Welcome to Spycraft, a podcast that tells gripping life and death spy stories and
the amazing devices and operations that made them possible. Now let's get started.
Well, this story, we're gonna be talking about Stanley Lovell, the Chemist.
He was an inventor and the man behind some of the worlds the war's
craziest, deadly schemes. So let's take a look at Stanley Lovell before we
get started. Make sure to share and subscribe if you like this podcast.
He was a chemist, as I mentioned in a very good one, he
signed up to contribute when the US joined the Second World War. His talents
and skills were immediately recognized by a doctor Vanivar Bush, the divector of an
American wartime agency known as the National Defense Research Committee, who assigned Lovell L.
O. V Ell to help the Quartermaster Corps design innovative chemical solutions to
common military problems posed by a truly global war. Some of these would include
how to make gromets like an islet on a shoe or tarp at a plastic
instead of metal to save the metal for other uses. How to make mold
proof tents, shoes, and leggings, This was immensely important work, and
Lobell was making a contribution, but he found himself bored. One of the
common themes we've seen in many of these spy stories they seek out adventure,
and doctor Lovell was no different this time. Doctor Bush was now helping to
recruit scientists for another organization, an organization that was inundated with spies. The
oss. Lovell couldn't just say a tactical nuclear weapon was what he was working
on, But what he did say was this. He spent about a week
concocting an answer and describing a weapon. This is what he said. I
want a completely silent flashless gun, a cult automatic submachine gun or something.
Technically this would be cheating. Of course, I can pick off the first
century with no sound or flash to explain his collapse, so the next century
will come to him instead of sounding an alarm. Then one by one I'll
pick them off and command the wireless station. Quite devious for a chemist,
and it was enough to get Bush's attention. Shortly after, Lavelle was told
to report to address in Washington, and it was the first time he would
meet William Wild Bill Donovan, that's right, the director of the newly formed
intelligence agency called the OSS the Office of Strategic Services now known as the CIA.
Donovan kept it simple. You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course,
he said, Professor Moriarty's a man I want for my staff here at OSS,
and I think you're it. Donovan can continued, I need every set
of device and every underhanded trick to use against the Germans and the Japanese by
our own people, but especially by the underground resistance groups in all these occupied
countries. You'll have to invent them all, Lavell, because you're going to
be my man. Lovell had found his war. He was in. He
found something to get rid of the boredom. Bill Donovan, of course,
was a firm believer the power of science to help win the war. He
thought the side that most effectively and efficiently applied science and technology to intelligence and
combat operations would have the decisive edge. Donovan formed the OSS Research and Development
R and D and put Lovell in charge. Like the OSS writ large,
the OSS R and D unit has some smashing successes, but of course some
failures as well. Some of the failures was a cat bomb, based on
the undisputed premises that cats always land on their feet and also hate water.
The plan was to hang a poor kitty cat and a harness from the bottom
of a bomb, with some kind device that allowed said cat movements to guide
the bomb as it fell if he dropped it in the vicinity of a naval
target such as a German battleship, and the cat's natural instincts would be to
think, oh, no, I'm falling into water, so let's try to
land somewhere dry like the German battleship, and then unfortunately, boom, a
martyred kittie cat. Of course, it was a preposterous idea. The test
cab became unconscious and thus uneffective during the first fifty feet of the fall.
Also, the OSS learned that Hitler and Mussolini would be holding a war conference
at the Brenner Pass, located in the Alps between Italy and Austria. Lavell
proposed an attack which they cannot anticipate. He was probably right, They couldn't
have seen this one coming. Lavell's plan called for smuggling in a vase of
cut flowers to be placed on the table between Hitler and Mussolini. In the
vase's water would be an odorless, colorless chemical derivative which would seep into the
two tyrants via their eyeballs Hitler and Mussolini, and annyone else in that room
will be permanently blinded as the chemical atrophied the optic nerve, rendering it non
functional. But that was only part one of the planets. Surprisingly, the
less crazy part Part two required the assistance of the Pope. Despite the Vatican
being officially neutral, who in isiual a papal bull stating that God himself has
smitten the two leaders for their evil ways. The OSS was now asking the
Pope to lie. Yet for Lovel this would be justifiable. In one action,
the Pope could stop the war and be advancing the cause of Christianity more
than any man on earth. Unfortunately, for Lovel, the plan fell apart
when the war summit was moved to Hitler's private railway car, surrounded by some
of his best troops. The OSS was good, but not that good.
These are just some of the unusual hijinks of the OSS r in d unit.
But the Kramdela krem of I guess craziness was an operation known as capricious.
For Stanley level, this was the high point of his time as the
Professor Moriarty. What is capricious, Well, let's take a look. In
a war in which tens of millions were killed in almost every matter possible conventional
weapons, disease, starvation, genocide, and so forth, nations would be
hesitant to use a type of weapon because they often thought it was unethical.
And although the United States formed the Committee to research the unity of biological pathogens,
the Merk Committee, named after its chairman, doctor George George Murk,
president of American Company, there was a little appetite among the American leadership to
go beyond the causal casual thinking about things. For a phase, Roosevelt was
vehemily opposed to the use of durim warfare. Military leaders such as George Marshall
and Bill donnovand himself thought it was in a moral way to fight a war.
