SecretComedy.com

The enlightening blog of Secret Agent Reginald Dipwipple

East Berlin. Would you believe there’s still a place on the planet named East Berlin? Really. And it’s not in Germany. Nope, the place is located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Literally named East Berlin, it is a borough of Pennsylvania’s Adams County. The county does not have a West Berlin.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Alright, let us remember what life was like in Communist East Germany.

“Hello, Comrade Leader? This is the chief of the infallible Stasi secret police. Comrade Leader, our impregnable Stasi headquarters has been burglarized!”

“Burglarized! Was anything stolen?”

“Yes, Comrade Leader. The results of next month’s elections!”

Back in the 1950s, American and British spies based in West Berlin got a lofty idea. They would go underground. I mean really underground. From the safety of West Berlin they would dig a tunnel into East Berlin and secretly tap into a few Soviet military telephone cables, buried underground. The plan was called Operation Gold because they were digging for a kind of spy treasure. On one side were the good guys, America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British spy agency, MI-6. On the other side were the bad guys, the infamous Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi.

(Incidentally, the British prefer to spell their spy agency as MI6, not MI-6. That is, they prefer to until the Americans pronounce it as M-sixteen and wonder why the Brits named their spy agency after an American rifle. To avoid confusion, we’re going to use MI-6.)

Well, the operation was not as simple as just grabbing a shovel and digging. Everything had to be done secretly and silently. The particular spot where the phone cables were buried (which the CIA learned from some sympathetic East Germans) was only a meter below the surface, right next to a major highway. The Americans, who did most of the digging, had to tunnel very closely under those cables while still maintaining enough of a roof so that any passing Communist truck would not tumble through and crush the tunnel spies.

“Hello Yanks, I’m just visiting from MI-6. How are you chaps coming along? You know, this tunnel reminds me of the Great Escape, when a motley bunch of British prisoners of war tunneled out of a Nazi prison camp. Except yours is tunneling the wrong way.”

“Yeah, because we’re tunneling into Commie East Berlin!”

“No, because you’re tunneling the wrong way. Two more feet and you’ll hit France. Yanks, try a compass.”

According to the CIA’s official history of the operation, the spies did encounter “an unanticipated, messy problem” when they mistakenly tunneled into their own sanitation system.

Otherwise, things went well. With remarkable quiet, the underground spies extracted 3,100 tons of soil, enough to fill more than twenty American living rooms up to the brim. The tunnel reached a quarter-mile in length, reinforced with 125 tons of steel liner plate. To conceal any hint of digging, not even on their clothes, automatic washers and dryers were installed at the secret entry point in West Berlin. In fact, not a single cubic foot of soil ever left the entry site; it all got piled into the basement of an adjacent warehouse. Metal parts for the tunnel were first sprayed with a rubberized compound to eliminate any clanking; then they were taken inside and assembled. Sandbags were piled along the walls to help muffle any noise and serve as shelves. Recording equipment was brought in. For added security a heavy steel door was installed on the West Berlin side, while underneath East Berlin a hidden microphone was inserted into the tunnel roof. The microphone was so receptive, it picked up the footsteps and conversations of the Stasi guards patrolling above.

“Hey Comrade, what are you thinking about?”

“Nothing, Comrade. Same as you.”

“Oh? Well, in that case — you’re under arrest!”

The Stasi patrols became an even greater concern during the winter. That’s because the tunnel’s amicable air temperature created the unintentional effect of warming the ground above it. Think about that for a moment. What if the Stasi guards, trouncing through the snow, suddenly discovered a path that was mysteriously frost-free, a quarter-mile long, emanating from West Berlin? The spies’ solution was to equip their tunnel with a better refrigeration system. (Can you believe it? The Cold War was actually fought with refrigerators.)

In March 1955, the tunneling spies reached their objective and tapped into three Soviet military telephone cables. Then, for almost a year, the spies recorded 40,000 hours of phone conversations and six million hours’ worth of teletype messages. The haul included 443,000 fully transcribed conversations, including discussions of the latest developments in Soviet nuclear weapons research, detailed information about Soviet military units, and even disagreements between the Soviets and the East Germans over what to do about that embarrassing blemish upon the workers paradise, West Berlin.

Nothing is forever. Someday the phone cables would require some routine maintenance — and then the Communists would discover the tunnel. That happened in April 1956, when a team of probing Soviet and East German engineers began to wonder what they had just unearthed. Meanwhile, the alert American spies rapidly packed up that day’s tape recordings and slipped away, closing the steel door behind them. The Communists burrowed into the eastern side of the tunnel. When they explored it, they were flabbergasted.

“What a filthy trick!”

Yes, somebody actually said that. We know because the hidden microphone recorded it. The enraged Communists walked all the way to the steel door. Behind it lay West Berlin. Next to the door they found a sign which declared in English, German and Russian: “Entry Prohibited — by order of the American Commander.”

The Communists had gotten snookered. And they didn’t like it. Almost never did the Soviet Army deign to hold a press conference, but this time they did. They denounced the whole operation and even gave public tours of the tunnel. Some 50,000 ordinary East German visitors gawked at it. At the Soviets’ invitation, so did liberal Western journalists. Those journalists were flabbergasted, dumb-founded, overwhelmed with emotion.

They loved it.

“You Communists got snookered! Ha ha! And the CIA is not as incompetent as we thought it was! Yeah!”

Not the message the Communists intended. Their embarrassment erupted in cheers and laughter in the corridors of the CIA and MI-6.

There was only one problem: the CIA and MI-6 had gotten snookered. And they didn’t know it. You see, the KGB actually knew all about the tunnel, even before it was built. That’s because the KGB had a spy inside British Intelligence.

His name was George Blake. Blake had been briefed in advance about the planned Operation Gold and duly told his Soviet handlers. But the KGB had a problem: they considered Blake to be such a valuable spy for them that they reasoned they couldn’t disrupt the tunnel without alerting MI-6 and the CIA that a traitor lurked in their very midst. What to do?

Well, why not insert false information into the tapped phone cables? Okay, consider the task of having to forge at least 443,000 conversations and six million hours’ worth of teletype messages. For any fake information to be believed, it must be convincing — which meant that a great many pieces of information, and even pieces of pieces derived from more pieces, all had to conform to whatever genuine information the CIA and MI-6 could confirm using their other spies. For such an enormous and complicated deception, why not use a computer? Well, back then a Communist computer was little more an abacus.

So what did the KGB do? Nothing. They told nobody. And both the Soviet Army and the Stasi got snookered. Only after Blake had transferred to another MI-6 section, and then only after heavy rains had hammered Berlin, could the Communists afford to “check” their phone cables for any natural damage without raising any spy suspicions.

So, who got snookered? Everybody! And everybody got something. The CIA and MI-6 got massive amounts of valuable military data, plus the public embarrassment of the Communists — and also, a bit later, the sly satisfaction of knowing that the KGB let them get away with it all. The KGB got to preserve their MI-6 spy, George Blake. He later escaped to the Soviet Union. And even the Soviet Army and the East German Stasi got something: they got the chance to complain to the KGB.

“You jerks! You rank rampallian hedge-pigs! WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?”

Finally, there are today’s Germans, East and West, who now live together in a united Germany full of democracy and free enterprise and with far fewer Trabants stinking up the place. Today’s Germans got the Berlin tunnel itself. It is still a tourist attraction.

So what do you think? Why not leave me a comment?

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire
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What is an official seal? An official seal is a logo of officialdom that a government agency affixes to its reports as a colorful symbol of its bureaucratic existence and, therefore, of its excellence.

Once upon a time, one of America’s intelligence agencies displayed upon its official seal a tiny mistake. A misspelled word. The word intelligence. Really.

Surely we couldn’t be that stupid!

Spies may haunt our lives, but haunting the spies are — bureaucrats. They spook the spooks from a parallel universe of memos, manuals, regulations and timecards, a puzzle palace of mind-boggling monotony we call procedures. Procedures which no ordinary person can understand, nor ever sanely should, for it is the bureaucrat who knows best. Knows that nothing is what it appears to be.

During the Cold War, both the Russian Communists and the Red Chinese raced against us to employ more bureaucrats than we did. They won. And that’s why we won. That should have taught us something. Nevertheless, once I became a secret agent, I was fed yet another meal of acidic acronyms and unsavory terminology. Consider, for instance, the following conversation:

“Hello, beautiful lady. I’m a spy.”

“You are? Oh my. How glamorous! Let’s make love!”

Sounds delicious. But for reasons I cannot digest, the word spy is not an officially approved term. Instead, the officially-approved term of art appears in this revised conversation:

“Hello, beautiful lady. I’m an operative.”

“What? You’re inoperative? What do you want from me? Pity?”

That’s a conversation I remember well.

After confessing this story, I’m a little reluctant to ask you for a comment. But go ahead.

Nope, she really hasn’t. Russian spy Anna Chapman hasn’t endorsed SecretComedy.com. But because that which constitutes Secret Comedy includes any clandestinely cute confabulation of comical covertness, or anything funny in a secret sort of way, I bet she’d love Secret Comedy. And likewise her fans.

Of course, there’s plenty of secret comedy in her own experience. But for now, let us try to content ourselves with a few photogenic happy snaps:

Anna Chapman thinking about immigrating to America.

Anna Chapman enjoying New York City.

Anna Chapman enjoying London.

Anna Chapman enjoying Moscow.

Anna Chapman enjoying the picture frame.

Anna Chapman enjoying the window.

Anna Chapman enjoying the radiator.

Anna Chapman enjoying her hair.

Anna Chapman enjoying her dress.

Anna Chapman enjoying her lack of a dress.

Anna Chapman not enjoying herself. (Her FBI mug shot.)

Anna Chapman enjoying her new career.

Anna Chapman wondering when the fun is going to end.

Tonight Show Host Jay Leno:

“Do WE have any spies as hot?”

Vice President Joe Biden (answering Jay Leno):

“Let me be clear: It was not my idea to send her back.”

