Speaker 1: You know, there is this line, a very thin, very
Speaker 1: blurry line.
Speaker 2: Yeah, almost imperceptible, really, right.
Speaker 1: This line that separates the guy standing on the street
Speaker 1: corner holding a cardboard sign about government mind control from
Speaker 1: a heavily redacted, highly classified document sitting quietly in a
Speaker 1: Pentagon vault.
Speaker 2: It is a razor thin boundary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we laugh off the cardboard sign, obviously,
Speaker 1: but when the ink on the classified document finally sees
Speaker 1: the light of day, while the laughter tends to stop,
Speaker 1: pretty fast, it does.
Speaker 2: And the terrifying part of studying history is watching how
Speaker 2: often that boundary just completely evaporates totally. Because you know,
Speaker 2: we grow up learning a version of history that feels solid,
Speaker 2: like it's objective and neatly packaged in a textbook.
Speaker 1: Safe. It feels safe, exactly safe. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the deeper you dig into the archives, the more
Speaker 2: you realize that some of the most outrageous, unbelievable rumors,
Speaker 2: I mean, the kinds of thing you would instantly dismiss
Speaker 2: as pure paranoia, they turn out to be absolute, documented reality.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling three. Today. You and I are crossing
Speaker 1: that line.
Speaker 2: We are definitely crossing.
Speaker 1: It, because in an era of absolute information overload, where
Speaker 1: you and I mean you listening right now, are bombarded
Speaker 1: with claims and counterclaims every time you glance at a screen.
Speaker 1: Separating a wild conspiracy theory from actual classified military history
Speaker 1: feels nearly impossible.
Speaker 2: The minefield out there.
Speaker 1: It really is. So our mission today is to pull
Speaker 1: back the cretan. We are going to look at eight
Speaker 1: declassified military secrets that sound like they were ripped straight
Speaker 1: from a Hollywood thriller, but are in fact documented historical facts.
Speaker 2: And we should probably clarify where we're getting this from, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, please, we need to be very clear about our sources.
Speaker 2: Right, So, we are pulling directly from declassified NSA materials,
Speaker 2: deep historical archives, veterans affairs records, and rigorous journalistic investigations. Specifically,
Speaker 2: there's a massive, incredibly detailed probe conducted by Fox six
Speaker 2: News that will be leaning on We are.
Speaker 1: Just following the ink on the no matter where it
Speaker 1: leads exactly.
Speaker 2: And I want to add a quick disclaimer here too.
Speaker 2: We're gonna be talking about politically charged figures today, Presidence, Johnson, Nixon,
Speaker 2: you name it, but we are completely impartial here, completely
Speaker 2: We are not taking a political side, we're simply reporting
Speaker 2: what is in the original declassified source material. We want
Speaker 2: to explore the ethical implications, not score political points.
Speaker 1: Because following that inc requires us to put ourselves into
Speaker 1: the mindset of the people making these decisions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to. You're dealing with the highest levels
Speaker 2: of government during the most tense moments of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna move from domestic biological testing to the
Speaker 1: manipulation of foreign wars, and finally end up with the
Speaker 1: ultimate faustion bargains of the atomic age.
Speaker 2: It is quite the roadmap, it is.
Speaker 1: So let's start our journey. And we aren't starting on
Speaker 1: some secret island or in a hollowed out volcano like
Speaker 1: a Bond villain.
Speaker 2: No, it's actually much more mundane than that.
Speaker 1: Right, It's a place that looks like a normal military installation,
Speaker 1: but it housed something incredibly dark right here on American soil.
Speaker 1: We're heading to Frederick, Maryland, Fort Detrick, Fort Detrick. What
Speaker 1: was actually going on there?
Speaker 2: So to grasp what happened here, you have to transport
Speaker 2: yourself back to nineteen forty two. The United States is
Speaker 2: fully engulfed in the Second World War, right, and they
Speaker 2: are facing adversaries who are already exploring chemical and biological warfare.
Speaker 2: So the stakes were viewed as entirely existential. You or
Speaker 2: die exactly in that pressure cooker environment. The US Army
Speaker 2: Chemical Warfare Service established this massive, sprawling research and development effort.
Speaker 2: It was focused entirely on biological warfare, and Fort Tetrick
Speaker 2: became the absolute epicenter of this initiative.
Speaker 1: And when I looked at the source material for this,
Speaker 1: the list of pathogens they were working with is just staggering.
Speaker 2: It reads like a horror novel, It really does.
Speaker 1: I mean, we aren't talking about studying the common cold
Speaker 1: keep soldiers healthy. This is a menu of microscopic nightmares.
Speaker 1: They researched anthrax, brucellosis, to larimia, q fever, and cytychosis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of very nasty bugs.
Speaker 1: I mean, I understand anthrax, We all know the terrifying
Speaker 1: implications of anthrax spores, But what is the biological mechanism
Speaker 1: behind something like q fever? Like, why does a military
Speaker 1: look at that and say, yes, this is a weapon.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. The military value of these pathogens
Speaker 2: isn't necessarily always about killing people instantly. Yeah, it lies
Speaker 2: in their infectivity, and there are specific debilitating effects on
Speaker 2: the human body. Okay, take Q fever for example. It's
Speaker 2: caused by a bacteria called Coxiella burnettii and it is
Speaker 2: incredibly resilient. It can survive heat, drying out, and even
Speaker 2: many common disinfectants.
Speaker 1: Wow. So it's tough to kill.
Speaker 2: Very tough. But its real weaponized value is it's infectious dose.
Speaker 2: A human being only needs to inhale a minuscule amount
Speaker 2: to get sick.
Speaker 1: How many skill are we talking?
Speaker 2: Sometimes just one to ten individual organisms?
Speaker 1: Wait? Really, just one to ten cells.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is enough to become severely infected. It causes
Speaker 2: high fevers, severe anemoonent, and it can completely incapacitate a
Speaker 2: population for weeks.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying.
Speaker 2: It is. And pathogens like brucellosis and tul aremia they
Speaker 2: operate on a very similar logic. They cause severe, long
Speaker 2: term illness rather than instant death.
Speaker 1: Why is that better for a weapon though? Wouldn't you
Speaker 1: want to just, I don't know, eliminate the enemy.
Speaker 2: From a cold tactical perspective. No, an enemy soldier who's
Speaker 2: severely ill requires massive medical logistics. You have to transport
Speaker 2: them give them a hospital bed, dedicate nurses and doctors
Speaker 2: to them.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I see.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It ties up enemy resources far more than a
Speaker 2: soldier who is killed. Outright. It paralyzes their infrastructure by.
Speaker 1: Overwhelming their hospitals. That is incredibly dark, very dark.
Speaker 2: And the researchers at Fort Detrick, they weren't just putting
Speaker 2: these bugs under a microscope to understand their biology. They
Speaker 2: were obsessively studying dispersion.
Speaker 1: Dispersion like how to spread it around.
Speaker 2: Exactly because having a deadly pathogen in a glass vial
Speaker 2: is useless if you can't deliver to the target. So
Speaker 2: they dedicated enormous resources to understanding how biological agents could
Speaker 2: move through various environments.
Speaker 1: I read they built these elaborate testing chambers.
