Isegoria

Gunpowder had been placed in a water-barrel on a seed-merchant’s cart

November 18th, 2024

Just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, December 24, 1800, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon and Josephine took separate carriages to the Opéra to listen to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation:

At the corner of Place du Carrousel and rue Saint-Niçaise, gunpowder had been placed in a water-barrel on a seed-merchant’s cart, drawn by a small dray horse, by Joseph Picot de Limoelan, a Chouan who had arrived from London just over a month earlier. The fuse was lit by a former naval officer, Robinault de Saint-Régant, an accomplice of the Chouan leader Georges Cadoudal, who gave the horse’s reins to a young girl to hold as he made off. A combination of the fuse being slightly too long and the speed with which Napoleon’s coachman César was driving, swerving past the cart in the street, saved Napoleon’s life.

‘Napoleon escaped by a singular chance,’ recorded his aide-de-camp Jean Rapp, who was in the following coach with Josephine at the time. ‘A grenadier of the escort had unwittingly driven one of the assassins away from standing in the middle of the rue Niçaise with the flat of his sabre and the cart was turned round from its intended position.’

Josephine’s carriage was far enough behind for all its occupants to survive the massive explosion too, although Hortense was lightly cut on her wrist by the flying glass of the carriage windows. The machine infernale, as it was dubbed, killed five people (including the young girl holding the horse) and injured twenty-six. It could have been far more, since no fewer than forty-six houses were damaged.

[…]

When Josephine was told that her husband was unharmed, and indeed insisted on continuing to the Opéra, she bravely followed and found ‘Napoleon was seated in his box, calm and composed, and looking at the audience through his opera-glass.’ ‘Josephine, those rascals wanted to blow me up,’ he said as she entered the box, and he asked for the oratorio’s programme.

[…]

On October 24 a dozen more people were arrested for a plot which involved throwing oeufs rouges (hand grenades) into Napoleon’s carriage on his way to Malmaison.

[…]

Two weeks after that, on November 7, the royalist Chevalier was finally arrested and a multi-firing gun was seized, along with plans for fireworks to frighten Napoleon’s horses and for iron spikes to be laid across the street to prevent the Consular Guard from coming to the rescue. A week later yet another plot, involving the blocking of a street down which Napoleon was to pass, was discovered by a hardworking Fouché. In an official report he listed no fewer than ten separate conspiracies against Napoleon’s life since he had come to power, including by accomplices of Chevalier who were still at large.

[…]

Of all these plots, the machine infernale came closest to success. Some excellent forensic work by Fouché’s detectives reassembled the horseshoes, harness and cart, and a grain merchant identified the man to whom he had sold it. As the net tightened, Limoelan escaped, perhaps to become a priest in America. Although everything pointed to the Chouan royalists, the incident was too good an opportunity for Napoleon to waste politically and he told the Conseil that he wanted to act against ‘the Terrorists’ — that is, the Jacobins who had supported the Terror and opposed Brumaire. Six years after his imprisonment in 1794 for his Jacobin loyalties Napoleon now believed them to be enemies of the state even more dangerous than the Chouan assassins, because of their ideology, familiarity with power and superior organization. ‘With one company of grenadiers I could send the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain flying,’ he said at this time of the royalist salons found there, ‘but the Jacobins are made of sterner stuff, they are not beaten so easily.’

When Fouché ventured to blame British-backed royalists such as Cadoudal, Napoleon demurred, referring to the September Massacres of 1792: ‘They are men of September [Septembriseurs], wretches stained with blood, ever conspiring in solid phalanx against every successive government. We must find a means of prompt redress,’ and adding that ‘France will be tranquil about the existence of its Government only when it’s freed from these scroundrels.’

[…]

On January 8, 130 Jacobins were arrested and deported — mainly to Guiana — by means of a sénatus-consulte passed three days earlier. (Although the sénatus-consulte was originally intended to be used only to alter the constitution, Napoleon found it increasingly useful as a way of bypassing the Legislative Body and Tribunate.) Guiana was nicknamed ‘the dry guillotine’ because its climate was almost as lethal as a death sentence.

