author of Fourier’s Law concerning heat conduction), the zoologist Étienne Saint-Hilaire and the mineralogist Déodat de Dolomieu (after whom dolomite was named).

The savants were not told where they were going, merely that the Republic needed their talents and that their academic posts would be protected and stipends increased. ‘Savants and intellectuals are like coquettes,’ Napoleon was later to tell Joseph; ‘one may see them and talk with them, but don’t make one your wife or your minister.’

From Toulon on May 10, 1798, Napoleon addressed his Soldiers of the Army of the Mediterranean:

You have campaigned in the mountains, in the plains and before fortresses, but you have yet to take part in a naval campaign. The Roman legions that you have sometimes rivalled, but have yet to equal, fought Carthage on this very sea … Victory never forsook them … Europe is watching you. You have a great destiny to fulfil, battles to fight, dangers and hardships to overcome. You hold in your hands the future prosperity of France, the good of mankind and your own glory. The ideal of Liberty that has made the Republic the arbiter of Europe will also make it the arbiter of distant oceans, of faraway countries.

In the same speech, he promised them 6 arpents (5 acres) of land each:

Denon later recalled that when the soldiers saw the barren sand-dunes of Egypt from the boats before they landed, the men joked to each other: ‘There are the six arpents they promised you!’

It was a grand expedition:

In addition to all the military equipment necessary for his army, he collected astronomical telescopes, ballooning equipment, chemical apparatus, and a printing press with Latin, Arabic and Syriac type.

‘You know how much we will need good wine,’ he wrote to Monge, telling him to buy 4,800 bottles, most of it his favoured red burgundy, but also to find ‘a good Italian singer’.

It was the largest fleet ever to sail the Mediterranean. There were 280 ships in all, including 13 ships-of-the-line of between 74 and 118 guns (the latter, Vice-Admiral François Brueys’ flagship L’Orient, was the biggest warship afloat). Napoleon had assembled 38,000 soldiers, 13,000 sailors and marines and 3,000 merchant seamen. His army was somewhat top-heavy as it included 2,200 officers, a ratio of seventeen to one against the more usual twenty-five to one – an indication of how many ambitious young men wanted to see action under him.

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This gigantic armada was fortunate to make it across the Mediterranean without being set upon by Nelson, who was looking for him with thirteen ships-of-the-line. Nelson’s fleet had been scattered towards Sardinia by a gale the evening before Napoleon set sail, and on the night of June 22 the two fleets crossed paths only 20 miles from each other in fog near Crete. Nelson made an educated guess that Napoleon was heading for Egypt but reached Alexandria on June 29 and left on the 30th, the day before the French arrived.

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Napoleon asked his savants to give lectures for his officers on deck during the voyage; in one Junot snored so loudly that Napoleon had him woken up and excused. He later discovered from his librarian that his senior officers were mostly reading novels. (They had started out gambling, until ‘everyone’s money soon found itself in a few pockets, never to come out again’.) He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids’ and ordered the librarian, ‘Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.’

He was apparently overlooking the forty novels, including English ones in French translation, he himself had brought out.

In August 1964 the White House claimed an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, Dominic Cummings reminds us, and Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution:

The truth did not emerge until 2005 when an NSA document revealed all the lies. LBJ was looking for an excuse, had had a resolution drawn up in June awaiting the right moment, and used this ‘attack’ to order air strikes on the North. US claims about the unprovoked attack were false. The NSA knew they were false and there’d been a chaotic blunder. It was all covered up. The House voted 416-0, the Senate 88-2.

This ought to have been a lesson when considering the intense propaganda on Ukraine but the big lesson of history is almost nobody learns from history, that’s why it rhymes. Much of the Vietnam debacle has been repeated on UKR: institutionalised lying from the White House and No10, the DoD and MoD, ‘mainstream’ media; the corruption of intelligence analysis; constant fake narratives about ‘the tide is turning’ to justify vast resources down the drain; fundamental inability to not fool themselves about ends, ways and means and what level of escalation is worth what political ends.

In Surprise, Kill, Vanish, Annie Jacobsen notes that the U.S. Secret Service was stunned by the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan:

That a singleton like Hinckley could unleash this kind of lethality made clear what the consequences could be in the event of an orchestrated attack by a Black September–type terrorist organization. The general feeling at the Secret Service, says Merletti, was, “We need to rethink our protection philosophy.”

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A covert paramilitary unit called the Counter Assault Team (CAT) would now shadow the president twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “They have nothing to do with cover and evacuate,” Merletti says of the CAT team. “They’re not stepping into the line of fire. Their job is shooting. They are shooters.” CAT members would be unconventional-warfare experts, capable of repelling a coordinated multi-shooter attack with crippling aggression, determination, and speed. The new philosophy was not simply to defend against an assassin but to have a guerrilla warfare corps of the Secret Service always there, anticipating an attack, as if the president were forever in a hostile environment. As if they were all behind enemy lines.

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“We trained with Delta Force, British SAS, Navy SEALs,” recalls Merletti. “When it came to shooting, we were right there with them all, standing shoulder to shoulder.” At their classified training facility in Beltsville, Maryland, Counter Assault Team members shot close to a thousand rounds a month just to stay sharp.

