Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. This is the show where we
take those facts you thought were just, you know, way
too strange to be true, right, and we pull them
right out of the rumor mill and give you the verifiable,
documented truth, straight from the source.
Speaker 2: And today we're on a pretty essential mission. I think
we're digging into this huge stack of curated sources. We're
talking classified archives, declassified documents, some really crucial whistleblower leaks.
Speaker 1: All revealing decades of governmental and corporate secrecy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that distinction you just made at the top
is so critical, especially now, which is you know, information overload.
There is a huge difference between a simple mystery, something
we just haven't figured out yet, and a true secret, right.
Speaker 1: A secret is something that was deliberately, systematically concealed, sometimes
for generations and why, specifically to protect power, to maintain control,
or just to shield reputations from well, catastrophic failures.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about like shadowy figures in a movie.
Speaker 1: No, No, not at all. We're talking about the documented,
verifiable actions taken by institutions that were built from the
ground up to be trustworthy.
Speaker 2: And our scope today is, well, it's pretty wide.
Speaker 3: And frankly unsettling.
Speaker 2: We're exploring how technology and simple deceit have been weaponized
across geopolitics, public health.
Speaker 1: All the way down to your personal data exactly.
Speaker 2: We're looking for the patterns in these hidden facts that
really they define modern history.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's unpack this for a minute for you listening.
The goal here isn't to feel overwhelmed. It's to gain
a rapid but thorough understanding of some of the most
surprising facts that really underpin this deep societal skepticism we
see everywhere today.
Speaker 2: And we're going to start by looking at a type
of warfare design not to target buildings or infrastructure.
Speaker 1: But to infiltrate and control the human mind itself perception. Yeah,
this first section it really requires us to accept that
the line between science fiction and documented military reality is
way way thinner than we like to believe.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: The focus here is on unconventional warfare, and it's all
aimed at sensory manipulation.
Speaker 1: The first thread we pulled relates to technologies that target
sound and hearing. It's summarized under a voice to skull
or VTK and silent audio deterrence, and it's all based
on a real phenomenon, the microwave auditory effect.
Speaker 2: And what's fascinating here is the physics of it. It's
really precise. It relies on these extremely short but very
intense microwave pulses. Okay, and when these pulses are absorbed
by the soft tissues in your head, they cause this minute,
incredibly rapid thermal expansion, a heating.
Speaker 1: Effect, So they're heating your head.
Speaker 2: Up a tiny, tiny amount, but that expansion generates a
pressure wave, almost like a microscopic shockwave that travels through
your head right to the cochleave.
Speaker 1: The part of your inner ear that handles hearing exactly.
Speaker 2: So the sound isn't coming from the air around you,
It's literally being generated inside your head by this mechanical
shockwave from the energy absorption.
Speaker 1: Wow, so what would you hear?
Speaker 2: A click, a tone, a buzz, something that only you
can perceive, no one else.
Speaker 1: Okay. So once the US Army figured this out, this
scientific principle, they.
Speaker 3: Did not waste any time.
Speaker 2: They poured money into research to push this capability, trying
to modulate those pulses to create more complex sounds.
Speaker 1: Or even intelligible secret messages.
Speaker 3: That was the goal.
Speaker 2: The record show this led to at least two major projects.
V two K, which is short for Voice to Skull
and Project MEDUSA. MEDUSA stood for mob Excess to turrent
using silent audio.
Speaker 1: The implication for espionage is just, I mean, it's staggering.
Imagine a field operative getting a complex command that absolutely
no one else.
Speaker 2: Can hear, right, it doesn't matter what the background noises
or what electronic countermeasures.
Speaker 3: Are in place.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate form of localized, silent psychological warfare.
Speaker 2: And what makes this file particularly disturbing is just the
complete lack of transparency around the testing phase. Unverified claims
started to emerge early on that some testing was on detainees.
Speaker 1: Not on willing volunteers.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the government has never to this day definitively
confirmed or denied those claims. And that ambiguity, that alone,
it just perpetuates this powerful form of psychological control, and
you know, constitutional distrust and.
Speaker 1: That total disregard for ethics, this willingness to test the
absolute limits of human control. It leads us directly into
the next bizarre chapter from the CIA archives. This one
deals with remote controlled animals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when people talk about the CIA's most you know,
far fetched projects. During the Cold War, everyone's mind goes
to Project mk.
Speaker 1: Ultra, the drug experiments, right always.
Speaker 2: But these recently released files they show a totally separate
and i'd say highly unsettling line of research. It was
all focused on biological remote.
Speaker 1: Control, and the key wasn't conditioning or training in the
usual sense.
Speaker 2: No, it was all technology. The method involves surgically implanting
these tiny electrodes deep inside the animal's brains.
Speaker 1: Started with rats, I believe, and then they moved onto dogs, right.
Speaker 2: And the setup was pretty elaborate. The animal would wear
a harness, and that harness had a stimulator.
Speaker 1: On it, and that stimulator would deliver electrical rewards or
stimulus signals to the brain through those.
Speaker 2: Electrodes, all triggered wirelessly from hundreds of yards away.
