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"How long can a conspiracy be kept secret?"

42 Comments -

1 – 42 of 42
Blogger IHTG said...

It's probably easier to keep something a secret when it's a highly technical megaproject that each individual worker only has a small part in.

1) It's too complex to explain to other people.
2) You don't know that much anyway.

4/2/14, 1:38 AM

Blogger Rainer said...

The more sinister problems are war and after-war falsifications. They can be keüt as secret as these decoding efforts.

4/2/14, 1:58 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tommy Flowers was the son of a bricklayer.
William Tutte was the son of a gardener.


Maybe the war conducted by the elites against the white working class in the US and UK might not be such a good idea.

4/2/14, 1:59 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Northrup - Northrop.

Creditable - credible (surely?)

4/2/14, 3:05 AM

Blogger Anomaly UK said...

The head of British Intelligence, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, wanted to move the GC&CS to Bletchley Park 1n 1938, but the government wouldn’t agree, so he bought the place with his own money and went ahead. That was the sort of people that the middle-class classicist–cryptographers and working-class craftsmen–technologists would work for at the time.

4/2/14, 3:05 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

We know know (search for Portes) that the mass 3rd world immigration into the UK post 1997 was a deliberate conspiracy. Yet a large number of people would sneer and dismiss such a thing. Many similar smoking guns exist for the US Im sure.

As long as you hold the political/MSM megaphone you can shout down any number of credible witnesses, documentation etc. The conspiracy is there yet intelligent, grown-up people are happy to chrus that the Emperor is indeed a well dressed chap.

4/2/14, 3:09 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The more sinister problems are war and after-war falsifications. They can be keüt as secret as these decoding efforts."

Indeed. The mass rape of German women by the Soviets wasn't reported on in the mainstream until the 1980's. Ditto for Japan's Unit 731 experiments.

4/2/14, 3:38 AM

Blogger James Thompson said...

Went to a lecture of his at UCL about two years ago. Was perfectly fluent, with only an occasional pause for words. He learnt German to a high standard in two years. Said his first decoded message was "Corporal Schmidt to report to Kiel" and thought to himself "This message is of absolutely no significance, save perhaps to Mrs Schmidt". He then went on to explain how a knowledge of the background of key persons lead to an understanding of what projects were being conducted where, and often for what purpose.
I thought Tunny had been spoken about years ago, but cannot find my copy of the 1970s Ultra book.

4/2/14, 3:56 AM

Blogger Hector Henry said...

There's a big difference between good people keeping secrets in order to safeguard a nation, versus a situation in which they intend to harm the public (the intent to harm is part of the definition of a conspiracy).

They aren't the same thing. Most of the country WANTS missile technology kept secret, so most of us aren't nosing around bases trying to find anything out. And if we did come across some missile part, and FedGov asked us to be silent, almost all of us would happily do so. Those are much easier secrets to keep.

4/2/14, 4:31 AM

Anonymous josh said...

It's obvious there are no conspiracies because I know about several!

4/2/14, 5:33 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

One theory is that the U.S. government encouraged rumors of flying saucers at Area 51 to discredit these highly creditable witnesses.

Yes, they did. I recall news reports on the radio about "flying saucers" spotted by pilots but not detected by commercial radar. Also, "cigar-shaped" objects flying at high speed and low altitude through the night sky. These witnesses were teased and discredited at the time; they were made into good examples of why it pays to keep your mouth shut.

4/2/14, 6:11 AM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

One common argument against the existence of any and all conspiracies is that it's impossible to keep secret any project requiring more than a few individuals.

Anything can be kept secret if the mass media want to keep it secret.

It's like the old question: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Someone can talk, but it doesn't matter if the public doesn't hear him.

We all know how hard it is to publicize a non-conspiratorial truth and how easy it is for the communications media to conceal the truth in other contexts -- why should it be different in the case of a conspiracy?

4/2/14, 6:29 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Typical Anglo-Saxon navel gazing. Russia won WW2. Repeat: RUSSIA WON WW2. It wasn't code breakers (English or Navajo), Patton, Eisenhower, Bradley or Montgomery.

4/2/14, 7:06 AM

Anonymous JDG1980 said...