[…]

In a bid to foil future plots, he never let it be publicly known where he meant to go until five minutes before his departure.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The less you knew, the better

November 17th, 2024

At Groom Lake throughout the 1960s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), at least once a month and always before dawn, base personnel would be shaken from their beds by a violent explosion:

When the rumbling first started happening, Ken Collins would leap from bed as a sensation that felt like a massive earthquake rolled by. A nuclear bomb was being exploded next door, underground, just a few miles west of Oxcart pilots’ quarters. Next, the blast wave would hit Collins’s Quonset hut and then roll on, heading across the Emigrant Mountain Range with a surreal and unnatural force that made the coyotes wail.

Early one morning, Collins woke not to a boom but to banging on his door:

Collins followed [Colonel] Slater in a run toward the hangar where the Oxcart lived. There he was quickly briefed on the situation: the Pentagon had called to say that a Russian reconnaissance balloon was flying across the United States, floating with the prevailing winds in a westerly direction. Collins was to find the Soviet balloon—fast. Normally, the flight surgeon would have spent two hours just getting Collins into his pressure suit. That morning Collins was suited up and sitting in the cockpit of the Oxcart in a little over thirty minutes. Up he went, blasting off the tarmac, north then east, on direct orders by the Pentagon to “hunt and find” the Soviet weather balloon visually and using radar.

Up in the air it dawned on Collins what a wild-goose chase he was on. What would a Russian reconnaissance balloon look like? What were the chances of making visual contact with such a thing? At speeds of more than 2,200 mph, he was traveling more than half a mile each second. Even if he saw the balloon, in just a fraction of a second it would be behind him. Even worse, what if he actually did get that close to the flying object? If the Oxcart hit anything while moving at Mach 3, the plane would break apart instantly and he’d be toast.

Flying somewhere over the middle of the continent, Collins briefly identified an object on radar about 350 miles away. As instructed, he flew around the object in the tightest circle he could perform at Mach 3, which meant his circle had a radius of about 400 miles. He never saw the balloon with his own eyes.

After Collins returned to base, engineers scrambled to read the information on the data recorder. The incident has never been declassified. Admitting that the Soviets invaded U.S. airspace—whether in a craft or by balloon—is not something any U.S. official has ever done. Collins never asked any follow-up questions. That’s how it was to be a pilot: the less you knew, the better. He knew too many fellow pilots from Korea who had come home from POW camps missing fingernails—if they came home at all. Now, ten years later, pilots shot down over North Vietnam were experiencing the same kinds of torture, maybe worse. The less you knew, the better. That was the pilots’ creed.

Posted in Technology, War | 1 Comment »

The mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them

November 16th, 2024

The apparent resilience of the Russian economy has confounded many strategists who expected Western sanctions to starve its war effort:

Russia continues to export vast quantities of oil, gas, and other commodities — the result of sanctions evasion and loopholes deliberately designed by Western policymakers to keep Russian resources on world markets. So far, clever macroeconomic management, particularly by Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, has enabled the Kremlin to keep the Russian financial system in relative health.

At first glance, the numbers look surprisingly strong. In 2023, GDP grew by 3.6 percent and is expected to rise by 3.9 percent in 2024. Unemployment has fallen from around 4.4 percent before the war to 2.4 percent in September. Moscow has expanded its armed forces and defense production, adding more than 500,000 workers to the defense industry, approximately 180,000 to the armed forces, and many thousands more to paramilitary and private military organizations. Russia has reportedly tripled its production of artillery shells to 3 million per year and is manufacturing glide bombs and drones at scale.

On the other hand:

Already, about around half of all artillery shells used by Russia in Ukraine are from North Korean stocks. At some point in the second half of 2025, Russia will face severe shortages in several categories of weapons.

Perhaps foremost among Russia’s arms bottlenecks is its inability to replace large-caliber cannons. According to open-source researchers using video documentation, Russia has been losing more than 100 tanks and roughly 220 artillery pieces per month on average. Producing tank and artillery barrels requires rotary forges — massive pieces of engineering weighing 20 to 30 tons each — that can each produce only about 10 barrels a month. Russia only possesses two such forges.

In other words, Russia is losing around 320 tank and artillery cannon barrels a month and producing only 20.

