Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second.
Picture of the moon. It's just hanging there in the
night sky. You know, silver serene, the same moon humans
have looked at for thousands of years. Now, imagine a
flash of light on its surface and then this massive,
silent mushroom cloud just blooming across the craters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a terrifying image. It feels like the opening
scene of some dystopian sci fi movie.
Speaker 1: It does, right. But here's the thing. It wasn't a
movie script. It was a budget item. It was a
real plan on a real desk in the Pentagon.
Speaker 2: It actually was.
Speaker 1: Or how about this one. Imagine a robot, a tactical
machine of war, trundling across a battlefield. It doesn't run
on gas, it doesn't plug into a wall. It fuels
itself well by eating.
Speaker 2: The biomass engine. That one always gives me the cruise.
Speaker 1: We see it eats plants. But in a war zone,
organic matter is a pretty loose term.
Speaker 2: It certainly is a very loose term.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. I am your host, and today
my brain is already hurting.
Speaker 2: I'm here to try to make some sense of the headache.
Or at least sharing it.
Speaker 1: We are doing something a little different today. Usually we
take one topic and sort of swim around the edges.
Today we are pulling at the loose threads of the
world's most secretive organization. We are looking at the Pentagon.
And when you pull these threads, what unravels is honestly,
it's just insane.
Speaker 2: It really is. We're looking at a massive collection of
you know, declassified documents, historical reports, project files, and what
we're finding isn't just dry military strategy.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. We are finding bat bombs, we
are finding psychic spies, we are finding false flag operations
that would make a conspiracy theorist blush. So welcome to
thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: Glad to be here, and you're absolutely right. The sheer
volume of weird in these files is staggering.
Speaker 1: We have fifty count them, fifty insane secrets to get through.
And the question I want to ask right at the
top is what happens when you give a group of
people like unlimited money, zero oversight, and a level of
paranoia that borders on clinical psychosis.
Speaker 2: You get the history of the US Department of Defense.
Speaker 1: Apparently exactly, we are just reading history today, we're kind
of auditing the sanity of the military industrial complex.
Speaker 2: Which is a tall order.
Speaker 1: So let's start at the beginning. Ground zero. The building itself,
the Pentagon.
Speaker 2: The very symbol of American military power.
Speaker 1: You see it in movies, you see it on the news.
It looks like this eternal fortress, like it's been there
since the dawn of time and will be there until
the sun explodes. But looking at the origin story, it
seems like it was just slapped together in a panic.
Speaker 2: Panic might be the strong word, but rush is definitely accurate.
You have to understand the context. It's the early nineteen forties.
Hitler is marching across Europe. The War Department in Washington,
DC is frankly a mess. Miss how they're scattered across
seventeen different buildings. They have people working in temporary shacks
on the National Mall. It was completely inefficient and you know,
dangerous from a security standpoint.
Speaker 1: So they needed a home base, central nervous system. Enter
bring your general Brehon B. Somerville. Right.
Speaker 2: Somerville was a man who, from all accounts, did not
like the word no, and he really didn't like the
word weight. He wanted a massive complex to house the
entire brain of the US military, and the story goes
he essentially sketched the idea out over a weekend, a
weekend for the penticast basic concept. Yeah, that's how fast
he moved.
Speaker 1: And the timeline is just it's spooky. I know we
don't do neurology here, but when did they actually break
ground on it?
Speaker 2: September eleventh, nineteen forty one.
Speaker 1: September eleventh, exactly sixty years to the day before the
building was attacked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sends a shiver down your spine. It's an
unbelievable coincidence.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But back in nineteen forty one, nobody was thinking about
two thousand and one. They were thinking about budget approvals.
And this brings us to the first major secret about
the building itself. It is built on a lie. A lie,
what kind of lie, A massive bureaucratic lie. See, Congress
didn't want to pay for a fortress. The prevailing thought was, Okay,
we need this for the war, but once we the Nazis,
the military will shrink back down.
Speaker 1: So it was a wartime expense exactly.
Speaker 2: So Somerville and the planners pitched the Pentagon as a
temporary structure temporary.
Speaker 1: They poured forty three thousand tons of steel into a
temporary building.
Speaker 2: That was the sales pitch. They literally argued that after
World War Two the building would be converted, maybe it
would become a massive records warehouse, maybe a hospital, maybe
just office space for the Veterans administration.
Speaker 1: That is the ultimate foot in the door technique. Honey,
let's just buy the ferrari.
Speaker 2: We could use it as a grocery Keetter later precisely,
don't worry about the cost. It's multipurpose. And because they
were rushing, because they were selling this temporary lie, they
weren't exactly careful about where they put it. They didn't
choose an empty field.
Speaker 1: No, I was looking at the maps in the file.
This wasn't a swamp. This was a place called East Arlington,
and it had neighborhoods with these incredible names, Queen City
and the one that sticks at Hell's Bottom.
Speaker 2: Hell's Bottom gets a lot of attention, and you can
see why the name implies it was this dangerous, sleazy slum,
and the government certainly used that narrative to justify it.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't the reality.
Speaker 2: Not really. If you look at the records, These were
thriving communities. They were populated largely by the descendants of
freed slaves.
Speaker 1: Right it says here one hundred and fifty families were
living there. There were churches, pawn shops, homes, a whole community.
