Corsairs, Crusaders, and Prowlers and one Viking up on the tippy top.
From pb earlier este dia
Allen W Dulles and Senator Theodore F Green discussing the unrest in Iraq in July 1958.
Baseless
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/baseless-an-indelible-portrait-of-the-cia-s-institutional-derangement-1.4430004
There’s an exotic cast to Baseless. It’s replete with grim “cryptonyms”, such as GIBBETT (a “sarin nerve gas plant” under construction in Alabama) and CARCASS (an operation to train ex-Nazi collaborators to foment insurrection in the Soviet Union), and sinister-sounding anagram-like names: Detlev Bronk, Oram Woolpert, Alenda Crymble, Hubertus Strughold. (Bland or effeminate names are vivified with macho sobriquets – Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson, Claire “Leatherface” Chennault.)
With the lethal gadgetry and hare-brained schemes (a time-release “bomb gondola” that “opened like a clamshell” to spill a payload of crop-spoiling “spores”; an idea to unleash bats synched into “napalm vests” on Tokyo during the second World War), it all suggests James Bond hokum.
But there’s little that’s campy here. The master feeling-tone Baseless evokes is horror: a flickering monochrome nightmare of 3,230 petrified guinea pigs in a mock village on a Utah military base awaiting the sorties of a bomber that will mist them with “Brucella organisms”; or a fleeing British Korean War sergeant in 1950 beholding a rearguard of masked men at the locus of subsequent reported smallpox and “hemorrhagic fever” outbreaks gingerly dispersing feathers, a known vector for biological agents, before being moved along, nothing to see here.
Allegations that US forces spread pestilence (reprised in 1952 with accusations they dropped repurposed leaflet bombs bearing cargoes of plague-ridden voles on North Korea) and, in East Germany, agricultural blight, were met with haughty derision.
Presiding over this insouciance was a cohort of buzzcut technocrats-cum-geopolitical puppet-masters, arrogating to themselves the “power to wage political war via cablegram in a suit and tie, and drop hints to newspaper columnists over cocktails in a Georgetown living room that same night”.
Even allowing for the era’s pervasive paternalism, the presumptuousness of the biological trials Baker recounts – “dusting” a low-income St Louis community, subsequent site of a cancer cluster, with carcinogenic cadmium – is staggering. Meanwhile, he convincingly traces widespread failure of US wheat crops in the early 1950s to “blowback” from CIA-cultivated spores intended to decimate Russia’s “bread basket”. This came on top of casualties within agency and military ranks from contagions at labs incubating sundry death-dealing viruses.
Burnout, crackup and suicide were legion among operatives. Director of covert operations Frank Wisner cuts an especially wretched figure, gripped by mania, before killing himself.
Clowns doing their thing even back then…
Say, I bet they wouldn't have been trying to draw from the old playbook and pull a play it again Sam? The Russian Breadbasket…at that time in history, wouldn't/couldn't that have been Ukraine?