Anna Chapman herself — describing her experience in America:

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow. — Oscar Wilde

Being a spy is easier than my childhood was. When I got kidnapped, the ransom note asked for only expenses. — Reginald Dipwipple (maybe)

There is nothing a Government hates more than to be well-informed. — John Maynard Keynes

In politics, absurdity is not a handicap. — Napoleon Bonaparte

The world wants to be deceived. — Sebastian Brant

Sometimes my job is just too easy. — Reginald Dipwipple (maybe)

Have you any funny quotes for me? Please leave me a comment!
— Reggie Dipwipple (definitely)

What was the Cold War? It might sound like a competition between rival refrigerator manufacturers. Well, it was. In fact, it was fought with everything, including refrigerators, phones and spies. Free market capitalists on one side, Communists on the other. One of the hottest places of the Cold War was Berlin, a city divided into two halves by the Berlin Wall. One half was capitalist, the other Communist. I will explain.

After the Second World War ended in 1945, the newly defeated Nazi Germany lost some of its territory to its neighbors, having previously treated those neighbors rather rudely. (Actually, very rudely.) The rest of Germany, including the capital Berlin, got divided by the victorious Allies into four zones of military occupation, one each for the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.

At that time the Soviet Union was the world’s leading Communist power. Officially known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), inhabitants of that mouthful were called Soviets. They were less accurately called Russians, because what we call “Russia” was only one of several nations which comprised (i.e., were stuck inside) the huge Soviet Union. Many millions of people died under Communism, several millions of whom were Russians. In all but name the Soviet Union was an empire, and a particularly nasty one at that. The word Soviet, by the way, is the Russian word for “committee.” It’s a strange way of describing yourself. And yet remarkably appropriate for the country whose government perfected the art of bureaucratic inefficiency.

“Hi, my name is John. I’m an American.”

“Hi, my name is Ivan. I’m a Committee.”

You can’t make this stuff up. Okay, back to Germany. The three zones occupied by the Americans, British and French eventually became the democratic country of West Germany, plus West Berlin. The fourth zone, controlled by the Soviet Union, became the Communist state of East Germany and its capital, East Berlin. Back during World War II, Nazi Germany had invaded and almost defeated the Soviet Union. With that memorable history in mind, the Soviet Union’s new puppet ally of East Germany became Moscow’s most trustworthy of allies. And its least trusted. Those fraternal feelings were reciprocated.

“Fritz, you’re a good German Communist. But why do you keep saying ‘Our Soviet brothers’? The official Party-approved phrase is ‘Our Soviet friends’.”

“Because you can pick your friends.”

With the entire city of Berlin located in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone, West Berlin was stranded inside the middle of East Germany. It was a fluke of fate and politics that rendered the West Berliners, and likewise the American, British and French troops stationed there, all a bit Commie claustrophobic. But they all decided to stay put, in West Berlin, where the place became a little landlocked island of democracy, enjoying a deliciously decadent capitalist party-animal lifestyle — surrounded by the Berlin Wall, adorned with barbed wire, machine guns, trigger-happy guards, and, beyond them, a dour Communist state.

And I do mean dour. East Germany’s secret police were called the Stasi, pronounced STAH-zee. Now there’s a weird name. In Nazi Germany, the secret police were called the Gestapo. At least Gestapo sounds sinister. Stasi sounds girlie. “Hello, this is my brother Tony. And these are my sisters, Gracie, Stacy, and Stasi.”

Alas, the Stasi had no sense of humor.

For more than forty years the entirety of Berlin remained divided. West Berlin became a showcase of Western free enterprise prosperity. The Communists called West Berlin a blemish upon the self-proclaimed “workers paradise” of East Germany — an unfair capitalist/Commie contrast between the moneyed materialism of the West and the ideological purity of the Communist East. Communist dictatorships decried any private property as downright obscene. So, for the good of “the People” (who never had any say in the matter), those dictatorships confiscated the entire economy. “So, you filthy capitalist, do you own a private business? Not anymore. It now belongs to the government.” And so do you.

Which system is better? Well, between filthy rich capitalism and naked Communism, most people preferred to get shamefully dirty. And that really annoyed the Communists, who were overly serious about such things. What did those Western capitalists think they were? Rich? Acting so cool and vogue with their fancy cars, their blue jeans and bikinis and cowboy hats, their stable television sets — “stable” meaning those TVs never exploded — and wallets packed with paper money that was actually worth something. Worst of all, those Westerners had that most hedonistic of extravagances, privacy. Who needs privacy? Only people with — ideas. Proper Communists could not understand why anybody would prefer a society of rock-and-roll, jazz and free debate over their new Commie paradise of cramped apartments, cheap television sets (okay, maybe they sometimes exploded), tapped telephone lines, media censorship, obligatory lectures on fun topics like Marxist-Leninist economics, hours and hours of Party Chairman speeches, very nosy secret police, and everyday neighbors who were paid to snitch on you.

Revolutionary red was the official color of Communism. And yet for some reason the predominant color of the streets, of the buildings, of the neighborhoods, indeed of this entire society of the future, this workers paradise, was soot gray.

Yep, that is definitely revolutionary.

And boring.

So what do you think? Leave me a comment!

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reggie Dipwipple

Washington, D.C., has long attracted unto itself colorful bureaucrats and blank politicians, lobbyists and lobby-doormen, lawyers and the attorneys of lawyers, party hacks and party animals, journalists and spin-meisters, scandal-mongers and power-smoochers. Yes, people of integrity. Oh, I forgot to mention the tour guides; they can be pretty sleazy. But what are these people looking for? Power? My friend, dismiss your naiveté. Going to Washington for power is like sitting in a traffic jam because you like to drive. Actually, it is exactly like that.

Of course Washington exists for power. But to understand the true essence of power in Washington, what truly constitutes it, you must imagine — an aquarium. Within the aquarium there are sharks and there are sardines, there are crabs and also jellyfish, slippery eels and ugly slugs. Just like in Washington. And there is the octopus. Upon an ocean floor so grimy that not even the weighty waters upon it can cleanse it — its city equivalent would be the smog, trying to cleanse away the corruption — the tentacles of the octopus spread forth and curl themselves around everything: squeezing, sucking, suffocating. It is said that an octopus has eight tentacles, but how do you really know? Ever count them? Indeed, at the aquarium, who deigns to even notice the octopus? After all, there are sexier seafarers worth seeing. Consider those salacious sharks, those juicy jellyfish.

That is power, my friend.

Have I confused you? Let me put it this way: Washington is in the grip of a conspiracy, one which hides in plain sight — its tentacles everywhere and yet nowhere. It is a conspiracy called incompetence. Not any ordinary incompetence, mind you. No, an incredibly sophisticated and ingenious incompetence. For it exists everywhere and yet nowhere. You cannot defeat it. You cannot bribe it. You can only defer to it, accommodate it, become its co-conspirator, and ultimately its defender.

Because it’s fun to be a tentacle.

That is, until you find yourself entangled by another tentacle. Well golly, where did that slimy competitor come from? From the same octopus? It happens, my friend. When placed under stress, even an octopus will eat off one of its tentacles. Washington does this all the time.

With this mass neurosis afflicting Washington, with corruption and incompetence operating hand in hand, plus the peril of being melted by the Washingtonian sun and crushed by the city’s humidity, or eaten by whatever still lurks in its swamp — well, I ask you: why does anybody dare to live in Washington?

The answer is so Machiavellian that it would confound even Machiavelli: Washingtonians are romantics. And love is blind. And what’s not to love? Washington is an enchanting metropolis, sprinkled with charming neighborhoods, majestic monuments, boring museums, romantic traffic circles, and statues polished by pigeon droppings. (Actually, if you visit the museums, they’re not so boring.) The city has much to see, and not just while you circle about, looking for a parking space.

So what’s your opinion? Please leave me a comment.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Slavery in America included the slavery of illiteracy. In the Dixie South especially, it was illegal to teach black slaves how to read and write. Illiteracy was meant to foster ignorance, and in ignorance is how most white slave-owners wanted their slaves. In that respect the household of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy during the Civil War, was the slave owners’ model.

Mary Bowser, a young black woman born into slavery, appeared in the Davis household typically docile and illiterate. Like most household slaves, she had been trained to be quiet, unobtrusive, nearly invisible, almost part of the furniture while performing the household drudgeries. Most white folk just ignored them.

Guess who hid in plain sight as a Union spy? Yep, rght in the Confederate White House. Mary Bowser wasn’t really a slave: her previous household had freed her. And she wasn’t illiterate: her previous household had financed her attendance at a Quaker-run school in Philadelphia, where she excelled. When President Davis was away from his office, Bowser went inside and read through every secret document she could lay her hands on, memorizing its contents. Literally word for word. When Davis dined with his generals, discussing military strategy and troop movements, Bowser was there too, attending to the diners’ needs and overhearing what they said.

“My name is Bond, James Bond.”

Or pretty close to that. The reason is because when Mary Bowser was granted her freedom, the process entailed a legal procedure that left legal documents in the public record. To operate as a spy, Bowser needed to hide the fact she had been freed, and therefore she had to hide the fact she was Mary Bowser. So she assumed a false identity: Ellen Bond.

Throughout her career in espionage, this secret freewoman still had a master. Not a slavemaster but a spymaster: a white Virginian woman named Elizabeth Van Lew, whose efforts had freed Bowser. The Van Lew family was of Richmond’s most prominent families — wealthy and slave-owning. But Elizabeth herself despised slavery and likewise the Confederacy, even as she insisted she was not a Yankee. She called herself a proud Virginian adamantly opposed to human oppression — as every good Virginian should be, she said. Mary Bowser agreed to be one of several agents in Elizabeth’s extensive spy ring in Richmond. And her best.

Well, in the capital of the Confederacy, you might think an outspoken abolitionist like Elizabeth Van Lew would arouse a little suspicion. Well, she did. What was she to do? Hide her beliefs? Too easy. Be quiet? She was a woman. So, just as Bowser the spy exploited the South’s blatant bigotry, Van Lew the spymaster exploited the South’s rampant male chauvinism.

“She’s a woman. How much trouble can she be?”

To deepen that complacency, Elizabeth walked the streets of Richmond while openly babbling to a companion not physically there. Today people do that and nobody notices, even without a cellphone, but back then Elizabeth’s behavior looked downright loony. Indeed, it so bemused Richmond society that she became known as “Crazy Bet.”

Well, just how crazy, bet you, Crazy Bet really was? Crazy like a fox. And so, too, was Mary Bowser. A serving tray with food sometimes concealed secret messages in a false bottom. In a basket of eggs, one eggshell might hide secret military plans. Even wet laundry hung up to dry could convey coded messages: for example, a white shirt hung beside an upside-down pair of pants could signal “Confederate General Hill is moving troops to the west.”