Speaker 2: A whole community. And because the War Department needed its
temporary office building right now, they just used eminent domain
to wipe it all away.
Speaker 1: So they displaced an entire historic black community for a
building they claimed they might not even keep.
Speaker 2: That's the tragic irony of its origin and the construction itself.
Oh wow. It was managed by a man named Leslie Groves.
Lieutenant General Lisley Groves.
Speaker 1: Why do I know that name? That name is so familiar.
Speaker 2: You know him because right after he finished building the Pentagon,
he was put in charge of the Manhattan.
Speaker 1: Project, the atomic bomb guy, of course.
Speaker 2: The very same. So you have the same man overseeing
the construction of the military's brain and then immediately moving
on to build the military's ultimate fist.
Speaker 1: That's quite a resume.
Speaker 2: And interestingly, Groves later joked that building the Pentagon was
actually more stressful for him than building the bomb.
Speaker 1: I can almost believe it. The stats in here are
just mind boggling. Six hundred and eighty thousand tons of
sand and gravel. They had fourteen thousand tradesmen working around
the clock.
Speaker 2: They built the largest office building in the world in
just sixteen months. It was a mobilization of industry that
really rivaled the war effort itself.
Speaker 1: But here we are, over eighty years later, the temporary
building is still standing, and apparently it's still a black
hole for money. I was reading the audit section of
these files and I actually laughed out loud, not a
happy laugh of this is painful laugh.
Speaker 2: The financial black hole of the DoD. It's legendary.
Speaker 1: The file says that between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty four,
the Department of Defense confirmed fraud totaling ten point eight
billion dollars.
Speaker 2: That is billion with a B. It's a number so
big it's hard to even comprehend.
Speaker 1: It's an incomprehensible amount of money. If you lost ten
pointy billion dollars, you could fund NASA for half a year,
you could end homelessness in major cities. And the Pentagon
just lost it to fraud.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a mix of things. It's bad actors for sure,
but it's also just terrible accounting and a system so
complex and so vast that nobody actually knows where every
single dollar goes.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's not even fraud, it's just catastrophic stupidity.
Oh yeah, we have to talk about the camouflage. This
is my absolute favorite example of just having money to burn.
Speaker 2: The Afghan National Army uniform scandal a classic.
Speaker 1: So set the scene for us.
Speaker 2: We are in Afghanistan, right, So the landscape of Afghanistan
is varied, but a huge portion of the fighting happens
in desert, rocky terrain. We're talking browns, tans, beige with
tones exactly. So in twenty seventeen it comes out that
the Pentagon spent twenty eight million dollars designing and manufacture
during camouflage uniforms for the Afghan Army, and the pattern
they chose was a lush, dark forest.
Speaker 1: Green, forest green for the desert.
Speaker 2: It was a pattern designed for a dense woodland environment,
like you know, a temperate forest in North America or Europe.
Speaker 1: So essentially, we spend twenty eight million dollars to turn
our allies into glowing green targets against the sand.
Speaker 2: Effectively, yes, it provided negative concealment. It actually made them
easier to see.
Speaker 1: Why was there a scientific study? Did they test it?
What was the logic?
Speaker 2: There was no logic. That's the best part. The report
found that the Afghan Minister of Defense at the time
was looking through a catalog, saw the forest green pattern
and just liked it. He thought it looked cool.
Speaker 1: Marshall, you're kidding. He picked it like he was picking
out wallpaper.
Speaker 2: And apparently nobody at the Pentagon said, sir, that's for
a forest and you're in a sandbox. They just signed
the check.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: There was a great quote from the Special Inspector General
involved in the report. He asked, and I'm paraphrasing, what
if the Minister of Defense liked pink, would we have
seen sent them pink uniforms.
Speaker 1: That's a valid question. It really highlights that while the
Pentagon is a place of high strategy and very serious people,
it is also a massive bureaucracy. And like any bureaucracy,
if the paperwork assigned, common sense sometimes just goes.
Speaker 2: Right out the window, and twenty eight million dollars goes
with it.
Speaker 1: Speaking of things going out the window, let's move to
thread too. If the building was built on Hell's bottom.
Some of the ideas that came out of it seemed
like they were conceived in a fever dream. I call
this the Looney Tunes era of warfare.
Speaker 2: The Animals and Nature files. This is where you see
the desperation of World War two driving people to try
literally anything.
Speaker 1: I mentioned this in the intro project X Ray the
Bat Bombs. I need you to walk me through the
logic here. How does a dentist actist yea, convince the
President of the United States to weaponize bats.
Speaker 2: It's a great story, Doctor Little Adams. He was a dentist,
but he was also an amateur inventor and crucially a
friend of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: Ah the connection, that's the key.
Speaker 2: He was on vacation at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico,
beautiful place, stunning, and he's watching these millions of Mexican
free tailed bats fly out of the cave at dusk.
It's like a river of bats in the sky. And
this is right after Pearl Harbor. The country is angry,
looking for payback, and Adams has this thought. Bats can
carry things, Bats seek darkness to hide and Japanese cities
are largely made of wood and paper, So.
Speaker 1: He does the math bat plus bomb equals fire exactly.