Speaker 1: A declassified letter confirms that after years of preliminary work
on this, by the mid nineteen sixties they had successfully
tested at least six dogs.
Speaker 2: And these were not just you know, theoretical lab exercises.
They could control these animals in an open field.
Speaker 1: Making them run, stop, turn left, or.
Speaker 2: Even follow complex pre programmed patterns, all controlled by a
hidden operator with a remote.
Speaker 1: For me, the takeaway here is what this shows about
the fundamental mindset of the CIA during that era. They
were just operating in an ethical vacuum totally. If they
could even conceive of some bizarre, cutting edge way to
get even the slightest tactical advantage, they would pour immense
resources into it.
Speaker 2: Whether it was manipulating human minds with.
Speaker 1: Drugs or controlling a living creature with radio waves, it
didn't matter.
Speaker 2: And that same bizarre ambition, this willingness to apply really unconventional,
far fetched ideas to global strategy wasn't just limited to
the ground or the inner ear.
Speaker 1: No, it also went high into the skies, which brings
us to I think the ultimate piece of weaponized visual
deception psychological warfare in the skies, the.
Speaker 2: Idea that the US military secretly tried to build a
flying saucer. I mean, it sounds like something torn straight
from the tabloids.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, but the g classified Air Force archives confirm it.
Millions of dollars were secretly spent trying to realize something
called Project seventeen ninety.
Speaker 2: Four, and the official specs for this thing were almost
unbelievable for the time. It was designed to be a
vertical takeoff and landing saucer zulsar, a literal flying saucer
capable of reaching one hundred thousand feet and flying at
mack fur.
Speaker 1: At that time, nothing else even came close to those
speeds or altitudes. Nothing.
Speaker 2: But what's truly revealing and what moves this from just
a failed engineering project into an active, documented psychological warfare
is the stated purpose right.
Speaker 1: From the nineteen fifty six report, which was finally published
in twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: And the report explicitly said the saucer would wage psychological warfare.
Speaker 3: On the Soviets.
Speaker 1: They actually wrote that down.
Speaker 3: They did.
Speaker 2: They believed that the mere sight of this impossible craft
would cause widespread panic, fear, confusion among the Soviet population.
Speaker 1: And that was in addition to its ability to deliver
conventional or nuclear bombs. They were actively trying to weaponize
the concept of a UFO.
Speaker 2: So when people back then were seeing mysterious, impossibly fast
objects in the sky, we.
Speaker 1: Were told they were crazy, or maybe they saw weather
balloon or something harmless.
Speaker 2: But the documented truth is the US military it was
actively trying to create a terrifying, visually inexplicable psychological weapon.
Speaker 1: Ultimately the tech failed, right it did.
Speaker 2: The engineers built the Avercar hovercraft prototype, but it could
barely get more than a few feet off then never
hit the speed.
Speaker 1: So it was scrapped as impractical.
Speaker 2: But the fact remains the concept of an unknown flying object,
which was later used to deflect attention from their own
failed engineering. Was initially a deliberate, documented, multi million dollar
strategy to inspire terror.
Speaker 1: So we start with this trifecta of unsettling facts. We
have tech designed to make you hear voices.
Speaker 3: Tech designed to remotely control life, and.
Speaker 1: Tech designed to weaponize site itself. These are all deliberate secrets,
and they show the lengths institutions will go to in
order to control your perception of reality. So if that
first section showed the fight for the human mind, this
next one reveals the fight for human existence itself. Let's
pivot now to what's been called the nuclear tightrope.
Speaker 2: We're focusing on the hair trigger nature of Cold War
systems and the frankly terrifying reality of how close we
came to global annihilation through technical errors or just deep misunderstanding.
Speaker 1: Understanding these near miss is so essential because they really
underscore the fundamental fragility of global stability even today.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we start with the ultimate mechanism of cold automated revenge.
Speaker 3: The Soviets developed the system known as.
Speaker 1: Perimeter, or more chillingly dead Hand by the people who
actually operated.
Speaker 2: It, and it sounds like something straight out of a
Doctor Strangelove movie, but it was horrifyingly real. It was
designed for one single unthinkable scenario.
Speaker 1: To automatically retaliate if a nuclear attack successfully wiped out
the entire Soviet leadership and severed all communication lines.
Speaker 2: The whole idea was to ensure mutual assured destruction mad
even if the entire human command chain was vaporized.
Speaker 1: The system itself is just this unsettling piece of engineering paranoia.
It's constantly watching a vast network of sensors all across
Soviet territory looking for what sharp pressure changes, massive radiation spikes,
intense seismic activity, anything that would indicate a strategic nuclear strike.
Speaker 2: And the mechanism for the lawn is designed around a
sequence of silence.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: If a strike is detected and the standard military command
structure remains silently unresponsive for a specific predetermined period of.
Speaker 1: Time, meaning the leaders are all gone, right.
Speaker 2: Then control shifts. It shifts to a small protected crew
sealed inside a deep, resilient bunker. Their only job is to.