Eventually Mary Bowser became suspected of being the spy she was. Only then did she flee the Confederate White House, though not before she tried to burn it down. The fire made her point. Still, the mansion survived, fortunately for today’s tourists.

In 1995, more than a century after the war, both Mary Bowser and Elizabeth Van Lew were inducted into the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

My toughest fight was with my first wife. — Muhammad Ali

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. — Dean Acheson

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. — Oscar Wilde

Youth is wasted on the young. — George Bernard Shaw

Anger is wasted on the incompetent. — Reginald Dipwipple (maybe)

Have you any funny quotes for me? Please leave me a comment!
— Reggie Dipwipple (definitely)

If you think Washington is limited to Washington, D.C., guess again. Officially the jurisdiction of Washington’s Mayor ends at the District limits, but in practice the place we call “Washington” or sometimes “greater Washington” now includes northern Virginia and a bit of southern Maryland too. Even the Pentagon is located not in D.C. but in northern Virginia, specifically in Arlington County — in spite of the Pentagon’s official mailing address being listed as “Washington, D.C., 20301.” It is a postal deception, designed to misdirect letter bombs, junk mail, and Congressional inquiries. It works.

Want to tour the Pentagon at your leisure? Well, all you need to do is enlist, get a military career, and plead for an assignment at the Pentagon. You won’t have much competition because most military people plead not to get assigned to the Pentagon. Why? Because it’s a world, a mini-universe actually, where even the mighty Colonels get stuck with lowly jobs like serving coffee because they’re outranked by plenty of Generals — who are outranked by even more senior Generals, and so on, etc. Where else can you feel so important and unimportant at the same time?

If, like most people, you’d prefer just a tourist tour of the Pentagon, then you need to make an appointment. You can do so via The Pentagon – Request a Tour website, which is http://pentagon.osd.mil/tour-selection.html. What you’ll get is a walking tour, upon largely concrete floors, lasting a mile and a half (I’m not kidding), taking you through hallways, corridors, and up and down steps of what is literally the largest office building in the world. Wear comfortable shoes. Is the experience boring? No, more like exhausting. But also, in its own military way, memorable.

For example, you’ll walk past the offices of the Defense Department’s most powerful officials, including the Secretary of Defense (the military’s most powerful civilian, other than the President) and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the military’s most powerful General or Admiral). If that experience sounds boring, just imagine how many foreign spies wish they could do that. (And not get caught.)

Another great memory will be your tour guide. He’ll be a Soldier, Sailor, Marine or Airman, dressed in the most snazzy, the perfectly perfect military dress uniform you’ve ever seen in Washington, politely speaking to your entire tour group with good humor and respect while he walks backwards — yes, backwards — throughout the entire mile and a half. He walks backwards in order to face you while speaking to you, and also to keep an eye on you. Yes, keep an eye on you. If you think I’m joking, then during the tour take a moment to walk backwards yourself, or at least look behind you, for there you will see another a Soldier, Sailor, Marine or Airman, likewise dressed in a perfectly perfect military dress uniform, quietly following your entire tour group. Is he there to enjoy the show? No, he is there to guard you — ensuring that nobody leaves the tour group for any reason. I’m not exaggerating when I warn you that he’s a trained killer. Polite but profoundly proficient. Don’t leave your tour group. If you get bored, satisfy your curiosity by glancing at the hallway displays. After all…they exist for the tourists.

And relish your experience experiencing the Pentagon! The building is utterly enormous. Some statistics: over 3.7 million square feet of floor space, 131 stairways, 19 escalators, 691 water fountains, 1 dining room of an upscale nature, 2 cafeterias, 6 snack bars, plus another snack bar outside. Why so many food establishments? 23,000 employees. Both military and civilian. Together, each day, they consume 4,500 cups of coffee, 1,700 pints of milk, and 6,800 soft drinks.

Once upon a time, through most of the year 1941, the Second World War was raging — but America hadn’t yet declared war. That would change in December, when Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Even before then, however, many Americans saw the Nazis and their cronies as a threat to the whole world, expecting that sooner or later America would have to fight. Well, try waging a world war without enough office space. It can’t be done. So it wasn’t a great surprise when, in mid-1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was informed that the U.S. military needed more office space. A lot more space.

Originally the Pentagon was to be built at a place called Arlington Farms. There, five roads crisscrossed into a pentagon-like pattern. Coincidence? Well, the bureaucrats of the War Department (in those days they actually called it the War Department) felt obliged to use up every square-inch they could get. Guess the result? A five-storied building shaped like a pentagon, designed to fill up every available square-inch of Arlington Farms.

Only it didn’t — because the building would have looked ridiculous. Five roads, five sides. Dhuh. The aesthetic sense of boring bureaucrats. Urban sprawl without the chic. Plus, the strange structure would have sabotaged some spectacularly scenic views of Arlington National Cemetery. So, what to do? Trash the building’s blueprints and start from scratch? Forget the taxpayer dollars already spent? Nope. FDR himself ordered a simpler solution.

They just moved the building. A little.

A little to the south, actually. Out of Arlington Farms and into a place called — and you can’t make this stuff up — Hell’s Bottom. And aptly named too, for Hell’s Bottom was a slum clustered around an outmoded airfield called Washington Hoover Airport. The airfield was so outmoded, cars drove right across the landing strip. Even as planes were landing. (Very exciting.) Well, the whole area got razed, leveled, and the Pentagon put up. Ah, what a difference a few miles can make. Instead of a monstrosity sabotaging the scenic vista, the Pentagon became an awesome product of artistic architectural genius. Or so many people now assume, totally ignorant of the building’s haphazard history.

In ways like this, large and small, the Pentagon is full of history. Wars do that. The military man who oversaw the Pentagon’s construction so impressed his bosses with the accomplishment that they put him in charge of another massive project that nobody in the military could understand: the Manhattan Project. Building the first Atomic Bomb. His name: General Leslie Groves. Another bit of trivia: Construction of the Pentagon physically began on September 11, 1941. In 2001, the 9/11 attacks took place on the Pentagon’s sixtieth anniversary, although I suspect al-Qaeda was ignorant of that.

Amid so much space and corridors, you might think many people get lost in the Pentagon. Well, they do. One trick to navigating the maze is to know (and just as importantly, to remember) the exact letter-number code of the room you’re looking for. Otherwise…you’ll eventually worry about starvation. The Pentagon is organized into five concentric hallways, called Rings, labeled A, B, C, D and E. Of these, the one most politically powerful is outermost, the E Ring, because it has the most floor space for (relatively) large offices which, if you’re lucky enough, also have windows showcasing beautiful views of Washington across the Potomac River. A typical Pentagon letter-number code is 3E-880. That stands for Third Floor, E Ring, Room 880 — which just happens to be the Secretary of Defense’s personal office. (Don’t try to visit him without an appointment. Otherwise the Marine manikin standing motionless next to his door will suddenly come alive. With violent enthusiasm.)

Another navigational trick is to use the A Ring more than the E Ring, because A is smaller, being located in the center. The A Ring exemplifies the strategic advantage of “interior lines of communication” that military strategists promote. (Maybe the A Ring gave them the idea.) By using the A Ring and knowing where you’re destined, even a newbie on foot can reach any Pentagon office from any other Pentagon office in only seven minutes. Really.

Who says the military isn’t efficient?

Or doesn’t like nature? The A Ring surrounds a pleasantly outdoor (and yet enclosed) park area, complete with manicured grass and even trees, known as the Pentagon Courtyard. The U.S. Armed Forces have designated it as the only place on the planet where Service caps need not be worn outside and where saluting is prohibited. Yes, prohibited. Why? Because the place is overrun with military people of every rank, including Generals and Admirals. How would you like to spend your time saluting that much? Just to walk to another Pentagon office, several times a day? Hell’s Bottom indeed.

During the Cold War, the spy satellites of the Soviet Union noticed that the Courtyard contained an especially frequented facility, albeit relatively small. With so many Pentagon people going to it and coming from it, the Soviets assessed it to be a nuclear fallout shelter, perhaps even a Command Center for waging a nuclear war. After all, it was right in the middle of the Pentagon. Literally.

It was a hot dog stand.

It’s since been replaced by the Pentagon’s outdoor snack bar.

During the time when the Pentagon was being constructed, racial segregation prevailed in America — which imposed, among other things, separate toilets for blacks and whites. Jim Crow segregation was an evil system, but its legacy did leave the Pentagon a surprising benefit: since 1948, when President Truman ordered the abolishment of segregation throughout the Armed Forces, the Pentagon has a vast abundance of toilets. Nearly 300.

And YOU don’t get to use any of them! Because you are a tourist. Under guard. Sorry. Therefore, do attend to your bodily needs before beginning the tour, because there are no restroom breaks throughout that mile-and-a-half walk. None. No exceptions. Otherwise the tour will end immediately — and permanently. And you’ll feel like an idiot. I know.

And now for the question you’ve been waiting for: Are there spies in the Pentagon? Of course! (And you thought Military Intelligence was a contradiction in terms.) But are there any enemy spies in the Pentagon? Well, I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a fun topic to make jokes about. Up until the real thing gets discovered. On the other hand, some Pentagon documents have gotten so acronym-filled, semantically unintelligible and substantively strange that any spy who steals them is probably being deceived.

So what’s your opinion? Was this review helpful to you as a tourist? Please leave me a comment.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Nope, Carmen Electra has not endorsed SecretComedy.com. Although I hope that, someday, she will.

Regardless, because of her contributions to the acting profession and entertainment (and as a Secret Agent Extraordinaire, I know a bit about acting; entertainment is another matter), she is honored here on SecretComedy.com.

This is yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog.

This has been yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog. Thanks for falling victim.

And thanks, Carmen. ‘Love your work.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

In India, the practice of espionage dates back to ancient times, at least as far back as an ancient book entitled the Arthashastra. The title translates roughly as The Science of Worldly Wealth. The book’s author called himself Kautilya — a pseudonym, we now believe, for a guy named Chanakya. Chanakya was a close advisor to the great Indian Emperor Chandragupta, and also an eminent professor at Taxila University.