Speaker 2: They did. They modeled how a pathogen would behave if
Speaker 2: it were released inside a building, or how it would
Speaker 2: navigate through a city's specific airflow dynamics. They were literally
Speaker 2: trying to solve the physics of mass infection.
Speaker 1: See. I really struggle with the logic the government presented
Speaker 1: to the public here, because whenever they acknowledged Fort Detrick
Speaker 1: at all, they leaned incredibly hard on this concept of
Speaker 1: defense and deterrence, right. The official story, Yeah, they told
Speaker 1: the American people, Hey, we have to study these things
Speaker 1: so we can create vaccines and protective gear.
Speaker 2: For our soldiers, which sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface.
Speaker 1: It does, but the declassified reality shows an active, robust
Speaker 1: development of offensive capabilities. It feels like building this massive
Speaker 1: doomsday vault, but instead of filling it with seeds to
Speaker 1: restart agriculture, you're filling it with the plagues that end
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: That's a really good analogy.
Speaker 1: How do you research defense without inherently creating the offensive
Speaker 1: weapon you are supposedly terrified of. I just don't get it.
Speaker 2: Well, you've hit on the fundamental paradox of the mid
Speaker 2: twenty century deterrence doctrine.
Speaker 1: Okay, unpack that for me.
Speaker 2: The institutional mindset following World War Two heading into the
Speaker 2: Cold War was rooted in this concept of offensive deterrence.
Speaker 2: The prevailing belief was that the only way to genuinely
Speaker 2: deter the Soviet Union from launching a biological attack was
Speaker 2: to possess an arsenal so devastating that the Soviets wouldn't
Speaker 2: dare risk retaliation.
Speaker 1: Ah. So it's mutually assured destruction. Like nukes, exactly like nucks,
Speaker 1: but instead of the flash of a nuclear bomb, it's
Speaker 1: the silent, aerosolized cloud of tularemia.
Speaker 2: That is the exact strategic calculus, and it requires a
Speaker 2: profound psychological dissonance to maintain that the public gets this
Speaker 2: comforting narrative about gas masks and vaccines. But behind the
Speaker 2: classified doors at Detrick, researchers were actively modeling how to
Speaker 2: effectively blanket a metropolitan area anthrax.
Speaker 1: Because you can't build the shield without knowing exactly how
Speaker 1: the sword works.
Speaker 2: Precisely. The brutal reality of biological warfare is that you
Speaker 2: cannot figure out how to protect a city from an
Speaker 2: aerosolized pathogen without first figuring out exactly how to aerosolize
Speaker 2: a pathogen over a city. The defensive research inevitably inescapably
Speaker 2: becomes the blueprint for the offensive weapon.
Speaker 1: And this wasn't just some short lived experiment that got
Speaker 1: shut down quickly. This offensive program was the official, heavily
Speaker 1: funded policy of the United States for decades decades.
Speaker 2: It operated right up until November twenty fifth, nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: What happened on that specific date, that.
Speaker 2: Is the day President Richard Nixon officially terminated the United
Speaker 2: States offensive biological weapons program.
Speaker 1: Wow, just like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he directed that the stockpiles be destroyed, ostensibly shifting
Speaker 2: the nation's focus entirely to defensive measures and immunization.
Speaker 1: The sources include this fascinating, almost mundane detail about that
Speaker 1: specific day. It really caught my eye.
Speaker 2: Oh the quote from the employee.
Speaker 1: Yes, they quote an individual who is actually working at
Speaker 1: Fort Detrich when the announcement came down. This person says,
Speaker 1: and I quote, I remember that date quite well because
Speaker 1: following his announcement of taking munitions and beating them into plowsheds,
Speaker 1: we all lost our job, and that was a very
Speaker 1: traumatic experience.
Speaker 2: It really forces us to look at the human element
Speaker 2: inside the military industrial complex, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It totally does. We view the end of a biological
Speaker 1: weapons program as this massive, sweeping victory for global humanity.
Speaker 1: But for the scientists and technicians inside that classified bubble,
Speaker 1: it was a completely different reality.
Speaker 2: Right because they genuinely believe they were performing essential, patriotic
Speaker 2: national security work.
Speaker 1: They spent years in an environment where weaponizing a pathogen
Speaker 1: was just normalized. It was literally their daily nine to
Speaker 1: five job.
Speaker 2: And then the commander in chief goes on television and
Speaker 2: declares their life's work a moral negative that needs to
Speaker 2: be destroyed.
Speaker 1: So suddenly they are out of work. It's the banality
Speaker 1: of the whole thing. You spend your Tuesday figuring out
Speaker 1: how to maximize the lethality of a spore, and on
Speaker 1: Wednesday you're trying to figure out how to pay your
Speaker 1: mortgage because the program got scrapped.
Speaker 2: It is a surreal juxtaposition.
Speaker 1: But we really have to look at what they were
Speaker 1: doing before the program ended. Because the theoretical modeling they
Speaker 1: were doing on chalkboards and in test chambers in Maryland,
Speaker 1: that wasn't enough for them.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't. A controlled laboratory chamber cannot replicate the
Speaker 2: complex variables of weather, architecture, and population density right.
Speaker 1: To perfect dispersion. They needed a real world environment.
Speaker 2: The military apparatus recognized that to truly understand how a
Speaker 2: biological attack would unfold, they needed to test it on
Speaker 2: a major American city.
Speaker 1: Which is just a massive escalation we've established as they
Speaker 1: were willing to research these devastating pathogens behind closed doors,
Speaker 1: but crossing the threshold from a laboratory in Maryland to
Speaker 1: the streets of a major populated city. That is a
Speaker 1: completely different psychological.
Speaker 2: Barrier, a huge barrier.
Speaker 1: Let's look at how they crossed it. In September of
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty, let's talk about the fog of San Francisco
Speaker 1: and a program known as Operation Sea Spray.
Speaker 2: Operation Sea Spray remains one of the most chilling examples
Speaker 2: of domestic military testing because of how entirely ordinary the
Speaker 2: setting was.
Speaker 1: Walk us through what actually happened.
Speaker 2: According to the declassified files, a US Navy minesweeper was
Speaker 2: positioned just off the coast of northern California. Over a
Speaker 2: period of several days, the crew of that ship systematically
Speaker 2: sprayed a massive cloud of a bacteria called Seratia morasans
Speaker 2: directly into.
Speaker 1: The air, just spraying it into the open ocean breeze.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and they timed it perfectly so the wind would
Speaker 2: carry it straight into San Francisco Harbor and across the
Speaker 2: entire city.
Speaker 1: And they didn't just pick any bacteria at random for
Speaker 1: those did they No.
Speaker 2: The documentation shows they chose Serratium marsssens for two very
Speaker 2: specific reasons, which were First, this particular bacteria produces a
Speaker 2: distinct red pigment. This was a logistical necessity for them.
Speaker 2: It made it incredibly easy for the military researchers who
Speaker 2: were secretly placed throughout the city to swap surfaces, culture
Speaker 2: the samples, and track exactly how far the bacteria was spreading.
Speaker 1: Like a biological dye marker exactly.
Speaker 2: And second, the scientific establishment at the time firmly believed
Speaker 2: this bacteria was completely harmless to humans.
Speaker 1: They viewed it as the perfect simulant.
