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Four Tales of CIA Shenanigans (What the Conspiracy!)
33 Plays2 years ago
Sex dolls in Moscow! Vampires in the Philippines! Two other things! Josh lets M in on a few of the weirder things the CIA got up to in the latter half of the 20th Century.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Listener Survey Insights
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, the listener surveys are in. And finally, finally, we have some concrete data about the podcast. Excellent. Let's get into the weeds. Right. So 50% of the audience think our episodes are too long. And 50% of our audience think they're too short.
00:00:17
Speaker
100% of those surveyed thought our digressions on pop culture were spot on. Although the survey does note that only one person answered that particular question. Okay.
Leprechaun Content Confusion
00:00:28
Speaker
53% think we should have more leprechaun content. So is that the creature or the film series? It's
00:00:34
Speaker
Not clear, I guess both? Anyway, carrying on, 43% of respondents like how we put it to the bastards, and 18% love that all we do is debunk conspiracy theories. Yeah, I know, I know. Now 23% of people want the podcast to go fortnightly, 39% think it should be twice weekly, and 41% think it would be great to bring the podcast back.
00:01:02
Speaker
That's over 100%. Also, what? Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, so is there any useful data? Anything we can do to, you know, make the podcast better?
Conspiracy Topic Introduction
00:01:18
Speaker
Well... Yes.
00:01:20
Speaker
No. Really? Nope. All this data is contrary. 16% of respondents think we should give more gardening tips and only one person answered that question. A question I might add I didn't put in the survey. 26% of respondents would like us to use the name Otis for everyone. All the data is useless.
00:01:40
Speaker
The only thing which is useful is... Yes? Well, people love those What The Conspiracy episodes, but they also find them incredibly stressful to listen to. They'd really like us to, you know, put at the top of the show what the content is going to be about. Well, we can't ignore our listeners. No, we can't. So, this is an episode of What The Conspiracy. Josh, what's the topic?
00:02:08
Speaker
Well, it's quite interesting. It's a tale about how the Walt Disney Corporation... for fun, mostly, while at the same time... on an island as Coca-Cola executives and Elon Musk in illicit... while the entire Republican Party...
00:02:31
Speaker
Really? No.
Podcast Introduction
00:02:51
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy who gained superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive They Might Be Giants album, Dr. M. R.X.Tentiff. The statue got me high. Your superpower is that you are the little bird house in our soul. You can build bird houses in people's souls.
00:03:15
Speaker
which is rather difficult for me because as I'm a materialist and not a jeweler, I don't even think souls exist and yet somehow that is my power. Well, there you go. So, we don't have anything at the top of the show, do we? Nothing new? Nothing new and interesting?
What The Conspiracy Game Setup
00:03:31
Speaker
No, no, nothing interesting at all. So it's what, the conspiracy episode? Should we just go straight into it? It's time to play What the Conspiracy.
00:03:52
Speaker
So, as I told you last week, in the bonus episode, as I recall, so our regulars won't know, this week I've done the same thing I did last time, where I had a bunch of interesting things that none of which would fill up an episode by themselves, but they're all basically on the same theme. So that's going to be my what the conspiracy story. So once again, when you try to guess where, when and what,
00:04:20
Speaker
the conspiracies I'm about to tell you are, you can either have one guess in the knowledge that there are, in this instance, four stories that might actually be right for, or if you really feel up to it, you could guess four different places and four different times.
Wacky CIA Hijinks Theme Reveal
00:04:38
Speaker
I'm going to go for four. I feel like I should go for four. All right, so ask me the first question.
00:04:43
Speaker
So where do you think these conspiracies occurred? North America, South America, Antarctica and Rapa Nui. Impressive, okay. When do you think they occurred? August 8th, 1526.
00:04:59
Speaker
the entirety of the 20th century, the Cretaceous era, although frankly if you can get me a conspiracy theory in the Cretaceous era I'll be very impressed given the lack of written or oral records about that time, and Guy Fawkes, any year, just Guy Fawkes.
00:05:21
Speaker
OK, you're completely wrong on all the places. I mean, the times do sort of span several years. So there would have been several Guy Fawkes days occurring over some of them. So you're a little bit right there. But everywhere else, I'm afraid you're way, way off. But what about the what? What what do you think I'm going to be talking about?
00:05:44
Speaker
What's a singular thing, isn't it? Because it's going to be the unifying theme. It's a theme, yes. I think you've given the way by using the word theme.
Operation Popeye: Weather Warfare
00:05:54
Speaker
I think it's going to be a conspiracy theory about show tunes.
00:05:59
Speaker
Oh, you wish. You wish it was a conspiracy about show tunes. We'd never, we'd be recording this from now until the end of time if I let you get show tunes into an episode. I'm afraid, I'm afraid not, though. So I can't, I can't break out my, in olden days, a glimpse of stalking was looked on as something shocking, but heaven knows, anything goes.
