Deep Secrets

I noticed some pundits talking about Trump getting his top-secret briefings. They were musing about the emotional impact of learning the Government’s ‘deep secrets’.

I wonder. I remember being read into a special access program and thinking “Is that all there is’?

There is important information that the U.S. government knows that isn’t on Wiki – details of nuclear weapons, for example – but on the whole I suspect that there are more truly interesting facts (some of them scary) that I know and the Feds don’t than the other way around.

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104 Responses to Deep Secrets

  1. Chase says:

    Did you read about Spirit Cooking? I don’t know what kind of scary things you know, but that was fairly unsettling. To say nothing of the more disturbing rumors floating around about our ruling class…

    • pyrrhus says:

      Satanism and child trafficking being substantially coincident from what I have heard from law enforcement, the Spirit Cooking memo is appalling…

      • MawBTS says:

        Off topic, but the “Satanism” you’re thinking of probably doesn’t exist.

        Real Satanism was a 60s counterculture fad: in practice a personality cult for a man called Anton LaVey. It was boring, and faded from relevance long before LaVey died.

        In 1972 a guy called Michael Warnke wrote a book called The Satan Seller, where he claimed to have been part of a network of Satanists that summoned demons and performed ritual human sacrifice. This book (along with the movie Suspiria) is where the popular image of Satanism comes from.

        Warnke became a huge hit on the evangelical speaking circuit. Lots of scared old people were willing to believe that universities were full of blood-stained altars and ritualistic pentagrams. Various other people have tried to recreate Warnke’s success. All of them are liars and con artists.

        From what I gather, “spirit cooking” is some weird performance art thing.

        • Darien says:

          Satanism as seen in popular culture (black mass, witches sabbath, baby sacrifices) definitely exists, since the 15th century witch hunters invented it. (everyone here surely knows that Middle Age was age of science and reason, and Renaissance was age of witchcraft and bullshit) Later it was practiced for real at royal court of Louis XIV. and by various psychos ever since. LaVey’s Satanism have nothing in common with satanic tradition, it is philosophy of Ayn Rand with added goat heads and pentagrams.

          • Science and occultish/witchcraft practices grew up together. Both were attempts to understand underlying principles and control them. Think alchemy, for an example. It’s hard to know when it grew up, because it overlaps with much older pagan practices – both in truth and in the imaginations of the witchhunters. We have much better records from more literate places, but should not conclude that these had more witches or witch hunters. There does seem to be an increase in killings and burnings as one goes east in Europe.

            People went nuts in the 80’s believing in ritual satanic abuse. Janet Reno owed her career to it.

            • Darien says:

              Science and occultish/witchcraft practices hadn’t grew up together. In the Middle Ages, the Church encouraged science and reason, and stroungly discouraged belief in witchcraft. During the renaissance, science ended for 200 years and all kinds of witchcraft, magic and new age bullshit flourished, like in our time.
              The witch burnings increased north and west, as one went into Protestant lands.


              • MawBTS says:

                In the Middle Ages, the Church encouraged science and reason

                Like everything anyone says about the Middle Ages, this is probably a “sometimes” truth.

                Medieval Europe was clever but unscientific. Good engineers. They invented things like the heavy plough and the tidal mill. But they contributed little new to science or philosophy, and there were periods of anti-intellectualism. From Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve:

                [St. Benedict’s Rule prescribed that when reading]As the listing of punishments in the influential rule of the Irish monk Columbanus makes clear, lively debate, intellectual or otherwise, was forbidden. To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as “It is not as you say”. there is a heavy penalty: “an imposition of silence or fifty blows.”

            • Greying Wanderer says:


              Looking back on that with recent hindsight I’d say there was probably a real case behind that which was buried by a smoke screen of exaggeration and invented stories.

          • saintonge235 says:

            ” LaVey’s Satanism have nothing in common with satanic tradition, it is philosophy of Ayn Rand”
            Interesting theory. But when a friend of mine who was an Objectivist brought up Rand with a Satanist, the reaction was “Who’s she?”