However, special circumstances can require sometimes special means of operations. We've seen
a lot of documentaries about Operation Torch in the Battle of Cassermine Pass. I'm
sure you can find it somewhere on the History Channel. But adding injury to
injury, the OSS officers in Morocco were reporting the large numbers of Germany's best
and most battle tested troops were flooding into Spanish Morocco. Franco Spain was nominally
neutral, but he was a fascist and highly sympathetic to the Axis cause.
Clearly, these German troops were entering Morocco with the consent and maybe even the
cooperation of Franco's government. This could be a frightening omen for things to come.
What if Spain finally joined the access Spanish Morocco could become a staging point
for hundreds of thousands of German troops who can get cut off the vital supply
lines to Allied forces who were trying to dislodge Germany from the African continent.
Something drastic had be done, as I mentioned a minute ago, and so
they turned to level mister doctor Moriarty. Now that the handcuffs were off,
German warfare could be the answer to the Allies problems in North Africa. His
mission was to execute the perfect, perfect covert action, a German warfare attack
against the Germans in North Africa without their knowing would hit them. This was
more than a desire to be sneaky. It was important to the Allies to
maintain the moral high ground in the war and to prevent the Germans from retaliating
with their own biological attack. One key aspect would be to employ a less
than lethal strain of biological agent. The idea wasn't to kill all the Germans
in the region just to make them all wish they were dead. Hordes of
six soldiers might be chalked up to just bad luck. Thousands of dead sogiers
and someone's going to be asking questions. So imagine the worst stomach fool you've
ever had. That could be a good one. So Lobell and the German
cocktail oss created containing a swarming of bacteria from tularemia and set acosist to all
the pests known to the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This would bring the
German war machine in Spanish Morocco to a sandsill, and when the troops came
back, they'd be significantly demoralized. LaBelle set out to federalize and finalize his
plans. As research of the region had uncovered several important facts. There were
more goats than people in Morocco. Moroccan goats pooped. There was also a
ridiculous number of flies North African flies were particularly pesky. They flocked to the
moisture from the eyes, nose, and mouths of humans. Flies wegurget to
what they had previously eaten when new food comes their way. Each of these
facts, taken together, crafted a recipe for a perfect German warfare operation.
If Levell could lace the poop with biotoxins, the flies would provide the perfect
vector to encampuss incapacitate the German army. But how do you guarantee the flies
would be attracted to your particular brand of biotoxin lay school goat poop? Well,
the oss wasn't going to leave this up to chance. Laville had the
answer. They would manufacture a synthetic variant of goat poop with a pull so
powerful that it would never fail to bring them flies home. The chemical attracted
was apparently so powerful it would wake North African flies out of hibernation. The
only challenge that remained was to figure out the deliver the synthetic goat poop to
Spanish Morocco without being observed. Lovell decided that the only way to do this
was introduced. Their concoction into the region was via air drop. It was
then that one member of Labelle's team spoke up, and it did invited a
major kink in the plan. Most of the houses in Morocco have flat roofs,
a whole lot of the goat poop would end up dropped on the roofs,
and unless the OSS was also planning on developing a new genetically flying goat,
be hard to explain the poop away. Lavell responded with the oders are
to take out Spanish Morocco in order to do so. If we do,
there might there'll be mighty few people inspecting rooftops. They did have a valid
point. Fortunately, the progress of the war intervened before Lovell could test this
theory and a synthetic poop. In the midst of development and testing, the
OSS learned that the Germans were completely pulling their troops out of Spanish Morocco and
redeploy them to the Eastern Front to reinforce the effort to capture the Soviet city
of Stalingrad. Hitler's al fate obsession would take in the city named after his
nemesis, save the OSS and by extension, the US. In addition to
this, Stanley level was really known for a lot of other things too.
He made so many it's hard to even possibly cover them all on the podcast.
But under Levell's direction, the OSS developed a number of devices for use
in clandestine warfare. Among these were the high standard pistol, the bino grenade,
which was actually an interesting grenade, and we'll talk about that here.
The bino grenade, as it's known, was a specialized grenade and it had
as time delay fuses. These grenades explode on impact, making them effective against
hard to hit moving targets, unlike most grenades, which have time to lay
fuses. I guess my bi apologies. It was unlike most grenades. These
grenades impact exploded on impact, making them effective against hard to hit moving targets.
The name gammon is a British word for ham. But we saw the
CIA Beino grenade was the one he created again to explode on impact, which
is something they hadn't had before. In addition to that, he created which
you might have seen, the match box camera. I don't know if you
ever seen the matchbox camera. That was a pretty cool camera. The Kodak
camerack developed a sixteen millimeter for use by the OSS during World War Two,
was made in the shape of a match box and could be camouflaged by adding
a matchbox label appropriate for the country in which it was to be used.
In addition to other ideas including an explosive disguised as flour which could even be
baked without exploding, and a plan to attack Japanese cities by releasing we'll get
this bats to which incendiary bombs had been attached and as we seem to hear
a lot about bats these days, but this was one of the attaching bombs
to it In World War two at US Dennis suggested arming one million bats with
a timed incendiary device and dropping them over Japan, roost in its military wooden
buildings and start a firestorm. So scientists began Operation or Project X Ray.
Hibernating bats were clandestinely collected from local caves. Engineers designed a tiny device and
a sendjury device with a time delayed igniter to fit each bat, plus a
special container to drop by parachute and release the bats in midair, and tests
all went well, actually too well. The bomb deployed as plan, but
the bats settled in the rafters of a newly built hangar at the airbase and
set the building ablaze. The project was then canceled the bat Bomb I like
the name. That's it for now.