00:06:23
Speaker
No, you cannot. No. I mean, it's a tune from a musical, but I don't know. I don't think that one applies. No. Okay. Anyway, I'll put you out of your misery. So I'm going to be talking about Wacky CIA hijinks, basically. And I figure with four stories, I'm hoping at least one of them will be one you haven't actually heard of before. But I've gone for the
00:06:48
Speaker
That means that at least my 20th century guess has to be somewhat on the money, given the CIA only comes into existence in the middle of the 20th century. I suppose that's true, yes. And only chosen 21st century CIA hijinks. And I suspect there are probably four CIA hijinks stories of the 21st century.
00:07:12
Speaker
But I suspect- Almost certainly. But no, no, you actually, no, yeah, I should give you that. Yes, they do all occur in the latter half of the 20th century. And can you guarantee that some of them weren't going on on Guy Fawkes Day? No, I'm pretty sure some of them were. Almost certainly. In fact, actually, when is Guy Fawkes Day? November. When is the monsoon season in Vietnam? I do not know.
00:07:39
Speaker
You'd think I would have written that down, but I didn't. But if Guy Fawkes Day occurs during the monsoon season, then definitely. Because, right, so I have four stories. You must be over 18 for the second two stories. They're a little saucy, but we'll get to that. The first one, though, is the story of CIA weather control in Vietnam.
00:08:06
Speaker
Yep, I'm talking about everyone's favorite operation, Operation Sober Popeye. I don't know why. Can you give me the name of that operation one more time? That's Operation Sober Popeye.
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah, that one's more appropriate, I'll give you, yeah.
Vampire Rumors in the Philippines
00:08:28
Speaker
I don't know why. Popeye was normally like, Popeye didn't drink in the cartoons as far as I mean, he was a sailor. So you'd expect he'd be no stranger to a bottle of rum, but I don't know why.
00:08:40
Speaker
So I don't know. Anyway, so Operation Soka Popeye was the Vietnam exercising weather control during the Vietnam War. And when I say weather control, I actually mean cloud seeding, which is technically weather control. I mean, you can't, you can't deny that. It is a form of geoengineering.
00:08:58
Speaker
It certainly is. I'm assuming our listeners are probably familiar with cloud seeding, but just in case, it's a thing that people do, people genuinely and honestly do, where you get up on a plane, you fly above the clouds and sprinkle particles of various substances. I think silver iodide
00:09:16
Speaker
is one of the more popular ones. And the scientific idea is that by spreading particles through a cloud, you increase the number of potential nucleation sites for raindrops or snowflakes, and you can either make it rain more or possibly make it rain when it wasn't quite going to rain. That said, from what I can tell, the sites is a little bit divided as to whether or not it actually works.
00:09:45
Speaker
some things I've read said it doesn't really have a statistically significant effect. If it works, it's a very imprecise science. I believe it got better at cloud seeding in the last decade or so. There have been advances in the understanding of how it works. But there's still a little bit of a worry that
00:10:08
Speaker
People are only reporting positive instances and not negative instances of, say, reporting where it does work and kind of ignoring the cases where it doesn't work. So statistically, I think the jury is still somewhat out on the utility of cloud seeding. But if you happen to be a cloud seeder, and you know more about cloud seeding than Josh and Ida, which is basically nothing. Not much.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean people use it for, people attempt it for agricultural purposes to get a bit more rain. I've heard of the super rich funding a bit of cloud seeding if they think it might be going to rain on the day of a special occasion to try and get it to rain a couple of days before. So the rain sort of all rained out and you get a fine day when you want it.
00:10:55
Speaker
But that's not what they were trying to do in the Vietnam War. In the Vietnam War, they thought that if they could extend the monsoon season beyond its usual time, that would do extra damage to the roads used by the North Vietnamese, especially if they could target their cloud seeding to specifically the areas that the North Vietnamese would be moving their supplies through. So they thought if they could muddy up the roads, if they could cause extra slips and landslides, it would damage the North Vietnamese's ability to transport things.
00:11:24
Speaker
And so that's what they did. They had a few test runs in Laos and then they ran missions taking off from Thailand over various areas in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. And supposedly they were flying these cloud seeding missions twice a day, every day during the monsoon season, every year from 1967 to 1972.
00:11:44
Speaker
So this was done under the official cover of being weather reconnaissance missions, and apparently they were as well. Like they'd go out, they'd do whatever you do on a weather reconnaissance mission, find out how it's looking and report back. But also while they were up there, they'd dump a bit of silver iodide or lead iodide apparently into the clouds. Now this is
00:12:05
Speaker
This is the sort of thing it's a little bit frowned upon. At the time, it wasn't specifically outlawed, but certainly they hadn't told the Laotian government that they'd been running tests there. They hadn't told the Thai government that they were taking off and doing cloud seeding operations from their country. They just stuck with the weather reconnaissance thing.
