Volunteers, this book festival l has been going on for ten years. When you see them, please give them a thank you to. Silence all of your devices. We hope youre following the festival on facebook, twitter and instead graham. If you post about the festival, please use the hash tag. Your feedback is very important. Surveys are available at the tent and on the website. By submitting a survey you will be entered into a drawing for a 100ft visa gift card. This is a free event but it does help if you buy more books. The more sold the more the publishers will want to send their offers to speak with us. Purchasing from politics and prose folks who support one of the best independent bookstores that benefits the local economy, supports local jobs and of course books make the best tgifts. If youn enjoy this program and you are in a position to do so, please buy your books here today. As i said inai the beginning, im jealous of the city and the book festival. Jealous and a good a way as i am pleased to see a body come together to support a great idea. As we all know that does not always happen. When it does, everybody when especially the community. The author we are going to hear from this morning is a historian and curator of the International Spy museum. He writes of intelligence plans but went from conception to planning to testing to cancellation. What was most interesting to me is how outofthebox these ideas were, how potentially catastrophic something could have been a. Using an iceberg as a floating airfield remember, this is during world war ii and the cold war, not now with global warming. And good atomic power be used for something more than bomb. Remember the stories are mind boggling and in c some cases, md blowing. Take away for me a a former history major and reader of lots is what makes a bold idea and outofthebox strategic Intelligence Mission worthy of risking. Thank you and give a round of applause for our speaker. [applause] thank you. I appreciate that. T. Didnt know i was going to be introduced by the mayor but its an honor for me. If you were here for the last speaker or kind of wandering around at the end, what an inspiration, such an inspirational speaker brought tears to your eyes about the power of coming together. I would like to say now on to completelsomething completely d. This is not that. This book was a bit of a passion project for me. I just wrote a book for the University Press and thought i have to do something thats going to get me out of wanting toat rip my eyes out and i wantd to write something that could be read by academic history is important we need people to understand the world around it, but it is so combining to those that have the time to go through footnotes and read through what my advisor would say is dont use any adjectives because theres always a balance that will workre for you and i thougt i cant imagine the cure for insomnia that your books must be. Sorry. I love you. [laughter] i wanted to write something that also coincided withnc the openig of the museum. If you dont know if just reopened. Weve been down for a little while and we spent five plus so come check it out. It is a great complement to that museum, the idea that a fun book that you can read chapter by chapter every night if you wanted to does have a real purpose andmi meaning. I wanted to write a book that made you laugh and kind of smile and say oh my god. I realized though that there was a bigger point to all this. Before we get there, the book is split into four sections and this wasnt on purpose as a result of the research i did before this. I kept running into stories that would make my eyes open and my jaw drop. I kept thinking im going to win a Pulitzer Committee are going to make this into a movie, im going to have an oscar because there was a crazy plan no one had ever heard of so i would spend a couple of days like forget the Dissertation Research im going t to follow this to is natural and then i realized was canceled before it actually happened. If you heard somebody throwing out expletives at the top of their t long that was me when i found out it was going up a goie window and i was going out the window and i was going to be stuck with another program that doesnt exist. But after i kept seeing more and more of these and realized how much money and resourcesaf we spent some of the kind of personalities that were involved in planning some of these extraordinary missions in Technology Observations i said there is a book here not that i have time to write a book, but in l the back of my mind i stard down these policies and said when i have time, i will start writing this and innocence i didnt mean to write this when i did. I wrote a podcast that was weakly related to sit down with offers and be on the other side of this, former directors of the agencies, people i find interesting. I was talking to one of them and she said to you have any ideas for books. You have to talk to my agent. So i talked to her agent in four days later, we had a proposal and then i had a book deal. Of course i told everyone i am writing this book. A lot of it was coming in early and staying in late. I have a lot of wonderful people that helped me and told me what worked and what different because i am not a canadian, i am a historian and i guess im kind of cool tha but in normal peoples realms im not so derisive of does this joke work, no, dont do that. That might work in your head but it doesnt work in reality, so i ended up turning it f into four sections of the first is on animals and it was was a beluge story about