Olive Makes Discovery, Village Becomes Real, More About Spying

Update - January 6 to January 12, 2019

-- Baby Olive Makes a Discovery

I Can Count to Two

Baby Olive and her big sister Lucy visited on Tuesday as usual and they had a very good day with us. Olive arrived in a pleasant mood and kept it most of the day. One of the highlights was her discovering that she could grab and take an occasional nibble of both of her feet. This amused her very much and she didn't seem to display a preference for either the left or right foot.

She happily grabbed and nibbled on either that came into her grasp. The most interesting observation was made when she had both at the same time. She could corral both but was frustrated that she couldn't get both into her mouth at the same time. Together with her previous achievement of grabbing various toys and force-feeding herself with them, she continues to explore her surroundings.


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READ my Blog "The Books of Richard F Wright" (Books, Bookstores, Writing)

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Overhead View of Village

-- Close Up View of the Village

The winter village vignette that we installed on the living room fireplace mantle has been a bit hit. Visitors are drawn to it and marvel at some of the fine detail in the buildings and accessories. I took a few photos from various angles to see how realistic it all may appear. I was pleased in general that the scene seems coherent even if it's not very realistic. There is a certain patina to the structures and the small vehicles that make them seem more like artwork and less like a toy.


-- Cold War Code Warriors

One of the Elephant Cages near USSR

In the "Reading Update" section at the end of this Blog Entry, I introduce the book that I read this week. But first, I wanted to expand a bit on why this book was so fascinating to me. At intelligence agency listening stations around the world, but mostly in a ring around Russia, the USAF Security Service went about the business of listening to every kind and type of communication, whether by telephone, radio, microwave relay, satellite up and downlink, or any other means to determine the intentions of our then enemy: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The book provides background on how the US came to develop its capacity for monitoring its enemy and then goes into excellent detail about how it was accomplished. It's eye-opening and a lot of fun to read.

-- Elephant Cages Formed Ring Around USSR

Karamursel is lower left on the map

-        The so-called “elephant cages,” which was the nickname for the large antennae arrays installed around the world by the USAF Security Service were “secret” only in the minds of the government that installed them. In point of fact, you can’t build an antennae array that consists of 96 towers, each 120 feet high, arranged in a circle that is one-third of a mile across with various buildings, roadways, and other equipment and expect not to be noticed. But, everyone always was careful not to say things such as “monitoring,” “listening,” “spying,” etc., unless you wanted to get caught by the Transmission Security police who were trying to keep the “secret,” the best they could.

-        My experience with the “elephant cage,” was in Karamursel, Turkey, on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, about three hours from Istanbul. The location permitted excellent monitoring of southern Russia, where they had most of their elaborate missile testing sites, air bases, and other strategic facilities. The other principal locations for an elephant cage were Italy, West Germany, England, Alaska, Japan, The Phillippines, and Thailand. Together, these eight stations formed a necklace around the neck of Soviet Russia.

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READING UPDATE: I had a lot of fun this week reading Code Warriors by Stephen Budiansky. It's a highly readable description of NSA's (National Security Agency) codebreakers and the secret intelligence war against the Soviet Union for over 40 years. I had fun reading about it because I was reading about me. I was part of the USAF Security Service in the late 1960s and early 1970s serving overseas with the specific assignment to spy on Russia to determine what their capabilities were for missile technology, high-speed bomber, fighter, and reconnaissance aircraft and to some degree, satellite telemetry too.