00:12:28
Speaker
And this operation was eventually outed in 1971. A reporter called Jack Anderson reported that the CIA was up to this in Vietnam. And then it had a, quote, brief mention in the Pentagon Papers.
Moscow Deception with Sex Dolls
00:12:44
Speaker
I think they mentioned some sort of an Operation Popeye, which was a cloud seeding thing, which then prompted a bigger article in the New York Times in 1972.
00:12:55
Speaker
which really brought national attention to what was going on. Apparently, the mission stopped like two days after the New York Times article was published. Essentially, it sounds like someone a bit higher up found out and was like, you're doing what? And it was stopped. And these days,
00:13:13
Speaker
where the manipulation for military purposes is in fact banned by the Geneva Conventions. The Environmental Modification Convention came into force in 1978, possibly prompted specifically by Operation Sober Popeye, and you're not allowed to do that anymore, which I guess is a good thing, messing with other countries' weather. It's a bit super villainy, isn't it?
00:13:35
Speaker
It is, but I'm still fixated on the name Soba Popeye. I mean, there's always rules around operation name because they almost always have two parts, native and a noun. Is it just a random word generator or is there significant?
00:13:53
Speaker
I would like to know, because some of them seem quite appropriate. I mean, we're moving outside of the CIA, but you know, one of those wars in Iraq was Operation Desert Storm. So that's obviously appropriate to the region. It's a desert, and you're storming it. Desert Storm.
00:14:17
Speaker
And if there's a random sobering your Popeye, does the word sober have a different meaning in America? And is it populism for water or clouds? I need to know. I need to know.
00:14:35
Speaker
I have a memory of hearing that they used to make them more meaningful and then decided to just make them random words in case people would hear the name of an operation that was being planned or something and be able to make some sort of guess as to what they were doing, but I might be making that up.
00:14:59
Speaker
I mean, I have a memory of that. That sounds it sounds sensible, but I cannot remember where I actually heard that. So it's possibly sounds too sensible. Yeah, a little bit evil. Oh, we can't give accurate names to our secret operations. People might find out about the bad things we're constantly doing. So let's just give them random names that no one ever connects the dots. Right? Yes, no, that's I don't know. But so that's story number one.
00:15:28
Speaker
Okay, I did not know about the sober Popeye. So I'm very good. Good record. Okay. Story number two was suggested to me by friend of the show Hayden and patron. So thank you very much on several accounts. This does not have an operation name as far as I'm aware, but we've gone from CIA where control in Vietnam to CIA vampire attacks in the Philippine.
00:15:59
Speaker
Now I think I've read about this in the Fortean times. Sounds like something they'd write about. It was a CIA seeding stories about vampire attacks around Manila.
00:16:15
Speaker
When we say vampire attacks, that's the Western equivalent, but it was the AS... I'm not sure if it's ASWANG or ASWANG, I don't know how the word is pronounced, but that's the specific entity that they were referring to, which apparently is sort of a general term for a bunch of creatures from Filipino folklore, but one kind
00:16:31
Speaker
is a creature that sucks people's blood, a humanoid creature that appears human and sucks people's blood. Rather than biting them with fangs, they have a proboscis-like tongue, which I assume is what gave Guillermo del Toro the idea for his vampires.
00:16:46
Speaker
in um in blade two and and in the strain his novels and tv series so yes this this happened post world war two in the philippines in the philippines there was there were the hucks huck being an abbreviation for a tiger log phrase that i can't pronounce which meant the people's army against the japanese so in world war two they were fighting against japanese invaders in the philippines so they were on the side of the west they were on they they were fighting
00:17:14
Speaker
side by side with the United States. But after the war, they were not too fond of the increasing role that the States was trying to take in running the Philippines. In particular, they opposed the Bell Trade Act, which was an act that was passed in the Philippines that apparently gave the US a lot of control over essentially the economy of the Philippines and Philippine industries.
00:17:40
Speaker
So their disapproval of that ended up getting them expelled from Congress. And they went back to using the same sort of guerrilla tactics they'd been using against the Japanese, but this time fighting against US forces. So the Philippines government had trouble handling them. So at that point, the CIA stepped in, led by a man called Edward Lansdale. And from 1950 to 1954, one of the things they did while fighting the Hux, apart from actually fighting them, which obviously they did a bit of,
00:18:10
Speaker
They used various propaganda tactics, and one of them was using belief in the Azuan, which was believed in in some areas of the Philippines. And so basically what they do is, having gotten a fight with some Hux and killed a bunch of them, they would sort of conspicuously leave the bodies lying around the place with big wounds in their necks.
00:18:35
Speaker
and drained of blood as though they had been munched on by some sort of supernatural bloodsucker. Basically to put the wind up the locals and make them think that the fights that these people are involved in are sort of drawing these supernatural forces.