        • ckp says:

          the level of creepiness in those pictures makes me conclude it doesn’t matter if they were real satanists or doing it for performance art — they’re degenerates either way

      • Greying Wanderer says:

        Also it doesn’t have to be real to be true.

        rituals and garb that the average person would see as “satanist” (from horror movies)
        – terrify pre-teens
        – make their story harder to believe
        – masks faces

        all of which are more important when the abusers are VIPs.

  2. dearieme says:

    In the aftermath of Chernobyl HMG gave me a heap of info on that reactor and others in its class, PDQ. I was impressed by how much they had to hand.

    (I think I am allowed to tell you that. I hope.)

    • gcochran9 says:

      RBMK, positive void coefficient.

      • dearieme says:

        You may say that but I couldn’t possibly comment.

      • Nuclear Lab Rat says:

        The fact that it had a positive void coefficient isn’t classified. Ridiculously stupid, but not classified.

      • The Monster from Polaris says:

        Bad enough in itself, would have meant that that reactor type wouldn’t have been allowed in any Western country. But in addition there was also positive scram, and then the conditions prevailing during the fatal experiment led to more Xe-135 poisoning than usual, which exacerbated both the positive void coefficient and the positive scram. So: BOOM!

      • El Bow says:

        There are a fair number of reactor designs with positive void coefficient, CADU for instance. It appears to be fairly common in designs that use something other than water for the moderator. In the absence of other design flaws it does not appear to be a fatal shortcoming.

        The US is blessed with an abundance of enrichment capacity, and so can easily use more enriched fuel than other countries. This means that the lower neutron efficiency of water-moderated reactors isn’t a problem, so US regulators can insist on negative void coefficients for all power reactors.

        • The Monster from Polaris says:

          OK, I was thinking of the Marviken reactor in Sweden. That was a heavy water reactor, and construction of it had already started when calculations showed that it would have a positive void coefficient. That (and some other things) led to cancelation of the project. At least that was the way I saw it.

  3. Gauss says:

    Had the same experience.
    Pundits are clueless blowhards. So what else is new?

  4. The Z Blog says:

    NSA: And Mr. President Elect, here is Obama Kenyan birth certificate…

    Trump: Wait. What? I was only kidding about that. It’s true?

    NSA: Yep. And the father of Ted Cruz was involved with the JFK assassination.

    Trump: That’s Yuuge!

  5. JayMan says:

    Interesting. I’m imaging a few. That said, as much as I’d love to inquire further, I won’t.

  6. You mean knowing about why crime rates are higher and SATs are lower in some school districts?

  7. MawBTS says:

    Is it reasonable to think that something like the Manhattan project would be impossible to keep secret in 2016 (at least in America)?

    The world is being run by seventy year olds with iPhones. Even supposed intelligence agencies aren’t great at digital security. The Podesta email hack was traced back to Fancy Bear (and probably the Kremlin) because some dummy forgot to set their bitly account to “private”.

    Maybe the traditional paradigm of information security (trust networks + airgapping) is the wrong approach in a digital world. Back when the sixth Harry Potter book came out, trolls would try to spoil the ending (Snape kills Dumbledore) and fans devised a counter-strategy: flood the internet with fake spoilers, so that nobody would recognise the real ones. This might be a viable strategy for other things. With botnets, we have the power to drown out signals with overwhelming amounts of noise.

    • Gauss says:

      I thought Podesta’s account was hacked because his password was p@ssword, or possibly p@ssw0rd.

    • pyrrhus says:

      Podesta was victimized by phishing, is my understanding…

      • MawBTS says:

        Yeah, he got a “someone has your password, click this link to change it!” email and clicked the link.

        Exact same thing with the celebrity iPhone hack a year ago. Some guy sent a phishing email to various actresses/models/agencies and a bunch of them fell for it. All so he could be the first computer nerd to truthfully brag that Scarlett Johannson gave him nude photos.

        When I was a kid, movies made hacking look super high tech and brainy. Now I realise that it’s not much more than “humans make mistakes, so give them as many opportunities to make mistakes as possible.”

    • Darien says:

      Is it a trick question? we all know how secret was the Manhattan project.

      • MawBTS says:

        Keeping it a secret after Hiroshima would have been hard.

        Here’s a transcript from some elite German physicists, recorded the day after the bombing. Their reaction: complete shock. Werner Heisenberg point-blank refuses to believe it.

