The older I get, the more I am learning that ALL History has always had 2 faces: The Public Face, or the one most everybody is shown and taught in school, and the Real Face, or the face that has been hidden because it is not really fit for “public consumption”. My Goal since I…
Category: Cold War Files
Cold War Files: Cold War Boardgame ‘Twilight Struggle’ Now Available Online
The Best Board Game Ever Is a Chilling Re-imagining of the Cold War ‘Twilight Struggle’ is finally available online Of all the modern board games that constitute the current golden age of tabletop gaming — your Settlers of Catans, your Ticket to Rides, your Pandemics — one looms larger than all the others, like a mythical icon made of…
Cold War Files: 10 Strange Cold War Tales Left Out of the History Books
We’ve previously talked about bizarre things that happened during the Cold War, and there are many more such stories. Four decades truly is more than enough time for all sorts of wackiness. 10. Nixon’s Pretend Attack On The Soviets In October 1969, nuclear-armed bombers took off from the US and raced over the North…
Cold War Files: What If Japan Had Built an Atomic Bomb?
During the Cold War, the United States supported selective nuclear proliferation as a means of deterring a Soviet invasion of Europe. The Russians might not believe that the United States would trade Berlin for New York, but they might find a British or French threat more credible. Washington did not pursue the same strategy in…
Espionage Files: The Strange Trip Surrounding MK-Ultra
Ten scientists, some from the CIA, gathered in a cabin in Maryland for their semiannual review and conference in November 1953. On day two, a bottle of Cointreau — spiked with LSD — appeared; after it was emptied, Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA program director, informed his colleagues that they were in for a wild ride….
Cold War Files: America’s Nuclear Cold War Casualties
Have any of you heard of a federal entity called “The Office of Legacy Management”? Unless you’ve traveled through the American Southwest, you probably haven’t. This is a federal agency that is ensconced in the Department of Energy and is in charge of remediating the old uranium mines and mills that the federal government left…
Brush-Up On Your History: Castro’s American Victims
In 1972, Ishmael Muslim Ali LaBeet and four other killers walked into the Fountain Valley golf club in the Virgin Islands. They rounded up four Florida tourists and four employees, forced them to kneel on the ground, and opened fire. That was how the Fountain Valley Massacre began. Afterward LaBeet and his fellow murderers were…
Espionage and Cold War Files: Extraordinary Lecture by Legendary Soviet Mole and Spy Kim Philby Emerges
A videotaped lecture by Kim Philby, one of the Cold War’s most recognizable espionage figures, has been unearthed in the archives of the Stasi, the Ministry of State Security of the former East Germany. During the one-hour lecture, filmed in 1981, Philby addresses a select audience of Stasi operations officers and offers them advice on…
Cold War Files: After-Action-Report (AAR) of a Rhodesian Ambush
Imagine initiating an ambush with a 40 mike-mike training round. That would be a Bad Thing. This ambush, as remembered by our friend and former Rhodie troopie Nick Bliksem, is just about as bad (but not quite). This was during the “Second Chimurenga” period of the Rhodesian Bush War, back when Jimmy Carter was POTUS,…
Cold War Files: JFK’s Plan to Invade Cuba with Airborne and Marines
Over the weekend I was looking through some handwritten notes in the papers of Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, placed on-line by the National Defense University. The document is undated and unsigned. The NDU catalog lists it as created by Lemnitzer, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff early in the JFK era, until Kennedy…