00:18:50
Speaker
So, Edward Lansdale talks about this in his memoir, apparently. In fact, he even talks about not just poking holes in dead bodies, but actually killing captured Hux, specifically so that they could, what did he say? He said that poke holes in the necks
00:19:06
Speaker
and then hang them up by their ankles after they were dead so that all their blood would drain out, and then leave their body to be found either by their comrades, who would think, oh crap, there's vampires around here, we'd better move somewhere else, or by the locals, who'd think, what are these hucks bringing into our area? And apparently it worked.
00:19:25
Speaker
Apparently as a psychological warfare tactic it did actually have an effect and the Hux began to lose support amongst the locals. Obviously by itself it didn't defeat them completely but apparently it did have an actual effect.
00:19:41
Speaker
And all they had to do was kidnap and murder some people and mutilate their bodies. If you can imagine the CIA doing such a dastardly thing. Yeah, so the version of the story I had heard was more that they were spreading the rumours that there were vampires around. I wasn't aware. They were also going, oh, we'll provide some additional evidence. I say, matey, come over here. Stab, stab, stab. All right, now drain that person's blood and leave them on the street. Because it's one thing.
00:20:09
Speaker
And I'm saying one thing as if there's a moral boundary that's been broken here. It's one thing to kill your opponent. It's another thing to kill your opponent, drain them of their blood, and then leave their corpse behind. It's the added thing of we'll also remove their blood before we drop their body off. We'll just desecrate their corpse, yeah. It just makes it slightly more evil than the previous plan.
00:20:36
Speaker
Mmm, yes. Okay, well then the next story, we're now into the slightly sexy stories. So brace yourself. Make sure you are... I'll just fan myself slightly. Yes. I guess I take all the vapours. I take no responsibility for any inflamed ardor about your person. So okay, we've had, what have we had? We've had weather control in Vietnam. We've had vampires in the Philippines. Now it's time for $6 in Moscow.
00:21:07
Speaker
I feel Six Dolls in Moscow could have used more of a sort of an 80s synthwave theme. It does sound like a prog rock band that would have done quite well for itself. From Full Moon Productions, one of the demonic toys or puppet master films, Six Dolls in Moscow. Almost certainly. It sounds like one of the great films that Charles Band would have made.
00:21:31
Speaker
Something like that. Probably directed by Albert Pure. Probably. Yeah, yeah, I can see it. I can see it in my head right now. Speaking of movies, though, did you ever see Red Sparrow, the Jennifer Lawrence one? No, no, I know of it, but I've never seen it. Jennifer Lawrence? Is that what you're thinking of? Yes.
00:21:49
Speaker
It's a good film. Hard to recommend, though, because it's basically just an endless series of horrible, horrible things happening to Jennifer Lawrence as she gets sucked into working for the Russian spy industry. But it's based on a book, and the book was written by a CIA, a former CIA agent who'd
00:22:12
Speaker
been in the CIA for decades. The thing about the book is apparently it's very authentic and very detailed in how it depicts spycraft as it's actually practiced. And so that's relevant to this story. You know how in a movie, someone will show up to a meeting and say, don't worry, I made sure I wasn't followed, or like, I'm sorry, I was late, I had to I was being tailed, I had to shake my tail. And it's just a single line of dialogue in the book. Apparently, it devotes multiple pages.
00:22:42
Speaker
to explaining exactly how you go about making sure you're not followed or shaking someone if you are being followed, which apparently is a very laborious and time-consuming process of sort of checking and doubling back and bluffing and counter-bluffing. And it gets very involved and repetitive. And in the late 1970s, the CIA just did not have time for that.
00:23:08
Speaker
It wasn't really laziness, it was apparently the KGB was stepping up their surveillance of people who they knew to be foreign agents working in Moscow, these mysterious people who'd work in the US embassy, but just sort of pop out on little errands all the time, doing who knows what.
00:23:29
Speaker
And so they were finding it increasingly difficult if they needed to go out and meet with a contact to actually do so without being followed or detected. And so one thing they came up with to help them get away with this sort of thing was the JIB, where JIB stands for Jack in the Box. Another movie, you know, I'm pretty sure it's Men in Black 2, where Will Smith comes to his car and there's like an agent sitting in it and he opens the car and the agent gets sucked back into the steering wheel.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that is part two, yes. Imagine that crossed with the automatic pilot from an airplane. Oh! So the idea is, right, you're a CIA agent, you need to sneak off and have a meeting with one of your contacts without the KGB knowing. So what you do is, you get in a car, the car's being driven by another agent,
00:24:23
Speaker
you start heading towards where you want to go and obviously this KGB I assume would probably have cars stationed outside the US Embassy ready to follow anyone who came out so you'd be able to tell fairly quickly when you're being followed. You then create a little bit of distance between yourself and the car that's following you
00:24:40
Speaker
turn a corner and then immediately the agent who needs to get away jumps out of the car, the driver then activates the jib which basically pops up an inflatable person in the passenger seat so that by the time the KGB car gets around the corner,
00:24:58
Speaker
It appears that there are still two people in the car, and the agent, who's dressed like an ordinary Muscovite, is able to get off to their meeting while the driver just leads the KGB agents on a merry chase around the city before returning to the US Embassy.