Not all professors confine themselves to ivory towers. Certainly not Chanakya. Which is not to say that he never made mistakes. According to one legend, he added small amounts of poison to the daily meals of the Emperor. Not to kill the Emperor, mind you, but to help the Emperor’s body build up an immunity to poisoning. It worked. Then the Emperor unexpectedly dined with his wife. The poison killed her.

“Well, I’m sorry, Your Majesty. Yes, Sire, I do see you’re upset. But you shouldn’t have had dinner with your wife. You disregarded the schedule. Naughty you!”

Perhaps the story is a myth, but the Arthashastra does include plenty of instructions on how to create poisons and potions. Poisons to kill instantly, other poisons which kill after a month. Poisons in the form of liquids, powders, or gaseous smoke. Poisons that cause blindness, deafness, or madness. Poisons that cause fever, leprosy, or gonorrhea. Potions to help endure a month’s fasting. Potions to change the colors of animals. Sleeping potions, ideal for insomnia. Potions to cure leprosy, although no money-back guarantee. Fiery potions: apply it to your skin, light it, and it burns without hurting you. Potions that burn while floating on water. Acidic potions that melt chains. Steroid potions to help you walk a long journey. Potions that render you invisible, although only at night. Even potions for casting magic spells. For instance:

When the statue of an enemy is carved from the wood of a cassia-fistula tree and then smeared with the bile fluid from a brown cow’s liver, the cow having been killed with a weapon on the fourteenth day of the dark half of the month, the result causes blindness.

Smeared with bile sucked out of a cow’s liver? Yeah, I’d prefer to be blind to that too.

Despite his knowledge of poisons and potions, history records that Chanakya himself was actually quite compassionate, a royal advisor who urged every ruler to love and care for the common people, even the slaves. He wrote, “In the happiness of his subjects lies the King’s happiness; in their welfare, his welfare.” Most of his book offers guidance on royal and court behavior, bureaucratic administration, foreign policy, military affairs, and the economy. “A debt should be paid off till the last penny,” he advised, “and an enemy should be destroyed without a trace.”

Compassion is nice, but politics is politics. Here’s another excerpt:

Spies, hidden in an underground chamber, or in a tunnel, or inside a secret wall, may slay the enemy when the latter is carelessly amusing himself in a pleasure park or any other place of recreation. Or spies under concealment may poison him. Or women under concealment may throw a snake, or poison, or fire, or poisonous smoke over this person when he is asleep in a confined place. Or spies, having access to the enemy’s harem, may, when opportunities occur, do to the enemy whatever is found possible on the occasion, and then get out unknown.

Attacking a guy in his harem? Is nothing sacred? Not to Chanakya. And by writing under a pseudonym, he could be blunt. “Kautilya” wrote that the “ideal” King should heed his royal advisors, even when they tell him that he’s behaving like a greedy, selfish, stupid, lazy-ass, playboy jerk. And he should thank them for their candor.

The Arthashastra also proposed a daily schedule for the King. The schedule was crammed so full of activity, it left him little more than four hours of sleep. The King was supposed to start his “day” before 2:00 a.m. in the morning! The first item of business: talk politics. Then decide what to do for the rest of the day.

“I have a royal idea, Chanakya. How about I go get some more sleep?”

“Absolutely not, Your Majesty, or you’ll become a greedy, selfish, stupid, lazy-ass, playboy jerk.”

“Yeah. Thanks for the candor. But if I don’t get some more sleep, I’ll become a homicidal jerk.”

“Sire, just drink this coffee. You’ll feel better. I’ve added your favorite spice, Strychnine.”

“Fine, whatever. At least this time you told me.”

Soon thereafter, while it was still dark outside, the King would send forth his spies. Then he would perform his morning religious duties, followed by some personal duties, then see his doctor, and only then have breakfast, advised by his foremost expert on future events, his astrologer. Then he could watch the sunrise and wonder why the common folk got to sleep late.

Thereafter, over the next four or five hours, the King would receive reports on military matters, on his tax revenues, and on budget expenditures.

“Your Majesty, I know that you find these reports excruciatingly boring, but you must read each and every one! Otherwise how will you pass my quiz? Sire? Oh Sire? WAKE UP!”

“…Huh? What is it?”

“Sire, you were being a greedy, selfish, stupid, lazy-ass, playboy jerk.”

“Oh. Right. Thanks for the candor.”

During those same hours the King was scheduled to meet with the common folk, receive their petitions and gifts, hear their complaints, take a morning bath, have lunch, and then devote some time to scholarly study.

“Sire, it’s time for your daily lesson in Chanakya’s philosophy.”

“Oh, not again. Chanakya, you’ve recited your philosophy to me eighty-six times!”

“No, Your Majesty, I’ve recited it ninety-nine times. And since you forgot the real number, you deserve to hear it one-hundred times. So Sire, to wit: ‘The ideal King should keep away from another man’s wife. He should not covet another’s property. He should practice non-violence towards all living things. He should avoid daydreaming, and also capriciousness, and also falsehood, and also extravagance. He should avoid associating with harmful persons, and also avoid indulging in harmful activities.’”

“I see. You know, Chanakya, under your philosophy, it’s no fun being the King.”

“Oh Sire, it’s good to be the King. In fact, in the neighboring kingdom, no less than the Emperor Melvin told me so.”

“Of course he did, Chanakya. My friend Mel listens to a very different philosopher, Henry the Hedonist. Mel brooks no boredom.”

“He doesn’t? Well Sire, in that case, you should buck Henry and get smart. Think for yourself. Or at least until it contradicts whatever I tell you.”

“And perhaps even then.”

“Uh, Sire…must I warn you with candor again?”

At about noon the King was scheduled to receive additional gifts and more tax revenues, appoint new ministers, allocate government tasks, write letters, and receive some secret messages from his spies.

“Mail call, Your Majesty. This morning you’ve received secret messages from Agents Adams and Feldon.”

“Adams and Feldon? Who are they?”

“Spies disguised as actors.”

“You’re kidding? I have spies disguised as actors? That doesn’t sound like quality control. It sounds likes a recipe for chaos!”

“Well, Sire, the alternative is to have actors disguised as spies.”

“Imagine that.”

Later, at about mid-afternoon, the King would finally get to enjoy some personal time. The Arthashastra refers to this period as “time for contemplation.”

“Hello, Your Majesty! As usual, I’ve had your bedroom prepared very alluringly, including silk sheets and the eagerness of twenty-two gorgeous girls, all skilled in the art of sexual pleasure. Are you ready to contemplate the divine experience of erotica?”

“Yes, Chanakya, I like the room. Thank you.”

“Please follow me, Your Majesty…oh…now this is very strange. Sire, where are the twenty-two gorgeous girls I left in here? Except for you and me, this room is empty!”

“That’s right, Chanakya. I sent the girls away. I’m taking a nap.”

“What? A NAP? Your Majesty, you are in danger of becoming a greedy, selfish, stupid, lazy-ass jerk!”

“But at least I won’t strangle you.”
“Hummm. A profound insight I can relate to. Very well, Sire, have a nice nap. But there’s something else not right about this room. Sire, where is the bowl of fruit punch that was left in here for your refreshment?”

“I wasn’t thirsty, Chanakya. The girls took it with them.”

“They did? — Sire, I suddenly have an urgent matter to attend to! EXCUSE ME!”

During the few remaining hours before sunset, the King would inspect his troops and consult his generals. Then, in the early hours of the evening, the King would receive another bath, eat dinner, and engage in another period of study.

“Good evening, Sire.”

“Good evening, Chanakya. So, did you rescue the girls?”

“Yes, Sire. They left the punch bowl with the Palace Guards.”

“Ah, I see. That would explain all the new faces. Chanakya, would you please stop taking care of me? Good help is getting hard to find. My cooks are afraid to taste my food. My cleaning staff is afraid to empty my trash cans. And this is the fourth set of guards this month!”

“But Sire, without my meticulous care, who would save you from yourself?”

“My wife! If you hadn’t poisoned her!”

“Exactly, Sire. Which is why you need me. And if not me, Sire, from where could you obtain knowledge and wisdom?”

“My library!”

“Oh Sire, I’m sorry, but earlier this afternoon the royal librarian was imprudent enough to taste your soup.”

“Chanakya!”

“Not my fault, Sire. He was in the Palace kitchen and snarfed a taste without asking. But if you want something to read, I do have this book called the Arthashastra. It’s quite brilliant.”

“Oh, not again! Chanakya, I know you wrote this book!”

“Ah, I am truly flattered that you think so, Sire, but whatever errors are in it are exclusively the fault of that guy Kautilya, wherever he is. Far from here, I’m sure.”

“Chanakya, I know you wrote this book.”

“Your Majesty, I assure you, I did not. If I am lying, may I drink a deadly poison!”

“Chanakya, you’ve made yourself immune to every poison in India! But if you want to continue this fiction, I’ll read the book.”

“Actually, Sire, the book is non-fiction. And very well written, if I do say so myself.”

At about 9:00 p.m. the King would retire to his bed chamber, soothed by the sound of music. (“Chanakya! Quiet! I hate Polkas!”) Beforehand, however, for about an hour, the King would consult with his spies — in person.

“Agent Jeeves, I have a problem. I need to get rid of somebody.”

“Consider it done, Your Majesty. There’s a great book called the Arthashastra. It contains plenty of information about poisons.”

“No, Agent Jeeves, you misunderstand me. I don’t want him killed. I just want him to leave me alone.”

“Consider it done, Your Majesty. The Arthashastra contains plenty of information about sleeping potions.”

“No, Agent Jeeves, I want to send him on a great and noble mission — far from my palace. Forever. But I don’t want to hurt his feelings. And please don’t suggest any poisons or potions. They won’t work on this guy. I’ve tried.”

“Oh, I see. Well, Sire, what you desire could be difficult. However, I do know of a vacant professorship at Taxila University.”

“Perfect! But I’ve never been there. What is it like?”

“It has towers made of ivory.”

“Perfect!”

So, my dear reader, what do you think of my story?

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Newly improved and newly re-released!

Yes, through the magic of light-hearted literature, you too can now partake in my abundantly aberrant adventures — and also feel history come alive with comedy, and then wonder why high school history had to be so boring.

