Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed

DANBURY, Conn. (AP) — 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.

Great, fascinating story! Thanks!

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was another ultra-secret project underway in Middletown, not far from Danbury. This was where the engine was being built for the nuclear-powered airplane. Before JFK was inaugurated, Jerome Weisner was already asking questions about this or other large secret military projects. Shutting down the project was one of JFK's first achievements. He asked a simple question of the proponents of the airplane, which was advertised as taking off only once (with the assistance of a jet) and then perpetually circling the globe. His question was, more or less, "Why do we want to do that?" This has since been considered one of the most foolish Cold War projects.

Actually, if you think about it, it would make for a great long range bomber, along the lines of a Trident sub. Put a couple crews on board, enough food for a week, and you have an aircraft 'on alert' for a long period, and able to sit off of your target's airspace.

The nuclear airplane was obsoleted by the satellite. Had there been no satellites, an ultra high flying nuclear airplane would have been invaluable.

The story of the ANP, it seems to me, provides a classic illustration of some of the forces that drive the arms race onward. It involves partisan politics: Congress was controlled by the Democrats, the White House by the Republicans. It provides a classic example of the exploitation of the fears and anxieties of the public through the use of imaginary "intelligence." It shows how sincere people who badly want to be misled can easily mislead themselves: the so-called intelligence that was used as one of the arguments in support of a crash program by our side was based in part on technical articles which really did appear in the Soviet press about possible uses of atomic energy, including application of nuclear propulsion to aircraft. These articles were strictly theoretical, but it was quite easy for persons who wanted to believe that the Russians were ahead, to believe it with passion. The ANP story shows how an industrial organization, in this case General Electric, does not merely do what the government asks it to do, but rather works very hard through all possible channels to make sure that the government asks it to do what it wants to do in the first place. It shows how military advocates of programs, especially programs involving more than one agency, attempt to take advantage of all the internal rivalries and tensions which exist in order to find a successful path for the accomplishment of what they--very sincerely, to be sure--believe to be essential, and which they therefore believe justifies the use of any tactics to ensure that administrators will not be able "to put the budget ahead of survival."

What makes a perfect spy tick?
By Jeff Stein, Published: February 9

“You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause.”

— “A Perfect Spy,” John le Carre

On a rainy day in the spring of 1967, I shuffled into a classroom at the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Md., in a grimy industrial area of East Baltimore. There were about 30 of us, mostly college graduates, including newly minted lawyers and a few erstwhile hippies who had received draft notices. It was the first day of a seven-month course blandly titled “Area Studies.” ...

Truth be told, few of us expected to be turned into James Bonds. Most of us had volunteered for an extra year’s enlistment in intelligence to avoid being shipped off to South Vietnam with a rifle.

Of course, intelligence did sound exciting, and only vaguely dangerous. I doubt that any of us knew exactly what to expect. A cross between “Mission: Impossible” and “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” maybe.

The shades were drawn. A rectangular red sign, “SECRET,” was slid into a bracket on the front wall. An instructor stepped to the podium. ...

It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but “case officers” — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now.

Fidel Castro, spy master, bedeviled US, says former analyst

MIAMI, May 27 (Reuters) - For almost three decades after Fidel Castro took power, Cuba's budding intelligence service fielded four dozen double agents in a world-class operation under the nose of the CIA, according to a new book by a veteran CIA analyst.

It was not until June 1987, when a Cuban spy defected to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, blind-siding U.S. intelligence services, that the CIA learned how badly it had been duped, writes Brian Latell, a retired veteran CIA analyst and Cuba specialist. ...

The revelations in Latell's book help explain how Castro survived several well-documented assassination attempts and the impoverished island of Cuba weathered the changes that toppled other communist regimes in the late 20th Century.

"In the annals of modern spycraft it's a pretty extraordinary accomplishment. It's difficult to keep one double agent in play, and he managed them all ... down to the minute details," added Latell, author of "Castro's Secrets, the CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine," published by Palgrave Macmillan.

It is probably an absolute certainty that at least one equally foolish project is now underway in some corner of the Pentagon. It was probably underway when the DoD could not afford to provide armor for the Humvees that were blown up by early versions of what may be the "weapon of the 21st century," the sophisticated descendants of last century's IED's.

All this reminds me of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (I was working in Washington at the time). The difference is that it was discussed quite openly. A lot of effort and money was spent on it although most experts said very emphatically that it couldn't work.