Speaker 2: Right. They couldn't release real antracs, obviously, yeah, but they
Speaker 2: needed an organism that would mimic how a deadly pathogen
Speaker 2: might behave in a specific.
Speaker 1: Microclimate, and they picked San Francisco for the weather, specifically
Speaker 1: for its famous invection fog.
Speaker 2: The researchers hypothesized that the heavy, moisture rich fog rolling
Speaker 2: in from the Pacific would trap the biological.
Speaker 1: Agent, holding it close to the ground rather than letting
Speaker 1: it blow away.
Speaker 2: Precisely, they theorized that this would dramatically increase the concentration
Speaker 2: of the bacteria at street level and consequently infect a
Speaker 2: much larger percentage of the population.
Speaker 1: Put yourself in San Francisco in September of nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: you are walking down the street, be heading to work,
Speaker 1: pulling your coat tight against the chill.
Speaker 2: Of the fog, just a normal morning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're holding a cup of coffee, buying a newspaper,
Speaker 1: going about your normal daily American life, and a few
Speaker 1: miles offshore, a US Navy ship is intentionally blanketing you,
Speaker 1: your family, your neighbors in a concentrated cloud of live bacteria.
Speaker 2: Then you have absolutely no idea it is happening.
Speaker 1: Nobody knew. The level of compartmentalization surrounding operations Sea Spray
Speaker 1: is just staggering to me.
Speaker 2: The documents revealed that the secrecy didn't just apply to
Speaker 2: the civilian population either.
Speaker 1: Right the chain of command was so aggressively siloed that
Speaker 1: the director of the CIA was completely unaware of the operation.
Speaker 2: Even the President of the United States was kept in
Speaker 2: the dark.
Speaker 1: I have to stop and unpack that mechanic for a second,
Speaker 1: because how does a military operation scale to the point
Speaker 1: where it can run a multi day citywide biological experiment
Speaker 1: on millions of American citizens without the commander in chief
Speaker 1: or the nation's top inti pulligence officer knowing?
Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal question that.
Speaker 1: Isn't just a secret you know that is a fundamental
Speaker 1: breakdown of civilian oversight.
Speaker 2: It reveals the true, often dangerous nature of the classification system.
Speaker 2: During the Cold War, we traditionally view secrecy as a shield,
Speaker 2: a way to prevent an adversary from discovering our vulnerabilities.
Speaker 1: Sure, keeping the blueprints for a tank secret makes sense.
Speaker 2: Right, But within massive, sprawling bureaucracies like the Department of Defense,
Speaker 2: secrecy frequently mutates into a tool to prevent internal oversight.
Speaker 2: The military mandate was to understand and prepare for biological warfare.
Speaker 1: So they just took the initiative.
Speaker 2: The specific division running Operation Sea Spray believe they have
Speaker 2: the authority within their specific need to know silo to
Speaker 2: conduct this test. In their framework, San Francisco was merely
Speaker 2: a popographical laboratory and the fog was just an environmental variable.
Speaker 1: They completely disconnected from the humanity of it.
Speaker 2: The profound ethical breach of experimenting on millions of non
Speaker 2: consenting citizens was completely subordinated to the necessity of gathering
Speaker 2: dispersion data.
Speaker 1: And the data they gathered confirmed their worst fears, didn't it.
Speaker 2: It did. The military secret sampling stations proved that the
Speaker 2: bacteria had successfully blanketed San Francisco and all the surrounding communities.
Speaker 2: The fog worked exactly as they hypothesized. It trapped the
Speaker 2: agent and insured widespread exposure.
Speaker 1: But that second assumption they made, the bedrock belief that
Speaker 1: Saratiu marssens was completely harmless.
Speaker 2: That turned out to be a fatal miscalculation.
Speaker 1: It really highlights the hubris of mid century science. They
Speaker 1: confidently declared the bacteria benign based on limited laboratory observations
Speaker 1: on healthy people.
Speaker 2: But shortly after the military released the cloud, a localized
Speaker 2: cluster of severe siatia infections erupted at a San Francisco hospital.
Speaker 1: The hospital cluster, yes.
Speaker 2: One patient, a man who was just recovering from a
Speaker 2: routine surgery, developed a critical infection that spread to his
Speaker 2: heart and he passed away. Oh my god, and several
Speaker 2: others became violently ill. Now, the historical record shows that
Speaker 2: proving direct legal causation between the Navy's mind Sweeper and
Speaker 2: those specific hospital infections has been incredibly difficult, and historically
Speaker 2: the military pushback very hard against taking responsibility for that death.
Speaker 1: I find the military's pushback there almost insulting to basic logic.
Speaker 1: You intentionally release a massive concentrated cloud of a specific
Speaker 1: rare bacteria over a city. Days later, a hospital in
Speaker 1: that exact city experiences an unprecedented outbreak of that exact
Speaker 1: rare bacteria. I mean, the variables are pretty clear.
Speaker 2: It perfectly illustrates the inherent unpredictability of biology, though, and
Speaker 2: it shows exactly why treating a civilian population is a
Speaker 2: test subject is so.
Speaker 1: Reckless, because a city is not a controlled lab exactly.
Speaker 2: The military scientists tested the bacteria on young, healthy individuals
Speaker 2: in a lab and deemed it safe. But a city
Speaker 2: contains the elderly, infants, people recovering from surgery with severely
Speaker 2: compromised immune systems.
Speaker 1: What is a harmless simulant to a twenty year old
Speaker 1: soldier can be a lethal pathogen to a patient in
Speaker 1: a hospital bed.
Speaker 2: The tragedy here stems directly from the total absence of
Speaker 2: informed consent. If they had known, the hospital could have
Speaker 2: taken precautions, but they were kept entirely in the dark.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've established that the military was willing to
Speaker 1: write off civilian collateral damage as a necessary variable in
Speaker 1: these experiments. That's horrifying enough.
Speaker 2: If it's worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because there is a different psychological threshold required to
Speaker 1: experiment on your own sworn protectors, the men who literally
Speaker 1: took an oath to defend you. Let's look at how
Speaker 1: the definition of acceptable collateral damage shifted from the public
Speaker 1: to the barracks, because our next sources document how the
Speaker 1: military treated its own service members.
Speaker 2: If Operation Sea Spray was an experiment conducted at a distance,
Speaker 2: the programs we are looking at next were up close
Speaker 2: and intensely personal. We need to examine Project SAHAD and
Speaker 2: the experiments conducted at the Edgewood Arsenal.
Speaker 1: This represents a profound shift. It's moving from a lack
Speaker 1: of civilian oversight to a direct, face to face betrayal
Speaker 1: of trust regarding American service members.
Speaker 2: Let's start with Project SAJAD. It stands for Shipboard Hazard
Speaker 2: and Defense, and honestly, the name itself is a masterclass
Speaker 2: in bureaucratic sanitization.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a routine safety protocol, like checking the
Speaker 1: fire extinguishers or something it does.
Speaker 2: It was part of a larger initiative known as Project
Speaker 2: one twelve, and the Department of Defense ran these operations
Speaker 2: for over a decade from nineteen sixty two until nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Three, over ten years of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The overarching objective was to analyze how US warships
Speaker 2: and the crews aboard them would fare during a chemical
Speaker 2: or biological attack.
Speaker 1: But the mechanics of how this was actually executed are horrifying.