00:25:13
Speaker
This actually does sound as if it's a scene out of the Naked Gun films. You can just see Frank Drebin driving out of the car and the inflatable Frank Drebin appearing in the driver's seat. Yeah, it was basically that. I mean, obviously it didn't. It only had to look realistic enough to make it look like there was a human figure.
00:25:36
Speaker
to somebody who's in another car some distance away from you. It didn't have to be hyper-realistic. So that was the idea. Now, we first heard about this technology in a book from 2008 called Spycraft.
00:25:52
Speaker
which was written by a fellow called Robert Wallace, who was formerly head of the CIA's Office of the Technical Service, and another CIA consultant called H. Keith Milton. Now, of course, I should point out, this is the 70s, and we're actually more into the 80s. Back then, it was still a bit of the old-fashioned kind of cloak and dagger stuff. I mean, in the 80s, the most sophisticated surveillance is gonna be what, sort of grainy video, security cameras, or a dude with binoculars. It's not,
00:26:21
Speaker
as sophisticated as things have got today.
00:26:24
Speaker
you know, wearing costumes and disguises, you know, the good old false mustache and a big hat sort of thing was still a thing in espionage. But when they wanted to solve this particular problem, they turned to Hollywood. So they talked to a couple of Hollywood sort of costumes. This isn't going to be the Brian Brown film FX now, is it, by any chance? Not specifically, but I mean, it's that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, the CIA did
00:26:53
Speaker
First film, bad sequel. Never? Have I seen the sequel? If I have, I don't remember it, which means it's not very good, yeah. That first film is actually, it's kind of great. Yeah, Brian's a good film. Then he enters Prime, Brian Brown, the gracest Roman detective of all time, Marcus Didius Valkio, and I'm here to solve a crime in ancient Rome. Put some shrimps on the Barbie, mate.
00:27:20
Speaker
I think there's actually another movie connection here. These two guys who worked in Hollywood but occasionally contracted for the CIA on the side, one of them was a man called Les Smith, who did costumes and stuff, but he also made illusions for stage magicians. What's the term, an engineer or something? But Jonathan Creek.
00:27:42
Speaker
Basically, he was a bit of a Jonathan Creek or a Christian Bale in dodgy prosthetics spoiling the twins plot twist and the prestige. Did you get that? I mean, when I watch the prestige, the first time he's like, Christian Bale, he's got this new engineer. And the first time you see the guy, it's like, that's Christian Bale in a fake nose and a mustache. So I bought the illusion up until the twist went, oh,
00:28:09
Speaker
No, I took one look at the dude and thought, no. Anyway, so this is what I took. As you can probably see from the description, it does share something with the concept of stage magic. You are pulling that sort of a trick on people where there's
00:28:28
Speaker
how would you describe it? There's a bit of sleight of hand going on, a bit of
Failed Sukarno Discredit Attempt
00:28:32
Speaker
misdirection. They think they're seeing one thing when they're actually seeing something else. So it definitely, you can understand a stage magician being involved. So the second guy involved was a man called John Chambers. He was a makeup and prosthetics guy. And he was involved as a key player in what they called the Canadian caper, that thing where they smuggled hostages out of Iran by pretending to film a science fiction movie.
00:28:57
Speaker
Oh, the Ben Affleck film. Yeah, yeah, the Ben Affleck film Argo. So if you've seen the film Argo, John Goodman's character is this guy, John Chambers. This is played by Goodman in the dramatization of that, but he wasn't just helping them in their affair. He also proposed this idea of the jib. But while Mr.
00:29:22
Speaker
What were their names? Smith and Chambers came up with the idea. It was actually put into practice by a guy called Walter McIntosh. He was an actual CIA agent. He was the head of the CIA disguise unit in the late 1970s. Apparently, according to the article I read, which was written in I think 2015, he moved to New Zealand and runs a bed and breakfast here, or at least did seven years ago.
00:29:46
Speaker
Does the breakfast feature a lot of inflatable sex dolls pretending to be possible? Well, could be, I don't know. They didn't give any more details than that, so I don't know where in New Zealand. So he was the guy, he had been given the idea, and it was up to him and presumably his team, to actually make it work. So to make it work, they needed an inflation mechanism like the ones used to inflate emergency life rafts, something that can be inflated in a matter of seconds. And they needed an inflatable person.
00:30:16
Speaker
I was kind of imagining that as the driver, as the person jumps out the door, the driver is having to just hold on to the wheel and go... Just desperately pounding a foot pump. No, so they had an inflation mechanism and they needed inflatable people. And fortunately, in the late 1970s, inflatable people were a thing. They're still a thing now. They still are, yes.