Speaker 1: Confirm the silence, so they just have to agree that
Central command is gone and the country's under attack, and.
Speaker 2: If they do, they initiate the final automated mechanism. They
fire Special Command missiles.
Speaker 1: And it's important to note these missiles are not warheads aimed.
Speaker 3: At an enemy, no, not at all.
Speaker 2: They're essentially massive armored radio transmitters. They fly high over
the surviving nuclear silos and mobile missile units.
Speaker 1: And the transmit encrypted radio orders to launch everything that's left.
Speaker 2: It's an apocalyptic mechanism where the machine essentially inherits the
right to start World War three.
Speaker 1: The Soviet rationale, as grim as it is, was sort
of logical. They wanted to prevent the US from ever
attempting a decapitation.
Speaker 2: Strike because they'd know that even if the leadership is gone,
retaliation was absolutely guaranteed. But the chilling legacy of all this,
according to multiple reports and former officials, part of the
dead Hands system is still active today, a.
Speaker 1: Constant, low grade mechanical reminder of.
Speaker 2: Instability, and that instability nearly erupted during the Cord War's
closest call. That was NATO's nineteen eighty three exercise known
as Able Archer.
Speaker 1: Yearly drills are routine, but this one, this one was
designed to be so realistic that it almost triggered the
very war it was practicing.
Speaker 2: For the detail they included was extreme. The drill involved
simulating the entire escalation sequence.
Speaker 1: So moving warheads, practicing the release of authorization codes.
Speaker 2: And rapidly shifting alert levels to mimic a genuine countdown
to conflict. So to anyone watching from the outside, especially
Soviet intelligence.
Speaker 1: It looked exactly like the preparation for a genuine surprise
first strike.
Speaker 2: And Soviet intelligence the KGB the gru They were already
highly paranoid at the time. They were operating under the
explicit belief that the US might stage an attack under
the cover of a massive military exercise.
Speaker 1: So Able Archer, with its high realism, its use of
unique reserved code phrases, and the movement of strategic assets.
Speaker 2: It matched every single warning sign they were trained to
look for. The misinterpretation was profound and incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 1: Documents that came out later showed that Soviet commanders quietly
raised their readiness levels.
Speaker 2: They even positioned certain nuclear units in a launch ready
state because they believed the drill is about to escalate
into real hostilities.
Speaker 1: Wait, so military exercise wasn't just realistic, It actually used
real code phrases and movements. That seems like an inexcusable
operational failure.
Speaker 2: It was a failure of operational communication and perception, definitely,
and it was compounded by this deep mutual suspicion. Both
sides were using identical intelligence processes to detect a surprise attack.
Speaker 1: But one side failed to properly signal that their action
were just as simulation.
Speaker 2: It is still considered the most dangerous misunderstanding of the
entire Cold War. It just illustrates how close we came
to catastrophe based on a single misinterpreted action.
Speaker 1: And this final story in this section, it really shows
that these near misses weren't just confined to misunderstood intelligence
or doomsday devices. Sometimes it was just catastrophic mechanical.
Speaker 2: Failure combined with sheer terrifying randomness.
Speaker 1: As evidenced by the North Carolina New concident.
Speaker 2: This happened back in January nineteen sixty one, a B
fifty two bomber carrying two Mark thirty nine hydrogen bombs,
broke apart in midair over Goldsboro, North Carolina.
Speaker 1: And as the aircraft disintegrated, both nuclear weapons were released.
Speaker 2: One of the bombs just slammed into a swampy field,
and thankfully it failed completely on impact. But the second one,
its parachute deployed.
Speaker 1: And it went through almost every single step of a
real nuclear detonation sequence as it fell to Earth.
Speaker 2: Engineers who looked at it later determined that multiple layers
of safety systems had failed. The bomb one was equipped
with four safety mechanisms designed to prevent accidental detonation, and
three of them three of them the impact switch, the
barometric switch, the thermal sensing mechanisms. They either failed or were
disabled by the fall.
Speaker 1: So what was the saving grace?
Speaker 2: A single low voltage safety switch, an electro mechanical component
probably no bigger than your thumbnail, and that.
Speaker 1: One switch prevented the bomb from arming the final trigger.
Speaker 2: That single electrical connection stood between a routine aircraft accident
and an unprecedented, unparalleled catastrophe on American soil.
Speaker 1: We had to emphasize the scale of what was averted here.
Each of those bombs carried a four megaton payload.
Speaker 2: To put that in context, that's roughly two hundred and
sixty times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Speaker 1: So if that device had gone off.
Speaker 2: Engineers calculated a radioactive fallout would have spread across the
entire Eastern Seaboard. It could have contaminated Washington, d C, Baltimore, Philadelphia,
and major parts of New York.
Speaker 1: A microscopic piece of an electrical component save the lives
of millions. It really makes you stop and think about
the terrifying randomness of history.
Speaker 2: Definitely, these events, the mechanical doomsday machine, the misunderstood drill,
the failing safety switch, they all just underscore how precarious
our existence really was, and that secrets about military capabilities
often hide the most profound vulnerabilities.
