Chapter 70: Look Ma, No Hands -- Or Head

[Victoria Steele]

If somehow a "unit" ( not talking about communications equipment here but a group of men and women .....) .... Lets say a "Unit" is sent to infiltrate the Russians. How much power would they actually have to moderate the actions of the people around them? I would think, not a whole lot, though they would be able to tell the American Caroline units and the English Caroline units what was going on. But that presents even more problems itself because when you are a " secret" unit wherever you are ...... you can only interact with your own. Soooooo . Townsend Brown might have known that something special was on one of those ships .... and the only way it could be checked out would be if the English thought they were looking for special mine laying devices or whatever .... Unless Crabb was a pure Caroline operative . In which case the trip to Portsmouth would make alot of sense, just a month before the dive took place. I am just beating around in a circle waiting to figure something out. Don't mind me all that much. I still think that we need to find out who those sailors are. Has any one offered suggestions Paul?

I don't know that we will ever know if the body found was Crabbs. If it was I think it would just underscore how dangerous all of this was. And the one hundred year hold on the information sure buys alot of wiggle room for somebody.

And about that notebook written in the thirties by that fellow (?) Lady(?) that has them in storage. Boy would I be skeptical. I have a tendencey to believe Dr. Brown when he said that he started to write in the fifties. Why would any one else claim ownership of other journals and then not present them. I smell a red herring. Victoria

[Radomir]

Well hello again Radomir

We missed you in the past few weeks.

Just letting you know that we all value your input and have missed your presence.

Trickfox

Thanks to you and to Victoria for the kind words. I definitely missed all of you as well on the forum. Business travel and a serious family illness kept me away from direct touch, but not far away in spirit. Both issues have been resolved now, so glad to rejoin the fold. Although I have to say it is going to take me a while to catch up, you folks have been extremely busy!

Best,
R.

[Radomir]

Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suppose that if there really was only the ship there, it still might have been the case that if the ship had some interesting mine-detection or high-powered-field-related mine-detonation devices, perhaps related to TTB's early work on such things, that might have been the link between TTB and what Crabb was looking for? I can't think what else would be outwardly visible on the hull of a ship?

R.

[Victoria Steele]

Radomir,

You said that Mr. Twigsnapper contacted you months before this and asked you to look into this Crabb situation? Does that strike you as sort of strange? Why would he do that I wonder, unless he thinks that you have the potential of seeing or finding some bit of information that the rest of us would have missed? Did he ever explain why he mentioned that particular frogman to you?

I'm not jealous ( well, maybe just a little) but I sure am curious!
edit addition........... Radomir, I wonder why you had " submarine" on the brain. I would not take that lightly. I wonder if there was a Russian submarine standing off as protection for the cruiser. With those two notable persons on board I would think that the Russian Navy might just call in a flanking sub.

And when I think of another sub I think of other frogmen. Did anybody ever say that Crabb might have run into enemy frogmen? Victoria

[Elizabeth Helen Drake]

Interesting to me Victoria that you would use the phrase " flanking submarine" ... Its a great visual and makes me think of the "Hunt for Red October".

And I think of another sub movie too ..... " Run Silent, Run Deep" remember it. There was a mystery " flanking sub there too ... running along unrecognized. Perhaps that is one of the things that was happening in this Portsmouth situation.

Back to those sailors. Who are those guys anyway? Crabb wouldn't be in uniform like that, he was out of the Navy by then and apparently sort of an underwater Paladin.

Notice that Twignspper OReilly has his left hand on one of the shoulders of the kneeling sailor in front. Its sort of a " hail fellow well met! gesture but there is a feeling I think of pride at being together. Some sort of unsaid " esprit de corps" ..... did I write that properly? You know what I mean?

So somebody raise their hand out there. Somebody say...... Hey, I remember that day! We were off the cruiser ******* or the sub *******. Any chance of that do you think?