If this is the first time you’ve ever heard of my memoirs, you are entitled to read this advertisement:

In a world wherein so much appears to be bizarre, insane, and beyond rational explanation, Secret Agent Reginald Dipwipple knows the insider truth: the world is incredibly incompetent. This is the world he operates in, fighting the good fight against terrorists struggling to make a living through mass intimidation. It is a world wherein words are weapons when they contain too many syllables. A world wherein computers have personality, geeks are cosmopolitan, and blondes are smart enough to deceive. A world of acronyms utterly indecipherable to the uninitiated: HUMINT, MASINT, GUTTER, USSR. A world where crises cause comedy.

And Dipwipple delivers. Join him at a spy school in rural Virginia where poachers encounter cute cuddly animals who shoot back. Dare to accompany him to Washington, D.C.’s fashionable neighborhood of Georgetown to the high fashions of New York City, to the funky fashions of Greenwich Village, to the Italian fashions of Rome, to the frumpy fashions of American tourists. It is a journey intertwined with Biblical espionage, ancient Roman postal workers, prostitutes and politicians, Nazis and Communists, philosophers and phonies, comedy writers and other political appointees. From spies full of hot air (ballooning) to spies of the underworld, tunneling into East Berlin. From the sexy spies of the Civil War to the sexy spy planes of the Cold War, Dipwipple delivers. From the United Nations to divided states, from the science of humor to the art of the bad joke, he delivers. From the great questions of theology to the questionable greatness of bureaucracy, he delivers.

Dipwipple not only delivers, he takes it back. This is his story.

Available on electronic reader devices!

For the Amazon Kindle version, click here.
Do you want a free Kindle “reader” embedded in your PC? Then click here.

However, because Angelina Jolie has contributed seductively to the nexus of spies and comedy, we hereby honor her here on SecretComedy.com.

This is yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog.

This has been yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog. Thanks for falling victim.

And thanks, Angelina. ‘Love your work.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Have you ever heard of HUMINT?

HUMINT is the acronym for Human Intelligence. Yes, this term is a contradiction in terms. But because bureaucrats ignore that obvious absurdity, we shall as well.

HUMINT refers to that quintessential guy who spies. I don’t mean that guy who operates a spy satellite in the safety of a control room, battling nothing but boredom. Nor do I mean the pilot of a spy plane while his aircraft’s snoopy gadgets scoop up a cornucopia of enemy radio signals and photo images. No, those types of spying are the result of sheer technological wizardry — the satellite, the snooper scooper — and therefore are not considered HUMINT. Real HUMINT is espionage at its most classic: a human spy doing all the work. Somebody with personal access, and who is almost always a sweet-talking liar. Kind of a covert Casanova.

In fact, Giacomo Casanova himself was a spy. Likewise he was a lawyer, a librarian, a playwright, pundit, pamphleteer, doctor, diplomat, historian, novelist, naval officer, churchman, salesman, lottery-runner, bonds-trader, entrepreneur, alchemist, autobiographer, musician, gambler, and notorious ladies’ man. None of these careers he practiced for very long, other than gambler and ladies’ man (which in Casanova’s case really were careers). “I have always loved truth so passionately,” he declared in his memoirs, “that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms…As for women, this sort of reciprocal deceit cancels itself out; for when love enters in, both parties are usually dupes.”

Giacomo Casanova was born in 1725, in Venice, Italy. Today the seaport of Venice is famed for its charming canals, its graceful gondolas, its tantalizing tourist traps. All of which are situated close to the majestic Mediterranean — and getting ever closer as the entirety of Venice gradually sinks. (Enjoy it while you can.)

Well, once upon a time, Venice was also a mighty republic and a major maritime power, its Venetian warships sailing far and wide to protect a prodigiously profitable Venetian merchant trade. Venetian glassmakers and their products were so prized that the Venetian Republic actually worried about industrial espionage — in other words, about glassmakers emigrating. So Venice also exported assassins. Really. (China did the same thing against renegade silk weavers.)

By Casanova’s time, though, Venice was in decline. Indeed, Casanova himself spent most of his adult life exiled away from Venice, wandering the royal courts of Europe in hope of finding favor. Preferably from pretty ladies. He was repeatedly successful, and that meant he repeatedly got into trouble.

“All the French ministers are the same. They lavished money which came out of other people’s pockets to enrich their creatures, and they were absolute: the down-trodden people counted for nothing.”

If you missed that, that was Casanova complaining about the French government. Which employed him. In 1757, the French government sent Casanova to Dunkirk, a northern port-city in France where a few of England’s Royal Navy warships had anchored for a visit. Casanova’s spy mission, which he later revealed in his memoirs, was to make “the acquaintance of the officers and of completing a minute and circumstantial report of the victualing, the number of seamen, the guns, the ammunition, discipline, etc., etc.”

To find good sources of information in Dunkirk, Casanova began with a place where he could find proper respectable gentlemen. But the bordello was closed. So he went to a tavern. He later wrote:

“After we enjoyed an excellent dinner, several persons arrived and card play began, which I did not participate in, as I wished to study the manner of the place, and above all, particular officers who were present. By speaking with an air of authority about naval matters, and by saying I had served in the Navy of the Venetian Republic, in three days I not only knew but was intimate with all the Captains of the Dunkirk fleet. I talked at random about naval architecture, about the Venetian system of maneuvers, and I noticed that the jolly sailors were pleased more by my blunders than by my sensible remarks.”

I can just imagine.

“Excuse me, Sailor, but when I walked past your ship anchored at the dock, something appeared to be missing. If your ship is really a Royal Navy warship, a ship of His Royal Majesty the King of England — well then, Sailor, where is the Royal Seal? Out for a swim?”

“Uh, no. The Royal Seal is in the Captain’s cabin. Up on the wall.”

“Up on the wall? Climbing it?”

“No. Hanging there.”

“Hanging there? Mutiny?”

“Aesthetics.”

“Four days after I arrived in Dunkirk, one of the Captains asked me to dine on his ship. After that engagement, all the others did likewise. And on every occasion I stayed on the ship for the rest of the day. I was curious about everything — and Jack is so trustful! I ventured into the hold, asked questions innumerable, and found plenty of young officers delighted to show off their own importance, gossiping without any encouragement from me. I was careful, however, to learn everything which could be valuable, and in the evenings I committed to paper all the mental notes I had made during the day. Four or five hours was all I allowed myself for sleep, and in fifteen days I felt I had learnt enough.”

Casanova returned to Paris, offered his report, received the gratitude of his employers, and likewise a pretty payment. Yet of his achievement Casanova himself was modest. (Gosh, who knew?) His boss, he later wrote, “might easily have procured all the information I gave him without spending a penny. Any intelligent young naval officer would have done it just as well, and would have acquitted himself with zeal and discretion, to gain the good opinion of the King’s ministers.”

Well, I’m not so sure about that. For in comparison to that connoisseur of comically captivating conversational confabulation that was Casanova, any young French naval officer seeking to seduce those salty seafarers from the British Isles — I mean seduce them semantically — would have found himself about as welcome as scurvy. When the Brits beheld Casanova, however, they beheld what appeared to be the walking remnant of a pathetically puny Venetian bathtub navy. A harmless oldster, a guy whose age marked him as long past his peak.

If only they knew. Certainly many ladies did. But that’s another story.

So what do you think? Leave me a post!

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Aspiring to be the next Casanova

MASINT, my dear reader, refers to “Measurement and Signature Intelligence.”

Whenever you read a thermometer, you are learning some MASINT. The degree of temperature is the “measurement.” The coldness or heat causing that degree (the air temperature) is the “signature.” Winter air leaves a different signature than does summer air. MASINT is that simple.

Or it’s that simple until you need MASINT from somewhere thousands of miles away without having any gadget there to measure the signature. Now imagine needing that information before we had the Internet. Or spy satellites. Or even much television.

Yes, the era before television. No, it wasn’t the Dark Ages. Okay, maybe it was. But we did have the Atomic Bomb. In fact, back in 1947, the only country with the A-Bomb was the United States. But because the Cold War was on, most people expected that Joseph Stalin, a conniving Communist dictator, would make sure that his Soviet Union got one too. After all, “Uncle Joe” had plenty of spies. We, however, had very few spies. Did you know the CIA was not even created until 1947? We had very few spies.

However, we did have a powerful institution called the Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by a guy named Lewis Strauss. To a plethora of scientific professionals Strauss posed a poignant predicament: “When Uncle Joe gets the Bomb, how would we know?”

Well, they answered him, we’d know when Uncle Joe blows up Cleveland.

Strauss disliked that answer. What if the first target Joe hits isn’t Cleveland? What if it’s Hackensack, New Jersey? Or Deadhorse, Alaska? Or East Berlin, Pennsylvania? Wouldn’t it be nice to know if the people there should leave those places? So Strauss challenged the scientists to devise a way to discover what was, at the time, the most secretive of Soviet secrets: how to detect a Soviet atomic test. It was a challenge so daunting that several of America’s best physicists warned him that our sensors weren’t good enough. Worse, they said, our sensors would never be good enough. The feat was impossible. Forget it.

So, how much do we need Cleveland?

Well, Strauss was just a typical guy. So typical, he had started his career as a shoe salesman and became a millionaire. So typical, he was smart enough to know when he needed help. So he went to his friend James Forrestal, who just happened to be the Secretary of the Navy and, later, Secretary of Defense. Strauss told Forrestal that throughout the entire U.S. Government, nobody — nobody — was monitoring the Soviet Union for atomic tests.

Forrestal didn’t believe him. The Secretary said, “[Expletive]! We must be doing it!”

Please don’t blame Forrestal for his ignorance. Even today, upon a multitude of momentous issues, what he expressed is a commonplace misconception. “We must be doing it!” Oh really? Why is that? Is it because the United States Government, convoluted since its conception, is known for its consistent competence? Its excellence? Its effectiveness? Its effervescent efficiency? Conscientious in its commitment to common sense? A bastion of buoyant brilliance, bereft of bombastic bureaucratic bumbling?

Forrestal made a few phone calls and discovered soon enough that he was wrong and Strauss right. Then Forrestal learned something else: Strauss told him that unless the Pentagon did something really smart, like help the Atomic Energy Commission, the Commission would endeavor to fix this MASINT problem all by itself. Well, Strauss continued, that project could get very expensive, so expensive that the Commission would have to ask Congress for more money. And to justify that request, the Commission would then have to inform every Member of Congress that the Pentagon had left the entire country dangerously vulnerable to a massive sneak attack. Just like at Pearl Harbor.

