With the mechanisms of apocalypse firmly in place, both sides accelerate their efforts to determine the actual capabilities of the other. No detail is too insignificant: attempts are made to recover Soviet test warheads from the bottom of the ocean.
By the time USS Triton circumnavigates the globe underwater, the full potential of the nuclear submarine as the preeminent weapon of the Cold War becomes apparent. And so the ever-increasing pressure to discover how many warheads the other side has, and how they work, and most importantly, where they are, the United States and the Soviet Union diverge in regard to intelligence gathering. The massive US lead in technology leads to spy satellites, hypersonic reconnaissance planes and the most ambitious intelligence operation in human history. The Soviets, on the other hand, play to their strengths as well: the ability to turn individual human assets. One of these paths will lead to the biggest intel haul of the Cold War.
7 replies on “The Cold War: What We Saw | Cloaks and Daggers – Episode 9”
Please turn these into CD audio books. I’ll buy several as gifts.
Excellent presentation, Bill, just like your entire series on the Cold War. With the heavy focus on maritime operations, I do hope you will cover what is perhaps the Navy’s greatest SIGINT success story, Operation Ivy Bells, the tapping into a Soviet Navy underwater communications cable. One of my ROTC instructors at Georgia Tech was a prior enlisted sailor who had been involved in one of the missions. He mentioned it to my class, which, in retrospect, is surprising because this was in the mid 1970s when the program was still ongoing and highly classified. You may recall an NSA employee named Ronald Pelton sold the secret to the Soviets in 1980. He later was sentenced to 29 years in prison for his treason and was released in 2015.
Bill, the first 8 are outstanding. But, I found this one absolutely, positively FANTASTIC! It kept my attention (which is hard at my age) for every single second. I will definitely listen to this one again. It may well have been the most spellbinding thing I have ever listened to in my life. My thanks, sir!
Wonderful, as is the entire series.
Bill, is your math faulty on the U2? You said that they’d stall at around 98 knots and be torn apart at a bit over 102. But in the next breath you said that pilots would travel 5,000 miles in 10 hours which works out to about 500 mph. What gives? According to Wikipedia, the plane’s max speed was 500.
This is going to be a cruddy answer! Hopefully a pilot or engineer will clean it up for me. The 98/102 number is “indicated airspeed” which is a raw number from the on-board gear. But at that altitude the air is so thin that the reading is very different from your “ground speed.” The U2 “ground” speed can increase as it gets higher, and due to the thin air the wings are not ripped off as they would be if the U2 were to (somehow) accelerate to 400MPH a hundred feet over the runway. Let me know if this helped at all, or just added to the confusion.
Wow. That was the best episode yet! This series would make a great audiobook. I hope it’s in the works.