Speaker 1: We have the first hand testimony of a Navy chief,
Speaker 1: a man named Mark Looney, who was stationed on one
Speaker 1: of the target ships.
Speaker 2: His count is chilling.
Speaker 1: He describes the visceral experience of looking up and seeing
Speaker 1: aircraft flying directly over his vessel. These planes would release
Speaker 1: a smoke or ass like substance that would descend and
Speaker 1: completely envelop the ship.
Speaker 2: And do you know what the protocol for the crew
Speaker 2: was while this was happening.
Speaker 1: Right, They were handed basic gas masks and explicitly ordered
Speaker 1: not to worry.
Speaker 2: Not to worry. That phrase encapsulates the paternalistic, dismissive mindset
Speaker 2: of the command structure perfectly. The service members were deliberately
Speaker 2: kept in a state of absolute ignorance regarding the substances
Speaker 2: falling on their decks.
Speaker 1: The psychological impact of that has to be severe.
Speaker 2: One veteran sighted in the Fox six News investigation articulated
Speaker 2: this perfectly. He described feeling like cannon fodder. He realized
Speaker 2: his health was completely secondary to the data collection. He
Speaker 2: stated on the record, I really know what a white
Speaker 2: mouse feels like.
Speaker 1: The white mouse syndrome. You volunteer to serve your country,
Speaker 1: and your command structure reduces you to a laboratory animal, and.
Speaker 2: The long term physical consequences for these men were devastating.
Speaker 1: The Fox six investigation tracked down over fifty crew members
Speaker 1: involved in these specific shipboard tests.
Speaker 2: Didn't they They did, and they uncovered a shocking pattern
Speaker 2: of severe chronic illness among them.
Speaker 1: We need to say their names because the secrecy of
Speaker 1: this program actively tried to erase them. Chief Lenin, who
Speaker 1: dedicated his life to the Navy, battled aggressive cancer. Charlie
Speaker 1: Gears developed debilitating asthma shortly after his service. Jim Hamlin
Speaker 1: suffered from a tumor on his lung.
Speaker 2: And the physical suffering, terrible as it was, was really
Speaker 2: only half of their ordeal.
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
Speaker 2: The true agony for these veterans was the impenetrable wall
Speaker 2: of classification they slammed into when they tried to seek help.
Speaker 1: Oh right, when they went to the va exactly.
Speaker 2: For decades, these men went to doctors, went to the
Speaker 2: Veterans' Affairs offices, trying to explain that they were exposed
Speaker 2: to something during their service, But because Project Sahad was
Speaker 2: so deeply classified, the military consistently denied the events ever
Speaker 2: even happened.
Speaker 1: So they're sick, they know why they're sick, but the
Speaker 1: government is gaslighting them.
Speaker 2: The veterans couldn't get the specialized medical care they desperately needed,
Speaker 2: or could they get the basic human acknowledgment that their
Speaker 2: government had harmed them. They were fighting an invisible internal enemy,
Speaker 2: and the government that unleashed it refused to confirm its existence.
Speaker 1: And while the Navy was conducting these tests out on
Speaker 1: the open ocean, the US Army Chemical Corps was running
Speaker 1: its own massive classified medical testing program on land.
Speaker 2: Yes, this brings us to the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.
Speaker 1: Between nineteen fifty five and nineteen seventy five, the Army
Speaker 1: ran experiments on approximately seven thousand American soldiers there.
Speaker 2: The sheer scale of the Edgewood experiments is just difficult
Speaker 2: to comprehend. According to the declassified Veterans Affairs records, those
Speaker 2: seven thousand soldiers were intentionally exposed to more than two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty different chemical compounds two hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: over two hundred and fifty. The inventory included severe irritants,
Speaker 2: blistering agents like mustard gas, potent psychochemicals, and highly lethal
Speaker 2: nerve agents.
Speaker 1: So the official documentation, the paperwork used to justify the
Speaker 1: budget for this to Congress, presumably claimed these tests were
Speaker 1: entirely defensive.
Speaker 2: Yes, they stated they needed to understand the effects of
Speaker 2: low dose chemical exposures so they could design better countermeasures.
Speaker 1: There is actually archival footage of officials proudly talking about
Speaker 1: developing a new lightweight, canisterless mask and treating combat fatigues
Speaker 1: to repel vapor and spray droplets of blister gases.
Speaker 2: The PR spin was heavy, but the methodology crossed a
Speaker 2: massive ethical boundary, even by the lack standards of the time.
Speaker 1: I really need to challenge the language used in that
Speaker 1: PR campaign because the archival promotional materials continuously refer to
Speaker 1: these seven thousand soldiers as volunteers. They bragged about the
Speaker 1: patriotism of these military volunteers stepping up to test the equipment.
Speaker 2: It's a very loaded term in this context.
Speaker 1: Extremely The source material explicitly reveals that many of these
Speaker 1: soldiers exhibited severe immediate symptoms during the tests, and the
Speaker 1: most damning detail is that the military never planned any
Speaker 1: long term medical follow up as part of the original
Speaker 1: study design.
Speaker 2: That is the right.
Speaker 1: If you are intentionally exposing a soldier to a nerve agent,
Speaker 1: but you have deliberately chosen not to track what happens
Speaker 1: to their nervous system five or ten years down the line,
Speaker 1: and you minimize the immediate dangers, can you legally or
Speaker 1: morally call them a volunteer? How can there be informed
Speaker 1: consent if the researchers themselves refuse to acknowledge the long
Speaker 1: term risks?
Speaker 2: You are absolutely right. The mechanics of informed consent require
Speaker 2: that the subject is fully briefed on the potential risks.
Speaker 2: By intentionally excluding long term follow up from the experimental design,
Speaker 2: the military structurally blinded itself to those risks.
Speaker 1: Willful ignorance exactly.
Speaker 2: You cannot inform a soldier of a danger you are
Speaker 2: actively refusing to measure, and the way the military chose
Speaker 2: to manage the public optics of this danger is incredibly revealing.
Speaker 1: Oh, you mean speedy, Yes, The.
Speaker 2: Source material points to a specific public relations maneuver involving
Speaker 2: a cat named Speedy.
Speaker 1: When I read the file on Speedy the cat, I
Speaker 1: was genuinely floored. It is so absurd it almost feels
Speaker 1: like a dark comedy sketch.
Speaker 2: It really is the weaponization of absurdity to mask and atrocity.
Speaker 2: The military actually produced these upbeat, cheerful newsreels featuring this
Speaker 2: feline mascot, Speedy, participating in the testing program alongside the soldiers, a.
Speaker 1: Literal cat in a chemical weapons testing facility.
Speaker 2: Yes, and to reassure the public, the military announced in
Speaker 2: this news reel that Speedy had recently had a healthy
Speaker 2: litter of kittens. They presented this as undeniable biological proof
Speaker 2: that quote, at no time were they in danger of
Speaker 2: suffering any permanent injury.
Speaker 1: It's insane.
Speaker 2: They took the immense, complex physiological risk of exposing seven
Speaker 2: thousand human beings to hundreds of toxic chemicals and reduced
Speaker 2: it to the reproductive success of a cat.