        • simon says:

          I don’t think that’s quite an accurate characterization, given that Heisenberg also says “and then it’s possible” in the first quote. The Manhattan project did indeed spend a lot of money on separating U-235, which they used for the Hiroshima bomb, though they also had reactors to make plutonium, something that the German physicists seem to be unaware of in the transcript. (The Nagasaki bomb made using plutonium wasn’t dropped until after the conversations in the transcript.)

          Generally they seem to underestimate the accomplishment of the Manhattan project – e.g. “HEISENBERG: Perhaps they have done nothing more than produce 235 and make a bomb with it. Then there must be any number of scientific matters which it would be interesting to work on.”
          and they seem to have inflated ideas about what they could have done themselves, e.g. “WEIZSÄCKER: If we had started this business soon enough we could have got somewhere. If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945, we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter 1944/45.”

          • MawBTS says:

            There’s other parts of the transcript where he casts doubt on the bomb.

            “HEINSENBERG: I still don’t believe a word about the bomb but I may be wrong. I consider it perfectly possible that they have about ten tons of enriched uranium, but not that they can have ten tons of pure U. 235.”


            “HEISENBERG: Did they use the word uranium in connection with this atomic bomb?
            ALL: No.
            HEISENBERG: Then it’s got nothing to do with atoms.”


            “HEISENBERG: I am willing to believe that it is a high pressure bomb and I don’t believe that it has anything to do with uranium but that it is a chemical thing where they have enormously increased the speed of the reaction and enormously increased the whole explosion.”

            Maybe there’s professional pride at stake. Jew Physics succeeded where he failed.

            • simon says:

              Hmm, those parts weren’t in the version you linked; I haven’t read the full transcript. The 10 tons thing is interesting since it suggests that the Germans miscalculated the critical mass for U-235.

              It sounds like Heisenberg was making up a whole bunch of hypotheses since he was very surprised (no wonder he would be if he thought it would take 10 tons).

        • simon says:

          Back on topic, note also that Heisenberg twice mentions a past US threat of an atom bomb attack:

          “HEISENBERG: Yes. (Pause) About a year ago, I heard from SEGNER (?) from the Foreign Office that the Americans had threatened to drop a uranium bomb on Dresden if we didn’t surrender soon. At that time I was asked whether I thought it possible, and, with complete conviction, I replied: ‘No'”

          “In a conversation between WIRTZ, VON WEIZSÄCKER and HEISENBERG,
          HEISENBERG repeated that in July 1944 a senior SS official had come to him and asked
          him whether he seriously believed that the Americans could produce an atomic bomb. He
          said he had told him that in his opinion it was absolutely possible as the Americans could
          work much better and quicker than they could. ”

          Suspicious contradiction there, but remarking on that FWIW.

          Obviously, they failed to keep it secret from the Russians (Klaus Fuchs being a spy) even though they apparently succeeded at keeping it secret from the Germans.

    • Greying Wanderer says:


      That’s exactly what they do when there are VIPs involved.

      For example

      1) VIP accused of child abuse
      – invent false rape charge of an adult woman
      – publicize that more than the child accusations
      – rape of the adult easily disproved
      – publicize that charge being dropped as if all accusation disproved

      2) rural paedophile ring prepares boys for VIPs in capital
      – rural end exposed
      – links to VIPs hinted at
      – victim comes forward, accuses guy in capital with same surname as the chief rural abuser of being responsible for the rural crimes
      – easily disproved so story fizzles out

      3) general accusations of a VIP ring in capital
      – guy comes forward with more extreme version of the truth
      – police chase the more extreme version
      – more extreme version disproved so the real version no longer investigated


      I used to think it was all nuts but nowadays i have no doubt that paedophile politicians and journos who come to light are actively protected and promoted because they can be controlled.

    • El Bow says:

      Mr. Cochran isn’t saying that he’s privy to terrible secrets that would shrivel the souls of mortal men were they freely available to the public. He’s saying that information that would shrivel the souls of mortal men is freely available to the public, but that most members of the public are simply too feckless to learn it and too stupid to understand it.

    • Marduc says:

      America didn’t keep the Manhattan project secret; it was a transnational project and it leaked like a sieve to the Kremlin.