the size and i will go check it out but actually happened. They turned a beluga whale into some kind of a covert operator. For us it detected in norway and wanted freedom in the west. So, not only human spies and animals are not objecting to the west. So thats kind of spurred these ideas and what you see in the book are several attempts where we try to turn animals into our allies and we talk about operations and technologies and finally Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear weapons are my passion project thatcl tells you a lot f things may be bad things about me that im somewhat obsessed with this topic. But, so many things went awry when we started talking about what we could possibly do with Nuclear Weapons and i will talk about why as it gets a little further on but i want to give you an insight into what you are going to see inside of this book. As the mayor mentioned the first chapter is a personal favorite of mine and its one that ive told multiple times any chance i get. For adults, kids come anyone in between, i get to tell the story of the official project an attempt by the agency in the 1960s to turn a house packed into a covert listening device. [laughter] and this doesnt mean just putting a collar around its neck with a tag it means cutting open the cat, putting a power packed inside, running up wires where the microphones were given during its tail into the antenna. [laughter] you laugh and read this and think out of the know. They are real documents that detail. To take a step back it sounds ridiculous now, the idea probably came from where the soviet embassy was a somewhat open and it was difficult because we were not good at infiltrating human sources inside butan what an american sy noticed his stray cats would wander in and out of the soviet embassy sometimes even in spite of the buildings are the courtyard and would sit down and get scratched behind the ears by the soviet diplomats were military personnel and in some cases with jump on the lap of the officers and someone said i wondered if we can do something with this and the idea kind of filtered back to the agency and this is the time when they were making big things. We can do big things with science. Part of this was a program to have heard of it because they had to do mind control usually using lsd and other hallucinogenic drugs to understand how the brain works withti electronic stimulation. A lot oin the experiments were g done on animals. The idea was to test if trained or do i what he wants them to d. They said we are going to train a cat to a be a spy. The idea was good we combine this knowledge of animal brain and ability to use electronic stimulation to overcome them with a cat that is essentially not trainable. But the part about the stories you dont actually know how when it. We have two versions of how it ended. One comes from a friend of mine that is a former director of the office of Technical Services at the cia, if you see the james bond movie, he was a cia q. s top engineer scientist at the cia and he came in after. He ha handled his access to classified data and sends it didnt work out all that well, they realized they wasted too much money and cancel the program, great story, its probably a true story but the only one that wouldnt end up in this book. Trust me that would be pretty boring. The other was a highlevel cia executives who got very disillusioned with the agency had left and wrote a book called the cult of intelligence which gives you an idea about the effect of the a book. He talked about it in a very different way. He said they trained caret when they have a natural instinct to wander off in search of food. They would rewire the brain to overcome its instinct to the plaintiff could actually do a fullfledged Laboratory Test according to what the cia wanted. Now we need to do a full scale test. Apparently it took place in northwest dc where they drove and had a secret spy van. Insulated home of the electronics you could do and lights blinking and switches and a telescope in the corner doing whatever it does making and they osaid as two men sitting on the bench, just randomly there for the day that we are going to see if our cats can listen to the conversation so theye click some buttons and push some lights, opened the door, pu, put the kiy on thtv onthe street and hit th. To their amazement of the acoustic kitty made a beeline straight for the man on a park bench. You have to understand thes that these are tech guys, my kind of people sitting in the van probably say i cant believe this is working. We are g going to get a raise, e one vacation, im going to get to ride a harley i always wanted so the operations guy was a darn cool. Now as they are thinking that they may not have been paying attention to the traffic patterns that were going on. And our hero got halfway across the road and then run over. That is how one side of the story in because this is how it ends in the documents and that t is when my mind takes overr and thanks they are sitting there and only getting their harley but they have their acoustic road to smoking in the middle of connecticut avenue and they had to run out there and scrape off the pavement before the soviets to see it osee it or the god foe Washington Post gets wind of what they are doing. That is an example of the kind of stories that are inside of this book. Another interesting one goes back to world war ii, and that is the primary focus, world war ii and the cold war. This is a time after pearl harbor most americans, patriotic ones weree trying to figure