Speaker 1: It is incredibly patronizing. Imagine suffering the agonizing burning effects
Speaker 1: of a blister agent or the terrifying hallucinations of a
Speaker 1: psychochemical and your command structure points to a newsreel of
Speaker 1: a cat and tells you everything is perfectly safe. It
Speaker 1: completely invalidates the genuine physical suffering of those When you.
Speaker 2: Analyze Project SAD and the Edgewood Arsenal collectively, they reveal
Speaker 2: a deeply entrenched institutional pathology. Oh so, the chain of
Speaker 2: command became so consumed by the overarching narrative of the
Speaker 2: Cold War, this absolute existential necessity of preparing for a
Speaker 2: Soviet chemical or biological strike, that they completely devalue the
Speaker 2: individual rights and the bodily autonomy of the American soldier.
Speaker 1: The mission became everything, the men became nothing exactly.
Speaker 2: The ultimate tragedy of these programs is that the profound,
Speaker 2: lasting damage was inflicted on these veterans not by a
Speaker 2: foreign adversary, but by their own commanders, who then hid
Speaker 2: the evidence behind a wall of top secret stamps.
Speaker 1: Let's shift our focus here, because we have spent time
Speaker 1: examining how the government, operating within this dark classified ecosystem,
Speaker 1: manipulated the physical environment and the bodies of its citizens
Speaker 1: and soldiers. Right, But the declassified archives reveal an entirely
Speaker 1: different kind of manipulation too. They show us how the
Speaker 1: government manipulated information itself. Yes, secrets and shaped intelligence aren't
Speaker 1: just used to test weapons in the fog. They are
Speaker 1: used to manufacture the justification for entire wars. We are
Speaker 1: moving to August of nineteen sixty four. We need to
Speaker 1: talk about the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 2: The Gulf of Tonkin incident is a masterclass in how
Speaker 2: a single murky, highly questionable data point can be structurally
Speaker 2: manipulated to alter the course of global history.
Speaker 1: Set the stage for us. What was the public told
Speaker 1: at the time.
Speaker 2: The public narrative, which was released by US officials in
Speaker 2: early August nineteen sixty four, was stark and alarming. They
Speaker 2: claimed that North Vietnamese forces had launched unprovoked, deliberate attacks
Speaker 2: against American naval destroyers operating in international waters in the
Speaker 2: Gulf of Tonkin, Okay.
Speaker 1: Now, to understand how the manipulation works here, we have
Speaker 1: to separate the reality of August second from the fiction
Speaker 1: of August fourth.
Speaker 2: Right, there were two alleged incidents.
Speaker 1: The first incident, involving the USS Maddox on August second,
Speaker 1: is a matter of historical record. It actually happened. But
Speaker 1: then text is crucial. The Mannox wasn't just on a
Speaker 1: Pleasure cruise. It was conducting a DeSoto patrol.
Speaker 2: Which is a specific type of intelligence gathering mission.
Speaker 1: Right they were intercepting North Vietnamese communications right off their coast.
Speaker 1: A skirmish occurred. It was real, but it was a complex, localized,
Speaker 1: and highly nuanced military engagement.
Speaker 2: The August second engagement was messi but crucially, it was
Speaker 2: not sufficient to justify a massive, unilateral escalation of American
Speaker 2: military power.
Speaker 1: The Johnson administration wanted to escalate.
Speaker 2: Though they did, but they needed a clear, undeniable provocation
Speaker 2: to sell it to the public and to Congress. And
Speaker 2: that brings us to the alleged second attack, the event
Speaker 2: that purportedly occurred on August fourth.
Speaker 1: And that second incident became the foundation, the singular catalyst
Speaker 1: that President Lyndon B. Johnson took to Congress.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was the direct justification for the Gulf of.
Speaker 1: Tonkin Resolution, and the scale of that resolution cannot be overstated.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just a minor authorization to fire back, it
Speaker 1: fired upon. It gave LBJ broad sweeping, virtually unchecked authority
Speaker 1: to radically expand US military involvement in Southeast Asia. And
Speaker 1: he got it all without a formal declaration of war
Speaker 1: from Congress.
Speaker 2: It was essentially a legislative blank check, and it turned
Speaker 2: Vietnam into the defining, tragic conflict of a generation.
Speaker 1: And this is where the declassified NSA materials completely dismantle
Speaker 1: the official history we were all taught.
Speaker 2: Yes years later, when the signal intelligence and the internal
Speaker 2: communications were finally declassified, the evidence conclusively proved that the
Speaker 2: August fourth attack simply did not occur as it was
Speaker 2: presented to the American public and to Congress.
Speaker 1: It was a ghost exactly.
Speaker 2: There was no unprovoked, coordinated second assault on American destroyers
Speaker 2: that night.
Speaker 1: See. I want to make sure I understand the exact
Speaker 1: mechanics of this deception, because it wasn't a case of
Speaker 1: a president just making something up out of thin air
Speaker 1: in the Oval office. It's like a game of bureaucratic.
Speaker 2: Telephone, Right, That's a good way to look at it.
Speaker 1: Imagine a sonar operator in the middle of a massive
Speaker 1: storm at sea. The radar is bouncing off waves, the
Speaker 1: thermoclines in the water are creating ghost echoes on the
Speaker 1: sonar screen. The weather was reportedly terrible that night, right,
Speaker 1: So the operator says, I'm seeing anomalies. Maybe torpedoes, but
Speaker 1: the weather is terrible and I can't be sure. How
Speaker 1: does that hesitant uncertain report from a sailor turn into
Speaker 1: an absolute certainty on the president's desk.
Speaker 2: Well, the declassified NSA documents use a very specific clinical
Speaker 2: phrase to describe this process. They state that the available
Speaker 2: intelligence was actively shaped shaped. Yes, it wasn't a whole
Speaker 2: cloth fabrication. It was the weaponization of confirmation bias within
Speaker 2: the intelligence hierarchy.
Speaker 1: They saw what they wanted to see precisely.
Speaker 2: The administration had a deeply held desired policy outcome. They
Speaker 2: wanted the authority to expand military operations in Vietnam to
Speaker 2: counter communist influence.
Speaker 1: So that desire filters down.
Speaker 2: That intense political desire created a massive gravitational pull with
Speaker 2: than the bureaucracy. When the confusing, contradictory data from the
Speaker 2: night of August fourth came in, the ghost radar echoes,
Speaker 2: the intercepted communications that were mistranslated or applied to the
Speaker 2: wrong day, the intelligence apparatus did not present the president
Speaker 2: with the profound uncertainty of the commanders on the seat.
Speaker 2: They cleaned it up at every level of the chain
Speaker 2: of command. The qualifiers were stripped away, the maybis were deleted.
Speaker 2: They smoothed off the edges of the data until it
Speaker 2: perfectly matched the narrative the administration needed. They shaped the
Speaker 2: intelligence to fit the policy, rather than shaping the policy
Speaker 2: to fit the intelligence.
Speaker 1: Intelligence shaping it's a beautifully sterile bureaucratic term for a
Speaker 1: systemic lying biomission.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: And the absolute tragedy of it is how flawlessly it worked.
Speaker 1: Congress didn't push back. They overwhelmingly passed the resolution. The
Speaker 1: source material includes an incredible, really sobering admission from Senator
Speaker 1: William Fulbright.