00:30:40
Speaker
Although I understand artificial sex partner technology has advanced a fair bit in the interim, but back then, Mr. McIntosh, having decided that it was a little too, he couldn't bring himself to send his secretary out to go shopping for sex dolls. He thought he should take that responsibility on himself.
00:31:03
Speaker
So he basically says how he walked around the area, found an adult bookstore and said, do you guys sell inflatable people? And they said, yes. And he said, I would like several, please. And apparently, obviously, the process of prototyping and getting it all working, they went through a fair few sextals. And so I think they went through a fair few sextals, protecting the technology.
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah, and so he said he thought he must have got something of a reputation because he was constantly going into these shops buying six dolls in bulk. But it worked, basically. They eventually got it going. They got the doll, they managed to attach ISU clothing and stuff to it to make it look more like the silhouette of an actual person.
00:31:52
Speaker
I don't know, they didn't go into much detail ice, because I assume, you know, it would only need to be a person from the waist up to fit in a chair. So they had it small enough that it could sit in a little box and that sort of thing. They had a bit of trouble with the inflation mechanism, apparently, because obviously, you want it to go as fast as possible, but too much pressure and it will burst and not enough pressure. And the thing will will sag and flop around and look silly. So but I reckon that they got it working.
00:32:20
Speaker
and in the lab, and apparently it worked just fine in real life. So the article I read said the first time the jib was used was in 1982. So they came up with the idea in the late 70s, but it was 82 before they actually had a proper working prototype that they could use in the field. So at this time, they needed to meet a guy called Adolf Tolkechev.
00:32:44
Speaker
He was a Soviet engineer who had been stealing technical information and passing it on to the CIA. And they had been sort of secretly, they'd been meeting with him to receive the stolen information for a while. But KGB surveillance was particularly high at the time. They made it sound like it wasn't specifically because of that, just the CIA occasionally would ramp up the surveillance just to keep people on their toes, or I don't know.
00:33:10
Speaker
So they really needed to meet with this guy. They were, you know, a little bit worried that something might have happened to him. And in case something might happen to him, they wanted to make sure they got the information off him as quickly as they could. So they needed to make a meeting, but they needed to avoid KGB surveillance to achieve that. So this looked like a job for the jib. A jib job, if you will. Hold on. Say that pun again.
00:33:37
Speaker
I said it looked like a job for the jib. A jib job, if you will. Thank you. And apparently it worked. Apparently it worked just fine. The agent was able to avoid, was able to jump out of the car and avoid detection. The KGB followed his driver back to the US Embassy and the meeting went off without a hitch.
00:34:01
Speaker
Unfortunately, Mr. Tolkachev's story does not have a happy ending. In 1985, he ended up being betrayed by a couple of CIA double agents working for the KGB and was arrested and executed, which is unfortunate, but no statement against the effectiveness of the JIB.
00:34:23
Speaker
And so because it worked that time, they used it a bunch more, following that apparently, became known enough that Edward Lee Howard, who was one of the CIA turncoats who had betrayed it off Tolkachev, ended up rigging up his own version of a jib and using it himself to allude the FBI when he was, when he defected to Russia. Sounds like he was jibbed on his own petard. Well, he was jibbed on their petard.
00:34:50
Speaker
or hoisted their own jib. And they're jibbing, and they hoisted, and they jibbed, and they jabbed. Yep, and it will work. And yeah, that's basically the story of the jib. Obviously, these days, the advances in sort of surveillance and tracking technology has reached the point where this sort of cloak and dagger stuff is just obsolete. There's no
00:35:12
Speaker
It would never work today because it's so easy to track and trace and plant bugs and listen in and surveil and what have you. The article I read didn't say exactly when the JIB was retired, just that it's not really used anymore. Presumably, it wasn't being used in 2008, for instance, when it was included in the book.
00:35:32
Speaker
All this could be an elaborate double bluff by telling people we don't use these jibs anymore. You don't need to worry about those strange looking people in company cars. We're definitely not using inflatable sex tolls to hide who we're meeting with these days. No, Siri, that doesn't happen anymore. I just told you, we're not doing it.
00:35:53
Speaker
Well, like I say, artificial sex partner technology has improved and leaps and bounds since the 80s. So maybe they have some complicated scheme involving real dolls to throw KGB agents off the scent now. I don't know. Could be anything. Could be animatronics. Could be robotic sex dolls roaming the streets of Moscow right now.
00:36:17
Speaker
Well, many people do think the CIA is just made up of robotic sextiles anyway, so frankly. So that's the story of sextiles in Moscow. I have one more story for you, another one of a slightly boardier nature. So to recap, we've had weather control in Vietnam, we've had vampires in the Philippines, we've had sextiles in Moscow. Our last story is sextapes in Indonesia.
00:36:45
Speaker
which sounds like it actually should be an 80s album. Oh yes, and coming up from Crowded House, it's their new album, Sextapes in Indonesia, with their first song, Minilla Folder. Surely Sextapes in Indonesia would be the first release by Sextiles in Moscow, or maybe those sort of sister bands who collaborate on different projects, I don't know.