      • saintonge235 says:

                Well, they tried to keep it secret.  But it is a national characteristic of the United States to refuse to do security well.

                The scientists were determined not to see what the Soviet Union was, and to classify any anti-Nazi as “loyal.” It would have taken a project starting at least a year or two earlier, with a hard-nosed bastard anti-communist in charge to keep the project from being infiltrated.

      • gcochran9 says:

        Most of the atomic spies were US citizens: I know of only one that was not (Klaus Fuchs).

        • Marduc says:


          The British knew (because they were officially involved) and the Soviets knew (because many people were happy to tell them), and there just weren’t a whole lot of other sovereign countries in the world at that time.

        • saintonge235 says:

          Fuchs was the only one known IN THE U.S. who wasn’t a U.S. citizen. But British subjects Bruno Pontecorvo, Alan Nunn May, John Cairncross and Melita Norwood were all spies for the late USSR.

        • syonredux says:


          There was thus guy:

          “Alan Nunn May (2 May 1911 – 12 January 2003) was a British physicist, and a confessed and convicted Soviet spy, who supplied secrets of British and United States atomic research to the Soviet Union during World War II.”

  8. ursiform says:

    In Trump’s universe all claims are equally valid, and he has chosen whatever sounds good at the moment. Perhaps piles of data, or at least piles of photos, will force him to accept real reality, not alternate reality. He doesn’t evaluate facts the way you do, Greg, which I think you know.

    • Darien says:

      Buildings that Trump built are still standing, Trump is still rich despite his many bankruptcies, Trump’s creditors got nothing despite liens and judgements etc.. And he just won the presidency as amateur, while lifetime professional politicians failed. Not bad for someone with no grasp of reality – maybe reality is overrated?

      • ursiform says:

        Yes, the bankruptcies. And also the many failed ventures, most predicated on his branding products with his name, thinking that alone would be enough to drive sales.

        Most successful business people, let alone billionaires, don’t have Trump’s track record of failure. The success he has had has mostly resulted from convincing investors or consumers of an alternate reality of his fashioning, often to their eventual regret.

        There has been a large enough pool of suckers for Trump to get rich, even though most prudent business people avoid him. As president he won’t get to choose his marks. Putin, Xi, and the other leaders on the world stage are not going to fall for his trumpery. (Real word, look it up.)

        • Glengarry says:

          With characteristics like those, you would think Silicon Valley would love him. But they sure don’t.

        • Peter Akuleyev says:

          Trump is a businessman in the sense that PT Barnum was a businessman, and when looked at as an entertainer, huckster and brand builder Trump is an excellent businessman. He was a very mediocre to lousy real estate developer, but to his credit he seems to have figured that out back in the early 1990s and reinvented himself as a very American style promoter and snake-oil salesman. Mark Twain would have loved him.

        • gda says:

          Most successful businessmen aren’t in the real estate business. Trust me, it’s really hard, and bankruptcies are common as muck. I agree that the failed ventures, predicated on his branding products with his name, are concerning, particularly the university thing.

  9. Isegoria says:

    In 1968, when Kissinger was just entering the government, Daniel Ellsberg was analyzing the Vietnam War for the Pentagon and Rand, and he gave Kissinger some advice on this topic — namely that knowledge corrupts .

  10. William O. B'Livion says:

    Having had a TS/SCI clearance back in the day, I feel fairly confident in saying that there is nothing you know (except for very private things, or very recently discovered things) that a Fed doesn’t know.

    Which is not the same as “The Feds” knowing.

  11. whyteablog says:

    I used to assume that these guys knew much more than I did. Then Colin Powell had to cite the New York Post for his claim that Bill Clinton was still “dicking bimbos.” If Colin Powell of all people has to cite normie news sources for big but obvious claims like that, then it’d be a pretty good guess that people at the top are nearly as clueless as the rest of us.

  12. says:

    This is one of those ‘turtles all the way down’ things. The people privy to THE top secret briefings will understand that they are being told what intel chiefs want them to hear. But the same is true for those Intel chiefs, and so on.
    There are many filtering/distorting layers and no clear way to ensure that this doesn’t lead to bad errors.