After his victories in Italy, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon turned his attention to England:

Napoleon visited Boulogne, Dunkirk, Calais, Ostend, Brussels and Douai over two weeks in February to evaluate the chances of a successful invasion, interviewing sailors, pilots, smugglers and fishermen, sometimes until midnight. ‘It’s too hazardous,’ he concluded. ‘I will not attempt it.’ His report to the Directory on February 23, 1798 was unequivocal:

Whatever efforts we make, we shall not for some years gain naval supremacy. To invade England without that supremacy is the most daring and difficult task ever undertaken… If, having regard to the present organization of our navy, it seems impossible to gain the necessary promptness of execution, then we must really give up the expedition against England — be satisfied with keeping up the pretence of it — and concentrate all our attention and resources on the Rhine, in order to try to deprive England of Hanover…or else undertake an eastern expedition which would menace her trade with the Indies. And if none of these three operations is practicable, I see nothing else for it but to conclude peace.

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It was in the Directors’ interests for Napoleon to go to Egypt. He might conquer it for France or — just as welcome — return after a defeat with his reputation satisfyingly tarnished.

For Napoleon it represented an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of both his greatest heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and he did not rule out the possibility of using Egypt as a stepping-stone to India.

As President Kennedy’s new secretary of defense, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Robert McNamara called for the Pentagon to assume control of all spy plane programs:

McNamara was at the top of the chain of command of all the armed services and believed his Air Force should be in charge of all U.S. assets with wings. The public had lost confidence in the CIA, McNamara told the president.

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One plan was that the CIA might work in better partnership with the Air Force. President Kennedy liked that. On September 6, 1961, he created a protocol that required the CIA deputy director and the undersecretary of the Air Force to comanage all space reconnaissance and aerial espionage programs together as the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified agency within Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense. A central headquarters for NRO was established in Washington, a small office with a limited staff but with a number of empire-size egos vying for power and control. The organization maintained a public face, an overt identity at the Pentagon called the Office of Space Systems, but no one outside a select few knew of NRO’s existence until 1992.

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“Because I was the person with a list of every employee at the area, it was my job to know not just who was who, but who was the boss of somebody’s boss. An individual person didn’t necessarily know much more about the person they worked for than their code name. And they almost certainly didn’t know who was working on the other side of the wall or in the next trailer over. Wayne Pendleton was the head of the radar group for a while. He was my go-to person for a lot of different groups. One day, Pendleton suddenly says, ‘I’m going to Washington, Jim.’ So I said, ‘What if I need you, what number should I call?’ And Pendleton laughed. He said, ‘You won’t need me because where I’m going doesn’t exist.’ Decades later I would learn that the place where Wayne was going when he left the Ranch was to a little office in Washington called NRO.”

After Gary Powers was shot down, President Eisenhower had promised the world there would be no spy missions over Russia, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), but that promise did not include Soviet proxies:

In his new position as deputy director of plans, Bissell had used the U-2 to gather intelligence before. Its photographs had been helpful in planning paramilitary operations in Laos and the Dominican Republic. And in Cuba, overhead photographs taken by the Agency’s U-2s revealed important details regarding the terrain just up the beach from the Bay of Pigs beach. Photo interpreters determined that the swampland in the area would be hard to run in unless the commandos familiarized themselves with preexisting trails. As for the water landing itself, from seventy thousand feet in the air, the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs looked flat and lovely. But because cameras could not photograph what lay underwater, Bissell had no idea that just beneath the surface of the sea there was a deadly coral reef that would later greatly impede the water landing by commandos.

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When the Bay of Pigs operation was over, more than one hundred CIA-trained, anti-Castro Cuban exiles were killed on approach or left to die on the beachhead at the Bay of Pigs. Those that lived to surrender were imprisoned and later ransomed back to the United States. When the story became public, so did brigade commander Pepe San Roman’s last words before his capture: “Must have air support in the next few hours or we will be wiped out. Under heavy attacks by MiG jets and heavy tanks.” Pepe San Roman begged Richard Bissell for help. “All groups demoralized… They consider themselves deceived.”

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There was plenty of blame to go around but almost all of it fell at the feet of the CIA. In the years since, it has become clear that equal blame should be imputed to the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and President Kennedy. Shortly before he died, Richard Bissell blamed the mission’s failure on his old rival General Curtis LeMay. Bissell lamented that if LeMay had provided adequate air cover as he had promised, the mission would most likely have been a success. The Pentagon has historically attributed LeMay’s failure to send B-26 bombers to the Bay of Pigs to a “time zone confusion.” Bissell saw the mix-up as personal, believing that LeMay had been motivated by revenge. That he’d harbored a grudge against Bissell for the U-2 and Area 51. Whatever the reason, more than three hundred people were dead and 1,189 anti-Castro guerrillas, left high and dry, had been imprisoned. The rivalry between Bissell and LeMay was over, and the Bay of Pigs would force Richard Bissell to leave government service in February of 1962.

There were many government backlashes as a result of the fiasco. One has been kept secret until now, namely that President Kennedy sent the CIA’s inspector general at the time, Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr., out to Area 51 to write up a report on the base. More specifically, the president wanted to assess what other Richard Bissell disasters in the making might be coming down the pipeline at Area 51.

Adding friction to an already charged situation was the fact that by some accounts, Kirkpatrick held a grudge. Before the Bay of Pigs, Richard Bissell was in line to succeed Allen Dulles as director of the CIA, and eight years earlier, Lyman Kirkpatrick had worn those coveted shoes. But like Bissell, Kirkpatrick was cut down in his prime. Kirkpatrick’s loss came not by his own actions but by a tragic blow beyond his control. On an Agency mission to Asia in 1952, Lyman Kirkpatrick contracted polio and became paralyzed from the waist down. Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Kirkpatrick was relegated to the role of second-tier bureaucrat.

In a world of gentlemen spy craft and high-technology espionage, bureaucracy was considered glorified janitorial work. But when Kirkpatrick was dispatched to Area 51 by JFK, the fate and future of the secret base Richard Bissell had built in the Nevada desert lay in Lyman Kirkpatrick’s hands.