Seems to me that it's a lot easier for secrets to be kept on a large scale if the motive is patriotism, rather than something more sordid. The British code-breakers during WWII and the Americans developing stealth technology during the Cold War were not troubled by uneasy consciences, nor with the fear that they would be punished if the public found out what they were doing.

4/2/14, 7:24 AM

Anonymous Harry Baldwin said...

We still don't know exactly how Jimmy Hoffa got it or where he is interred, do we? Some conspirators can keep their mouths shut, it seems. Though it may be that the truth is hidden among the many stories that have come out about it.

4/2/14, 7:33 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Secret projects" aren't equivalent to conspiracies. The latter are by definition crimes, and conscientious individuals who know about them are more likely to blow the whistle.

4/2/14, 7:58 AM

Anonymous Black Death said...

Thanks for the links to the British codebreakers. There's a museum about them at Bletchley Park, where they worked.

4/2/14, 8:09 AM

Anonymous Power Child said...

I've read in various places, and have been personally told by one or two people who worked on or closely with the SR-71 project that its ceiling is actually higher than 100,000'--not just 80,000' as you say.

I don't know how important that difference is from a tactical standpoint, but it seems important at least from a purely numeric one.

4/2/14, 8:27 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Typical Anglo-Saxon navel gazing. Russia won WW2. Repeat: RUSSIA WON WW2. It wasn't code breakers (English or Navajo), Patton, Eisenhower, Bradley or Montgomery.

4/2/14, 8:35 AM

Anonymous BurplesonAFB said...

"Maybe the war conducted by the elites against the white working class in the US and UK might not be such a good idea"

There's been a tremendous brain drain from the working class as a result of the meritocratic sorting that Charles Murray described in Coming Apart. The bottom third of the SES ladder still produces some geniuses of course, but not at nearly the rate prior to WWII.

Also Steve, it occurs to me that the sheer number of overseas civil servant posts Britain had to fill during the height of their Empire was a tremendous benefit in finding/selecting/sorting excellent administrators. When you can give your up & comers enormous responsibility at relatively young ages you will see who cuts the mustard.

A 25 year old Harvard grad who wants to work in government can... intern at some shitty little NGO? ... be deputy assistant coffee getter at a federal department?

A hundred years ago, the 25 year old Oxford grad could be well on his way to running a province.

4/2/14, 8:40 AM

Anonymous Discard said...

Any reading of history will show that conspiracies work all the time. Look into our entrance into WW1 or our wars against Spain and Iraq. Read today's papers on the doings in Ukraine and read January's papers on the same topic. Conspiracies are how bad things get done in this world. Those who deny conspiracies are nuttier than many of the conspiracy nuts.

4/2/14, 9:43 AM

Anonymous Drawbacks said...

There's a story about an elderly couple taking a Bletchley tour not long ago: The wife corrected the guide on a technical point because she had worked in that department and the husband exclaimed, "You worked in Bletchley? So did I!"

4/2/14, 10:43 AM

Blogger Whiskey said...

Blunt, Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Ames, Falcon, Snowman, Hanssen.

The only ones in the dark were the US and UK public. Soviets knew everything. Like atomic secrets.

4/2/14, 10:45 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I saw some footage of the lobby of the NSA. One of the people who passed the desk and entered the secure area was a big, fat black woman walking with authority. My point being that England in WW II wasn't showing the world it's secret HQ and most certainly didn't have any staff members who looked like the fat black woman in that footage I watched. Diversity isn't conducive to secrecy, I'm guessing.
JohnDSee

4/2/14, 11:01 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Re conpiracies: "Offiicial" (i.e., government sponsored) conspiracies proceed because members are aborbed into a consensus culture of conspiracy where conspiracy discipline is the highest value, stressed on daily basis.
Illegal conspiracies, on the other hand, conspicuously lack such consensus discipline and are by definition "against the state," thereby outlaw. Moreover, such activities tend to involve marginal people.
Thus a Bletchley conspiracy could last, while it's still doubtful a JFK one would.

4/2/14, 11:25 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Maybe the war conducted by the elites against the white working class in the US and UK might not be such a good idea. " - what makes you think they want that sort of thing to happen to them?

