On being all covert and stuff...

Way back in the dark ages, while I was still a grad student at San Diego State, I was recruited to design a logistics management program for a very new, very different type of Navy project, based on (gasp!) COMPUTERS!  I had to get a top secret clearance for that job and for my next job with the Air Force Systems Command, and for all the jobs after that until I quit that type of work.

Consequently, my natural inclination in talking about these subjects is to not. After all, it is difficult to overcome years of zipped-lip conditioning. But now I seem to have been recruited again - with an odd reverse twist this time. My job is to broadcast a story that has been deeply hidden for most of its life. entwined with the growth and development of the U.S. clandestine services from the pre-WW II days all the way to the founding of the National Reconnaissance Office.

Ask the average person on the street what Townsend Brown is best known for and they won't  even know who he was. Ask a group of fringe-dwelling woo-woos and they might say that he invented anti-gravity, or that he was the scientist mentioned in The Philadelphia Experiment. Ask his daughter, Linda and she might tell you that he is best known for his work in electrohydrodynamics and sidereal radiation.  The truth is that beyond knowing that he was a physicist and scientist, she never really knew what he did for a living.

Describing her childhood, she says:

Now, before someone rolls his or her eyes and says that it would have been impossible that I would not have asked more questions, you have to understand something. I had been involved in Dad's work since I was nine. I knew, even then, that if I could know something he would tell me. Asking questions just flat didn't work...so I gave up on that.

Maybe some of you who who had fathers in high security situations would understand. Asking questions was just something you knew was pointless.

I happen to believe that Townsend was an important contributor to and member of a very select group of scientists who designed and built the Hydra network in 1939 and '40 for William Stephenson's British Security Coordination. This network, connecting Ottawa, Washington, London and New York, incorporated the then state-of-the-art radio, radar, and cryptographic technologies in a model that is still used by the National Security Agency. I also believe that this cabal would have included Canadian Patrick DeForest Bayly, programming and crypto genius, Beau Kitselman and quite possibly physicist, Robert Sarbacher.  I will make my case for these conclusions in later posts.

Some seventy years later, we now live with a hydra that feeds on 39 or 57 or a bazillion flavors of intelligence. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) begat Electronics Intelligence (ELINT) which begat Communications Intelligence (COMINT) which begat...and so on, down to Measurement Intellignce or MASINT. The sum and substance of them all is that we now seen to live in a world where nothing is private. That luxury essentially ended with the launch of the first Corona Reconnaissance Satellite carrying its "Keyhole" camera payload.

If there is no going back to those halcyon days when liberty included privacy then, we must ask, how are we to go forward? I think we are about to launch ourselves into a very positive collective adventure, but I also think that it is going to require some shifts of consciousness to get us there. The thing is, though, that I sense a great readiness to change in the air, and I say, “Hallelujah!”