Speaker 1: So, pivoting from those existential threats, we now have to
examine a darker, maybe more chronic danger. This section reveals
a documented pattern where powerful entities, corporations, and governments knowingly
prioritized profit and strategic advantage over the health and lives
of ordinary citizens.
Speaker 2: And these weren't accidents. That's the key These were long
term public health crises engineered by calculated deceit.
Speaker 1: We have to start with a disaster that fundamentally altered
human intelligence and development across the twentieth century, the leaded gas.
Speaker 2: Conspiracy tetra ethyl lead. It was added to gasoline starting
in the nineteen twenties as an anti knock agent to
improve engine performance.
Speaker 1: The benefits for engines were immediate, but the devastating human
cost was also known almost immediately.
Speaker 2: Lead is a severe, irreversible neurotoxin. Internal company memos showed
that scientists were actively warning executives at major corporations like
General Motors and.
Speaker 1: Standard Oil, warning them about what.
Speaker 2: That workers were fining and handling the lead were getting
violently sick. They were suffering from tremors, insanity, even death.
Speaker 1: So instead of stopping production or issuing warnings, the executives
chose a totally different strategy.
Speaker 2: A massive, coordinated public relations campaign. They insisted the product
was completely safe for public consumption. They aggressively fought against
any suggestion of danger.
Speaker 1: Even after a government study confirmed the severe hazards of
the fumes to the general public.
Speaker 2: And that government study the results were deliberately suppressed they
were kept quiet while the industry just continued its profitable marketing.
Speaker 1: The scale of this deception is just staggering. By the
time the US finally phased doubt leaded gasoline in the
nineteen seventies, a phase out that took.
Speaker 2: Decades, millions of children had absorbed led just by breathing
urban air. This historical exposure has been widely linked in
academic theory to subsequent rises in violent crime rates in
the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 1: Showing a century long societal cost for corporate profit.
Speaker 2: And it's a playbook that tragically we see repeated with
other industrial materials.
Speaker 1: Like the asbest discover up.
Speaker 2: The dangers of asbestos, a known cause of severe lung
disease and cancer, were documented by company doctors as early
as the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: But the deceit was systemic. Major firms actively hid the
medical data, They silenced internal critics.
Speaker 2: And crucially, they instructed their own medical staff not to
tell workers when their X rays showed initial signs of
lung damage.
Speaker 1: So they could ensure that miners, factory workers, construction crews
just kept breathing the fibers, all while operating under the
false assumption that they were safe.
Speaker 2: It took decades of massive lawsuits and whistleblower disclosure to
fully expose the scope of this cover up.
Speaker 1: And what's truly shocking is the institutional power they had
to delay essential public health measures. The US only banned
the very last remaining form of asbestos chrysotole in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Four, decades after most of Europe and other industrialized nations
recognized the danger and band it outright.
Speaker 1: Now, moving from these general industrial toxins to more targeted weaponry,
we can't talk about covert operations without getting into one
of the most infamous stories, the CIA's heart attack gun.
Speaker 2: Developed during the Cold War. This was an assassination weapon
designed specifically to be untraceable.
Speaker 1: It was essentially a modified M nineteen eleven pistol, but
instead of a standard bullet, it fired a tiny frozen
pellet of saxytoxin.
Speaker 2: Sexatoxin is a naturally occurring, extremely potent neurotoxin. You find
it in certain shellfish.
Speaker 1: And the pellet was microscopic, right about the width of
a human.
Speaker 2: Hair exactly, so it would leave only this minuscule red
pinprick when it penetrated the skin.
Speaker 1: And the mechanism of death was designed to mimic a
completely natural event.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Saxotoxin is a sodium channel blocker. It rapidly prevents nerve impulses,
which leads quickly to muscle paralysis and most importantly, respiratory failure.
Speaker 1: Which then causes the heart to stop. The victim would
just appear to have suffered a sudden fatal heart.
Speaker 3: Attack in this toxin.
Speaker 2: It came from a covert CIA program called Project mk Naomi,
which was supposed to have been completely destroyed after President
Nixon banned offensive biological weapons in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1: Nine, but the existence of the gun and the fact
they still had the toxin proved that some materials were
secretly retained.
Speaker 2: It just highlights the agency's persistent disregard for presidential directives
when it came to maintaining lethal deniable capabilities.
Speaker 1: And the military's willingness to use dangerous unseen biological agents
wasn't just limited to enemy targets. Declassified records confirmed that
the US military conducted over two hundred secret bioweapon tests
on American cities.
Speaker 2: This is one of the most alarming revelations about domestic
public health negligence These trials ran all through the nineteen
fifties and sixties, supposedly to test the country's vulnerability to
biological attacks.
Speaker 1: But the real shock is where and how they did it.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty nine, army operatives literally walked into the Pentagon,
the epicenter of military power, slipped into the building's ventilation system,
and sprayed a cloud of benign bacteria just to test
the distribution patterns.
Speaker 1: A year later, in nineteen fifty, they released large quantities
of microbes off the coats of Norfolk and San.