4/2/14, 11:38 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Isn't almost everything embraced by the Jewish left the opposite of what Middle America and Southern America (iows, all minus the Coasts) would approve of?

It's knee-jerk: "Oh, a farmer in Iowa or Nebraska said that, believes that; therefore, it's a horrid thought" or "A Christian in a Methodist church in Georgia said that so I know it's wrong." Or "A guy working in an auto plant likes bowling so I can't possibly try it to see if it's fun."

4/2/14, 12:15 PM

Anonymous Canadian Cincinnatus said...

I suspect one thing that kept the stealth aircraft projects and the British decoding projects secret was that the participants all felt that it was their patriotic duty to keep quite.

The NSA scandal was blown up because Snowdown didn't feel the same way. Quite the opposite, he felt that the NSA domestic spying program was a threat to the country.

4/2/14, 12:26 PM

Anonymous Black Death said...

Mavis Batey, another Bletchley Park code breaker, and one of the few women, died last year.

4/2/14, 6:04 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Typical Anglo-Saxon navel gazing. Russia won WW2. Repeat: RUSSIA WON WW2. It wasn't code breakers (English or Navajo), Patton, Eisenhower, Bradley or Montgomery.

Exactly! And to preempt the usual objections:
1. Without land-lease, Russia would still have won (the war would have lasted 1-2 years longer and cost more Russian lives).
2. The only reason US/UK opened the second front is that they were scared shitless at the prospect of victorious Stalin army taking over the entire Europe. Even more: without the entire Western from and UK's heroic fighting, Russia would have still won.

4/2/14, 7:07 PM

Anonymous Christos T. said...

‘Besides decoding the German Enigma machine, there were other projects at Bletchley that weren't declassified until much more recently, such as Tunny, the breaking of Hitler's personal cipher.’

Steve, the Lorenz SZ40/Z42 cipher teleprinter (called ‘Tunny’ by the Brits) was not Hitler’s personal cipher. It was used for high level messages sent to Army Groups etc. Hitler had at his disposal both teleprinters and also specially wired Enigma cipher machines.

4/3/14, 12:47 AM

Anonymous Simon in London said...

anon:
>>Exactly! And to preempt the usual objections:
1. Without land-lease, Russia would still have won (the war would have lasted 1-2 years longer and cost more Russian lives).
2. The only reason US/UK opened the second front is that they were scared shitless at the prospect of victorious Stalin army taking over the entire Europe. Even more: without the entire Western from and UK's heroic fighting, Russia would have still won.<<

Well, this is probably right - Stalin was good at overstating Russian weakness to get more stuff out of Churchill and Roosevelt. I'd guess that Nazi conquest of Britain in 1940 followed by Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941 would have put a final Soviet victory back to 1947, assuming minimal US aid - though surely the US would have at very least taken the British Isles once Berlin fell, so no hammer & sickle over Downing Street. The final result would have been very much Oceania/Eurasia.

But it's not 'navel-gazing' to discuss Bletchley Park and its role in Russia's victory in 1945. Probably saved tens of millions of lives across Eurasia.

4/3/14, 1:41 AM

Anonymous E. Rekshun said...

I worked w/ an otherwise articulate and smart guy (a 60-year old mid-level manager) who stubbornly believed that G. W. Bush masterminded the WTC attack, and that strategically placed explosives imploded the buildings.

I pointed out that, if that were true, it would have taken hundreds of government workers and outside contractors to pull it off. Several of them surely would have been Bush-haters and would have told someone of the scheme. And wouldn't obama and his senior staffers and law enforcement & spy agency heads have learned of the scheme and spilled the beans as well; and if obama didn't advise the public , then obama was in on it too, right?

My coworker grumbled, got mad, and his head imploded.

4/3/14, 2:43 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Typical Anglo-Saxon navel gazing. Russia won WW2. Repeat: RUSSIA WON WW2. It wasn't code breakers (English or Navajo), Patton, Eisenhower, Bradley or Montgomery.