Speaker 2: He drafted a proposal. He argued that if you released
thousands of bats, each carrying a tiny time delayed and
sendiary bomb, they would scatter over a Japanese city. They
would fly into the attics, the eaves, the bamboo walls
to hide from the daylight, and then the timers go
off and suddenly you have thousands of fires starting simultaneously
from inside the structures. The fire department would be overwhelmed instantly,
the whole city burns.
Speaker 1: Down diabolically clever I have to make in theory.
Speaker 2: In theory, it's brilliant. Because he had that connection to
the roosevelts. The plan actually got greenlit. The Marine Corps
was assigned to test it. They designed these little canisters
to hold the bats. They figured out how to cool
the bats down so they would hibernate during transport.
Speaker 1: So they're dropping sleeping bats, right.
Speaker 2: They dropped from a plane in this canister. It opens
and they wake up as they fall, deploy their wings
and fly off to find a place to roost.
Speaker 1: So what happened? Why didn't we win the war with
an army of bats.
Speaker 2: Well, they did a live fire test, or maybe a
live bat test, at the Carl's Bad Army Airfield. They
armed the bats, they released them. But bats are wild animals.
They don't follow military orders.
Speaker 1: They didn't go to the mock Japanese village they built.
Speaker 2: Some did, but a lot of them just looked for
the nearest dark, warm place to hide, which happened to
be under the fuel tanks of the base, under the barracks,
inside the hangar, under the general's car. Oh no, the
bats roosted, the timers went off, and they incinerated the
air force base. They burned down the very facility that
was testing them.
Speaker 1: Talk about friendly fire. Yeah, so they proved it worked,
just on the wrong target.
Speaker 2: It was uncontrollable, and eventually the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb,
was nearing completion. The military decided that one big, reliable
bomb was better than a million, tiny, furry, unpredictable arsonists.
So Project X RAY was shelved.
Speaker 1: It is just wild that nuclear annihilation was the sane
alternative in that scenario. Yeah, but they didn't just try
to weaponize the sky. They tried to weaponize the ocean itself.
Project Seal the Tsunami bomb right.
Speaker 2: This was a joint operation with New Zealand in nineteen
forty four, and the logic was simple, If a natural
tsunami can wipe out a coast, can we artificially create one.
Speaker 1: They wanted to play Poseidon pretty much.
Speaker 2: They detonated massive amounts of explosives underwater just off the coast,
trying to trigger a tidal wave. They thought if they
could just get the rhythm right, if they could blast
the water in a specific sequence, they could generate a
thirty foot wave to wash away coastal defenses or e
than entire cities.
Speaker 1: But physics had a different opinion.
Speaker 2: Physics said no, a very firm no. It turns out
the energy required to move that much of the ocean
is exponentially higher than conventional explosives can provide. Even later
calculations showed that detonating a nuclear bomb underwater wouldn't create
a city destroying wave. It would just create a very
radioactive splash and a lot of dead fish.
Speaker 1: So much for that. I appreciate the ambition, though, let's
just invent a tidal wave. But my favorite animal project
has to be the pigeon guided bomb because this involves
BF Skinner, the famous behavioral psychologist.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is before microchips, before GPS. Guidance systems in
the forties were terrible. If you dropped a bomb from
a high altitude, you were lucky if it hit the
right neighborhood. Skinner said, you know, it has a great eyesight,
great reflexes, and can be trained with positive reinforcement.
Speaker 1: Pigeons, so describe the interface for me. The pigeon isn't
flying the plane with a tiny joystick, right, not.
Speaker 2: A joystick, a touch screen, well more of a a
pex screen.
Speaker 1: I love it.
Speaker 2: The pigeon is strapped into a custom harness. Inside the
missile's nose cone. There is a lens that projects an
image of the ground, say a battleship, onto a small
screen in front of the bird. The pigeon has been
trained to peck at the image of the ship to
get a food.
Speaker 1: Pellet, so it sees the ship. It pecks the ship simple.
Speaker 2: Enough, and the screen is conductive. The pecking mechanically operates
the fins. If the image of the ship moves to
the left of the screen, the pigeon pecks to the
left and the missile turns left to recenter it. They
actually had a system with three pigeons for.
Speaker 1: Redundancy, democracy and guidance systems.
Speaker 2: Two out of three pigeons vote to turn left. Its
majority rule.
Speaker 1: Did it? Did it work?
Speaker 2: It worked brilliantly in simulations. The pigeons were incredibly accurate.
They were unjammable, they didn't need batteries. They were practically
fool proof. But the military brass just couldn't get past
the giggle factor. They couldn't seriously field a weapon system
that relied on bird seed.
Speaker 1: That's a shame. It would have changed the phrase bird
brain forever. But let's jump to the modern day. Because
the animal inspiration hasn't stopped, it's just become robotic.
Speaker 2: We have to talk about the etr robot AH, the
energetically autonomous tactical robot.
Speaker 1: This feels like the prequel to the Matrix of the Terminator.
This is how the machines take over.
Speaker 2: Well, the concept addresses a real problem supply lines. A
tank needs gas, a truck needs diesel. If you are
deep in enemy territory, refueling is one of the most
dangerous things you can do. So DARPA funded a robot
that could forge for its own fuel. It has a
buyer mass.
Speaker 1: Engine, meaning it burns organic matter to generate electricity.
Speaker 2: Exactly sticks leaves, grass, wood chips. It has a robotic
arm that grabs vegetation, shoves it into a combustion chamber,
and just keeps going indefinitely.