[…]

Open-source researchers have counted the loss of at least 4,955 infantry fighting vehicles since the war’s onset, which comes out to an average of 155 per month. Russian defense contractors can produce an estimated 200 per year, or about 17 per month, to offset these losses. Likewise, even Russia’s expanded production of 3 million artillery shells per year pales in comparison to the various estimates for current consumption at the front. While those estimates are lower than the 12 million rounds Russian forces fired in 2022, they are much higher than what Russian industry can produce.

[…]

Defense spending has officially jumped to 7 percent of Russia’s GDP and is projected to consume more than 41 percent of the state budget next year. The true magnitude of military expenditures is significantly higher. Russia’s nearly 560,000 armed internal security troops, many of which have been deployed to occupied Ukraine, are funded outside the defense budget — as are the private military companies that have sprouted across Russia.

[…]

Rather than demobilizing or bankrupting themselves, Russian leaders could instead use their military to obtain the economic resources needed to sustain it — in other words, using conquest and the threat thereof to pay for the military.

Plenty of precedents exist. In 1803, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ended 14 months of peace in Europe because he could not afford to fund his military based on French revenues alone — and he also refused to demobilize it. In 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein similarly invaded oil-rich Kuwait because he could not afford to pay the million-man army that he refused to downsize. In both cases, the mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 9 Comments »

Live freaky, die freaky

November 15th, 2024

Peter Bart, the longtime editor in chief of Variety, had been close to Polanski, and what he told Tom O’Neill (for what became Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) gave O’Neill some semblance of a lead:

“I must confess that that crowd was a little scary,” Bart said, referring to Polanski and Tate’s circle. “There was an aura of danger around them… there was an instinctive feeling that everyone was pushing it and things were getting out of control. My wife and I still talk about it,” he said. “Anybody who underestimates the impact of the event is full of shit.”

This was my first taste of the “live freaky, die freaky” view: the idea that Polanski’s circle, with its bacchanalian parties and flexible morals, had brought about their own murders.

[…]

I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”

[…]

I pulled a book from my bag: Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, a history of L.A.’ s music industry. I’d been reading it for research — what with all the rejections I’d gotten, I had a little more free time on my hands than I’d expected — and I wanted Bugliosi to look at a passage I’d highlighted. Hoskyns alleged that a few S&M movies had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied up and flogged against his will at a party there. Other sources, including Ed Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.

Bugliosi seemed to be in the midst of some kind of internal debate. After what felt like a long silence, he told me to turn off my recorder. “This can never be attributed to me,” he began. “Just say it’s from a very reliable source.” (I’ll explain later in the book why I’m treating this as an on-the-record response.)

When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.”

It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,” Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”

The more I thought about it, the more startled I was that the footage was so sordid. It gave yet more weight to the “live freaky, die freaky” motto. And soon after, it occurred to me: if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was telling the truth — and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged — the tape seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect, and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.

I hoped that I could verify Bugliosi’s story. It was the first piece of new information I’d found so far. In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the house.

In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bugliosi to authorize search warrants. If he’d learned about the tape from the detectives back in August — if he’d been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return to the house — then something in the police investigation had necessitated his involvement much earlier than he’d ever acknowledged. Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know, because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

This amused him enough that he agreed

November 14th, 2024

Dwarkesh recently interviewed the inimitable Gwern — who (a) wanted to remain anonymous and (b) isn’t comfortable speaking to an audience, because of the “deaf accent” he retains from growing up with impaired hearing: “In order to protect Gwern’s anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed.”

After the episode, Dwarkesh convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he’s up to.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Manifesto for the British Revolution

November 13th, 2024

I mentioned recently that Larry Taunton had listened to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol and then went to take a closer look at certain passages — about how British democracy might be subverted from within via a classic “march through the institutions” — and found, first, that the book was out of print, and then, second, that the used copy he could find was missing those passages entirely.