out ways to help the government in the country when the war. He had grand ideas and passion he has ideas for how to help theyll move faster and it was the most genius idea at all to create a Fried Chicken vending machine and that kind of cheap gas doesnt come around every day. But the idea was spurred out by listening to the attack with most americans did at the time on the radio. R after vacation to southwestern United States, he spent several days going in and out of the system is in the southwest United States looking at the back that existed in the southwest United States and something clicked. Something in his mind clicked. Ive been looking at that and i understand that. It will always try to find warm, dark places to go to the day. When in doubt, the instinct is to find a close cozy place to hide out then they had a Second Thought japan is made up of buildings and wood and paper from the cold dry dark places, wood and paper and explosives if we are going to fix an exclusive and drop it over japan it will find its way across the buildings and if it goes off on a timer if well bring them to the ground this was a plan that might have worked and w if we kw from some ofht the testing how r these wind that it had a pretty good chance of doing so. The first test they di did was a bit problematic. This is where the knowledge wasnt as high as we would like it to be even though the man ate was the top person whoco discovered the navigation using echolocation so the top person i cant figure out what word i want to use here. Anyway, itll come to me at some point. To drop the canister full of hibernating bats to cool them down and put them into the hibernation, they miscalculated so whenlc they drop the canister full of bats they didnt wake up in time and i dont care if you are lighter than air, he will hit its just as hard as if you invite you to the ground when we were asleep so the first test didnt work out well. But its not a failure it is a learning experience. They collected more and decided this time we are going to get it right. As they all come flying out of the truck the good news is they set up a fake japanese town as a test site and about half of them flew up into the attic and burned the test site to the ground like this works perfectly. The bad news is they went to a working u. S. Army airfield with the barracks and the towers and planes and burned back to the ground. Making matters worse, he didnt have the need to know. This was a topsecret program that he had no idea why. When he showedtm up at the Fire Department come he couldnt get in the gate to his own building because he was told was classified. He had to sit there and watch it burn. But in the end, it worked. We losing airfield here or the there. The u. S. Navthe u. S. Navy that o fund this fully and had to turn to the chief of Naval Operations who said we had a great plan thats going to win the war for us. I didnt tell you wha what tim period this was with the early summer of 1945 when e the admirl was told about this situation and said we had a great but is always bats in new mexico and training and testing and hes like i thought you were going to mention Something Else happening in new mexico because that is what is going to endur the war o we are not going to spend millions of dollars when we just spent 2 billion on building the atomic bombs are not a sake. As crazy as the plan was it wasnt because it was wacky or canceled because it was stupid, its because we were going to win the war another way and that is what is fundamentally found inside the stories. The vastem majority of them were not so crazy they didnt work for the majority of them worked so crazy somebody said no we are not going to do this. Most of them were canceled because they were superseded by events and som some of the technology came along that worked better becausthe workedb, because the coldus war ended so its not like we stepped up and someone said they are not going to spend money on that. It just went in a very different direction. So i want to make sure that i cover the topic the book is named after its like my dream of getting my oscar and once when i get laid off will be sitting here. This is the last chapter in the book and its a program that came after. And if yoin the book and its a program that came after. None of you were even remotely alive. Cspan isnt looking at the crowd. You are all in your 20s. Everyone looks to the United States and we built the first airplane and Chocolate Chip Cookie and microwave popcorn and the etchasketch. But now all of a sudden the soviets had beat us at our own game. A couple years later putting first manha into space Latin America Africa and east asia was looking for people to follow. What side we want to join up with . And to have all that technology and innovation to be part of the developed world even the soviets be to set her own game. We need something to show we are the talked on top dogs to say not so fast americans invent big things so it was truly a plan to detonate a small weapon on the moon and where the dark and light side of the moon meet each other so we would stare up at the Mushroom Cloud and this is the idea so what kind of crazy scientist would research . As one of the prominent scientist and with the Deputy Director of the Apollo Program in the 1980s and how to deal with the chernobyl attack. Anybody watching sports or the weather . And thenen to invent the tele straighter where people write on the tv screen. That was leonard rifle. He was an inventor and realw scientists. He understood and to discover the