Speaker 1: But the Internet immediately pointed out the flaw in the
pr Organic matter includes well everything dead bodies, right if
this thing is roaming a battlefield and there are casualties
human or animal.
Speaker 2: The creators issued a very antic press release insisting the
robot as a strict vegetarian. They swore they had programmed
it to recognize and distinguished plant matter from animal matter.
But just the image, the idea of a military robot
eating to survive it triggers a primal fear in us.
Speaker 1: It's the industrialization of predation. We don't like it. Nice robot, here,
have a salad, Please don't eat my leg.
Speaker 2: It creates a psychological barrier that is just very hard
to overcome, even if it is perfectly harmless.
Speaker 1: Let's move away from the flesh eating robots and look
up way up thread number three, the nuclear obsession.
Speaker 2: If the animal ideas were about creativity. The nuclear ideas
were about brute force and insecurity.
Speaker 1: Specifically the insecurity of the Cold War Project A one
nineteen the plan to nuke the Moon.
Speaker 2: Context is absolutely key here. It's the late fifties. The
Soviets have just launched Sputnik. They're winning the space race.
The American public is terrified. They look up at the
night sky and think the Russians are up there looking
down on us. The US government felt they needed a
gesture that it was impossible to ignore a show of force, So.
Speaker 1: They didn't want to land on the Moon. They wanted
to attack it.
Speaker 2: The plan was to launch a nuclear warhead to the
terminator line of the Moon, that's the border between the
light side and the dark side. Upon detonation, the massive
dust cloud would be illuminated by the sun. It would
be a huge glowing spectacle, visible to everyone on Earth
with the naked eye.
Speaker 1: It was a cosmic billboard, a piece of graffiti on
the Moon that said, look what we can do.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to put it. It had zero
scientific value. It was purely psychological warfare. We can touch
the Moon and we can.
Speaker 1: Destroy it, so why didn't they do it?
Speaker 2: Cooler heads prevailed, someone finally did the math on the
potential pr fallout. Imagine if the rocket failed on launch
and crashed back to Earth, You've just nuked your own country.
Or what if it succeeds, You've just desecrated the celestial
body that all of humanity shares. You'd instantly become the
villains of the Solar System. They decided that a human
landing the Apollo program was a much better symbol of superiority.
Speaker 1: Oh goodness for that, But they didn't stop trying to
find uses for nukes. Project Ryan is the one that
really breaks my brain. This wasn't a weapon. It was
an engine.
Speaker 2: Nuclear pulse propulsion, and this is real physics. The idea
is to build a massive spaceship with a giant steel
pusher plate on the back. You then eject a small
nuclear bomb out the back, detonate it, and the blast
wave hits the plate and pushes the ship forward.
Speaker 1: You are literally surfing on a continuous series of nuclear explosion.
Speaker 2: Boom push, boom, push, over and over. It sounds insane,
like something whilely Coyote would draw up, but the physics
is sound and it is incredibly efficient. It would have
allowed us to build massive ships battleship size and get
them to Mars in weeks or Saturn in months.
Speaker 1: We could have been a solar system spanning civilization by
the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: It's very likely, yes, But the downside is the fallout.
Every single launch from Earth would release massive amounts of
radiation into the atmosphere. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of
nineteen sixty three, which banned atmospheric testing, effectively killed the project.
We chose clean air over fast space travel.
Speaker 1: A fair trade, I suppose, yeah. But if they could
put nukes in space, they certainly tried to hide them
under the ice. Project ice Worm.
Speaker 2: This is a story of incredible engineering hubris versus the
unstoppable reality of nature. In the late fifties, the US
built a secret base under the Greenland ice sheet. It
was called Camp.
Speaker 1: Sentry, and the cover story was polar research, right, and.
Speaker 2: They did do some legitimate research. They drilled the first
ice cores that helped us understand ancient climates. But the
real top secret mission was Project ice Worm. The plan
was to dig twenty five hundred miles of tunnels under
the ice to house six hundred nuclear missiles, a.
Speaker 1: Mobile launch site hidden into the glare of the Arctic,
red on the Soviet storstep. It's strategically brilliant.
Speaker 2: It was. They built the city, They had a movie theater,
a chapel, a portable nuclear reactor for power. It was
an absolute marvel of engineering. But they forgot one very
important thing. What's that glacier's move?
Speaker 1: Ah, the ice isn't static, not at all.
Speaker 2: It flows. It's like a very very slow river. The
tunnel started warping and de forming almost immediately. Walls crushed
in the ceiling of the reactor room began to lower.
The glacier was slowly but surely eating the base.
Speaker 1: They were fighting geology, and geology always wins.
Speaker 2: It does. They had to abandon it in nineteen sixty six.
And here's the lingering horror story. When they left, they
assumed the continuous snowfall would bury the base forever. But
with climate change, the ice sheet is melting. There is
a very real fear that the toxic waste, the sewage,
and the radioactive coolant from the reactor left behind at
Camp Sentry could be exposed in the next few decades.
Speaker 1: So the secrets are literally sawing out. Exactly before we
leave the nuclear topic, we have to talk about fog bank.
That sounds like a mystery novel, the Case of the
Lost fog Bank.