Naturally, I listened to the audiobook myself and recommend it. There’s no Kindle edition, and I assume the mass-market paperback is missing the “offending” passages — but you can find them by searching for the fictitious Manifesto for the British Revolution:

The twenty-point plan is known as the Manifesto for the British Revolution — or MBR for short. The first fifteen points concern mass nationalization of private enterprise, property, and wealth; abolition of all private landholding, medical care, and education; subordination of the teaching professions, police force, information media, and law courts to state control; and abolition of the House of Lords, which has the power to veto an act of self-perpetuation by an elected government. (Evidently, the British revolution could not be stopped or put into reverse at the whim of the electorate.)

But the final five points of the MBR vitally concern us here in the Soviet Union, so I will list them.

1. Britain’s immediate withdrawal, regardless of any treaty obligations, from the European Economic Community.

2. The downscaling without delay of all Britain’s conventional armed forces to one fifth of their present size.

3. The immediate abolition and destruction of all Britain’s nuclear weapons and weapon-delivery systems.

4. The expulsion from Britain without delay of all United States forces, nuclear and conventional, along with all their personnel and matériel.

5. Britain’s immediate withdrawal from, and repudiation of, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I need hardly underline, Comrade General Secretary, that these last five proposals would wreck the defenses of the Western Alliance beyond any possible hope of repair in our lifetimes, if indeed ever. With Britain gone, the smaller NATO nations would probably follow suit, and NATO would wither on the vine, isolating the United States firmly on the other side of the Atlantic.

Obviously, everything I have outlined and described within this memorandum depends for its full implementation on a Labour Party victory, and for this the next election, expected in the spring of 1988, may well be the last opportunity.

All the above was, in fact, what I meant by my remark at General Kryuchkov’s dinner that the political stability of Britain is constantly overestimated in Moscow “and never more so than at the present time.”

Yours sincerely,

Harold Adrian Russell Philby

I purchased a used hardback copy of Dogs of War a decade ago and quite enjoyed it. It seemed to be completely out of print, aside from the audiobook — which may or may not include any excised passages — until I stumbled across it under the slightly different name of Dogs of War: A Spy Thriller.

Posted in Media, Policy | 5 Comments »

The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea

November 12th, 2024

The birthplace of Chinese civilization, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain:

A large, low-lying tract of nearly 160,000 square miles, it is situated below Inner Mongolia, south of Manchuria, in and around the Yellow River and down past the Yangtze River, which both run west to east. It is now one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The Yellow River basin is subject to frequent and devastating floods, earning the river the unenviable sobriquet “scourge of the Sons of Han.” The industrialization of the region began in earnest in the 1950s and has been rapidly accelerating in the last three decades. The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea. Nevertheless, the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt — the cradle of its civilization, where its people learned to farm, and to make paper and gunpowder.

To the north of this proto-China were the harsh lands of the Gobi Desert in what is now Mongolia. To the west the land gradually rises until it becomes the Tibetan Plateau, reaching to the Himalayas. To the southeast and the south lies the sea.

[…]

The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and — crucially — the agricultural center of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite its being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 322 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions that surrounded them, especially Mongolia, with its nomadic bands of violent warriors.

China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defense, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers that — if the Han could reach them and establish control — would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, fully realized only with the annexation of Tibet six decades ago.

[…]

Between 605 and 609 CE, the Grand Canal, centuries in the making and today the world’s longest man-made waterway, was extended and finally linked the Yellow River to the Yangtze.

[…]

It took several million slaves five years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved — but not the problem that exists to this day, that of flooding.

[…]

The Chinese leaders were against any sort of permanent European presence, but increasingly opened up the coastal regions to trade. It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected. The prosperity engendered by trade has made coastal cities such as Shanghai wealthy, but that wealth has not been reaching the countryside. This has added to the massive influx of people into urban areas and accentuated regional differences.

In the eighteenth century, China reached into parts of Burma and Indochina to the south, and Xinjiang in the northwest was conquered, becoming the country’s biggest province.

[…]

But, in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions; but for the Han, the buffer was worth the trouble, even more so after the fate that befell the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the coming of the Europeans.

[…]

A few outside observers thought the postwar years might bring liberal democracy to China. It was wishful thinking akin to the naive nonsense Westerners wrote during the early days of the recent Arab Spring, which, as with China, was based on a lack of understanding of the internal dynamics of the people, politics, and geography of the region.