“Forrestal saw the point immediately.”

With that little mission accomplished, Strauss’ next task was to find a way to violate the laws of physics. Well, Strauss was just a typical guy. So typical, he had never gone to college, an absence that probably made him smarter. Regardless, not every American physicist had dismissed his challenge. There were a few mad scientists (“mad” meaning mavericks) who were intrigued by the idea of creating special sensors that could detect trace amounts of the radiation an atomic blast would create. The sensors could be carried on airplanes flying near, but not inside, Soviet airspace. It was a great idea and it merited a great response.

“This program is nonsense.” So proclaimed a famous physicist, asserting that too little radiation would remain for any sensor to detect it, certainly not thousands of miles from the blast. But because the maverick scientists were mad, they persevered. Imagine being in their place — tackling the most urgent, the most daunting spy problem of the day, attempting something that people smarter than you have declared to be nonsense, even physically impossible. No pressure.

Well, the sensors did get built, the planes got equipped, and the MASINT flights got flown. And almost immediately the sensors detected — radiation. Yikes!

Relax, it was just a few volcanoes. Yes, it’s true. Even small amounts of volcanic activity create trace amounts of radiation. Who knew? Now we do.

More MASINT flights got flown. Then, on September 3, 1949, the sensors detected more radiation than the designated alert level. Four times more. It was evidence, very disturbing evidence, that pointed to one inescapable conclusion.

Their sensors were crap. Either that or Uncle Joe had just detonated an A-Bomb. Critics of the MASINT technology were asked to assess the data. Albeit, they were the critics, but they were still some of America’s best scientists. Almost unanimously they agreed that, yes, an atomic test had occurred in the Soviet Union. But they weren’t sure when. Their best guess was sometime over the previous two weeks. Then the MASINT creators stood up, those maverick scientists mad with enthusiasm, and declared that the exact date was August 29. At exactly midnight, Greenwich Mean Time.

They were off by just an hour.

That wasn’t all. Further study of the MASINT data revealed that the Soviet A-Bomb was nearly identical to the American A-Bomb which, four years before during World War II, had been dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Here was definitive proof that America’s super-secret Manhattan Project had been infiltrated by Communist spies. Drat. But now we knew for sure.

The good news, what little there was, is that American ingenuity had invented a scientific way to pierce the Stalinist secrecy of the Soviet Union — without any insider secret agent. In the decades since then, so many additional forms of MASINT have been invented that American bureaucrats have happily bestowed the highest distinction they can: an acronym. Hence, MASINT.

Cynics contend that Lewis Strauss, the former shoe-salesman without a college degree, just got lucky. “So the guy ordered a MASINT solution and some scientists got him one. Big deal.” Well, it was a big deal. Albeit, the mad scientists never did violate the laws of physics. But neither did they know, exactly, what those laws were. People who dismissed Strauss as naïve failed to realize that a former shoe salesman never leaves that job naïve. Brilliance is no guarantee against being wrong. Some eminent nuclear physicists saw impossibility and quit without trying, whereas Strauss saw the unknown and took the risk. Maybe he wasn’t just a typical guy. Maybe he was just a typical American.

Lucky Cleveland.

So what’s your opinion? Leave me a post.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Nope, Scarlett Johansson has not endorsed SecretComedy.com. Although I hope that, someday, she will.

Regardless, because of her contributions to the acting profession and entertainment (and as a Secret Agent Extraordinaire, I know a bit about acting; entertainment is another matter), she is honored here on SecretComedy.com.

This is yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog.

This has been yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog. Thanks for falling victim.

And thanks, Scarlett Johansson. ‘Love your work.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

This post is about espionage during the American Revolution.

It is also about the bad guys, for during that conflict that created the United States, one particular spy operating against the Patriots provided to his Royal employers hundreds of reports. Many were in invisible ink written between the lines of — you can’t make this stuff up — love letters. Talk about a forbidden relationship. But a great excuse for hiding the letters in a public park, which he did.

In this clandestine correspondence the spy reported what progress the American Patriots were making in arranging a formal alliance with France; what commercial trade deals they were getting with France; how the Americans were obtaining credit and investors; how the French were smuggling arms and ammunition into America; on which particular ships the weaponry was smuggled; from which French ports the ships departed; on which dates they departed; to which American ports they were headed; and anything else King George III might consider of interest.

The spy was able to report all this because he just happened to be the private secretary to an important American official.

Benjamin Franklin.

The spy’s name was Edward Bancroft. An American by birth, he was a medical doctor and likewise a scholar across several fields of interest, including anthropology, the natural sciences, economics, and political science. Bancroft decided the smartest thing to do was to stay in the good graces of both sides — and therefore get paid double.

Bancroft needed the money, or at least he wanted the money, because he lived very expensively and liked to gamble in the stock market, not always successfully. When the overseas needs of the Revolution took Ben Franklin to Paris — with a mission to sway the royal courts of Europe in favor of democracy in America, where they hoped democracy would stay — Bancroft became Franklin’s personal secretary. Franklin even asked Bancroft to spy a bit on the British. Bancroft did. But he spied a bit more on Franklin himself.

Have you ever heard of the United States of America? Well, you can guess at just how well Bancroft’s information helped the British. It was excellent information, mind you. But not all of it constituted what spies call actionable intelligence — that is, information which gives you an advantage over your opponent because you can actually use it. Consider, for example, this piece of intelligence: “General Washington wears false teeth. Most people think his teeth are made of wood, but in actuality they’re carved from animal teeth.”

Excellent actionable intelligence if you peddle dentures. But how could that tantalizing tidbit help the British Army? “Sorry, blokes, but according to the latest intelligence, we’ll have to drop our plan to lure General Washington to dinner by serving corn on the cob. Try porridge.”

Now consider this piece of intelligence: “General Washington plans to attack Trenton on the morning after Christmas, 1776.” Well, if you’re the Hessian commander and get this tidbit before the morning after Christmas (and you don’t stuff it in your pocket, unread, as the Hessian commander actually did), you can outwit General Washington.

That is, if you have the right technology. You see, a great limitation of endeavors in the eighteenth century was technology, and I don’t just mean Washington’s teeth.

Let us imagine, for example, that you are a warship captain in His Majesty’s Navy and you’ve just been ordered to subdue a French cargo ship, the bountiful Escargot. Due to the espionage of Dr. Bancroft, you learn the Escargot plans to set sail from the French port of Brittany, headed for Boston, on May 13th, 1778. Well then, as the nautical nemesis of those naughty French smugglers, go forth and find the Escargot. God save the King! And God help you — because you have no tracking satellites. Nor any radar. No radio. No diesel engine. No steam engine. No engine at all. Sometimes some wind. In fact, the Escargot can sail nearly as slowly as a snail and still avoid becoming your dinner.

Okay, back to the story. Before France and America had a formal alliance, they had an informal alliance whereby the French smuggled to the Americans lots of guns and ammunition. So what did the British do? The British took the fine intelligence collected for them by their spy in Paris and — perhaps the word security had a different meaning back then — they told the French. They paid a courtesy call and, being the prim proper dignified diplomats the English epitomize, they threw a temper tantrum.

In response to their complaints, what did the British expected the French to do? Stop? Oh yeah, like that’s in character.

“Egad! This behavior of you Frenchmen just isn’t Cricket!”

“Not Cricket? Monsieur, why you English name your national sport after an insect? In France insects are for eating. Like chocolate-covered grass-hoppers. We would eat crickets too, but we not want to offend you.”

“Balderdash! I didn’t come here to converse about your cockamamie cuisine! Stay on the subject!”

“Stay on the subject? Monsieur, you sound so American! Very well, Monsieur, are you accusing we French, zee most honest people in zee world, of smuggling a dozen ships full of cargo illégal to your brethren, zee Yankee Doodles? Yes?”

“Most emphatically! Categorically! Indubitably! Do you deny it?”

“Of course we deny it. A dozen ships? Ridiculous!”

“Oh? And just why is that fact so ridiculous?”

“Because we sent two dozen.”

“Two dozen?! You gorbellied boil-brained flax-wench! I should have guessed! In the words of Shakespeare, ‘He can speak French…and therefore he is a traitor!’”

“A traitor? Well, Monsieur, in zee words of Monsieur Shakespeare, your brain is as dry as zee remainder biscuit after a voyage.”

“You read Shakespeare?”

“Of course. In French.”

“In French?! How dare you!”

“Monsieur, how dare you imply zhat we French — how you say? — are chintzy parsimonious tightwads! Only twelve ships? Monsieur, even a baker’s dozen is thirteen! Whoever your spy is, you should fire him. Now, if you please, I must go. I am expected at Versailles for some very French experiences. Au revoir!”

After the British lost the war, which they eventually did, Edward Bancroft settled himself in England. Prodigious polymath that he was, he entered the dye industry and made a small fortune. In 1891, nearly seven decades after his death, the British government publicly revealed that Bancroft had been their spy. They even released all the secret reports he wrote. Throughout his career he had never been caught.

Or had he? Arthur Lee, a fellow member of the American delegation in Paris, did warn Benjamin Franklin, indeed more than once, that Bancroft lived “in open defiance of decency and religion,” that Bancroft evinced a “notorious character” in his stock market dealings, and that Lee himself had “evidence in my possession that makes me consider Dr. Bancroft a criminal with regard to the United States.”

Franklin just ignored him. (Lee should have warned himself. His private secretary was also a British spy.)

Franklin already knew that, in Paris, he was surrounded by spies. Spies were so plentiful in Paris that a common saying of the time was, “When two Parisians converse, a third listens.” Have you noticed the word espionage is French? So Franklin just laughed it off. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:

“I have long observed one rule which prevents any inconveniences from such practices [as spying]. It is simply this: to be concerned in no affairs I should blush to have made public, and to do nothing but what spies may see and welcome. When a man’s actions are just and honorable, the more they are known, the more his reputation is increased and established. If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as he probably is, I think I should probably not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.”

Not fire his valet for being a spy? Which he probably is?

Talk about a great boss!

So what do you think?

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

How, you ask?

Well, all you need is a cellphone camera, a naïve teenager, and a parent crazy enough to pay the phone bill.