Speaker 2: This is less about explosions and more about institutional memory loss,
which can be just as scary. Fog Bank is a
code name for a material. We don't know exactly what
it is. It's classified some kind of aerogel or fun
but it is a critical component for the W seventy
six warhead. It's the interstage material that channels the X
rays from the primary fission explosion to trigger the secondary
fuson explosion.
Speaker 1: So without fog bank, the nuke is a dud. A
thermonuclear bomb doesn't go thermal correct.
Speaker 2: The US stopped making this material in the eighties. They
closed the facility. The scientists who knew the process retired
or passed away. The notes were well they were archived.
Fast forward to the two thousands, the Navy needs to
refurbish these warheads and extend their life. They go to
the archives to find the recipe for fog bank and
they couldn't make it work. They had literally forgotten how
to manufacture this critical, top secret material. They had the
chemical formula, but there was some art to the process
a specific temperature, a certain humidity, a particular mixing speed
that wasn't written down.
Speaker 1: It's like your grandma's cookie recipe where she just says,
add a pinch of love. But here, if you miss
the pinch, the nuclear deterrent fails.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect analogy. They had to spend millions of
dollars in years of research to reverse engineer their own invention.
It's a terrifying reminder that knowledge is fragile. Even classified
top secret knowledge can just fade away if you don't
actively maintain it.
Speaker 1: That's wild. Let's move to a thread that is less
about science and more about well obsession, specifically the Pentagon's
obsession with one man Del Castro.
Speaker 2: Ah Cuba, the Operation Mongoose era. This is where the
lines between military strategy and a fratthouse prank war get
incredibly blurry.
Speaker 1: The man in charge was Brigadier General Edward Lansdale. We
have to give his background because it explains everything. He
was a psychological warfare gas He was a.
Speaker 2: Legend in that field. In the Philippines fighting the Huck rebellion.
He staged fake vampire attacks.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, what fake vampire attacks?
Speaker 2: I'm serious. He knew the local gorillas were superstitious about
a creature in their folklore called in a swan, a
sort of vampire like creature. So Lansdale's men would snatch
a rebel patrolman from the rear of his patrol, punch
two holes in a drain all the blood from his body,
and leave him on the trail for his comrades to
find in the morning. My god, the rebels would find
the body, think the swine is hunting us, and flee
the area in terror.
Speaker 1: That is horrifyingly creative. So they put this guy in
charge of getting rid of Castro, and he.
Speaker 2: Brought that same creative energy to the job. The ideas
they generated were just wild.
Speaker 1: Let's run through a few of them. Operation Free Ride.
Speaker 2: The concept was simple, drop thousands of one way airline
tickets to Mexico or Venezuela over Cuban cities. The goal
was to induce a massive brain drain. Here's your free
ticket out. They thought, if all the doctors, engineers and
professionals left the country would collapse on its own.
Speaker 1: Okay, and what about Operation full Up.
Speaker 2: That one was biological warfare, but against engines. They wanted
to sneak agents into Cuba to spike the fuel supplies
with a biological agent that would eat the gasoline or
you know, clog the engines of trucks and tanks, and then.
Speaker 1: They blame the Soviets for sending bad gas exactly.
Speaker 2: The goal was to make Castro distrust his allies.
Speaker 1: So chaos though, my absolute favorite is the pettiness of
the fat Castro plan.
Speaker 2: This is Lansdale at his peak. The proposal was to
fake photographs of Fidel Castro. In these photos, he would
look obese, sitting in a lavish room, surrounded by beautiful
women and just mountains of fancy food.
Speaker 1: The idea being to make the starving Cuban population jealous.
Look at El Camante feasting while you starve.
Speaker 2: But just think about it for one second. Castro was
on television constantly. He gave these four hour speeches. The
Cuban people knew exactly what he looked like. The moment
he stepped on a podium looking normal, the entire operation
would be exposed as a clumsy lie.
Speaker 1: It's just cartoonish. Yeah, But we have to stop laughing
for a minute because this thread takes a very very
dark turn. Operation Northwoods.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is where the Looney Tunes aspect completely vanishes.
Northwoods is one of the most disturbing documents ever declassified
by the US government.
Speaker 1: This wasn't about pranks. This is about false flags.
Speaker 2: A false flag operation is when you attack yourself and
blame the enemy to justify going to war. In nineteen
sixty two, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking
military officers in America, all signed off on a formal proposal.
Speaker 1: What was in the plan?
Speaker 2: It was a menu of options. They proposed sinking boats
filled with Cuban refugees on their way to Florida and
blaming Castro. They proposed hijacking American planes. They proposed blowing
up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay, a remember the
main incident. They proposed orchestrating a terror campaign with bombs
in Miami and Washington, d.
Speaker 1: C killing American citizens.
Speaker 2: Killing their own people, and then planting false evidence to
prove Castor and Cuba did it. They wanted an invasion
of Cuba so badly that they were willing to manufacture
a national tragedy to get the American public to support it.
Speaker 1: Stopped it.
Speaker 2: President John F. Kennedy, the plan went all the way
to his desk, and he rejected it flat out. He
effectively removed Lansdale from the Cuba project shortly after. But
the fact that it made it that far, that men
with stars on their shoulders thought this was a viable, acceptable,
option is genuinely terrifying.
Speaker 1: It validates every conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare. Would the government
hurt its own people to start a war in nineteen
sixty two? The answer from the top of the Pentagon
was yes, we'd like to.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate breach of trust between a government and
its people.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pivot to something slightly less heavy, but equally weird,
the world of spies, the occult, and maybe even aliens.