[…]

By the end of the 1990s it had recovered from the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, regained Hong Kong and Macau from the British and Portuguese, respectively, and could look around its borders, assess its security, and plan for its great move out into the world.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration

November 11th, 2024

The greatest reforms of the Consulate were carried out between July 1800 and May 1803, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when Napoleon was in Paris in regular conclave with his Conseil d’État (Council of State), “which was mainly made up of moderate republicans and former royalists, although there were occasions when some councillors had to sit next to others who had sent their fathers or brothers to the guillotine”:

‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil État, ‘we must now commence its history.’

Napoleon gave the Conseil direction, purpose and the general lines of policy, which have been accurately summed up as ‘a love of authority, realism, contempt for privilege and abstract rights, scrupulous attention to detail and respect for an orderly social hierarchy’.

He was the youngest member of the Conseil and, as Chaptal recalled,

He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration. He asked many questions, asked for the definition and meaning of the most common words; he provoked discussion and kept it going until his opinion was formed. In one debate this man, who is so often portrayed as a raging egomaniac, admitted to the aged and respected jurist François Tronchet ‘Sometimes in these discussions I have said things which a quarter of an hour later I have found were all wrong. I have no wish to pass for being worth more than I really am.’

[…]

When members were tired during all-night sessions he would say: ‘Come, sirs, we haven’t earned our salaries yet!’

(After they ended, sometimes at 5 a.m., he would take a bath, in the belief that ‘One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep to me.’)

Other than on the battlefield itself, it was here that Napoleon was at his most impressive. His councillors bear uniform witness — whether they later supported or abandoned him, whether they were writing contemporaneously or long after his fall — to his deliberative powers, his dynamism, the speed with which he grasped a subject, and the tenacity never to let it go until he had mastered its essentials and taken the necessary decision.

‘Still young and rather untutored in the different areas of administration,’ recalled one of them of the early days of the Consulate, ‘he brought to the discussions a clarity, a precision, a strength of reason and range of views that astonished us. A tireless worker with inexhaustible resources, he linked and co-ordinated the facts and opinions scattered throughout a large administration system with unparalleled wisdom.’

He quickly taught himself to ask short questions that demanded direct answers. Thus Conseil member Emmanuel Crétet, the minister of public works, would be asked ‘Where are we with the Arc de Triomphe?’ and ‘Will I walk on the Jena bridge on my return?’

[…]

Ambitious men preferred to take junior positions as auditeurs in the Conseil to grander ones elsewhere in the civil service, because it was a good place to catch Napoleon’s eye.

[…]

Many people rightly saw a place in the Conseil as being a faster route to promotion than a seat in the Senate.

[…]

‘Do you know why I allow so much discussion at the Conseil?’ he once boasted to Roederer. ‘It is because I am the strongest debater in the whole Conseil. I let myself be attacked, because I know how to defend myself.’

[…]

Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder. ‘He reformed the calendar,’ he wrote of Julius Caesar, ‘he worked on the wording of the civil, criminal and penal codes. He set up projects to beautify Rome with many fine buildings. He worked on compiling a general map of the Empire and statistics for the provinces; he charged Varro with setting up an extensive public library; he announced the project to drain the Pontine marshes.’

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft

November 10th, 2024

The phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project Kempster-Lacroix, Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined, would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the ground.

Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with Kempster-Lacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Force changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.

[…]

Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than for its top secret work for the CIA. “The first jamming system was called Red Dog; later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an electronic pulse.

[…]

With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG& G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars.

Posted in Technology, War | 2 Comments »

Polanski had invited along a psychic

November 8th, 2024

Julian Wasser, a photographer for Life magazine, was Tom O’Neill‘s first interview for what became Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties:

Days after the murders, as part of an editorial for Life, Wasser had accompanied Roman Polanski on his first return visit to the house on Cielo Drive. One of Wasser’s pictures from that day is a study in grief. Polanski, in a white T-shirt, sits slumped and devastated on the front porch of his home, his eyes carefully averted from the faded word “Pig” written in his wife’s blood on the front door.

