The Secret Squirrels and the Circus didn’t interact a lot, but I used to tick him off with a piece of equipment that the ground could activate when they didn’t follow the established protocol on the times. There was no way for me to stop them doing it on the ground, other than to send nasty memos, but that sucker would mess up everyone’s work when it tripped.

SAC allowed those guys to takes pictures and violate all kinds of rules that we got dinged for by our command.

They did good work, but we had our own people who did the same job, only in my command they were enlisted, not officers.

The Soviet Union fell when they ran out of money. They couldn’t afford a space program, ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, a large conventional army to keep China at bay, and a reasonable standard of living for their own people.

The need to import food because of the mess Khrushchev made of the farming sector required hard currency, and they didn’t have it. They exited not with a bang, but a whimper when the cash ran out.

It has reached 46.4C (in the shade). The hottest day in Vic ever recorded. A hot Northerly wind has been gusting to 90Km/h which has been pushing fires to fast to deal with effectively. Meanwhile, up North, especially Queensland, they have had 900mm of rain in Feb so far! That’s insane. 🙂 We haven’t had any rain down Sth in Months, and they get our entire annual quota in a matter of days. Crazy stuff.

Anyway, I was just going to add a last paragraph to the above that I saw your name listed at the site, and reading about that crash. Yeah, I understand close calls. You never forget, sometimes even when you sleep.

The 70’s – 90’s were a very dangerous and unstable time. It was exhausting trying to keep track of all the players and figure out what they were planning and why. Most of the time, we just did the job we were paid to do. Every now and then, we’d see or hear something that would make that little “Danger Will Robinson!” thought come up and I’d usually utter the fateful words “Oh, sh*t!” if it was something I’d not known soon enough or missed and was probably too late to stop, or “Jesus C*!! Here we go again!” If i saw something (like when Regan announced that the USSR was the ‘Evil Empire’ in some address). I usually shared an office with 2 or 3 others and if they were there, they would usually sigh and say “Now what?” And I’d be on my secure phone to whoever my appropriate opposite number was and say “Well?” And they would get busy with their contacts. I made sure I worked with good sane people. Ideologues and ladder climbers didn’t last long in my office. 😉 🙂 Sometimes, my phone would ring and one of my Russian contacts would invite me for dinner. If he said ‘chilled vodka’, that meant there was a problem, ‘Icy vodka’ meant a serious problem. “beer’ meant the World was about to end. LOL There were a lot of rules we had to abide by, and we did.

After KAL007 was splashed, I had a call from a Russian contact who was very nervous and annoyed. Very unusual for him. He was very worried. The Politburo and KGB considered Reagan very dangerous and a threat to the USSR.

You know… a lot of people credit the dissolution of the USSR on Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programs, but the truth is that the USSR did it to themselves. It would have happened anyway. All Reagan did, was to almost bankrupt the USA and make the MIC players very wealthy. 🙂 It’s a shame that so many people are so ignorant about what really happens around the World. 🙂 Much of it would never happen if people had a clue and gave a rat’s ass. 🙂

BTW when you posted about Rivet Ball a while back, it stirred some half-forgotten memories about that name and others, and Shemya, and several things. I found a good site that triggered lot’s of memories and gave me quite a few smiles. 🙂 They seemed like a good bunch of cool headed guys, my kind of people. 😉 You probably already know it, but anyway… by Kingdon R. “King” Hawes Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.):

A Tale of Two Airplanes

I enjoyed his stories, and ‘The Iron Pumpkin’ video. 😀 Did you get your balls? 😉 LOL

The tape that Reagan played contains a clear description of a 747 with the double row of cabin windows at the front, so there was no mistaking what it was. Of course, the Soviets don’t have the International emergency frequencies in their radios to avoid defections, which prevented any contact with the aircraft.

The aircraft was doomed, because it would have been shot down by Sakhalin air defense systems if the aircraft hadn’t splashed it. They are a different military district and have no sense of humor.

Immediately following the shot-down the Soviet media reported it as an American military aircraft from Shemya, which is why I tuned in to the problem. Later reports claimed they had a CIA photo pod on the aircraft, which is why it overflew Petropavlovsk, like we would trust Korea with equipment that sophisticated for anything other than a Korea centered operation.