Did you really think making pornography was hard?

Well then, now that I have your attention — welcome to my blog!

If you’re a new visitor, drawn here from the Internet to this particular post with its tantalizing title — well, gosh, that must have been a very, very interesting keyword search you just performed.

Since this is a post for February, the month of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d post something especially saucy and spicy. So, to continue the saucy spiciness, let us turn to what some people call prostitution. What others call journalism.

What are journalists? Journalists are spies who want to see their names in print. In fact, some of the best information available can be found via newspapers, television, the Internet, even the public library. Tsar Nicholas I of Russia once declared, “We have no need for spies. We have The Times.”

Spies call that stuff Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT. Of all the raw information the CIA collects, guess what percentage is openly available?

Eighty. Yes, eighty percent. In fairness to the spies, though, that percentage includes a lot of stuff nobody wants but we get anyway. For example, try to buy a newspaper without including all of those uninteresting articles and advertisements that you’ll never read.

You can’t. It’s all or nothing. Same problem.

The existence of an acronym should tell you just how valuable OSINT is. Still, there are spies who loath OSINT. They believe that secrets, deeply secret secrets, secrets they can steal secretly, are really sexy. Maybe so. But if you think OSINT isn’t sexy, you’re not looking in the right magazines.

Perhaps the spies who loath OSINT fear the sentiments of a guy like Richard Nixon. President Nixon once complained that the CIA “tells me nothing I don’t read three days earlier in The New York Times…What the [expletive] do those clowns do out there in Langley? What use are they? They’ve got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers!”

Well, a bit more than just reading them. In the hands of somebody trained to “read between the lines” — keeping a sharp eye out for that conspicuous omission, that screaming silence — even a printed platform of preposterous propaganda can become as informative as a university coffeehouse, or a barbershop of busybodies, or a pub full of professional wannabes.

In other words, even a newspaper can reveal a few facts.

So what’s your opinion? Why not post a Letter to the Editor?

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

P.S. Anna Chapman has not endorsed SecretComedy.com. Although I hope she will.

According to the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, Russia’s recent troubles with too many of its space probes failing could be due to sabotage. From foreign spies. “I wouldn’t like to accuse anyone,” he said, “but today there exist powerful means to influence spacecraft — and their use can’t be excluded.”

Uh oh. The secret is out. I love my ham radio.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has decreed that Roscosmos’ problems will not be tolerated. Hummm. I didn’t know they were screwing up deliberately. I guess we need Stalinist space exploration.

So, is the culprit really America? I’d find that strange, considering how many dollars we pump into the Russian space program. Today, if an American child wants to grow up to become an astronaut, the first step is to learn Russian. I’m not making this up. American astronauts now have to train at Russian facilities. So who really won the Space Race?

For those without much knowledge of history (which I’m sure doesn’t include you, my dear reader), during the Space Race the Soviet Union achieved a number of “firsts”: the first man-made satellite in space, the first dog in space, the first man in space, the most space probes lost in space. The Soviets never put a man on the Moon, but they did dream a lot. Below are a few Soviet-era paintings and posters illustrating a future that never came:

Fire retro-rockets! Yep…Retro and Rockets.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Nope, Lindsay Lohan has not endorsed SecretComedy.com. Although I hope that, someday, she will.

Regardless, because of her contributions to the acting profession and entertainment (and as a Secret Agent Extraordinaire, I know a bit about acting; entertainment is another matter), she is honored here on SecretComedy.com.

This is yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog.

This has been yet another shameless attempt to attract more traffic to my blog. Thanks for falling victim.

And thanks, Lindsey. ‘Love your work.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

If you’ve read my blog post from last May of 2011, The Joke Is On You, Bin Laden, you’ll recall how Communists (and others) would doctor historical photographs, which in a sense made those photos even more historic. Certainly more interesting. Well, in lovely North Korea the practice still goes on.

Late last year North Korea’s longtime ruler Kim Jong Il died. In accordance with egalitarian Communist principles, Kim Jong Il had graciously accepted absolute power from his father (no favoritism in North Korea) and upon his own death last year, that power passed without any messy democracy to his 20-something son, Kim Jong Un, who spent his childhood at a boarding school located in that living model of Marxism-Leninism, Switzerland. With the death of Kim Jong Il, a great many North Koreans were televised weeping hysterically. I would too after a lifetime forcing myself to look stoic. Call it catharsis.

Anyway, at Kim Jong Il’s funeral on December 28, 2011, as his 1950s-vintage hearse (topped by a big “Big Brother” portrait) passed through Pyongyang, the snow-covered capital, somebody snapped an overhead photograph of the hearse between long rows of mourners on either side of the street, as well as a North Korean news camera crew filming the scene at ground level. Well, apparently the North Korean government doesn’t like pictures of reporters, not even of its own, so it later doctored the history-making photo by editing-out the camera crew. The re-finished photo is now much tidier.

So was that the reason? That propagandists should be heard but not seen? Well, Hitler once did the same thing to his own Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, as seen in this before-and-after photo dating from 1937:

However, I suspect there’s another reason for the North Korean clean-up: dirty snow. And too much smog. Go compare the before-and-after photo and see for yourself. The re-finished version is not only more tidy, it’s more white. Maybe the white-washing censors got carried away with their enthusiasm and consequently got rid of the camera crew too.

In neither version of this photo do you see Pyongyang’s outskirts. Why? Because the outskirts of Pyongyang look like this:

In all fairness, visitors to Pyongyang say the city is actually less polluted than most other industrial cities. And in all fairness, the reason is because North Korea’s economy has slowed to near-medieval levels. If that sounds like an exaggeration, take a look at the only, satellite-observable form of pollution that North Korea doesn’t have: light pollution.

In the middle of North Korea that tiny white dot is Pyongyang. (The light itself is probably the dictator’s palace.) Meanwhile, just across the border in South Korea, that huge bright spot is Seoul, which has plenty of bright company throughout the country.

I don’t want to end this blog post on such a dour note, and so… Ahem, ladies and gentlemen, straight from North Korea, I present a sexy photo!

So, what do you think? Why not leave me a post?

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Once upon a time there was a guy named John Honeyman. Yes, I know — it is a cute name and, no, I didn’t make it up. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, you can. But I’m not.

Honeyman the man was anything but a honey, however. In fact, he was a notorious butcher. Famous for selling beef. And notorious for his stinging contempt of the American Revolutionaries. In the spy business there are occasions when even an ordinary person can become a threat, and so it was with John Honeyman. He was a blatant Tory dedicated to the Revolution’s doom. Not only did he openly support the British troops in America, he happily did business with their armed allies — mercenaries known as Hessians, who were German soldiers hired by the King of England to help stamp out the American rebellion. In fact, Honeyman made himself so notorious that no less than General Washington himself ordered his scouts to capture Honeyman if they saw him. After all, it might be fun to shoot him. But capture him first. It might be more fun to interrogate him.

Honeyman did get caught — and Washington got his chance to see this guy. Afterwards, this heifer handler for the Hessians’ hunger got hauled into a guardhouse.

That night, in the Patriots’ camp, a fire started. Apparently somebody was playing with matches; or in those days, torches. The blaze became so serious that it caused even Honeyman’s guards to scramble to put it out. Leaving Honeyman alone.

He escaped — and made his way to the Hessians’ encampment. There Honeyman told the Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rall, that the American forces were a pathetic mess. And not very awe-inspiring.

But Honeyman neglected to mention one thing: in the Hessians’ own camp there was lurking a Patriot spy. The spy’s name: Honeyman. It was Washington who had arranged for Honeyman’s escape, first by distracting the guards with a convenient fire, and then by unlocking the guardhouse door. Earlier, in their brief meeting, Honeyman informed the General that the best time to attack the Hessians was the morning after Christmas. For just about every Hessian mercenary could be nursing a hangover from partying the night before.

You can guess what happened next. On Christmas night, while the Hessians were whooping it up, drinking heavily and playing cards, and eating Honeyman’s beef, General Washington led his rag-tag army across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania and onto the shores of Trenton, New Jersey. The Hessians awoke to find themselves taken prisoner. The year: 1776.

You can guess that’s what happened, but you’d be wrong.

Mind you, General Washington and his army did cross the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776. The problem was, the Hessians weren’t drunk. They weren’t even all that surprised. They had been expecting an attack for several days because they had spies too. But on that blustery cold December morning, the billowing winds prevented even their muskets from firing because, amid the wind, their flint mechanisms could not always spark enough flame to ignite the gunpowder. What could happen? Presumably nothing, and so the Hessians assumed that nobody, nobody, would dare attack them on that particular morning. “No Dummkopf could be that stupid!”

Then again…

“Oh Scheiβe!”

That quaint German word refers to manure. In this particular case it refers to the fact that both sides, both the Germans and the Americans, realized very abruptly that they now had to fight a real battle. With malfunctioning muskets.

It wasn’t a fair fight. Not with professional German soldiers pitted against American farmers bundled up in grungy rags and, all too often, no shoes. The Germans lost. When you’re a German mercenary, stuck in a land where you don’t speak the language, where the weather is so frigid and windy that your musket malfunctions, and it’s the day after Christmas — well, that’s okay. Life is an adventure. But it gets very intimidating when the angry farmers you’re up against suddenly roll out eighteen loaded cannons. And your side has only six.

It was all over in an hour. The Hessians spent most of that time retreating.

If any of the Hessians did party the night before, it was their commander, Colonel Rall. Apparently he decided to party hard based upon the “intelligence” fed to him by John Honeyman. Later that evening, when a genuine Tory spy arrived to warn Rall that Washington’s army was on the move, Rall was so annoyed by the disturbance of his card game that he refused to admit the guy. The spy, astounded but undeterred, scribbled a note for Rall’s aide to pass along. Rall took it from the aide and stuffed it in his coat pocket. Unread.

Honeyman, meanwhile, made himself conveniently absent from Trenton. With his true occupation still a secret, he spent the rest of the war hearing slurs that he was a Tory. Angry Patriots even charged him, time and again, with crimes related to being a Tory. Time and again, however, the charges got dropped, quietly, after somebody paid a visit from Washington’s headquarters.