Reagan felt that in the event of an attack this would place the president in a terrible position between immediate counterattack or attempting to absorb the attack and maintain an upper hand in the post-attack era. In the fall of 1979, at Reagan's request, Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham conceived a concept he called the High Frontier, an idea of strategic defense using ground- and space-based weapons theoretically possible because of emerging technologies. It was designed to replace the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, a doctrine that Reagan and his aides described as a suicide pact.

Stated at the level of intentionality, the SDI case seeks to capture the moral high ground, undoubtedly contributing to the popularity of the program with the general public.

MORAL CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING SDI

1. Intended objectives
2. Technological feasibility
3. Risks for strategic stability
4. Economic costs and trade-offs

Judged within an adequate moral frame-work, one that takes into account the relevant moral circumstances surrounding this policy, it is our prudential judgment that proposals to press deployment of SDI do not measure up to the moral criteria outlined in this Report.

Tapes found in AP reporter's Cold War show trial

While the 1951 proceedings may have been all farce, the sentence for the American journalist was real: 10 years in a communist prison on trumped-up espionage charges. ...

Now, the discovery of two audio tapes in the Czech capital offers unique new insight into the trial. No other audio record from the three-day trial has been found. ...

"On the first day I admitted that I had done unofficial reporting, which I had; within three days I confessed that this was espionage, which - by any Western standard - it was not; and within seven days I confessed that I had spied for the U.S. government - which was a lie," Oatis wrote.

A U.S. diplomatic offensive and trade and travel embargoes that badly hit the regime led the new Czechoslovak President Antonin Zapotocky to pardon Oatis in May 1953.

During the 1960s, Czechoslovak judicial reviewers exonerated Oatis, but this finding was overturned in 1968 after the Soviet Union-led invasion of Warsaw Pact troops ousted Alexander Dubcek's reformist government. In 1990, as the Soviet empire tottered, he was quietly cleared again.

Cold War Spy Tunnel Under Berlin Found After 56 Years

A section of an ingenious tunnel built by U.S. and British spies to intercept Russian phone conversations in Cold War Berlin has been found after 56 years in a forest 150 kilometers from the German capital.

The 450-meter-long tunnel, built in 1955, led from Rudow in West Berlin to Alt-Glienicke in Soviet-occupied East Berlin. By tapping into the enemy’s underground cables, Allied intelligence agents recorded 440,000 phone calls, gaining a clearer picture of Red Army maneuvers in eastern Germany at a time when nuclear war seemed an imminent threat.

The western part of the tunnel was excavated in 1997 and part of it is preserved at the Allied Museum in the former American sector of Berlin. The Soviet authorities dug up the eastern part in 1956 and until now, its fate was unknown. ...

The find is one missing piece of a puzzle that will take decades to solve completely, as access to intelligence files about the construction and discovery of the tunnel -- a tale worthy of a John le Carre novel -- is still restricted.

Amazing Investigation: How a Real Life James Bond Got Whacked by a Bag Lady Assassin

On the morning of Nov. 19, 1985, a wild-eyed and disheveled homeless woman entered the reception room at the legendary Wall Street firm of Deak-Perera. Carrying a backpack with an aluminum baseball bat sticking out of the top, her face partially hidden by shocks of greasy, gray-streaked hair falling out from under a wool cap, she demanded to speak with the firm’s 80-year-old founder and president, Nicholas Deak. ...

Deak-Perera had been headquartered on the building’s 20th and 21st floors since the late 1960s. Nick Deak, known as “the James Bond of money,” founded the company in 1947 with the financial backing of the CIA. For more than three decades the company had functioned as an unofficial arm of the intelligence agency and was a key asset in the execution of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. From humble beginnings as a spook front and flower import business, the firm grew to become the largest currency and precious metals firm in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. But on this day in November, the offices were half-empty and employees few. Deak-Perera had been decimated the year before by a federal investigation into its ties to organized crime syndicates from Buenos Aires to Manila. Deak’s former CIA associates did nothing to interfere with the public takedown. Deak-Perera declared bankruptcy in December 1984, setting off panicked and sometimes violent runs on its offices in Latin America and Asia. ...

Lois Lang was tried, convicted and institutionalized under the assumption that she was mad. According to state psychiatrists, she targeted Deak because of random delusions, and her handlers were figments of her cracked imagination. The first judge to hear Lang’s case ruled her unfit for trial and sent her to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center. She was sentenced eight years later, in 1993, when a state Supreme Court justice convicted her on two counts of second-degree murder and sent her to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility upstate, where she remains. Conspiracy was never part of the trial. ...