“It was too soon,” Wasser told me. He’d shadowed Polanski as he moved through the bloodstained rooms. It wasn’t a home anymore; it was evidence. “There was fingerprint-dusting powder all over the bedroom and the phones, and there was blood in the carpet. It was thick like Jell-O.” And there was so much of it that it hadn’t even dried yet, Wasser said. “You could still smell it… Salty, carnal.” The odor reminded him of a slaughterhouse.

Right away, Wasser regretted the assignment. But Polanski wanted him there, even at his most vulnerable moment. It wasn’t an exercise in vanity, at least not entirely. Hoping to help solve the murders, Polanski had invited along a psychic, Peter Hurkos, whose alleged clairvoyance had made him a minor celebrity. Wasser was enlisted to provide duplicates of his photos to Hurkos, who could glean “psychic vibrations” from them.

Polanski led them to the nursery, which Tate had carefully furnished and decorated in anticipation of the baby. “Roman went over to the bassinet and just started crying. I said, ‘This is such a private moment, I shouldn’t be here,’ and he said, ‘Please, don’t take any more pictures right now.’ It was just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve never seen anything, in my mind, so intrusive, even though he had invited me… The enormity of it,” Wasser added, “going into this pregnant woman’s bedroom and seeing her intimate area covered with fingerprint powder and realizing what happened there.”

Hurkos, it turned out, didn’t share Wasser’s sense of solemnity. A week before the Life story ran, pirated reproductions of Wasser’s photos appeared on the front page of the tabloid the Hollywood Citizen News. The psychic had sold his copies, vibrations and all.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

Who’s Yehoodi?

November 6th, 2024

I stumbled across an old wartime Disney cartoon about camouflage, and I noticed that the soldiers kept calling their lizard mentor “old now you see him, now you don’t Jehudi”:

Apparently Who’s Yehoodi? was a popular catchphrase at the time:

The catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” (or “Who’s Yehudi?”) originated when Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin was a guest on the popular radio program The Pepsodent Show hosted by Bob Hope, where sidekick Jerry Colonna, apparently finding the ethnic name inherently funny, repeatedly asked “Who’s Yehudi?” Colonna continued the gag on later shows even though Menuhin himself was not a guest, turning “Yehudi” into a widely understood late 1930s slang reference for a mysteriously absent person. The United States Navy chose the name “Project Yehudi” for an early 1940s precursor to stealth technology, also known as Yehudi lights.

A song with the title and catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” was written in 1940 by Bill Seckler and Matt Dennis. It was covered by Kay Kyser and more famously by Cab Calloway. The final stanza of the song is:

The little man who wasn’t there
Said he heard him on the air
No one seems to know from where
But who’s Yehoodi?

Yehoodi makes an “appearance” in the 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon Hollywood Steps Out, sitting beside Jerry Colonna and watching exotic dancer Sally Rand. Yehoodi is depicted as an invisible man looking through a pair of binoculars. Colonna introduces himself by saying “Guess who?” then indicates his seat mate saying “Yehoodi”. 1942′s Crazy Cruise features the “S.S. Yehudi”, an invisible battleship.

Hollywood Steps Out is a great example of the kind of cartoon we watched as kids back in the day without getting any of the references:

Yehudi lights were a kind of diffused lighting camouflage.

Posted in Science, Technology, War | 3 Comments »

This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy

November 5th, 2024

Tim Marshall opens his chapter on China (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with this anecdote:

In October 2006, a US Naval Super Carrier Group led by the thousand-foot USS Kitty Hawk was confidently sailing through the East China Sea between southern Japan and Taiwan, minding everyone’s business, when, without warning, a Chinese navy submarine surfaced in the middle of the group.

An American aircraft carrier of that size is surrounded by about twelve other warships, with air cover above and submarine cover below. The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power, but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour.

The Americans were amazed and angry in equal measure. Amazed because they had no idea a Chinese sub could do that without being noticed, angry because they hadn’t noticed and because they regarded the move as provocative, especially as the sub was within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk itself. They protested, perhaps too much, and the Chinese said: “Oh! What a coincidence, us surfacing in the middle of your battle group that is off our coast, we had no idea.”

