The Golden Age of Homeland Security: Groucho Marx's Civil Defense PSA

Fifty years before we had the Department of Homeland Security, we had a Federal Civil Defense Agency that was charged with promoting measures to protect the civilian population in the event of an attack on the United States.

No one under 60 would remember this, but we used to have bomb shelters in schools and other public buildings - sometimes in backyards - and did duck and cover drills between math and English classes. Ah, wonderful memories!

And so, back in the '50s, major entertainment figures such as Bob Hope, Art Linkletter (who maybe needs an intro today), and Groucho Marx made public service announcements about what you should do in the event an atomic bomb explodes in your town.

Civil Defense strategy in the 1950s was heavy on self-help and education about atomic hazards with the intention of controlling panic. As Groucho told us in 1953, "nobody else will help you" in the event of war but, nevertheless, your chances of surviving an atomic attack are excellent. Both statements were true.

Today, that seems like a remarkable message to get from your government. Nobody else will help you, so you'll have to be prepared to help yourself and your family. To see how much stress the government used to place on self-help listen to this 1961 civil defense message from President Kennedy in which he states that "individual preparedness, which is beyond the providence of government, is essential to an effective civil defense." I can't imagine DHS saying that anything is beyond the providence of government. 

Unlike today, back then the government wanted to reduce public fear about the - then highly probable - threat of an attack, and thought the best way to do so was with education about the threat and the promotion of self-reliance.They even published handy guides full of practical ideas that were even better than the much-ridiculed duct tape and plastic sheeting recommendation DHS put out in 2003.

Self-help booklet (1951), read it here

To quote Yakov Smirnoff, "what a country!"

Two Thumbs Up For A CIA Documentary Film

H/T to The Snake's Mommy for telling me about the most interesting Cold War history artifact that I've seen in some time, a CIA in-house documentary film about the long imprisonment in China of CIA Operations Officers John Downey and Richard Fecteau.

I was generally aware that the two had been captured when their plane went down over mainland China during the Korean War and that they were not released until the Nixon administration's rapprochement with China, but the entire story is much more complicated and interesting. You can read it here, in a CIA in-house journal article:

Beijing’s capture, imprisonment, and eventual release of CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau is an amazing story that too few know about today. Shot down over Communist China on their first operational mission in 1952, these young men spent the next two decades imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, while their government officially denied they were CIA officers. Fecteau was released in 1971, Downey in 1973. They came home to an America vastly different from the place they had left, but both adjusted surprisingly well and continue to live full lives.

Even though Downey and Fecteau were welcomed back as heroes by the CIA family more than 30 years ago and their story has been covered in open literature — albeit in short and generally flawed accounts — institutional memory regarding these brave officers has dimmed. Their ordeal is not well known among today’s officers, judging by the surprise and wonder CIA historians encounter when relating it in internal lectures and training courses.

Downey and Fecteau were not joyriding on a CIA support flight over China, as the "generally flawed" accounts had it, but were assigned to that flight in order to operate a winch and recover an agent who was to be picked up from the ground using the All-American System, a modified version of a military mail retrieval technique. [See more on that system here. My thanks to commenter Charles Lathrop for correcting my error in first describing that as the Skyhook system, which was a later development.] However, the agents on the ground had been captured and were fully cooperating with the Chinese, and the support flight was shot down. The doubled agents even sent a signal reporting that the agent extraction had been successful, with the result that the CIA assumed its aircraft must have crashed on its return flight, and all aboard were initially reported dead.

The documentary is titled "Extraordinary Fidelity." You can watch it on YouTube, or - but only if you have an hour to spare - click on the embedded video below.

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Area 51 (or, Homey Don't Play Dat)

The Cold War is now history, which is a good thing, especially because WE WON. The U.S. government is starting to declassify many records about the period and release some personnel from their old secrecy agreements. As a result of this new openness, men of a certain age are coming forward with their personal accounts, and that brings me to a good piece of oral history in this weekend's LA Times Magazine, The Road to Area 51:

Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground.

Then again, maybe not -- the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted -- all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.