Speaker 2: He was a key figure in all of this.
Speaker 1: He was highly influential, instrumental in guiding the Tonken resolute
Speaker 1: through the Senate, and when he was questioned about it
Speaker 1: years later after the truth came out, he gave this quote.
Speaker 1: He said, I accepted the story given to us by
Speaker 1: the President and mister McNamara and mister Rusk, and I
Speaker 1: believe General Wheeler. I had no reason at that time,
Speaker 1: and under those circumstances, to doubt the validity the truthfulness
Speaker 1: of this whole operation.
Speaker 2: Senator Fulbright's admission is the ultimate cautionary tale for a
Speaker 2: functioning democracy. Just blind trust Right here is a powerful,
Speaker 2: intelligent experience, Senator, and he candidly admits that he simply
Speaker 2: trusted the executive branch. Implicitly, he assumed that the intelligence
Speaker 2: data presented by the Secretary of Defense and the military
Speaker 2: brass was objective and empirical.
Speaker 1: This is exactly why analyzing these declassified sources is so
Speaker 1: critical for US today.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it demonstrates that in moments of intense national crisis,
Speaker 2: when the drum beat for war is at its loudest
Speaker 2: and the pressure to unify is immense, critical thinking cannot
Speaker 2: be suspended.
Speaker 1: You can't just nod along when.
Speaker 2: The government and stands before the public and declares we
Speaker 2: have undeniable proof. The immediate necessary response from the press
Speaker 2: and the legislature must always be show us the unshaped data.
Speaker 1: Because if the Gulf of Tonkin was the shaped intelligence
Speaker 1: that provided the legal cover to escalate the war, our
Speaker 1: next set of declassified files reveals how that war was
Speaker 1: secretly expanded beyond any legal or geographical boundaries.
Speaker 2: We are moving forward in time a bit to nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty nine.
Speaker 1: The Johnson administration is out, the Nixon administration is in power,
Speaker 1: and we are looking at the mechanics of Operation Menu.
Speaker 2: To understand Operation Menu, have to understand the geography of
Speaker 2: the conflict. The Vietnam War, despite the name, was not
Speaker 2: neatly contained within the borders of North and South Vietnam.
Speaker 1: The borders were pretty poorous.
Speaker 2: Very The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong heavily
Speaker 2: utilized supply routes, specifically the Home Marine Trail, and established
Speaker 2: massive base camps just across the border in neighboring Cambodia.
Speaker 1: But Cambodia was officially an under international law, a neutral
Speaker 1: sovereign nation, exactly, the.
Speaker 2: United States was not legally at war with Cambodia. However,
Speaker 2: from a purely strategic military perspective, the Nixon administration believed
Speaker 2: that destroying those sanctuaries was absolutely essential to protecting American
Speaker 2: troops in South Vietnam and forcing the North to the
Speaker 2: negotiating table.
Speaker 1: So they just decided to bomb them anyway.
Speaker 2: They authorized a massive, sustained covert bombing campaign inside Cambodian territory,
Speaker 2: and this campaign was highly classified under the code name
Speaker 2: Operation Menu.
Speaker 1: I really have to pause on the naming convention here
Speaker 1: because the cognitive dissonance is just staggering to me. The
Speaker 1: menu names, yes, they called the overarching campaign operation menu,
Speaker 1: and the specific targeted bombing phases were given these surreal
Speaker 1: food themed designations. You had breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, supper,
Speaker 1: and dessert. I mean, I am struggling to comprehend the
Speaker 1: psychological detachment required to name a campaign of earth scorching
Speaker 1: mass destruction after a casual dining experience.
Speaker 2: The nomenclature is deliberately macabre. It SERTs a very specific
Speaker 2: psychological function within a command center.
Speaker 1: Right, but what kind of distance does it create for
Speaker 1: a commander sitting in a secure, air conditioned war room.
Speaker 1: They are looking at a map ordering dessert, knowing full
Speaker 1: well that that order translates into B fifty two strato
Speaker 1: fortresses unleashing thousands of tons of high explosives onto a
Speaker 1: neutral country. It sanitizes the violence so completely that it
Speaker 1: almost turns it into an abstraction.
Speaker 2: It creates an essential emotional buffer for the people giving
Speaker 2: the orders. You're right, but if you look at the
Speaker 2: underlying philosophy driving the operation, it was anything but sanitized.
Speaker 2: What do you mean the source material site? Henry Kissinger,
Speaker 2: who served as Nixon's national security advisor, and they highlight
Speaker 2: one specific recurring word that the administration emphasized regarding their
Speaker 2: strategic posture. The word is brutality.
Speaker 1: Brutality That isn't a word usually see in polished diplomatic cables.
Speaker 2: No, it is highly revealing. The Archives quote Kissinger explicitly stating,
Speaker 2: you're dealing with people, and you have to be brutal
Speaker 2: in your use of power.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: He rejected the idea of treating Cambodi in Vietnam as
Speaker 2: separate political entities. In a message regarding the bombing, he stated,
Speaker 2: we link the two. They viewed the entire Southeast Asian
Speaker 2: theater as a single fluid chess board.
Speaker 1: But the most historically significant aspect of the operation menu
Speaker 1: documents isn't just the tactical military strategy, is it.
Speaker 2: No, it is the elaborate, complex architecture of deception built
Speaker 2: to hide it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the mechanics of that deception. Because the
Speaker 1: secrecy here wasn't designed to hide the bombers from the enemy,
Speaker 1: not at all. The North Vietnamese knew they were being bombed.
Speaker 1: The Cambodians obviously knew they were being bombed. You cannot
Speaker 1: stealthily drop thousands of tons of ordinance from a B
Speaker 1: fifty two.
Speaker 2: The enemy was fully aware, the ground was literally shaking.
Speaker 2: The secrecy was not for tactical military advantage on the battlefield,
Speaker 2: then who is it for? The internal planning documents from
Speaker 2: the Nixon did ministration reveal a highly coordinated, deliberate bureaucratic
Speaker 2: effort to evade the American press and the American public.
Speaker 1: The system they used to hide this was incredibly complex.
Speaker 1: They utilized a dual reporting system.
Speaker 2: Explain how that worked for the listeners.
Speaker 1: So a pilot would be officially briefed for a bombing
Speaker 1: run over a legitimate target in South Vietnam. The official
Speaker 1: paperwork would reflect that legal target, but once they were airborne,
Speaker 1: a ground directed radar station would take over and basically
Speaker 1: give them new coordinates, guiding the bomber across the border
Speaker 1: into Cambodia.
Speaker 2: Right. They bait and switch in midair.
Speaker 1: And then after the strike, the post flight reports were
Speaker 1: completely falsified by the officers to show the bombs had
Speaker 1: fallen on the original legal target in South Vietnam.
Speaker 2: That is an astonishing level of institutional fraud.
Speaker 1: It is the administration issued direct instructions to officials on
Speaker 1: how to handle the press too. If reporters started asking
Speaker 1: questions about explosions near the Cambodian border, officials were instructed
Speaker 1: to treat the strikes as routine legal military operations were
Speaker 1: to simply stonewall with a no comment.
Speaker 2: So let's recap that the enemy knows, the victims on
Speaker 2: the ground know. The only people who are systematically intentionally
Speaker 2: kept in the dark are the American citizens whose tax
Speaker 2: dollars are funding the bombs exactly.