Speaker 2: The X file section of the archives.
Speaker 1: Let's start with what might be the grossest spy mission ever,
Operation Tamrisk.
Speaker 2: Spycraft is usually depicted as you know, tuxedos and martinis.
Operation Tamrisk was about dumpsters and dysentery.
Speaker 1: This was a joint effort US UK French intelligence. What
exactly were they doing?
Speaker 2: They were following Soviet military maneuvers in East Germany and
they discovered a key vulnerability. Soviet troops were not issued
toilet paper.
Speaker 1: A critical supply chain failure for sure.
Speaker 2: A major one. So what do soldiers do? They used
whatever paper they had on hand, letters from home, coating sheets,
secret documents, training manuals, and because the plumbing in the
barracks was terrible, they wouldn't flush this paper. They threw
it in trash bins.
Speaker 1: I see where this is going, and I don't like it.
Speaker 2: Our spies would wait for the Soviet units to leave
on maneuvers. Then they would literally jump into the dumpsters.
They were digging through use toilet paper.
Speaker 1: All defined secrets, and they found them.
Speaker 2: They recovered codes, troop movements, reports on low morale. It
was an intelligence gold mine wrapped in filth. But the
files mentioned in even darker detail. They weren't just looking
for paper.
Speaker 1: What else were they looking for?
Speaker 2: They were looking for biological sample like severed limbs. Yes,
they found amputated limbs and heavily bandaged bloody waste from
the base infirmris. They analyzed it to see if the
Soviets were testing chemical weapons on their own troops. They
were looking for traces of nerve agents in the blood
and tissue found in the trash.
Speaker 1: That is a grim, grim job. I'm a spy. Oh
did you drive an aston Martin? No, I dig through
radioactive medical ways for used codebooks.
Speaker 2: Not quite the glamorous life portrayed in the movies.
Speaker 1: From the physical world to the metaphysical, we have the
psychic spies, the gateway process.
Speaker 2: This was the Cold War's desperate attempt to find an edge.
If we can't get a spy into the room physically,
can we send their mind? The Army, Intelligence and the
CIA spent millions trying to train soldiers in remote viewing.
Speaker 1: Astral projection, basically sitting in a room in Maryland and
seeing a secret bunker in Siberia.
Speaker 2: That was the goal. They wrote these very detailed, very
scientific sounding manuals on how to use audio frequencies to
sink the hemispheres of the brain to escape space time.
They explored reincarnation. They treated it like a legitimate science,
as did it work?
Speaker 1: Did they find any secret bunkers?
Speaker 2: They produced thousands of pages of drawings and reports. I
see a red building, I see a crane. But when
they check the results against actual satellite photos, the accuracy
was statistically no better than random guessing. You can't build
a war strategy on a.
Speaker 1: Vibe, it would seem not. And speaking of things in
the sky UFOs, we have to talk about the Area
fifty one twist.
Speaker 2: Everyone knows Area fifty one. It's the mecca of UFO
conspiracy theories. But what a lot of recent reports and
earlier declassifications suggest is that the Air Force loved the
alien rumors. They cultivated them.
Speaker 1: They encouraged them.
Speaker 2: Why think about it, it's the sixties, seventies, eighties. You
are testing the U two spyplane or the SR seventy
one Blackbird or the F one to seventeen stealth fighter.
These aircraft look weird. They are bizarre shapes. They're matte
black triangles or shiny silver discs that fly at impossible
speeds and altitudes. If a civilian sees one, you don't
want them guessing that's a top secret high altitude reconnaissance aircraft.
Speaker 1: You want them guessing martians.
Speaker 2: Exactly because if the Soviets here, some Americans think they
saw aliens, they laugh. If the Soviets here, the Americans
have a t angular jet that is invisible to radar,
they panic and start building counters. So the Air Force
quietly fed the UFO mythology. It was the perfect cover
story for real secret technology.
Speaker 1: Please keep talking about the Little Green Man, just don't
look at the fuselage.
Speaker 2: It went so far that they actually used it as
a hazing ritual for new guys. There's this story that
was finally declassified about Yankee Blue.
Speaker 1: This is just me.
Speaker 2: It's terrible. Senior officers Area fifty one would take a
new recruit, bring them into a secure room and tell them, son,
you have been selected for the Yankee Blue program. They'd
show them fake dossier's, fake photos all about a captured
alien that was supposedly kept on base. They'd make the
kids sweat thinking he was about to meet et, just
for a laugh, just for a laugh, to see how
they'd react. It went on for decades. It was finally
banned in twenty twenty three because it was considered, you know,
unprofessional to gas light your subordinates about the existence of
extraterrestrial life.
Speaker 1: I would imagine it was bad for morale when they
found out it was all a.
Speaker 2: Joke, probably a relief.
Speaker 1: Honestly, think it's some fun with the weird stuff. Yeah,
but we have to address the thread that really hurts
to read. Thread six War crimes and unethical experiments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where the lack of oversight stops being
funny or quirky and starts being tragic.
Speaker 1: We all know about Operation paper Clip recruiting Nazi scientists
like Werner von Braun to build our rockets.
Speaker 2: And space program, and that was a clear moral calculation.