Speaker 2: Francisco, and leader monitoring confirmed that nearly the entire population
of San Francisco was exposed to these agents, which they
believed to be harmless surrogates for more dangerous passogens.
Speaker 1: The program then expanded significantly into the mid fifties, with
full city tests in places like Saint Louis, Minneapolis, and
even Winnipeg, Canada, and.
Speaker 2: Local officials were told the military was just doing atmospheric studies,
you know, studying smoke patterns.
Speaker 1: While teams were actually releasing live bacteria into the environment
to track their spread.
Speaker 2: We also learned about large scale airborne testing using airplanes
that spread particles over an area stretching more than one
thousand miles from South Dakota through Minnesota.
Speaker 1: The intent was to understand dissemination, but the consequence was
widespread secret exposure of non consenting citizens to potential biological agents,
all justified under the umbrella of national defense.
Speaker 2: The Soviet Union, of course, had its own terrifying capacity
for secrecy, which led to catastrophic hidden nuclear and biological disasters.
Speaker 1: We have to start with a Kishten disaster.
Speaker 2: In September nineteen fifty seven, a storage tank with highly
radioactive nuclear waste overheated and exploded at the Mayac Plutonium
complex in the Southern Urals. This was the largest nuclear
accident in the world before.
Speaker 1: Chernobyl, spreading contamination across twenty thousand.
Speaker 2: Square miles, and the Soviet response wasn't panic, It was
comprehensive cynical secrecy. They buried the incident entirely for thirty years.
Speaker 1: Villages near the blast zone were cleared in total secrecy,
were relocated without any explanation.
Speaker 2: And contaminated settlements were literally erased, just wiped off the
official map as if they never existed.
Speaker 1: They even used extreme misdirection. The nearby city of Kishtim
was used as a decoy name in official state documents
to hide the real strategic location of the Mayak weapons facility.
Speaker 2: The human toll was immense, hundreds of thousands of people exposed,
and the world only learned the specific details in nineteen
seventy six when a Soviet biologist, Jorge Medvey, who had
been exiled, published the evidence in the West.
Speaker 1: And a similar catastrophic cover up happened with the anthrax
leak near Sperdlovsk in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: This was the deadliest anthrax outbreak on record, killed dozens
of people, but it was officially blammed on contaminated meat
for over a decade.
Speaker 1: The official lie was simple and immediate, but.
Speaker 2: The pattern of deaths, as investigators later uncovered, told the
irrefutable truth. The fatalities lined up perfectly along this narrow
path leading away from a restricted military.
Speaker 1: Compound, a compound that was a Soviet facility producing anthrax
for its biological weapons program.
Speaker 2: The leak happened because a filter, an essential filter for
containing the spores, had been temporarily removed for maintenance.
Speaker 3: The wind just picked up the.
Speaker 2: Spores carried them directly across a busy neighborhood and caused
a massive, hidden, man made epidemic.
Speaker 1: And the government reflex was always the same denial, immediate deception,
and blaming external factors rather than admitting to a catastrophic
internal failure.
Speaker 2: So if the last seption focused on physical harm and poison,
this pivot brings us to the control of information and
the manipulation of political systems. We're looking at how powerful
interests shift their focus to maintaining control through unseen surveillance,
digital sabotage, and the subversion of democracy, all foreign and
domestic right and the most modern manifestation of this is
the idea of data as a psychological weapon, which was
really embodied by the camberd Analytica scandal revealed in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: This involved the political consulting firm secretly harvesting the personal
data of over fifty million Facebook users without their explicit consent,
and this.
Speaker 2: Was far more sophisticated than just simple demographic targeting. They
used Facebook quizzes and third party apps to scoop up
detailed user activity, your likes, your interests, even information about.
Speaker 1: Your friends to build what highly granular psychographic profiles.
Speaker 2: Exactly they weren't just guessing if you were a Democrat
or Republican. They were predicting exactly what type of messaging
would trigger an emotional or behavioral response in you.
Speaker 1: The whistleblower, Christopher Wiley, famously described the firm's methods as
a psychological warfare tool, and that description is key.
Speaker 2: They saw this massive data set not as a marketing database,
but as a mechanism for mass manipulation designed to influence elections.
Speaker 1: And what deepened the crisis was the platform's role. Facebook
reportedly knew about the massive data breach in twenty fifteen,
but they stayed silent for years.
Speaker 2: They only disclosed the issue when it became public knowledge
through the WA. It just underscores this severe power imbalance
when private entities control so much sensitive personal information.
Speaker 1: Data is now frequently compared to oil for a reason.
Speaker 2: It's an asset of immense strategic value that powerful groups
are highly motivated to use and lie about for their
own purposes.
Speaker 1: From this psychological manipulation, we move to physical digital sabotage.
We have to address digital weaponry and sabotage, and we
have to start with Stucksnet.
Speaker 2: Stucksnet emerged in twenty ten when it was discovered just
tearing through Iran's Natin's nuclear facility. It was immediately clear
that this wasn't random malware. This was surgically precise designed
by a nation state.
