Robin Moore, author of the classic special-forces book “The Green Berets” (and co-author of the “Ballad of the Green Berets”), died in February of this year. With much patience and wrangling, I managed to get a copy of, well, at least parts of his FBI file. Some of the documents - referenced in other, later memos - seem to be missing, perhaps destroyed; most of the remainder are heavily redacted; some were referred to “another agency” for review. Assuming, as seems safe, that this second party is the Defense Intelligence Agency, it’ll probably be, oh, five years from now before anyone knows the full details of Moore’s government files. In the meantime, however, you can take a look at what’s been released so far.
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Today, a potpourri of random military stuff, spanning the 1950s to the near future (sorry, time travel not included). For starters, Wikileaks have an interesting powerpoint on security measures in Secure Classified Intelligence Facilities, or SCIFs. Perhaps not the most interesting thing ever, but there are still some good bits in there. If nothing else, the closing slide is worth remembering: “Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions; they’re easier to handle than dumb mistakes!”
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Today, another FBI document recently released as part of a much larger collection of “stuff” by The Government Attic. As with yesterday’s releases, it’s extracted from one of the much larger PDF files found here. While yesterday’s stuff was concerned with political trivia from the ’50s, today’s is the details of a very interesting “international incident” alleged to have taken place in the summer of 1980: the capture and temporary imprisonment by Vietnam of a handful of U.S. citizens who apparently accidentally sailed into (disputed) Vietnamese territorial waters.
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The Government Attic website in the past day or two posted a staggering 342 megabytes of what are described, ostensibly, as records from the FBI concerning the transfer of older Bureau records to the National Archives for preservation. That is in part true, especially of the later documents; much of the earlier stuff is a completely random selection of stuff - including but not exclusively FBI records - which are held by the National Archives, and which were forwarded to the Bureau for input prior to release to researchers. Because of the way the FBI works, copies of all these documents wound up being preserved - once again - in the Bureau’s files! None of the stuff is “new”, of course - it’s all been released previously to someone, somewhere - but much of the material has never been available on the web before.
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Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re at least somewhat familiar with reasonably modern technology. The many of you who will read this via RSS feed, or on a Blackberry, iPhone, or PDA, are probably a bit more cutting-edge. Still, if you, like me, are able to appreciate the technology of yesteryear, you might enjoy a four-part series recently aired on BBC radio, called “It’s Big and It’s Beautiful: the Rise of Retro-Tech”. Each of the bits is a roughly fifteen-minute reflection on old, obsolete, or “redundant” technology, and their places in history and society. If that sounds like something up your alley, why not have a listen?
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