kuiper belt which is a string of i. C. E. And rocks outside of neptune. He had a young graduate School Student who was very good at math and looking at the way we looked like on the moon remember carl sagan and then try to help that program so talking about real scientists are not making this up Gerard Kuiper they are all involved in the air force program how to detonate a bomb on the moon. Does nobody really understand why it was canceled . Not to my satisfaction reading why it was canceled not a Single Person can to definitively lay out why. It seems as though this was the reason are apparently a was the reason why we heard it was the reason or somebody told me. Not Even Air Force documents it says it was, canceled. And a crazy plann. Like this, we dont know why it didnt happen. Because someone somewhere said you could not get a Mushroom Cloud on the moon so the whole big idea depends on an atmosphere like on earth. The reason you get a Mushroom Cloud is that gas and dust and debris kicked up you even need the nuclear to make a Mushroom Cloud and then it swished down. Then twisted aside in the air rises rapidly so it is sucked back in it is a vacuum already so we could spend billions of dollars putting a Nuclear Weapon on the moon only to have dust going and lots of directions. Maybe it would have been pretty but not the Mushroom Cloud. And the soviets had a program that was part of the lunar obmission. And then to detonate to stick on them and withov the soviets. And the lunar three went around the moon. And fortunatelyhe for them they canceled the program as well because it would be a very different perspective with armstrong stepping onto a move that was nuked by both countries only a decade earlier. And with that tongueincheek i wrote this so firmly planted in my cheek it almost hurt at the end of the day. I had no intention of there being a big picture or a lesson to be learned but i talked myself into it by looking at all these programs. And with cold war in Second World War is because of a very specific instance. The first line is this is a tbook about desperation. That is what we are seeing. These are all stories about when the United States and others were desperate and with that existential threat. Every single president ial debate somehow the existential threat like iran or al qaeda. And then to be a threat to the existence of the United States. And they were a threat and then for all the money in the world and now there are plans built out of desperation. And necessity is the mother of invention but this is the drunk uncle. [laughter] to call in once a year three in the morning on your birthday to say i have the greatest idea in the world. And then as a reason for not doing it it hasas to work. And it is important. The United States and the british and others were too truly desperate when the existence was under threat so programs like this were funded or tested they were almost operational because we truly felt we had no other choice. Nothing elsef could possibly work. That would not keep us safe or secure. And then to go down the rabbit hole so they all go down with m me. I hope you enjoyed it as much as i did now i will take any questions you might have. Thank you. [applause]st thank you so much. Can you expand upon the Dinosaur Program talking about the topsecret and to have that reusable space plan not only for exploration and reconnaissance but missions worldwide. And the aircraft based on a concept of dynamic scoring which is something the birds do all the time they find layers if you ever watch an eagle in flight that goes from place to place and then could they use the upper atmosphere to do this and send up a plane in space to balance its way around the world to do reconnaissance . And then to do bombing missions. And then when they decided to make this i aircraft and with that soaring but in these common words like branch alina so what could we name the topsecret nuclear arms space plan to inspire fear in the hearts and make Congress Want to givell billions of dollars . Lets call it the dinosaur. The topsecret space plan was legit called thee dinosaur. It potentially worked in there is a little jealousy but but it didnt have a home. So what is now called darpa and it was interested it the air force wanted it. They needed a bomber that can go anywhere within minutes ago but the issue is how do we get the government and the different ideas and how can we make this work . That was the real issue from robert mcnamara. And the and the perfectly laid out 100 percent purpose agreed upon everybody. And with that active designation if you have an x in front of it it will be experimental it will not be put into production. The x 20 designation the Dinosaur Program was dead but the money put into another program called the man orbited laboratory a space station that would have a culmination of spies and air force personnel where they would be inside the space platform with a telescope to take photos in a massive camera it sounds like a great idea with those man satellites that are digitally able to take pictures. Too much be much more cost prohibitive where this had its problems but now we found out much later the m o l had another mission that was a mission that is still so topsecret you dont find it a lot in the documents. Some of that is redacted thats a fancy way to say take out other guys satellites and those reconnaissance satellites in those missiledefense satellites. Man in space who could maneuver over there and spacewalk to the other satellites. And they really liked this idea so when it