Speaker 1: Anti classified details later confirmed it was a joint US
Israeli operation developed under a covert program across multiple administrations.
Speaker 2: The goal was simple, sabotage Iran's nuclear progress without the
political cost of dropping a bomb. The execution was brilliant
and also terrifying.
Speaker 1: The malware specifically targeted the siemens controllers or pass that
govern the frequency converters running the centrifuges.
Speaker 2: And it used multiple unknown zero day exploits vulnerabilities the
software developers didn't even know existed to get access.
Speaker 1: Once it was inside stuck that would force the centrifuges
to spin themselves to destruction.
Speaker 2: While simultaneously creating a fake operational loop. It fed the
human operators perfectly normal, safe data, so they had.
Speaker 1: No idea they were actively watching their machines tear themselves apart.
Speaker 2: By the time Iran figured it out, reports suggest about
one thousand centrifuges were destroyed. Stucksnet demonstrated that major powers
could wage war digitally targeting critical infrastructure with invisible, precision
guided code, and.
Speaker 1: It set a dangerous global precedent for non kinetic warfare.
Speaker 2: Now compare that to the globalization of surveillance Pegasus spyware.
A twenty twenty one data leak exposed how the NSO Group,
a private Israeli company, sold military grade phone hacking software
to governments all over the world.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just about reading text messages. Pegasus ran
it's total invisible access to a target's phone.
Speaker 2: It allows whoever is operating it to read every message,
listen to calls, read emails, activate the microphone for real
time surveillance, and track.
Speaker 1: Location, in essence, seeing and hearing a user's entire life
without them ever knowing.
Speaker 2: The leak included a list of fifty thousand phone numbers
flagged as potential targets, and the targets weren't.
Speaker 1: Just criminals, no, The list included multiple heads of state,
human rights activists, reporters, and notably the family of Jamal Kushogi,
the well.
Speaker 2: Known writer killed inside the Saudi consulate in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: The investigation confirmed Pegas's had been linked to at least
eleven governments with hundreds of journalists and opposition figures on
the target lists. It represents a paradigm shift where tools
once reserved for top tier military intelligence are now sold commercially.
Speaker 2: And they often end up in the hands of regimes
with appalling human rights records. It's made global surveillance a
privatized industry of secrecy, and.
Speaker 1: The government's own internal inventory of these tools is deep,
as revealed by the NSA's secret menu right.
Speaker 2: The Edward Snowden leaks in twenty thirteen didn't just reveal
massive data collection programs. They revealed a physical document, a
fifty page NSA catalog called the ant Catalog.
Speaker 1: This sounds almost comical, but it's real. It was essentially
a secret Amazon catalog filled with hardware specifically designed by
the agency to physically infiltrate almost any device on the market.
Speaker 2: These were custom built gadgets for persistent, untraceable access.
Speaker 1: Think of tiny radio implants added to computers before they
even reached the.
Speaker 2: Buyer, or devices disguised as ordinary cables or USB plugs
that sent collected data out over hidden radio links. The
catalog showed the agency had a tool for every single scenario.
Speaker 1: One of the most famous examples was called cotton Mouth,
a device disguised as a regular USB connector. Its chilling
purpose was to open a wireless back door, even into
computers that were not connected to the Internet.
Speaker 2: Bypassing the crucial air gaps that are put in place
for maximum security.
Speaker 1: The implication is massive. The US government not only built
these master keys, but stockpiled specialized hardware designed specifically to
bypass modern encryption and tap into routers, servers, and personal
computers without a trace.
Speaker 2: As Snowden publicly argued, if a master key exists, it
will eventually be used against systems it wasn't intended for,
or it will fall into the wrong hands.
Speaker 1: Now, moving from digital infiltration to historical political maneuvering, we
have to look at foreign intervention and media control. The
case of overthrowing Iran's democracy is a critical piece of
twentieth century history that stayed hidden for decades.
Speaker 2: In twenty thirteen, the CIA finally released records that confirmed
what many historians had suspected. The agency, working closely with
British intelligence, engineered the nineteen fifty three coup that successfully
pushed Prime Minister Mohammad mosadog out.
Speaker 1: Of power and Mosadek had nationalized Iran's oil industry, which
directly threatened British and American economic interests. The documents they
released were stunning in their detail.
Speaker 2: They showed how peign operatives funded opposition networks, backed staged
street protests, and coordinated operations with the SHAW, who had
briefly fled the country.
Speaker 1: They even released maps detailing where hired groups were strategically
deployed to create tension and instability.
Speaker 2: With the explicit goal of turning public opinion against the
democratically elected leader. It was a textbook documented case of
using secret funds and manufactured unrest to subvert democracy for
strategic and economic gain.
Speaker 1: And this political subversion wasn't just limited to foreign nations. Domestically,
there was Operation Mockingberg.
Speaker 2: This program, exposed during the nineteen seventy five Church Committee hearings,
confirmed that the CIA launched secret campaigns in the nineteen
sixties to control and influence the American press.
Speaker 1: The agency recruited dozens of American and foreign journalists and
editors as assets. These individuals, working for major news outlets
would either write stories favorable to CIA objectives or publish
outright propaganda disguised as independent journalism.