00:37:10
Speaker
So anyway, we're talking about a plot to get rid of the president of Indonesia with a sex tape. So in 1945, following the war, a man who went by Sukarno, which was not his birth name, that's sort of the name, just Sukarno is one word, was the name that everybody knew him by, he became the first president of Indonesia after it won independence from the Dutch.
00:37:35
Speaker
Now, Sukarno wasn't a communist himself, but the Communist Party was an ally of his, and he did definitely have leftward socialistic leanings.
00:37:50
Speaker
which meant that the US and the UK weren't entirely happy with him being in charge of the world's most populous Muslim nation. So both countries decided they would rather get rid of this fellow. So yeah, the CIA seemed to be kind of in two minds about how they wanted to deal with Sukarno. There was talk of
00:38:10
Speaker
a paramilitary solution, the old fermenting a coup, backing a revolution or a coup against him. But then other people thought that maybe that might be a bit risky. You never quite know exactly which way a revolt is going to go. It could make matters worse. So it seemed like both things were kind of being planned at the same time. But other people were pursuing the idea of, can we just blackmail him? Can we blackmail him out of office?
00:38:38
Speaker
Now, Sukarno was known to be a ladies' man. He loved the ladies. And there were even rumors that it had somewhat of a dalliance with an air hostess who turned out to actually be a Russian agent.
00:38:55
Speaker
There was a minor revolt in 1956 to 1957, which was put down by his government. It was unsuccessful. But apparently these rumours that he had been possibly compromised by the Russians did feed into that revolt in some manner.
00:39:10
Speaker
And so the CIA decided, apparently, that if a bit of a sex scandal almost got rid of him, well, if we can make an even bigger sex scandal, that might just do the job. And so their idea was, well, if rumors didn't do it, what if we actually release a sex tape of the guy or at least release what we claim is a sex tape of the guy? And so they decided they would fake a sex tape of
00:39:37
Speaker
Sukano, basically. So apparently they sort of, somebody had the job of surveying the output of the local porn industry.
Reflection on CIA Tactics
00:39:47
Speaker
I don't know if this was often, was it San Fernando? Is it still San Fernando? Valley? Where all the porn comes from? I don't know. Used to be. I don't know. I mean, I think given the rise of intimate porn, you can just, you can make porn anywhere. We could be making porn right now, Josh.
00:40:03
Speaker
as far as you know we are. But anyway, they looked around and were hoping that if they looked through a bunch of porn films, they might find a guy who looked a bit like Sukarno and then be able to use him, but they were unable to find anybody who looked like a bald Indonesian president.
00:40:24
Speaker
And so they just said, okay, plan B, we will make a mask. They'll make a latex face mask that looks like Sukano. We'll put it on a guy. We'll film it in, you know, this is late 50s, early 60s. So film technology would be grainy enough that you could possibly get away with, you know, someone who just looked enough like the guy that we could say, this is actually him.
00:40:50
Speaker
Make this sextape, release it, destroy the guy's reputation, or at least threaten to leak it and blackmail him out of office under the threat of his reputation being destroyed. Now apparently, depending on who you talk to, apparently they did actually make this film.
00:41:08
Speaker
They made the CIA commissioned a porn film with a guy wearing a Sukano mask, but it was never released. I'd sort of read a couple of different accounts. Nobody can quite agree on the details of exactly what the film was called or exactly what happened in it. So maybe it's not actually true that they made it, but most people seem to say, yes, the film was made, but they couldn't actually agree on the details of it.
00:41:35
Speaker
All we know is that Sukano was not blackmailed out of office, having been threatened with the release of a sex tape. And there's possibly a good reason for that. Because while the CIA was faking a sex tape of Sukano, apparently the KGB had a real one. I talked about the idea that he had been, these rumors about his rendezvous with an air hostess who might have been a Russian agent,
00:42:04
Speaker
seem to have something to them. Apparently, the KGB did the same thing that they've been doing ever since, the same thing that they allegedly did to Donald Trump. He went on, Sukarno went to Russia, as a head of state might do, and they put him up in a hotel room, which turned out to have hidden cameras around.
00:42:25
Speaker
saw to it that a bunch of attractive quote-unquote ear hostesses were sent up to his hotel room and filmed the proceedings. But that text tape was also never used to blackmail him out of office, and there's probably a good reason for that, because if you'll recall,
00:42:43
Speaker
I said at the beginning he was known to be a ladies man and moreover than that he was a ladies man who was a big believer in polygamy. The man had four official wives and a fifth de facto one. So a sex tape of this guy
00:42:58
Speaker
probably wasn't going to have the impact they wanted it to. Oh no, you're going to provide proof that I had wild sex with a group of beautiful women in a hotel room? Oh no, don't do that. Not the Briar Patch, we're at it. So the story goes that apparently when the KGB said, hey, we have the sex tape of you and a bunch of beautiful women, his only response was to ask for a copy of it.