-- snip --

"We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," [Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, who was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s] says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there's a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left.

The LA Times is correct that no military institution or facility named Area 51 exists. It's an Officially Certified True Fact that neither the U.S. Air Force nor any other Defense Department entity operates any place by that name. The Air Force can't speak for everyone, of course, and anyway, the place is no longer called Area 51. It's gone through a few names over the years, and is currently known - delightfully - as Homey Airport.

For a place that supposedly doesn't exist, Homey Airport sure gets photographed a lot.

The best thing about stories of Area 51 and Cold War secrecy is the excuse it gives me to embed this old video about Homey D. Clown. Not unlike the U.S. government when people nibble around the edges of its deepest darkest secrets, "Homey don't play dat."

Cold War Records on "Project Azorian" Declassified

The National Security Archive at The George Washington University has posted a new collection of documents on the CIA's declassified history of the Glomar Explorer, the 1974 attempt to covertly raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific floor.

Washington, D.C., February 12, 2010 - For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, "Project Azorian," the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. Today the National Security Archive publishes "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," a 50-page article from the fall 1985 edition of the Agency's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. Written by a participant in the operation whose identity remains classified, the article discusses the conception and planning of the retrieval effort and the creation of a special ship, the Glomar Explorer, which raised portions of the submarine in August 1974. The National Security Archive had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA for the document on December 12, 2007.

-- snip --

Internal evidence suggests that the article was written in 1978, but it was prepared at such a high level of classification that it was apparently unpublishable until the Agency made decisions in 1985 to downgrade it to "Secret."

The basic story has long been in the public sphere, but these documents fill in the background and add some new information.

The Cold War has been over for so long that I got an odd sense of surprised recollection, kind of like when you find some long-lost but familiar object, when I read this snippet from the CIA's account:

The Hughes Glomar Explorer's recovery operations were greatly complicated by almost 14 days of near-continuous surveillance of the ship's work by two Soviet naval vessels. Despite the presence of the Soviet surveillance vessels, recovery work did not stop. But fearing that the Soviets might try to land personnel on his ship by helicopter, on July 18, 1974, the CIA mission director on the Glomar Explorer ordered crates stacked on his ship's helicopter deck to prevent the Soviets from landing on it. According to the article, orders were given to "be prepared to order emergency destruction of sensitive material which could compromise the mission if the Soviets attempted to board the ship. The team designated to defend the control room long enough to destroy the material ... was alerted, but guns were not issued."

Ah, the good old days. Intrusive surveillance ... emergency destruction drills ... internal defense preparations ... 'they-wouldn't-really-do-that-would-they' thoughts. All merely the stuff of Cold War nostalgia now, but they were very real concerns during the 1970s.

These documents are the first materials related to "Project Azorian" to be declassified other than for a video of the burial at sea of six sailors whose remains were recovered inside portions of the sub that were raised. The tape was delivered to the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and was subsequently released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request made to the CIA.



I find that burial ceremony strangely affecting. I assume it was filmed partly for foreign relations purposes, as in, 'although we couldn't return their remains to you at the time due to the exigencies of the Cold War, we recorded this ceremony to document that we treated your dead with respect and rendered to them all proper military courtesies.' But it also looks and sounds perfectly sincere. There was a distinctly non-bellicose tone to the wording of the service, like this part:

"So long as men and nations are suspicious of each other, instruments of war will be constructed and brave men will die, as these men have died, in the service of their country."

Taking my Cold War hat out of storage, I could nit-pick that language. Are there not good reasons for suspicion and military preparation when some men and nations are held captive by others? And, weren't the military forces of the Soviet Union acting not in the service of a country or nation - the legitimacy of national identity being denied by Marxist-Leninism - but rather in the interests of the working class, a social construction that theoretically gave the Soviet Union a justification to insert itself anywhere in the world?

But, that no longer matters. The Cold War is over, we won, and today I'm happy to simply accept the humane and generous sentiments of that burial ceremony on board the Glomar Explorer. Of course, it's easy to be generous to an enemy after he's defeated.