Speaker 2: The CIA also funded cultural organizations and had ties to
publishing houses. The whole aim was to ensure that narratives
favorable to Washington's foreign policy objectives dominated the public discussion.
Speaker 1: While the full scope is still debated, the fact that
the CIA covertly paid or persuaded media personnel to report
desired narratives is documented and established.
Speaker 2: And finally, we have to examine the ultimate form of
pervasive internal surveillance, the informant state in East Germany.
Speaker 1: When the Berlin Wall fell and the regime collapsed in
nineteen eighty nine, the Stasi, the secret police, they panicked.
Speaker 2: They literally began tearing their files apart by hand. They
left fifteen thousand sacks stuffed with ripped pages, as hoping
the decades of surveillance records would never be reconstructed.
Speaker 1: But the painstaking historical effort by archivists to restore these
documents has been ongoing for decades, sorting fragments by color, paper, texture,
handwriting to rebuild these documents.
Speaker 2: And the deepest, most shocking betrayal revealed in those rebuilt
files wasn't the surveillance tech itself. It was the sheer
terrifying scale of the informant network. The Stasse recruited neighbors, coworkers.
Speaker 1: In a shocking number of cases, even family members.
Speaker 2: The human cost of this system was unimaginable. One woman
discovered through the reconstructed files that her own husband had
been reporting on her for years, detailing their private conversations
and disagreements.
Speaker 1: Another case documented a mother being awarded a state medal
for informing on her own son's political activities.
Speaker 2: By the nineteen eighties, estimates suggests there was roughly one
full time or part time informer for every six or
seven citizens. It illustrates a system where social trust was
systematically annihilated at the most basic levels of human interaction.
Speaker 1: Our final major thread tonight addresses the blurring of military
and political lines. It focuses on unacknowledged historical harms, strategic
support for hostile regimes, and the profound lack of accountability
that often follows these covert decisions.
Speaker 2: We have to start with the uncomfortable truth of US
involvement in I Rock's chemical weapons campaign during the nineteen
eighties Iran Iraq War.
Speaker 1: It's tragically well documented that Sado Hussein's forces used horrific
weapons must gas and nerve agents on Iranian troops and
even on Iraqi citizens.
Speaker 2: What took longer to surface was the specific, alarming extent
of American knowledge of this. Declassified CIA files showed that
US officials were regularly updated on the specifics of Iraq's.
Speaker 1: Attacks, including specific details on where chemical agents were being
used and the frequency of deployment. They were just vaguely
aware they knew the details.
Speaker 2: And despite the specific ongoing knowledge of war crimes, the
US continued to provide a rock with crucial battlefield intelligence.
This included satellite images, detailed troop movement maps, and tactical
analysis of Iranian positions.
Speaker 1: The chilling implication is clear this intelligence directly aided Iraq's
war effort, including those offensives where chemical weapons were utilized.
Speaker 2: The priority was pure geopolitical strategy. Weake in Iran at
all costs, even at the known documented cost of facilitating
the u of internationally banned chemical agents against militarier and
civilian targets.
Speaker 1: Next, we have to address the profound lack of internal
accountability regarding unacknowledged war crimes.
Speaker 2: In Vietnam in the early nineteen seventies, the Pentagon quietly
assembled a massive non public archive detailing war crimes committed
by US forces during the conflict. This archive was successfully
hidden for decades.
Speaker 1: When the files were finally declassified, they confirmed over three
hundred separate documented atrocities across every single US division that
served in Vietnam.
Speaker 2: This file showed that internal investigators determined at least two
hundred and three soldiers should have faced charges for their
actions based on the collected evidence, Yet when it came
to actual justice, the system failed catastrophically. Only fifty seven
were ever court martialed, and fewer than two dozen were
ultimately convicted.
Speaker 1: Most walked away with reduced sentences, simple reprimands, or just
escaped consequences entirely.
Speaker 2: The existence of this massive non public archive proves that
the military establishment was fully aware of the scope of
these violations at the time, Yet the deliberate lack of
accountability ensured that the truth of those events remained a secret,
undermining the possibility of justice or genuine institutional reform for
nearly half a century.
Speaker 1: After nine to eleven, the secretive state expanded its reach
globally with the post nine to eleven Black Sites and
interrogation program.
Speaker 2: The CIA established a global network of off the book's prisons,
the black sites, often with the cooperation of Allied countries.
Speaker 1: Detainees captured in counter terror operations were moved between these
clandestine sites, held without legal counsel, and questioned under conditions
that the later twenty fourteen Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed
broke both US and international law.
Speaker 2: That Senate report, even with heavy redaction, made it clear
that lines no democracy should ever cross, were indeed breached.
About one hundred and nineteen men were cycled through these
black sites, with.
Speaker 1: Thousands more held in places like Abu Grave and Guantanamo,
often without ever being formally charmed.
Speaker 2: This network of secrecy created a legally ambiguous space outside
the reach of the rule of law, undermining the very
principles the operations were supposedly defending.