The US government decided that winning the space race and
beating the Soviets was worth forgiving men who used slave
labor from concentration camps to build V two rockets that
bombed London, a whitewashed history for utility.
Speaker 1: But what about what they did to their own soldiers?
Edgewood Arsenal.
Speaker 2: This was a facility in Maryland from the nineteen fifties
to the nineteen seventies. They used six seven hundred American
soldiers as human guinea pigs.
Speaker 1: What were they testing on them?
Speaker 2: Everything you can imagine, chemical weapons like mustard gas and
saren nerve agent VX had a whole range of hallucinogens
and psychoactive drugs like LSD and BZ, which was a
super hallucinogen.
Speaker 1: Did soldiers consent to this?
Speaker 2: They signed forms, but the forms were incredibly vague. They
were told they were helping test equipment or doing medical research.
They were never told we are going to dose you
with a powerful incapacitating agent and leave you in a
padded room for three days to see if you go
permanently insane.
Speaker 1: And many of these men suffered from severe health problems
for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 2: Cancer's psychological trauma, you name it, and the government denied
it for decades. It's a fundamental betrayal of the uniform.
Speaker 1: And then there's Operation C Spray. This is the one
that makes me look at the fog in San Francisco differently.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty, the Navy wanted to know how vulnerable
is a major US city to a biological attack, so
they decided to simulate one. They took a Navy ship,
parked it just off the coast of San Francisco, and
used giant hoses to spray a bacteria called Sarutia marsessens
into the air.
Speaker 1: They just blanketed the city with bacteria their days.
Speaker 2: The city's famous fog carried it everywhere. They had monitors
set up all over the Bay Area, and the bacteria
reached every single neighborhood. They proved that a terror attack
like that would be incredibly effective.
Speaker 1: But they claimed that bacteria was harmless.
Speaker 2: They thought it was harmless at the time. It turns
out it wasn't. It's an opportunistic pathogen, meaning it can
cause infections in people who are already sick or have
weakened immune systems. Dozens of people went to the hospital
with rare pneumonia and urinary tract infections. One man, Edward Nevin,
died from a severe heart infection caused by that specific bacteria.
Speaker 1: So the government killed a citizen in a secret test
and didn't tell anyone for nearly thirty years.
Speaker 2: The family only found out when the files were to
classified in the late seventies. They sued in the eighties
they lost. The court ruled the government was immune because
they were making high level policy decisions.
Speaker 1: That is absolutely chilling. And finally, in this section, Vietnam atrocities,
specifically the manipulation of intelligence the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Speaker 2: This is the event that served as the legal justification
for them massive escalation of the Vietnam War. We were
all told that North Vietnamese torpedo birts launched two unprovoked
attacks on US destroyers.
Speaker 1: But the declassified files show back.
Speaker 2: The files and even signals intelligence that was kept secret
for decades show a different story. The first attack likely happened,
though it was provoked. But the second attack, the one
that caused the massive escalation and the congressional resolution, was
almost certainly phantom radar images. It was nervous sunnerm and
misinterpreting the sound of their own propellers in rough seas.
But the intelligence officers at the Pentagon and the NSA
cherry picked the data. They ignored the report saying maybe
it's nothing, and pushed only the reports saying we are
definitely under attack.
Speaker 1: They shaped the truth to fit the policy they already.
Speaker 2: Wanted, and fifty eight thousand Americans and millions of Vietnamese,
Leotians and Cambodians died as a result of that escalation.
Speaker 1: It's a heavy reminder that military intelligence isn't just a
collection of facts, its interpretation, and that interpretation can be manipulated.
Speaker 2: Or fabricated entirely.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's take a breath. That was the heavy stuff.
We need to end on something that captures the sheer,
unadulterated absurdity of military conflict. The action movie files.
Speaker 2: These are the stories where reality feels like it was
scripted by a Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the Battle of Los Angeles nineteen forty two, the.
Speaker 2: Night Los Angeles went to war with well with nothing.
Speaker 1: Tensions were incredibly high. Just a few months after Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2: Ai Hi, the West coast was convinced a Japanese invasion
was imminent. So one night, a radar operator sees a blip,
then someone reports seeing a flare. Then the air raid
sirens go off, the searchlights sweep the sky, and then
the anti aircraft guns all around the city open up.
Speaker 1: How much did they fire?
Speaker 2: Over fourteen hundred artillery shells into the sky over a
populated city. The sky was just exploding for over an hour.
Shrapnel was raining down on homes and streets. People were terrified.
Speaker 1: And what were they shooting at?
Speaker 2: Smoke a weather balloon that got loose nerves. We still
don't know for sure, but we know what it wasn't
Japanese planes. There were none, but the casualties were real.
Five civilians died that night from car crashes during the
blackout or heart attacks from the stress. They fought a
massive kinetic battle against their own anxiety.
Speaker 1: Wow, then there's the battle for inter Castle. This one
absolutely needs to be a movie.
Speaker 2: It's the final days of WWII in Europe. A medieval
castle in Austria is being used by the SS to
hold high value French prisoners. We're talking former prime ministers,
top general's political figures. The local SS division is ordered
to execute them all before the war officially ends.
Speaker 1: And who defends them This is.
Speaker 2: The crazy part. A handful of American soldiers, the French
prisoners themselves who decide to fight, and a unit of
the Wehrmacht, the regular German Army. So Germans and Americans
fighting side by side, fighting side by side against the FANATICALESS.