Speaker 1: This secrecy was weaponized purely as a tool for domestic
Speaker 1: political management.
Speaker 2: Because the administration knew that openly expanding the war into
Speaker 2: a neutral country would ignite massive political backlash, supercharge the
Speaker 2: anti war movement, and potentially derail Nixon's presidency.
Speaker 1: So they made the calculated decision to execute the campaign
Speaker 1: in total darkness and systematically lie to the legislative branch
Speaker 1: and the public.
Speaker 2: But secrets of that magnitude, involving that many moving parts
Speaker 2: in that many pilots, they eventually leak.
Speaker 1: And when the truth about the secret bombing of Cambodia
Speaker 1: finally broke, the fallout was catastrophic to the American psyche.
Speaker 1: The source material notes that it fundamentally fed the growing
Speaker 1: pervasive sense that the American government had completely lost its
Speaker 1: credibility at ability gap right, you cannot repeatedly, structurally lie
Speaker 1: to your citizens about where you're dropping bombs and expect
Speaker 1: them to trust you when you ask for more troops
Speaker 1: or more funding.
Speaker 2: It ruptured the fundamental bond of trust between the governed
Speaker 2: and the government, and the source includes a profound, almost
Speaker 2: tragic reflection on the massive disconnect between American policy makers
Speaker 2: and the reality of the region.
Speaker 1: It notes that the United States fundamentally misunderstood the ground reality.
Speaker 2: Yes, the quote reads, we still thought that what we
Speaker 2: have to offer is democracy is certainly good for them,
Speaker 2: but you have to have the other side agreeing. They
Speaker 2: saw it completely differently.
Speaker 1: The American leadership, insulated in their war rooms believe they
Speaker 1: were dispensing necessary tough medicine for the greater good of
Speaker 1: halting global communism.
Speaker 2: But to the people on the ground, eventually, to the
Speaker 2: disillusioned American public, it just looked like unchecked, unaccountable in
Speaker 2: illegal destruction.
Speaker 1: We have traced this intricate thread of secrecy, compartmentalization, and
Speaker 1: moral gray areas through the biological tests of the fifties,
Speaker 1: the chemical experiments of the sixties, and the covert wars
Speaker 1: of the seventies.
Speaker 2: It's a dark trajectory.
Speaker 1: But to truly understand the DNA of this system, to
Speaker 1: see where this institutional template of absolute secrecy was successfully forged,
Speaker 1: we have to go back in time, back to the beginning.
Speaker 1: We have to look at the absolute apex of military
Speaker 1: secrets at the end of World War II, the moment
Speaker 1: that proved to the government what was mathematically and bureaucratically possible.
Speaker 2: We have to examine the Manhattan Project and the subsequent
Speaker 2: highly controversial Operation paper Clip.
Speaker 1: These two initiatives are the twin pillars upon which the
Speaker 1: modern military industrial complex was really built. Let's look at
Speaker 1: the mechanics of Manhattan Project first, because it's genuinely difficult
Speaker 1: for a modern mind to comprehend the sheer scale of
Speaker 1: the secret they kept.
Speaker 2: It was unprecedented. This was a nationwide, decentralized effort to
Speaker 2: engineer and construct the most complex, power full, and destructive
Speaker 2: weapon in the history of human civilization, the atomic bomb.
Speaker 1: The logistics are mind boggling. You have massive, sprawling secret
Speaker 1: cities build virtually overnight in the middle of nowhere. You
Speaker 1: have the laboratories at Los Alamos in New Mexico, the
Speaker 1: uranium enrichment facilities at Oakridge and Tennessee, the plutonium production
Speaker 1: reactors at Hanford in Washington, massive infrastructure. You have tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of people, scientists, engineers, construction workers, secretaries, all
Speaker 1: working on the singular goal. How is it mechanically possible
Speaker 1: to keep an undertaking of that massive magnitude completely hidden
Speaker 1: from the public and the press.
Speaker 2: The success of the Manhattan Project relied on extreme, ruthless compartmentalization.
Speaker 2: General leslie Grosse, who directed the project, implemented a system
Speaker 2: where information was fiercely restricted.
Speaker 1: Him to know only beyond that.
Speaker 2: Even the source text highlights a foundational principle of the project.
Speaker 2: All minds did not need to see the whole task
Speaker 2: to contribute. In fact, seeing the whole task was explicitly
Speaker 2: considered a severe security.
Speaker 1: Risk, so people didn't know what they were building.
Speaker 2: The project was so aggressively compartmentalized that the vast overwhelming
Speaker 2: majority of the personnel working on it had absolutely no
Speaker 2: idea what they were actually building.
Speaker 1: They were just processing a specific mineral or machining a tiny,
Speaker 1: seemingly random piece of metal or turning a valve on
Speaker 1: a pipe without ever grasping the true purpose of the facility.
Speaker 2: There literal cogs in a doomsday machine intentionally kept blind
Speaker 2: to the big picture of what they were assembling.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate historical triumph of the bureaucracy of secrecy,
Speaker 1: and it culminated, as we all know, in August nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Speaker 2: The immediate instantaneous devastation was utterly unprecedented in human history.
Speaker 1: The declassified transcripts include an incredibly chilling interrogation of a
Speaker 1: doctor U, a key figure who assisted the military in
Speaker 1: calculating and selecting the targets.
Speaker 2: Oh that transcript is haunting.
Speaker 1: In the trans script, the interviewer asks him point blank
Speaker 1: if he knew during the planning phase that thousands of
Speaker 1: civilians would be killed or injured. Doctor U answers simply yes,
Speaker 1: but then he admits that he didn't realize it would
Speaker 1: be as many as it turned out.
Speaker 2: To be, and the interviewer pushes him.
Speaker 1: The interviewer presses him, asking how many he thought would die,
Speaker 1: and he replies seventy.
Speaker 2: Thousand, seventy thousand lives extinguished in this single blinding flash.
Speaker 1: The public revelation of the atomic bomb didn't just expose
Speaker 1: a classified military project. It permanently, irreversibly altered human history.
Speaker 1: It ushered in the atomic age.
Speaker 2: But crucially for our discussion, it taught the United States
Speaker 2: government a very specific, very dangerous lesson, which was that
Speaker 2: you can keep a massive nation altering secret as long
Speaker 2: as you compartmentalize the bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: Enough that realization profoundly emboldened the National security operatus.
Speaker 2: It proved that absolute secrecy was achievable. If they could
Speaker 2: successfully hide the construction of the atomic bomb across multiple
Speaker 2: states and tens of thousands of workers, they believe they
Speaker 2: could hide anything, which.
Speaker 1: Leads directly into the profound moral quagmire of Operation paper Clip.
Speaker 2: Yes, the aftermath of the war.
Speaker 1: As World War II in Europe was drawing to a bloody,
Speaker 1: chaotic close, the US military initiated a highly classified, aggressive
Speaker 1: program to seek out, capture, and recruit Hitler's top scientists
Speaker 1: and weapons.
Speaker 2: Engineers, Operation paper Clip.