But then just like the " earlier journals" I think you are going to have to start being really careful now Paul that some of the material that volunteers itself in your direction could be false. You have the one big card in the game though ..... a fathers daughter with an enthusiasm for getting things right. Elizabeth

[Trickfox]

Ahhh.... the wonders of Electrohydrodynamics...

You can listen for prop wash comming from propellers, and you can use a pulsed form to propel a submarine just to illiminate the sound normally comming from prop wash. When you combine them together you can sneak in a small submarine ridding next to (flanking) an expected ship crossing the over the underwater detectors. (an underwater Paladin indeed)

Interesting to note that some of Doctor Brown's ideas were the origin for both detector and propulsion technologies

Trickfox

[James Barrett]

Obvously in this sort of world sometimes its important not to tell what you know right away and normally there are all kinds of reasons for that silence. For example, The Soviets knew about the Berlin Tunnel before it was even constructed. Why did they not clamp down on it right away? Because it served their purpose not to , and it protected a man who was extremely important to them. This George Blake that Paul mentioned. I found this interesting, maybe you will too.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for- ... art-7.html

"Unfortunately, the whole operation was blown even before the DCI approved the project. On 22 October 1953, US intelligence officers briefed a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) audience that included KGB mole George Blake. Blake reported the existence of the tunnel project during his next meeting with his case officer, Sergei Kondrashev, in London the following December. However, a full report was not sent to Moscow until 12 February 1954.8

Although the KGB was aware of the potential importance of the tap, its first priority was to protect Blake.9 Knowledge of the tunnel's existence was very closely held within the KGB--neither the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) nor the East German Stasi was informed. Rather than immediately shutting down the tunnel, the Soviets thus implemented a general tightening up of security procedures. A small team was formed to secretly locate the tap, which they did by late 1955. Early in 1956 the Soviets developed a plan whereby the tap would be "accidentally" discovered without putting Blake at risk. On the night of 21-22 April 1956, a special signal corps team began to dig.10 By 0200 they had discovered the tap chamber. At 1230 the following day they opened a trapdoor leading from the tap chamber down a vertical shaft to the tunnel. By 1420 they had penetrated the tunnel in the full glare of a well-organized publicity coup.11"

Yes, this George Blake must have been an important fellow to them. JDB

[Elizabeth Helen Drake]

Thankyou JDB for that date. I see what you are getting at.

On the 19th of April Lionel Crabb enters the waters on his mysterious mission. He never comes back Apparently he was spying on the Soviet ships. . On the 22nd of April the Soviets move on closing the Tunnel that they have known was in existence for months. I wonder if that sort of timing means anything? Elizabeth

[kevin.b]

No hands , will mean the trophy could have been a ring?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-8KNCq2Ky8
And to set the flavour of the time,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpOpTBp9N0U

World parliement ,hmmm.
Kevin

[James Barrett]

Sometimes, it seems to me, you learn as much about what is NOT written as what is.

Paul you brought it out very nicely that Dr. Brown had started his famous lab notebooks in 1955 BEFORE his trip. Even noted the posts before and then after his trip . So was there NO MENTION of the famous tests there in Paris .... at all? Doesn't that say something?

A test where the whole room lights up? And he does not mention it in his " book of thoughts" Gives you an idea of what a clamp was on this information. Who during that time would even have known that he was not in this country? Except of course the man who stamped his passport. And Paul has already said that some of that trip didn't get stamped.

And if we all forget somehow the seriousness of the intelligence infiltration by the Soviets, just look at the Berlin Tunnel situation. This George Blake handed the information right over, so early in the game they could have shut the Tunnel down on day one. Later I notice that the US "studied the information" and found most of the collected stuff valid. Yes , some of it would have been but that attitude just covers the fact that they were duped.

Paul. You have done no small amount of detailed study of Blake. You knew that he was at Wormwood Scrub . Was your interest in him centered because you figure he had a part in the Pearl Harbor mole incident? Forgive me if you mentioned his name before. I don't remember seeing it but he obviously is a major player.