Speaker 1: And this next point touches on a far more subtle,
but i'd say pervasive form of manipulation the military's reach
into sports and culture.
Speaker 2: Think of the pregame patriotic pageantry you see today, the anthem,
the giant flag across the field, the military jet flyovers.
It feels like an authentic, organic American tradition.
Speaker 1: It wasn't organic at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: A twenty fifteen Senate report revealed it from the mid
two thousands into the twenty tens, the Department of Defense
and the National Guard paid major professional sports leagues, the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL,
and college programs millions of dollars specifically distaged these moments
on camera.
Speaker 2: The purpose was strategic marketing. It was to make military
service highly visible, admirable, and emotionally appealing, and thereby boost
recruitment numbers.
Speaker 1: The money turned spontaneous patriotism into paid advertising, or, as
the report called it, paid patriotism.
Speaker 2: The most surprising anecdote from the report is that before
two thousand and nine, NFL players didn't even stand on
the field for the national anthem. They often waited in
the locker room.
Speaker 1: That tradition of standing on the field for the anthem
only began after the money started flowing from the DoD
to the leagues. It completely reframes that entire cultural touchstone.
Speaker 2: Finally, we have to revisit the historical compromises made right
after World War Two with the uncomfortable legacy of Operation
paper Clip.
Speaker 1: As the war ended, the US and the Soviet Union
raced to secure German scientific talent. The US effort was
paper clip.
Speaker 2: President Truman issued an outward directive saying that nobody with
active Nazi involvement or who supported the regime could be
brought into the program.
Speaker 1: But the problem was many of the best rocket scientists
and aerospace engineers had deep ties to the Nazi war machine.
Speaker 2: So to get around the order, officials within the Joint
Intelligence Subjectives Agency, the entity running the operation simply rewrote biographies,
removed documents, they sanitized records, and they deliberately hid the
wartime activities of key scientists to ensure they passed security checks.
Speaker 1: A number of these men had worked in programs that
relied on forced labor or committed other.
Speaker 2: Abuses, and while the scientific benefits were immediate and clear,
I mean individuals like Werner von Braun were essential to
developing the US based program, the cost was a documented
cover up of their past complicity.
Speaker 1: Decades later, when the truth surfaced, several recruits like Arthur
Rudolph and Walter Schreiver came under intense scrutiny and were
pushed out of the US.
Speaker 2: The cover up itself is now a documented chapter of
the program. It demonstrates the willingness of the US government
to compromise ethical and moral boundaries for strategic technological advantage
during the intensity of the Cold War. We have covered
so much ground today moving through some of the darkest,
most carefully guarded secrets of the last century, from weaponizing
sound and data, to hiding massive public health catastrophes and
covering up historical atrocities.
Speaker 1: What really synthesizes the core theme of all these sources
is a clear and deeply troubling pattern. Institutional secrecy is
systematically used to manage specific.
Speaker 2: Outcomes, whether political, military, or economic, and.
Speaker 1: Almost always at the profound expense of public transparency and
human safety.
Speaker 2: We even saw how cynical geopolitics could infect seemingly moral causes.
Consider the funding that was provided to the Dalai Lama.
Declassified files showed that through the nineteen sixties and seventies,
the CIA funneled millions into Tibetan resistance groups fighting Chinese control.
Speaker 1: And they even sent significant support money directly to the
Dalai Lama's office while he was in exile.
Speaker 2: Washington's goal wasn't a mystery, it was pure Cold War
strategy aimed at weakening communists China by keeping a high profile,
low cost resistance alive.
Speaker 1: The Dali Lama himself later wrote that the funding had
far more to do with that cynical geopolitical strategy than
any genuine, sustained push for Tibetan independence.
Speaker 2: So even support that that appears noble can be deeply
entangled in systematic secrecy.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. I think the biggest
secret isn't the exotic technology or the specific disaster. It's
the predictable, repetitive nature of these cover ups across different
decades in different governments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, whether it's the Stossy deceiving families in the eighties
or Facebook deceiving users about massive data breaches in the
twenty tens.
Speaker 1: The methods of manipulation evolve from informants to spyware, but
the motivation remains frighteningly constant.
Speaker 2: Maintain power and avoid accountability by controlling the public's perception
of reality.
Speaker 1: All these threats, from V two K technology designed to
make you hear secret commands to Cambridge Analytica using psychographic
data to micro target your fears, they all show that
the ultimate goal of institutional deception isn't just control of
resources or territory, it's.
Speaker 2: The control of reality itself.
Speaker 1: Every thread we've pulled today confirms that the actions of institutions,
whether government, corporate, or military, are often dictated by self
interest and hidden from the public record until they are
forced into the light by decades of investigative work or
the brave actions of whistleblowers.
Speaker 2: We've seen verifiable, documented deceptions across every major entity. So
if the facts show that powerful actors consistently use secrets
to manage outcomes, and that they're willing to compromise the
truth for strategic or financial advantage.
Speaker 1: What institution today do you still trust implicitly to guard
the truth? And why let us know what stands out
to you.