Spies are a secretive bunch. At least until they publish their memoirs. Honeyman never wrote any, and because spies like him dislike any official documentation of their activities — for who knows what traitors lurk among those ordinary bureaucrats? — little documentation exists. Consequently, there are historians who question whether Honeyman was indeed a spy for General Washington, despite what Honeyman’s descendents say. The naysayers theorize that the story, which Honeyman himself never told, has been embellished, perhaps from nothing.

Well, if the story is true, Honeyman covered his tracks pretty well, as a sneaky spy should. If the story is false, well, that means Honeyman ended up a pretty lucky Tory. For when the war ended, a great many Tories decided to skedaddle from the newly independent United States, most of them fleeing to England or Canada. But Honeymen and his family stayed put in New Jersey, unmolested. He died there, decades later, at the age of 93.

So what do you think? Why not leave me a post?

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple

Would you believe that the CIA employs dogs?

Would you believe that the CIA has a K-9 Hall of Fame?

Would you believe that it’s online?

Would you believe that the dogs actually give interviews?

You’d better believe it, because here’s the link:

https://www.cia.gov/kids-page/k-5th-grade/the-cia-k-9-corps/k-9-hall-of-fame.html

You can’t make this stuff up. Here is the CIA-posted interview of one of those spy dogs, Bonja:

“Hi, my name is Bonja. I am a female German shepherd. I was born in Germany on Jan. 11, 2001. I came to the United States to become an Explosive Detection K-9.

“When I first started working with Officer Jason, I didn’t understand why I had to find explosives to get my toy. I was very upset because I used to play with my toys all the time. After a few weeks of training, I learned that I needed to find an explosive smell to get my toy. It was like playing a game. When I’m working and I sit, Officer Jason knows I found an explosive. After I sit, I give him ‘the look.’ After a long day, I go home with Officer Jason where we relax.

“At home, I like to play with my sister Reilly, who is a Beagle. We love to play together. I also like to roam around the house and gather up all my toys and put them in a pile. I love to play ball and tug-of-war. I also have a neighbor dog, Ranger, who I like to play with. When I go outside to play, Ranger and I like to race near the fence to see who is faster.

“Officer Jason is married and has two children, who I love to protect. When we eat dinner, I like to eat the crumbs that the kids drop on the floor. My mother is very nice. Sometimes she lets me test what the kids are having for dinner (but don’t tell Officer Jason because I am on a strict diet). When it’s bedtime, I like to sleep at the top of the stairs where I can keep one eye on the front door to make sure my family is safe.”Yep, a German shepherd born in (where else?) Germany. Joined the CIA. Yes, foreigners can work for the CIA. I expect quite a few foreigners work for the CIA. But what’s this about having a sister who’s a Beagle? Interesting parents.

Here is another CIA-posted interview, of Harrington:

“Hello, my name is Harrington. I am a chocolate Lab. I was born on April 24, 2006, in a prison in New York. A group of prisoners raised me in a program called Puppies Behind Bars. In the program, I learned how to behave, how to search for my toys, how to sit, and lay down.

“When I was 10 months old, I was picked to come to the CIA to be a member of the K-9 unit. When I first met my partner, K-9 Officer Paul, we hit it off from the start. Training to find explosives was a lot like finding my toy. When I find it, I sit. The training started out simple and got harder and harder as the training went on.

“When I first went home with my partner, I got to meet my new family and some new friends. The first friend I met was Maggie; she used to work with Officer Paul. Then I met his two cats, Smokie and Jerry. They swat at my tail and ignore me most of the time. Then I met my Officer Paul’s wife and his two sons.

“I love to be at home with my family. I play hide and seek with the boys or with Maggie. And every now and then, if I am good, my mom will give me and Maggie treats, so I always keep an eye on her.

“What we do is very important. If you see us working, ask our human partners if it’s OK before you come pet us and say hi.”Uh huh. Born in a prison and raised by convicts, huh? And now you work for the CIA? Yeah, you bet’cha I’ll ask first before I pet you.

Welcome to my world.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reggie Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire

IMINT is the acronym for Imagery Intelligence. If you like to use maps and like to say big words like coordinates, another acronym is GEOINT, which stands for Geo-spatial Intelligence. Some spies say IMINT, others say GEOINT. Some forswear any acronym in favor of using the word imagery. The word sounds very technical (one of its charms), but it’s really just a fancy way of saying intelligence from photographs.

You might think that sexy photographs are found only in magazines, but spies know another source: aerial reconnaissance — photos taken by a spy plane or a spy satellite. That said, what a spy considers to be “sexy” may have nothing to do with sex. (It also means the spy needs to get a life.) In the Army and Marine Corps, the word reconnaissance is sometimes abbreviated as recon, whereas in the Air Force the abridged version is recce. The latter is pronounced WRECK-kee.

“That sounds a bit ominous.”

Yes, it can be.

Fighter pilots like to call themselves “hot stuff.” That’s kinda strange, considering what “hot stuff” really means. Perhaps they’re envious of reconnaissance pilots. In the early days of propeller airplanes, back in the early twentieth century, the average recce pilot would fly over enemy lines, searching for where the enemy’s troops had gathered that day. He’d wave to them, graciously, and they waved back. It was very civilized. And upon landing his airplane, the pilot would notify his artillery friends where to aim their big guns. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Once the shell-shocked foot soldiers made the connection, they started shooting at the spotter planes. And alas, ultimately even the pilots themselves started shooting at each other. Thus were born fighter planes.

For an alternative method of aerial reconnaissance, the Germans mounted tiny cameras on harnesses strapped to pigeons. Really.

And it worked. In fact, the pictures proved to be panoramically pulchritudinous, truly a bird’s eye view. After each reconnoiter the bird would then rendezvous with his birdie beloved in the pigeon coup. Before being put inside, however, his camera was removed, lest the inadvertent creation of any pigeon pornography.

You can’t make this stuff up.

During the Cold War the most advanced airplanes were spy planes, the most famous being the U-2. (No, not the Rock band.) Created jointly by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA, the U-2 flew at extremely high altitudes, benefiting from its extremely long wings and because it was extremely light. So light, the U-2 was not much stronger than a compact car made of aluminum foil. Whenever a U-2 on the ground got bumped by, say, a mechanic’s tool box, that clumsiness actually dented the plane. And it wasn’t a cheap fix. But the end product was a spy plane which did fly very high. So high that one pilot complained, “The worst thing about flying higher than anyone has ever flown before is that you can’t tell anybody!”

For a time U-2 spy planes overflew even the Soviet Union itself. Those were tense years, but the overflights were kept very secret — by both sides. The Americans kept quiet because they were sneaky. The Soviets kept quiet because they kept botching their chances to shoot the darn things down. One U-2 overflew a Soviet test site — just before the Soviets tested an Atomic Bomb. (Guess what the pilot saw in his rearview mirror?) Ultimately, against another U-2, the Soviets launched missiles even while the aircraft was being chased by Soviet fighter planes. BOOM! BOOM! (Oops. One boom too many.) The U-2′s pilot survived, although he did get captured and was later sent back to America, traded for a captured Soviet secret agent. As for the luckless Soviet pilot — well, his widow married another pilot. From the same squadron.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The next generation after the U-2 was the SR-71. The SR-71 was a spy plane so sleek and sexy, you might call it a red hot lover. Because it loved getting red hot. Cruising at more than three times the speed of sound — that’s nearly 2,200 miles per hour, or three dozen miles every second — the SR-71 generated so much air friction that the airplane glowed red hot and actually grew several inches. To withstand all that heat, the airframe contained the metal titanium — imported from the Soviet Union. The Communists never got the metal back, despite more than 4,000 attempts.

Trying to shoot down the plane.

But if the SR-71′s speed and shape rendered it hot and sexy, its soaring altitude gave it a soaring attitude. Its pilots flew so high that their chest medals included Astronaut Wings. Really. Their flight suits were later adapted for use on the Space Shuttle.

Well, Communist fighter pilots could be forgiven for thinking that the SR-71 was some kind of alien spaceship. As their fighter planes tried, tried, and tried again to reach its cursing altitude — and never succeeded — the lofty SR-71 would sometimes fly in a circle, just to taunt them. Nice.

If you’re a UFO aficionado, get this: the SR-71 was flight-tested at the super-secret Area 51. And it was created by a secret organization called the Skunk Works.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

So…what do you think of this post?  Leave me a comment!

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple, Secret Agent Extraordinaire

In the glorious annals of our Republic — that is, in the history of these great United States — who was our first great spymaster?

The answer: George Washington.

It’s true. During the American Revolution, our great Continental Army had a very great problem: it was pathetic. So pathetic, it was awe-inspiring. Ill-equipped, ill-fed, ill-tempered, many of General Washington’s soldiers didn’t even have shoes. The Continental Congress paid those gritty guys what the Congress called Continental dollars. It was paper money worth less than the paper itself. Hence the American expression, “Not worth a Continental.”

Quill in hand, an exasperated General Washington scribbled to a friend:

”Our treatment at the hands of the Congress and the States is a scandal…If the British Army doesn’t defeat us, it seems likely that our own factions will…Yesterday, when an aide reported that a delegation of enlisted men was at my door — something quite unheard of — I feared the worst: mutiny or desertion. (One could hardly blame them!) And when they expressed great sympathy with my difficulties and said they just wanted to assure that their own were understood, my eyes filled with tears.”

As I said, pathetic and awe-inspiring. Many went without shoes even during those bitterly cold winters they spent camping out and shivering at Valley Forge.

Well, with this colorfully ragged force, faced against the mighty British Empire, General Washington rode gallantly into battle. And lost. Repeatedly. Which is better than losing just once, when you consider the finality.

In point of fact, the history books record that Washington lost more battles than he won. But because of the good intelligence gathered for him by his spies, Washington did win the few battles that mattered most. And oh, what wondrous spies Washington ran! Centuries before our own time, his spies utilized secret codes, invisible ink, even special equipment. In Philadelphia, a woman named Lydia Darragh hid messages inside the cloth buttons of her young son’s winter coat. Then the boy trounced off to visit his older brother in the Patriots’ camp. Day after day.

“My word, Agnes! Have you noticed that every time that little boy goes into the woods, he comes back with a button missing? What his mother must think! My word! Kids today!”

Or in the words of General Washington himself, “There is nothing more necessary than good intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy. And nothing requires greater pains to obtain.”

So what do you think? Leave me a post!

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),
Reginald Dipwipple
Secret Agent Extraordinaire