And in this world of spies and counterspies, of Bondlike individuals, I have to say. What a handsome gentleman Mr. ORiley is and forgive me, how very Bondlike. I can almost hear the words " Shaken, not stirred"

So Did ORiley then know of this George Blake? Or did he learn about him much later? JDB

[James Barrett]

Kevin. You mention that Peter Wright had said that one of his operatives could do crossword puzzles in his head and I thought immediately of course of ORiley and wondered if ORiley was the one. It sort of fits. JDB

[Elizabeth Helen Drake]

JDB, And you ask about not sleeping? From the time of your last message, thats funny.

An interesting point about the crossword puzzle. I knew of course that the people drawn into Sir William Stephensons group were given that test. Hadn't really thought that the person giving the test to Morgan might also have been expert at it himself. You see people of this calibre don't generally brag about what they know or can do.\\

And talking about a quiet gentleman. What about William Stephenson? We haven't talked about him for a long time but you can be sure that his pull was being felt by everyone during this age. I am sure that he had stepped down from his active work, had apparently moved to Jamaica and begun his " concrete" businesses with .... of all people .... General Donovan. I will give a dunce cap to the first person who actually believes that those two were out of the intelligence field and didn't have their fingers on just about everything that was going on during the cold war. Stephenson was the one remember that saw the Soviets for the threat they were when others in this country were calling Stalin " Uncle Joe"

So thank you JDB for bringing that personality up again.

Elizabeth

[Paul S.]

It's very gratifying to see that everybody seems to like this chapter. I guess it's a testament to something that it turned out as smoothly as it did, and that most of the grief and sweat that went into its construction wound up on the cutting room floor, so to speak...

And you have also established the conclusiveness of the Caroline Group's transcendance of national interests. The bit about there being "set" groups both in the west, and behind the iron curtain is fascinating. It reveals to us that the stakes in the cold war were likely larger than we perceived and were likely driven by things lurking in the background and forever out of sight, except to people such as Townsend Brown.

Flow, your use of the word "driven" here in regard to the vast machinations of geopolitical events in the second half of the 20th century makes me wonder:

Do we add the word "managed" to that sentence? Were international events driven -- and managed -- by "things lurking in the background" ? Is that ultimately what this "Caroline Group" is all about?

There are other issues coming up now too that have gnawed at me since the very beginning, as alluded to in the first reference to the Europe trips and then the discussion of the vacuum chamber tests: just how much of this technology has been proven out, developed, engineered, constructed.... and is in operation somewhere on this planet now, today??

The material here certainly implies that there are communications in use that the public has no idea of. What about transport vessels as well? Giant black triangles, maybe?

I don't know if I can ever answer that question, but when we talk about things "lurking in the background," well.... that's the big one for me.

--PS

[Paul S.]

Can we learn more about all of this simply by looking at what Wright has written?

Yes, I certainly believe so. I have had quoted to me some passages from that book, I can get the pages for you later if you'd like (knocking out some messages this morning before going off-line more or less for the rest of the day). But there are some names that come up in Wright's book that have been brought to my attention, names like 'Harvey' and 'Tordella' amd 'Wisner' and even 'Dulles'

I have not had nearly enough time to spend digging into these resources to find the possible connections, and of course even what Wright has published is probably highly constrained by "Official Secrets" requirements.

But, yeah, there's a lot there, much of it "lurking" (there's that word again) just beneath the surface....

--PS

[Paul S.]

I won't ask you about THURSDAYS for a long while. Promise.

Ah, aren't you sweet.

Actually, a lot of the effort that went into this one already spills over into the next one. I figure to get started in earnest on it tomorrow, and I am going to try like hell to get 71 together before Ann and I go over the river and through the woods for Thanksgiving weekend (but not to grandmother's house, thankfully....)

So be careful what you don't wish for <g>

--PS