00:43:23
Speaker
So that's the rumor, but the fact that he was Indonesia's greatest sex machine was part of his appeal. He had the sort of machismo thing going for him, so possibly this whole blackmail him out with the sex tape thing was doomed to failure from the start.
00:43:44
Speaker
He was eventually ousted. They eventually got rid of him the old-fashioned way. In 1967, there was a coup which was backed by the CIA and MI6, and he was booted out after that. But no sex tapes were involved in his downfall as far as
Bonus Content Promotion
00:44:00
Speaker
I know. And that brings me to the end of my story of CIA shenanigans. So what was I, three out of four? Or had you heard some of these sex taping rumours as well?
00:44:12
Speaker
I suspect I may have heard about sex tapes in the CIA in some degree, but I don't think I knew about this particular one, especially the twists in the tale of, so we made a fake sex tape.
00:44:24
Speaker
then we didn't use it because it turned out there was a real sex tape which we also couldn't use because it turned out that actually a sex tape against this particular president isn't going to work anyway he's kind of known for doing this stuff it wouldn't be surprising i mean what would probably be more surprising would be there is no sex tape of your president he claims to be a bit of a swinger and yet we can fight no evidence makes you think vote for the other guy in this coming election
00:44:50
Speaker
They probably would have been more successful with the sex type of him trying to satisfy a woman, but failing to rise to the occasion or something. Now, I don't know the article that I read. I'm not sure if the CIA knew about the KGB one at the time. It's just sort of something that we found out about afterwards, but it shows that if a real one didn't do the job, then a fake one almost certainly wasn't going to.
00:45:14
Speaker
And so that is all I have to tell you about dodgy, occasionally humorous, largely depressing when you get down to it, things that the CIA got up to in the second half of the 20th century. I came into this segment with the highest esteem for the CIA, and I feel that you've lowered them in my estimation. Yeah, I apologize for sullying the reputation of the CIA.
00:45:38
Speaker
and the things they get up to in foreign countries. But I can only tell you what I've learned. Don't shoot the messenger. Literally CIA, if you're listening in on us, please don't shoot the messenger. And I think that is all I have to say. Indeed.
00:45:53
Speaker
Which means that there's nothing for us to do but finish up this episode and maybe go record a bonus one if we're able to. I'm assuming I've been able to cleverly edit around it but we've hit a couple of technical snags while recording this one which resulted in no amount of DDA but I think we've got that sorted and with any luck our luck will hold. I mean maybe what we should do now is we should record a few.
00:46:18
Speaker
A few instances of me going, oh, that is interesting, Joshua. Please do go on and tell me more about insert topic here.
00:46:28
Speaker
And that is very interesting, Josh. Please insert topic here. Could you tell me more about the way in which the CIA created Robot Dogs? And then continue on with insert topic here. Just add in a few things to really make those transitions seem really elegant. Yeah, maybe we can work on that. Maybe we can include it as bonus content. Although we do actually have things to talk about in the bonus episode this week. What are we going to talk about?
00:46:58
Speaker
something crashed into the moon and no one's willing to own up to who put it there and I guess we've got to talk both about the Jan 6 stuff which people are saying is the smoking gun you need to show that Trump really was involved in an insurrectionist coup and I guess we should probably also touch upon the fact that it seems that some
00:47:21
Speaker
Supreme Court appointees lied about their intentions about what they would do when they got on the Supreme Court. And then when they got on the Supreme Court, they did what everyone thought they were going to do in the first place. So unfortunately, we've got a fun story and then two increasingly depressing stories to talk about.
00:47:41
Speaker
So if you want to hear stories about people shooting the moon and then also a bit of talk about all the business going on in the States and you're a patron, well you're in luck because you're going to get that whether you want it or not. If you'd really like that and you're not currently a patron then just go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and become one and then you'll get this bonus episode plus what are we up to in bonus episodes now? A hundred and something.
00:48:06
Speaker
A whole lot of other ones anyway. We are getting awfully close to the 200th bonus. Oh goodness. And I feel we probably need to do something for that. Must do. And if you're not interested in being a patron, well, that's just fine because you're an audience, you're part of, you're a loyal, I assume,
Contact Information
00:48:25
Speaker
listener. Maybe you're a first time listener and you're expecting to every episode to be full of rousing tales of CIA hijinks. I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.
00:48:37
Speaker
or you're a first-time listener who's going, oh, I can't wait to find out about the, what do all this talk about sex dolls? Why is there so much talk about sex dolls? But whoever you are and wherever you are, thank you for listening to the end of this. And I really don't have anything to say apart from goodbye. Murder, she wrote.
00:48:57
Speaker
You've been listening to Podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Imdentit. If you'd like to help support us, please find details at our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.