This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy; whereas the British used to heave a man-of-war off the coast of some minor power to signal intent, the Chinese heaved into view off their own coast with a clear message: “We are now a maritime power, this is our time, and this is our sea.” It has taken four thousand years, but the Chinese are coming to a port — and a shipping lane — near you.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Napoleon was conservative about primary education, but revolutionary in secondary education

November 4th, 2024

Napoleon was conservative about primary education, putting it back in the hands of the clergy, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), but revolutionary in secondary education, which began at age eleven:

In May 1802 he passed a law setting up forty-five lycées (state secondary schools) whose aim was to produce future soldiers, administrators and technicians. The lycée was his answer to the question of how to create a patriotic, loyal generation of future leaders.

All eligible French children were now taught Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics and physics, and also some of the other sciences and modern languages. Here religion was kept to a minimum: he did not want a secondary system dominated by the Church as that of the Ancien Régime had been. Discipline was strict, school uniforms of blue jackets and trousers with round hats were worn until fourteen, and pupils were grouped into companies with one sergeant and four corporals commanded by the best student, who was called the sergeant-major.

Lycées offered 6,400 full-fees scholarships for what were called ‘national students’, but were also open to others who passed exams to enter, and to those whose parents paid fees. Students followed a mandatory programme of courses, instead of the old system where they could choose.

[…]

By 1813 French secondary schools were the best in Europe and some of Napoleon’s original lycées, such as Condorcet, Charlemagne, Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV, are still among the best schools in France two centuries later.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

There was nothing scarier than an engine un-start

November 3rd, 2024

To the pilots of the experimental Oxcart spy plane, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), there was nothing scarier than an engine un-start:

To the engineers, there was nothing to explain the cause of it. Flying at a certain pitch, one of the two J-58 engines could inexplicably experience an airflow cutoff and go dead. At that speed, the inlets were swallowing ten thousand cubic feet of air each second. One engineer likened this to the equivalent of two million people inhaling at once; an un-start was like all those people suddenly cut short of air. During the ten seconds it took to correct the airflow problem—one engine dead, the other generating enough power to propel an ocean liner—a violent yawing would occur as the aircraft twisted on a vertical axis. This caused a pilot to get slammed across the cockpit while desperately trying to restart the dead engine. The fear was that the pilot could get knocked unconscious, which would mean the end of the pilot, and the end of the airplane.

[…]

Once, a pilot flying over semirural West Virginia had to restart an engine at thirty thousand feet. The resulting sonic boom shattered a chimney inside a factory on the ground, and two men working there were crushed to death.

[…]

Collins pushed the aircraft through Mach 2.8. In another forty-five seconds he would be out of the danger zone. Nearing eighty-five thousand feet, the inevitable tiny black dots began to appear on the aircraft windshield, sporadic at first, like the first drops of summer rain. Only a few months earlier, scientists at Area 51 had been baffled by those black dots. They worried it was some kind of high-atmosphere corrosion until the mystery was solved in the lab. It turned out the black spots were dead bugs that were cycling around in the upper atmosphere, blasted into the jet stream by the world’s two superpowers’ rally of thermonuclear bombs. The bugs were killed in the bombs’ blasts and sent aloft to ninety thousand feet in the ensuing mushroom clouds where they gained orbit.

[…]

In a critical instant, the airplane banged and yawed so dramatically it was as if the airplane’s tail were trying to catch its nose. Collins’s body was flung forward in his harness. His plastic flight helmet crashed against the cockpit glass, denting the helmet and nearly knocking him unconscious. As the airplane slid across the atmosphere, Collins steeled himself and restarted the engine. The aircraft’s second engine kicked back into motion almost as quickly as it had stopped.

[…]

A hand-cranked calculator and a metal slide rule sat on Rich’s desk. Park set his flight helmet down—it had its own crack, similar to Collins’s—and pointed to it. “Fix it,” Park said. “And I mean the un-start problem, not my helmet. Time to suit up, Ben. Time for you to see how it feels.” The pilots figured that the only way to get Ben Rich to understand just how unacceptable this un-start business was would be to have Rich experience the nightmare scenario himself, and there just happened to be a two-seater version of the Oxcart on base. The Air Force was currently testing its drone-carrying version of the Oxcart, the M-21/ D-21, in the skies over Groom Lake, and the pilots had seen the two-seater going in and out of the hangar all week. Park told Ben Rich the time had come for him to take a Mach 3 ride.

