{"id":164157,"date":"2024-12-09T07:00:41","date_gmt":"2024-12-09T12:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=164157"},"modified":"2024-12-08T17:51:24","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T22:51:24","slug":"monday-monday-short-bits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=164157","title":{"rendered":"Monday, Monday… short bits"},"content":{"rendered":"

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First up, a familiar name from the ’80s – Major General Richard Secord of the Air Force has died, age 92.<\/p>\n

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Major-General Richard Secord, who has died aged 92, was a highly decorated US Air Force bomber pilot who worked with the CIA organising covert operations, directing the only successful rescue of prisoners during the war in Indo-China.<\/p>\n

He achieved notoriety a decade later when, having left the military, he was exposed as the logistical middleman in the Iran-Contra scandal that tarnished Ronald Reagan\u2019s administration. Secord had worked with his friend Lt Col Oliver North, deputy military affairs director for Reagan\u2019s National Security Council, to sell arms illegally to Iran and use the profits to arm rebels (or \u201cContras\u201d) fighting Nicaragua\u2019s Leftist government.\u00a0 The Telegraph<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep, Iran-Contra – he and LTC Oliver North were the two lynchpins of an operation which sold $45 million+ dollars of weapons to Iran and funneled part of it in weapons and dollars to Contra-Sandanista rebels in Nicaraugua. Millions also came up missing, and Congress had a field day with it. Read the article if you are weak on Reagan-era scandals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Next up, a SIGINT guy’s dream.\u00a0 There weren’t a slew of articles on Pearl Harbor on Saturday, but in the last couple of days some interesting ones appeared.\u00a0 One, in the Military Times, is an absorbing account of how the Japanese suckered us in the Pacific.<\/p>\n

With a great deal of foresight and planning, the imperial navy\u2019s leadership had enacted a synchronized strategy for the attack on Pearl Harbor that combined radio silence, active radio deception and its own effective radio intelligence to be assured that the Americans remained in the dark throughout the final moments of peace.<\/p>\n

U.S. naval intelligence was aware of Japan\u2019s defensive outlook and had come to accept it as absolute. The Americans believed wholeheartedly that in any future conflict the majority of Emperor Hirohito\u2019s naval forces would choose to remain in home waters rather than run the risk of leaving Japan undefended.Military Times<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Navy at this time was not overburdened with sophisticated SIGINT assets. That, combined with extremely limited direction-finding (DF) helped convince us that the Japanese fleet was sitting quietly in their home waters when in fact, they were headed for Pearl.<\/p>\n

Quite a bit to read in the article. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Quick plug – just rewatched a movie about one of the US’ greatest linguists. “Hell to Eternity” is about a WWII Marine who enlisted on his 17th birthday named Guy Gabaldon. A Chicano kid from California, he was taken in by a Japanese family and learned fluent Japanese. You may remember the images of civilians throwing themselves off of cliffs there; on Saipan he was credited with talking over 1500 mixed military and civilians to surrender instead of suiciding. His nickname was “The Pied Piper of Saipan.” Not the best war movie ever, but an interesting tale. Made in 1960, so old that the young George Takei in it is still interested in girls.<\/p>\n

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And a bit of good, and in some ways incredible, news.<\/p>\n

Remember a few years ago in ’19 when fire turned quite a bit of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral into a burned out shell?\u00a0 The French vowed to rebuild it, an effort that some said would take decades.<\/p>\n

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From 340,000 donors, big and small, 846 million euros (US$895 million) poured in from more 150 countries after the 2019 inferno to fund the rebuild.<\/p>\n

Together, all those who helped and all those who prayed proved that it’s the people who cherish and venerate buildings like Notre Dame that keep them alive, making them more than inanimate examples of human history, architecture, and culture.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Five years to fix all that. Wow. From above to this:<\/p>\n

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First up, a familiar name from the ’80s – Major General Richard Secord of the Air … Monday, Monday… short bits<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":668,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,308,119,649],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-iran","category-navy","category-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=164157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=164157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=164157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=164157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}