Exactly! And to preempt the usual objections:
1. Without land-lease, Russia would still have won (the war would have lasted 1-2 years longer and cost more Russian lives).
2. The only reason US/UK opened the second front is that they were scared shitless at the prospect of victorious Stalin army taking over the entire Europe. Even more: without the entire Western from and UK's heroic fighting, Russia would have still won.


Typical Slavic/Slavophile navel gazing.

Who gives who "won" WW2?

We're discussing how long you can keep a conspiracy secret.

4/3/14, 2:48 AM

Anonymous Sean said...

"How long can a conspiracy be kept secret?" About 15 minutes, if any intellectualy demanding project necessarily has traitors due to the intelligentsia having been infiltrated by commies. Stalin knew all about Bletchley Park thanks to commie John Cairncross. And Stalin was allied with Hitler at this time. Stalin thought his Marxist perspective gave him the key to what was going on and the capitalist powers were going to exhaust themselves. Stalin had every reason to give Hitler a bit of help to get totally committed in the West against Britain at this stage.

During WW2 a US newspaper printed the US order of battle in the Pacific. PRINTED IT.

4/3/14, 5:18 AM

Anonymous Sean said...

Read R. D. HOOKER, JR. and Stofi. Hitler alone wanted to stop at Smolensk, on the land bridge to Moscow for almost two months, and GO INTO THE UKRAINE.

He took the decision that lost the war, but if he had smashed the Soviet state in August 1941 he would not have gotthe Wagnerian ending Rienzi, would he?

4/3/14, 5:31 AM

Anonymous Sean said...

Official secrets are different to conspiracies, so those who find out official secrets keep very quiet. There can be the death penalty for divulging an official secret. But implicating people in a conspiracy you have discovered brings benefits. We don't know about conspiracy, (officers fragged in Vietnam for example). It's supposed to have happened but probably not as often as is claimed.

There is only a need for high level conspiring if the people that matter are not all on the same page behind closed doors. I mean, what business says in their mission statment that their priority is to make maximum profit? McDonalds is not really about what it says its about. What is?

The best tank of WW2 would be the one the Germans surrendered at the sight of: Churchill Crocodile

The USSR didn't win the war, Hitler lost it.

4/3/14, 6:06 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The idea in war is to kill the enemy and not how many of your own are killed. Without Western aid and Soviet spies controlling the White House the Soviets would have won even less.

4/3/14, 6:29 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Maybe off topic but,

Robert Caro wrote a book the Powerbroker about Robert Moses and his control of New York City and State from 1920s to 1960s. If he did not write the book people would have dismissed stories about Robert Moses as conspiracy theories. So the Moses story might have been lost forever but for Caro.

The status of the Lusitania as a belligerent ship has only been learned recently.

That HMS Hood was likely not hit by shells from Bismark and just spontaneously exploded like her sister ships did at the Battle of Jutland has only been recently admitted by the British Admiralty.

4/3/14, 8:01 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

1100 years

Procopius, the writer of "History of Justinian's Wars", came clean in his "Secret History" which was discovered in the Vatican Library 1100 years after being written.

"The Secret History reveals an author who had become deeply disillusioned with the emperor Justinian and his wife, Empress Theodora, as well as Belisarius, his former commander and patron, and Antonina, Belisarius' wife. "

4/3/14, 8:13 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Typical Anglo-Saxon navel gazing. Russia won WW2. Repeat: RUSSIA WON WW2. ...

Without land-lease... (the war would have lasted 1-2 years longer and cost more Russian lives)..."


It's silly to waste your life on hypotheticals. Just read real history instead, it's quit fascinating. Woulda, shoulda, coulda... if, if, if...

Nobody knows what would have happened in a war which wasn't fought.

Interesting facts about Lend-Lease:

"The USSR was highly dependent on rail transportation, but the war practically shut down rail equipment production: only about 92 locomotives were produced. 2,000 locomotives and 11,000 railcars were supplied under Lend-Lease.

...by 1945 nearly two-thirds of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built."

4/3/14, 9:15 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Simon in London:" I'd guess that Nazi conquest of Britain in 1940"

Most military historians rate the prospects of a successful Nazi invasion of Britain as being somewhere between slim and none.

4/4/14, 9:01 AM

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