In a burst of what he would later describe as “a crazy moment of weakness,” Ben Rich agreed. Rich was a self-described Jewish nerd. Totally unathletic, he was a kid who never made the high school baseball team. Before joining Skunk Works, Ben Rich had only one claim to fame: being awarded a patent for designing a nickel-chromium heating system that prevented a pilot’s penis from freezing to his urine elimination pipe. He was a design wizard, not an airplane cowboy. He’d never come close to flying supersonic before, and he had absolutely no desire to go that fast. But he was chief engineer for Skunk Works, so fixing the un-start problem was his job. “I’ll do it,” Ben Rich said.

[…]

Rich passed the physical and a few early stress tests but when he got to the pressure-chamber test—the one that simulated ejection at fifty thousand feet—things did not go as the engineer had planned. The moment the chamber door closed behind Ben Rich, he panicked. “I was sucking oxygen like a marathon runner and screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’” Rich later recalled. Without ever getting close to simulating what it was like to fly at Mach 3, let alone experiencing an un-start at that speed, Ben Rich admitted in his memoir that he had still nearly dropped dead from fright.

But the point was made. Rich dedicated all his efforts to fixing the un-start problem.

[…]

Rich invented an electronic control that made sure that when one engine experienced an un-start, the second engine dropped its power as well. The control switch would then restart both engines at the same time. After the new fix, pilots were notified of the un-start by a loud buzzing noise in the cockpit. And as far as nearly getting knocked unconscious at 2,000 miles per hour, Oxcart pilots could cross that off their lists of concerns.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

It never happened in an exercise before

November 2nd, 2024

The Washington Post recently obtained Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper‘s report about the Millennium 2002 war game in response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request:

I first learned of this classified document by reading a 2002 Army Times article in which Van Riper criticized Millennium Challenge 2002 as “rigged” and mentioned “a 20-page report” that he had submitted to his superiors.

With this information, I filed the declassification request to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2013. At the time, I was working for the National Security Archive, a nonprofit based at George Washington University that fights to make government records of historical significance public.

Eleven years later, I got my answer — an email explaining that the record I had requested had been declassified in part. The released report demonstrates why it is important to push back against government secrecy: Unearthed records may reveal to the public critical information omitted from official government narratives.

Van Riper’s write-up contradicts portions of an official 752-page final report on Millennium Challenge 2002 released by the military more than a decade ago that called the war game a “major milestone” and described the loss of an entire carrier group as only “moderately unsuccessful.”

The story of what happened definitely got out:

In the exercise, Van Riper played the “Major General” of a country resembling Iraq or Iran that “possessed natural resources critical to the world community.”

His report notes that he used a strategy of ambiguity, asymmetry and denial of territory to have his forces, known as “Red,” defeat the superior U.S. military. He wrote that because the U.S. forces, designated “Blue,” appeared determined to go to war, he “saw no option except to strike Blue first.”

To plan his attack, Van Riper wrote that he “employed a command and control methodology specifically designed to thwart” American technological advantages, including the ability to intercept electronic and phone communications. He relied on couriers to relay sensitive messages and communicated to aircraft with lanterns to avoid radio chatter.

After his surprise attack simulated the destruction of the carrier group, the atmosphere at Norfolk command, where Van Riper led his team, was “shock,” he told The Post in an interview. “It was just quiet. It never happened in an exercise before. … I don’t think [Joint Forces Command] knew what to do.”

Van Riper wanted to continue to attack U.S. forces, pressing forward with his asymmetric advantage, his report notes.
Instead, a war game adjudicator determined Van Riper’s successful attack “wouldn’t have happened” in real warfare and ruled that all but four of the virtual U.S. ships would be “refloated” and the war game would continue, according to his report.

[…]

After the U.S. carrier group was “refloated,” other restrictions were imposed on Van Riper, he noted in his report. His forces could not initiate combat, but U.S. forces could. Van Riper’s forces were also forbidden from using chemical weapons against the United States, which he considered his country’s “most significant” asymmetric military strength.