Oh, yes, you don’t tell the bosses everything or they might think they were really in charge. When it’s your butt that is going to get shot at if things go bad there are things that are kept in notebooks, not in reports. That’s one of the things that bothered me most about what the Hedgemony was doing – a lot of long time unofficial agreements were probably flushed by their screwing around with the raw data. They didn’t know the good guys from the bad.

It paid to remember that a lot of the senior people started out in the Moscow military district during Stalin, so paranoia was a necessary survival trait. Most of them had zero combat experience which means no true appreciation of what war really means.

As you say, Kryten, there are no new radioactive glassy areas added to the landscape, so we must have been pretty good at what we did. I think that people who vote for wars should be given the “honor” of being in the lead company for the first assault. War is very different after you figure out that the other side can shoot back.

There were several rumors about why KAL007 was actually shot down Bryan. One of my contacts told me the rumor you posted above, and another that it was known it was a civilian airliner, and that it was carrying an important (so it was thought) US politician, Congressman Lawrence McDonald, and the Soviet decided to send Reagan a message for all his *Evil Empire* rhetoric and other things. One thing that came from it is that Reagan decided to allow civilian aircraft to use the more precise military GPS system and it forced a redesign by aircraft manufacturers of the autopilot system.

The greatest danger that the Bush Administration posed was to decimate and politicize the US intel services. They got rid of anyone they found who wasn’t a complete ass-kissing wingnut ideologue. So, the watchdogs became that same as the crazies. That’s why Bushmoron was able to create so many disasters, some of which most US citizens are still unaware of. I have to admit that were I still in the biz the past decade, I would have done all I could with all the insider contacts I had from every Nation to stop the US in any way possible. It would have been my opinion that the USA had become potentially the most dangerous Nation on Earth. The Bushmorons didn’t understand the way the *game* works and decided to ignore all the rules. The USA became a rogue State. Hopefully, Obama understands and repairs that damage, before it’s too late. 🙂

So, yes. During the Reagan years, WW3 was a possibility. But Soviet *friends* made sure that cool heads were in important places, such as the faulty Soviet early warning systems. It was a few weeks after the Soviets shot down KAL007. My Russian and other contacts were very nervous about the heightened paranoia in the Politburo, Soviet Military and KGB etc., and the stupid red flag waving coming from the White House. So, plans were put in place to save us all from out masters, and those who would take advantage of this situation for their own agenda’s. 🙂 The politicians didn’t know that there had been 3 US missile launch warnings during a high state of alert until well after the event, and then they were given a plausible story for the events. By a strange coincidence, my superiors here didn’t get the memo that the Soviets had detected bogus US missile launches, which they would have been duty bound to pass on to the US, who would have immediately raised their nuclear alert status, which would have added weight to the bogus launch warnings, which would have raised the status in the USSR, which would have… 😉 You get the idea. 🙂 We decided that the politicians were too busy with important matters like dinner reservations etc to be bothered with such mundane things which we understood completely and could deal with just fine. And see, it worked. We are all still here and the general population doesn’t know what *truly* happened that fateful week when the World could have ended, and would have if the Politicians had been allowed to make decisions. 🙂 It isn’t always a good idea to allow Politicians to know things. Politicians are most dangerous when they know too little, or too much 😉

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.
Albert Einstein

Archy’s latest post some shit about mammoths.

BT, he would have made a canary sound like a basso profundo, but dogs would like him.

Braid and cords and fringe, and a horse, of course, with a jeweled sword, and …

Maybe they just missed the meeting because they couldn’t figure out what day it was on the new calendar that Turkmenbashi created. The Marx brothers would have been perfect for a bio-flick, or maybe they were the source for his ideas.

And Turkmenbashi… yes, it would have to be a very fancy hat, with feathers and gold fringes and such. But don’t forget the rest of the uniform. The Father of All Turkmen could never accept a position as Supreme Leader Generalissimo of all the forces with just an ordinary military uniform. It would have to be a special one, with epaulets. And medals. Lots of shiny medals. And stripes on the sleeves and lots of chest cabbage. And decorated buttons. Just plain old buttons wouldn’t be good enough. And a bright sash. I have an image in mind, I think it may have been an Indian military uniform, but I can’t seem to dig it up, oh well! Too bad Turkmenbashi had the bad luck to die and leave his look-alike in charge… I have not enough knowledge of Berdymukhamedov (or however you spell his name 🙂 to know whether he has any of Turkmenbashi’s, err, quirks. Well, other than the absolute dictator thing. 89% is just embarrassing.