Congressional hearings subsequently uncovered a large network of top-secret CIA-funded psychological warfare programs grouped loosely under the project name MK-ULTRA. These programs today sound like absurd cloak-and-dagger relics of “Twilight Zone”-inflected Cold War hysteria. But the people running these programs, which continued until at least 1979, were often leading researchers backed by the U.S. government. Enormous resources were committed to the study of how human behavior might be controlled for the purpose of interrogation and the creation of “programmed” assassins and couriers. In a detailed roundup of MK-ULRA-related operations, Psychology Today explained that the CIA “conducted or sponsored at least 419 secret drug-testing projects” at “86 United States and Canadian hospitals, prisons, universities, and military installations,” and that “by the agency’s own admission, many [experimental subjects] were ‘unwitting’.” ...

If the tossed-off human byproduct of a half-baked CIA assassin program was indeed recruited by one of many potential-suspect crime syndicates to kill Deak, how did it go down? Who provided Lang’s name to whom? Who helped her to buy a bus ticket to Florida via Tijuana? Who helped her buy a Saturday Night Special in Orlando and taught her to shoot?

FBI removes many redactions in Marilyn Monroe file

LOS ANGELES — FBI files on Marilyn Monroe that could not be located earlier this year have been found and re-issued, revealing the names of some of the movie star's acquaintances who drew concern from government officials and her own entourage.

The files had previously been heavily redacted, but more details are now public in a version of the file recently obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act. The updated files reveal that some in Monroe's inner circle were concerned about her association with Frederick Vanderbilt Field, who was disinherited from his wealthy family over his leftist views. ...

"She talked mostly about herself and some of the people who had been or still were important to her," Field wrote in "From Right to Left." ''She told us about her strong feelings for civil rights, for black equality, as well as her admiration for what was being done in China, her anger at red-baiting and McCarthyism and her hatred of (FBI director) J. Edgar Hoover." ...

For all the focus on Monroe's closeness to suspected communists, the bureau never found any proof she was a member of the party.

"Subject's views are very positively and concisely leftist; however, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles," a July 1962 entry in Monroe's file states.

Court tries couple in suburban spy thriller

A spectacular trial at a Stuttgart court is about to begin, involving a German-based couple accused of spying on NATO and the EU for decades on Russia's behalf. Neighbors say they knew something was fishy.

It reads like a John le Carre novel: "dead mail boxes," secret radio signals, encrypted messages hidden in plain sight on the Internet.

According to accusations, a married couple has been spying in Germany for more than 20 years - first at the behest of the Soviet Union and thereafter for its post-Soviet incarnation, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

On Tuesday (15.01.2013) 54-year-old Andreas Anschlag and his 48-year-old wife, Heidrun, will stand trial in Stuttgart. Federal prosecutors accuse them of "secret agent activity" and of "forgery of documents." ...

The history of the purported agent couple begins at a time when the Soviet Union still existed and the Cold War was still cold. According to accusations, Andreas Anschlag traveled to West Germany in 1988 with the help of a forged Austrian passport. His wife did the same in 1990. Both were supposed to have been born in South America. The two settled in Aachen, close to the western border with Belgium, where Mr. Anschlag studied mechanical engineering.

John le Carré: 'I was a secret even to myself'

After a decade in the intelligence service, John le Carré's political disgust and personal confusion 'exploded' in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Fifty years later he asks how much has changed ...

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. Fifty years on, I don't associate the book with anything that ever happened to me, save for one wordless encounter at London airport when a worn-out, middle-aged military kind of man in a stained raincoat slammed a handful of mixed foreign change on to the bar and in gritty Irish accents ordered himself as much Scotch as it would buy. In that moment, Alec Leamas was born. Or so my memory, not always a reliable informant, tells me.

Today I think of the novel as a not-very-well-disguised internal explosion after which my life would never be the same. It was not the first such explosion, or the last. And yes, yes, by the time I wrote it, I had been caught up in secret work off and on for a decade; a decade the more formative because I had the inherited guilt of being too young to fight in the second world war and – more importantly – of being the son of a war-profiteer, another secret I felt I had to keep to myself until he died.

And the deep background of the novel? The sights, smells and voices that, 15 years after the end of the war, continued to infest every corner of divided Germany? The Berlin in which Leamas had his being was a paradigm of human folly and historical paradox. In the early 60s I had observed it mostly from the confines of the British Embassy in Bonn, and only occasionally in the raw. But I watched the Wall's progress from barbed wire to breeze block; I watched the ramparts of the cold war going up on the still-warm ashes of the hot one. And I had absolutely no sense of transition from the one war to the other, because in the secret world there barely was one. To the hard-liners of east and west the second world war was a distraction. Now it was over, they could get on with the real war that had started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and had been running under different flags and disguises ever since.