Speaker 1: I really want to pause and challenge the sheer moral
Speaker 1: whiplash of this operation. You have a nation that has
Speaker 1: just sacrificed hundreds of thousands of young American men. They
Speaker 1: crossed an ocean to defeat the Nazi regime, which is
Speaker 1: universally recognized as one of the most evil, genocidal political
Speaker 1: entities in modern history.
Speaker 2: And almost the second the gun stopped firing.
Speaker 1: The US military quietly sifts through the rubble of Germany,
Speaker 1: locates the very men who designed and built the weapons
Speaker 1: that slaughtered Allied soldiers and secretly offers them lucrative contracts
Speaker 1: in a new life in the United States. I struggled
Speaker 1: to accept the logic behind completely whitewashing their history. Why
Speaker 1: couldn't the military just extract their knowledge through interrogation? Why
Speaker 1: offer them a pristine public image.
Speaker 2: The decision was the definition of a faus Gin bargain,
Speaker 2: and the internal classified debates within the Pentagon were incredibly.
Speaker 1: Fierce, so there was pushback internally, oh absolutely.
Speaker 2: The archives revealed that there were high ranking American generals
Speaker 2: and officials who were absolutely loathed to work with Hitler's
Speaker 2: former scientists on purely ethical and moral grounds. They found
Speaker 2: the idea repulsive, naturally, but those ethical objections were ultimately
Speaker 2: systematically overruled by the brutal pragmatic logic of the emerging
Speaker 2: Cold War. The military establishment looked at the geopolitical map
Speaker 2: and concluded, the Soviet Union is our next existential enemy.
Speaker 2: If we do not weaponize this advanced Nazi aerospace and
Speaker 2: rocketry expertise for ourselves, the Soviets will capture them and
Speaker 2: they will undoubtedly use them against us.
Speaker 1: So it was just a race for the brains.
Speaker 2: In that calculus. Ethics, justice, and the memory of the
Speaker 2: Holocaust were entirely subordinated to the pursuit of strategic technological advantage.
Speaker 1: And the absolute poster child for this dark bargain is
Speaker 1: Werner von Braun, yes von Broun. He was the brilliant
Speaker 1: mastermind behind Nazi Germany's V two rocket program, a weapon
Speaker 1: that terrorized London. Through Operation paper Clip, the US brings
Speaker 1: him over, effectively scrubs his Nazi Party affiliations from his
Speaker 1: public record, and he eventually becomes the Shining Star, the
Speaker 1: charismatic face of NASA's space program.
Speaker 2: He is undeniably instrumental in designing the Saturn V rocket
Speaker 2: that eventually puts American astronauts on the Moon. It is
Speaker 2: a triumph of engineering.
Speaker 1: But as the source material pointedly emphasizes, von Braun's American
Speaker 1: success story is completely inextricably impossible to separate from the
Speaker 1: horrific truth behind his earlier work.
Speaker 2: The V two rockets that made him so incredibly valuable
Speaker 2: to the Pentagon were built using brutal Nazi forced labor.
Speaker 2: Thousands of prisoners from the Middle Baldoorra concentration camp were
Speaker 2: work to death, starved in, ex secuted in underground tunnels
Speaker 2: building those rockets, and the historical record is clear von
Speaker 2: Braun was well aware of the horrific conditions in those tunnels.
Speaker 2: He toured them, he picked labor from the camps.
Speaker 1: So when we look at footage of the Saturn View
Speaker 1: rockets sitting on the launchpad, a towering testament to American
Speaker 1: ingenuity and the triumph of the human spirit reaching for
Speaker 1: the stars, we have to confront the fact that the
Speaker 1: foundational math, the engineering, the rocketry that made it possible
Speaker 1: was literally paid for with the blood of forced labor
Speaker 1: in Nazi Germany.
Speaker 2: That is an incredibly heavy realization to carry. It forces
Speaker 2: us to confront the deeply uncomfortable reality that some of
Speaker 2: humanity's greatest, most celebrated achievements are intrinsically tied to some
Speaker 2: of its darkest, most unforgivable compromises.
Speaker 1: The source material ends with a quote that encapsulates this
Speaker 1: tension perfectly. It says, if we are to extend man's
Speaker 1: boundary to the outer reaches of the universe, it is
Speaker 1: imperative that we also resolve men's relationship with men on
Speaker 1: this earth.
Speaker 2: We reached the stars, but we did it by forgiving
Speaker 2: the unforgivable and hiding that forgiveness behind classified files.
Speaker 1: Let's pull all of these disparate threads together. When we
Speaker 1: started this journey, we talked about that blurry line between
Speaker 1: a paranoid conspiracy theory and documented history.
Speaker 2: And what we've seen today is that the line doesn't
Speaker 2: just blur under the weight of the national security state.
Speaker 2: It shatters completely.
Speaker 1: Spring a concentrated cloud of live bacteria into the fog
Speaker 1: over San Francisco to see how many citizens it would blanket.
Speaker 2: Using American sailors as test subjects to measure the efficacy
Speaker 2: of nerve.
Speaker 1: Gas, actively shaping intelligence and falsifying radar reports to justify
Speaker 1: a decade long war.
Speaker 2: In Vietnam, running a secret, devastating bombing campaign in a
Speaker 2: neutral country, and sanitizing it by naming the missions after
Speaker 2: the dinner.
Speaker 1: Menu, scrubbing the records of the architects of the Nazi
Speaker 1: war machine so they could build our rockets. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you wrote these events into a script and pitched
Speaker 1: it to a movie studio, they would reject it for
Speaker 1: being too unrealistic.
Speaker 2: But it is the unvarnished historical record. It is exactly
Speaker 2: what happens when the massive mechanisms of national security are
Speaker 2: allowed to operate in total, unchecked darkness, completely free from
Speaker 2: the friction of public oversight, legislative pushback, or open review.
Speaker 1: Secrecy is initially justified by the state as a necessary
Speaker 1: shield to protect the nation from external threats, but historically
Speaker 1: that shield inevitably morphs into.
Speaker 2: A wall, and that wall is used to hide the
Speaker 2: actions of the state from its own.
Speaker 1: Citizens, and that leaves us with a massive, profoundly unresolved tension.
Speaker 1: Because we do live in a complex, dangerous world, some
Speaker 1: level of operational secrecy is undoubtedly necessary for a nation
Speaker 1: to survive. But the true cost of that secrecy, as
Speaker 1: we've explored today, is astronomical.
Speaker 2: And it comes at a heavy, heavy price.
Speaker 1: So I want to leave you with a final provocative thought.
Speaker 1: I want you to really mul this over. Knowing what
Speaker 1: we know now about the mechanics of compartmentalization, how unchecked
Speaker 1: secrecy can successfully hide actions like operations Sea Spray or
Speaker 1: the covert bombings of Operation Menu for decades. Where do
Speaker 1: you draw the line between necessary national security and the
Speaker 1: public's absolute right to know what is being done in
Speaker 1: their name? Which of these declassified secrets disturbed you the
Speaker 1: most and.
Speaker 2: Why we really want to hear your thoughts on this.
Speaker 1: Leave a comment, share your perspective, and most importantly, keep
Speaker 1: questioning the narrative. The truth is out there, usually buried
Speaker 1: in a box of declassified files, waiting for someone to
Speaker 1: read it. Thank you so much for joining us for
Speaker 1: this edition of Thrilling Threads. We'll see you next time.