came down to it it was up against the third satellite called the hexagon. Those that were run by the cia one was corona, the first ever manmade american satellite and space bar go the second was gambit and third was hexagon that would cost just as much as the lol and congress only had money for one of them. Why they had a great concept every Intelligence Agency except the cia wanted it. And then to cancel the Program Later on. Any other questions . Are there any desperate situations that actually work . But most of the time there are libraries full of books where world war ii desperation led to the most innovative and useful technology in history. Go down to the air and space area in virginia the first thing that you see and i say that it made me want to be a pilot when i was a kid. And when that plane is on the ground it leaks fuel so what crazy man came up with that idea . There was a lot of friction building 90000 feet in the air what happens when metal gets heated it expands so the aircraft itself will feel the fuel tax it is a genius idea this is the idea that a lofty engineer had two in the morning so now stick with me. [laughter] so is the plane leaks fuel when it is on the ground . Can you imagine being the first brs test pilot so lets pretend so im getting the hell out of here so that was out f of desperation and it works fantastically for the normandy invasion with the desperate f attempts and it worked o the only reason it does is because we avoid the weather all the different the different storms and the only reason it worked is the german bought into the Deception Program that they are working on and it works so well hitler refused to letfo reinforcements go to normandy because he thought the real mission was coming from somewhere else. One hundred things had to go right for dday to go right. And we talkfo about these what a great idea that eisenhowers plan was perfection and then all the Landing Craft off to the north sea and then most of europe would be glowing in the dark because he would have won the war with the atomic bomb eisenhower goes on to become president but that is outcome history with hindsight and applying what we know from 2019 to the ground. But had that been a disaster it is interesting to look at these programs. And the other from master yoda dont apply the 2019 hindsight because if you do then you will react by saying what were they thinking . What were they thinking. Why were they so afraid and willing to do i these plans . You just dontt know this anyway. But you are sitting here and you need to forget all the history that you know more clearly wouldnt be sitting here if you arent the most intelligent people in the entire country. [laughter] and now tog say put myself in the shoes to understand the desperation that they felt. There is a a lot of books in the library these are the ones that led us down a path. When i was in vietnam and a friend told me the goose control officer as a west point graduate what is a goose control officer it is an Experimental Program they put the geese on the perimeter rather than using soldiers and gis they put the geese out there then they start honking. Not to be super easy to hear but for Permanent Defense so the idea if you ever run into a goose it will wake up the dead if the vietcong is trying to infiltrate the base camp. That was the effective way to use animals for defense. And other types of mammal and anything that comes out of the ordinary automatically trained to warn o people that could be a diver, pollution but they are using animals very effectively. Had we use them and their senses to our benefit . That is what they were trying to do. He and with that glowinthedark paint to scare the japanese or using synthetics or biological weapons. And they are not used on the same way. And there are wonderful books out there and National Security going the entirely opposite direction for being here. So president kennedy said with that in mind with those Desperate Measures what keeps us on the right side . What stops the security from going too far . [laughter] the way the country has been set up with checks and balances. And those that are not necessarily the most aweinspiring in the conclusion i did not mean for this to be serious. That most of us will never forget. And people dying in 9 11 helm much a change them it was not a moment where our existence was under threat. Al qaeda i dont care how many if they would have ran another 100 airplanes it is not threatening our existence. Thats not compared to Nuclear Armageddon or the nazi war machine marching across the world. That we almost reacted as ifld it did because i was under threat. And it was the design the way to work any d time i dont care where they come down if you are a libertarian or liberal or anyone in between. And then we come back for that. So to get inside our heads only because of 9 11. And to celebrate what our ancestors were afraid of. And what would happen when world war iii broke out it is a biological weapons attack or the invasion had happened what do . D they be willing to with a true existential threat to be philosophic and you dont need to understand and three is ourselves. And then to destroy who we were as a country. And always to be guilty of leading us down theh. Path and then we would kill ourselves we dont need the russians to do that for us. Thank you. [applause] thats a great place to end. [inaudible conversations] left in the drawing board. Good afternoon good afternoon i am Research Director and welcome heto the auditorium the highest here in washington dc