It's believed to be the only time it happened in
the entire war. They held the castle together until American
reinforcements arrived. It just breaks that clean arrative of US
versus them. In that moment, it was sanity versus madness.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. And we have to talk about Operation Constant
Peg Top Gun, but with real Soviet planes.
Speaker 2: This was a deeply held secret for a very long time.
Through various means, defections, back channel deals, the US managed
to steal, buy or otherwise acquire real Soviet meg fighter jets.
They brought them to a secret base in the Nevada Desert.
Speaker 1: So our pilots could practice against the real thing.
Speaker 2: It changed everything for American fighter pilots. Before this, a
pilot only saw a MiG in a grainy photo or
a manual. Now he's up in the air. He looks
over his shoulder and there is a real Russian jet
on his tail. He learns how it turns, how it accelerates,
what its weaknesses are. They devistified the enemy, No.
Speaker 1: Your enemy taken to its most literal conclusion.
Speaker 2: It's credited with saving countless lives and later conflicts.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to our finale. The most overkilled story
in the entire stack of files, Operation Paul Bunyan.
Speaker 2: This is the ultimate example of disproportionate response of I
don't mess with the United States.
Speaker 1: Okay. Set the scene. It was nineteen seventy six. The
Korean DMZ the most heavily fortified border on Earth, and in.
Speaker 2: The middle of it there's a large poplar tree. It's
partially blocking the line of sight between a UN checkpoint
and the North Korean side. Just a tree.
Speaker 1: Two American officers Captain oars A Boniface and Lieutenant Mark
Barrett go out with a work party to trim a
few branches.
Speaker 2: Standard maintenance, but a group of North Korean soldiers intervene.
An argument breaks out. It escalates, and the North Koreans
grabbed the axes from the work party and Bunny are
brutally murdered the two American.
Speaker 1: Officers over trimming a tree.
Speaker 2: It was a shocking brutal provocation. The US response had
to be strong, but they didn't just bomb them. They
decided to finish the job. They were going to cut
down that.
Speaker 1: Tree, but they didn't just send a gardener this time,
I tak no.
Speaker 2: They launched Operation Paul Bunyan. Three days later, a convoy
approaches the tree. But this convoy consists of twenty three
US and South Korean vehicles, eight hundred soldiers armed to
the teething special forces with chainsaws.
Speaker 1: And the backup. That's not all, is it.
Speaker 2: Not even close? Overhead, they had twenty utility helicopters and
seven Cobra attack helicopter circling behind them. B fifty two
bombers from Guam, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, were flying
patterns F four phantoms and F one eleven's were in
the air and off the coast. The aircraft carrier USS
Midway moved its entire battle group into position.
Speaker 1: They brought an aircraft carrier to a landscaping job.
Speaker 2: They brought enough firepower to level the entire country of
North Korea and focused all of it on protecting a
team of engineers cutting down one tree. The engineers got out,
started their chainsaws, and cut the tree down in forty
two minutes. The North Korean soldiers stood there, watched in
stunned silence, and did absolutely nothing. They were terrified.
Speaker 1: It's the definition of speak softly and carry a big stick,
or in this case, a nuclear capable stick.
Speaker 2: It was effective deterrence. The message was you killed two
of us over a branch, we will bring the apocalypse
to your door step, just to finish the pruning.
Speaker 1: So we've covered fifty secrets. We've gone from bat bombs
to moon nukes, from fat shaming Castro to chopping down
trees with an aircraft carrier. When you look at this
stack of files as a whole, what is the big
takeaway for me?
Speaker 2: It's a story of duality. On one hand, you have
absolute brilliance, the daring, the engineering feats, like the SR
seventy one Blackbird or the cleverness of the Navajo coat talkers.
But on the other hand, you have the staggering stupidity
of the green camouflage. You have the moral void of
the biological testing on your own citizens.
Speaker 1: It's like the Pentagon is a massive amplifier. It amplifies
human genius, and it amplifies human incompetence and all our
worst impulses.
Speaker 2: And it amplifies fear. That's the real through line for me.
The moonnuke, the psychic spies, the false flags, they all
came from a place of deep paranoid fear that we
were falling behind, that the enemy was about to get us.
Speaker 1: And paranoia with an unlimited checkbook is a very dangerous thing.
Speaker 2: And remember we're only reading these files because they were
declassified some after fifty years. But these are the ones
they let us see.
Speaker 1: That's the question that nags at me. If these are
the secrets they are now willing to admit to, right
what are the secrets they're still keeping in the dark
right now? What is the bat bomb or the Operation
Northwoods of this year?
Speaker 2: That is the question and we probably won't know the
answer for another fifty years, and by then it might
be too late to ask.
Speaker 1: On that cheerful note, I want to turn it over
to you or listeners. Which of these threads did you
find the most justifiable? Maybe you think nuking the moon
was a solid plan to show strength, And which one
terrified you the most? Was it the EATR robot, the
false flags.
Speaker 2: I'm genuinely curious if anyone out there will defend the
green camouflage. I want to hear that argument.
Speaker 1: If you do, please let us know why in the comments.
We really want to hear your take. This has been thrilling, Dreads.
Thanks for unraveling the madness with us.
Speaker 2: Stay curious.