  13. AllenM says:

    I reread that transcript, and one of the smartest things ever said by Heisenberg:
    There is a great difference between discoveries and inventions. With discoveries one can always be skeptical and many surprises can take place. In the case of inventions, surprises can really only occur for people who have not had anything to do with it. It’s a bit odd after we have been working on it for five years.”

    Then he goes on to talk about how he pushed heavy water- he basically derailed Germany from getting the bomb because he wanted reactors instead- ref- “the engine”.

    He also makes some astute comments about the regime to Hahn in private.

    He knew, he made conscious choices to obfuscate the possibility, while setting it up to escape blame if it was done by the Americans before Germany fell. Remember, they had a lot of private contact with the Americans through 1941.

    That is a great example of the government not knowing a secret that could be used.

    Meanwhile, the real horrors are being cooked up in Asia, out of reach of our petty stupid laws, as technology proceeds apace and innovation begins to percolate in Asian labs.

    We, on the other hand, dream of jobs for the folks left behind.

    • gcochran9 says:

      I think the Germans just screwed up, had limited resources, etc. I read Jungk’s book, don’t believe it.

      • JoachimStrobel says:

        Very true. Jungk’s book is a big coverup like “we could have done it if we wanted”. You as physicist know that better than me – but Heisenberg simply did not know how to make the bomb. He became confused calculating the critical mass believing that all atoms would disperse before enought neutron could do their work. Plus their graphite was contaminated so the ones who at least made the correct calculation concluded that only heavy water could be used as moderator which was out of reach for them.
        They probably knew that they were monitored and started making up the Lesart of the noble scientists not wanting to help Hitler.

        • gcochran9 says:

          As I understand it, the Germans were the first to get a pile that achieved neutron multiplication (but not a chain reaction). Alternate history: they enlarged that pile until they accidentally got a chain reaction, which killed everybody for blocks around and convinced the Nazis that they really had something. After which they buckle down and work hard on the Bomb. Remember that they spent more on the V-2 than we did on the Manhattan project.

          • JoachimStrobel says:

            The alternate story has been cooked up lately and is a continuation of Jungk’s book with another twist. (Fueled by somebody experimenting with liquid oxygen, TNT and some radioactive powder during the very last days). The V2 was made by engineers, the bomb was a science non-project. That is a common theme here.

  14. dearieme says:

    “he basically derailed Germany from getting the bomb”: that seems unlikely. In Britain, where after all the Admiralty held the patent for the bomb, progress had been pretty good but led to the assessment that Britain alone couldn’t get the bomb ready quickly enough to use against the Nazis. Hence the British badgering of FDR to get a project going, and the provision of all the British work to the project. I find the most remarkable feature of that being the British badgering of the President of a country that was then neutral. Needs must when the devil drives.

    • syonredux says:

      Yeah, my understanding has always been that Heisenberg simply did not think that the Germans could build a bomb until 1945-ish, by which time the war in Europe would have been over (one way or another).

    • MawBTS says:

      Heisenberg said that he deliberately failed, so as not to deliver a weapon to Hitler. Thus joining the huge list of Nazis who stepped forward after the war to reveal they’d actually been double agents all along!

      There’s other explanations at hand. The Germans had a few great physicists. The Americans had lots of them. The Manhattan Project cost $2bn. The entire German physics budget was something like 3m reichsmarks a year. The Americans had hundreds of thousands of people involved in the project. Heisenberg never had more than a few hundred people helping him, etc. They brought a knife to an atom fight, basically. I don’t see any reason to think it wasn’t a legitimate failure.

  15. Fourth doorman of the apocalypse says:

    OT, but some folks want to test Head Start among non-human primates:

    If they are honest maybe this idea can finally get put down like it should be.

  16. Erik the Red says:

    And what if your reading-ins to your special access programs was the skipping of a stone across the surface of a very deep pond?

    • gcochran9 says:

      That would be interesting, but I’ve never seen any evidence. Probably the closest was when I was at a DARPA conference: this chick was talking about a Thor-type system, orbiting metal rods that could re-enter on command, come down at orbital speeds and wipe out an armored column. She was explaining that the tungsten rods needed to be longer and stiffer, in order to achieve greater penetration. The entire audience, except for me – reacted with shocked silence. I was laughing my head off.


  17. Xenophon Hendrix says:

    Potentially scary: If the EM drive turns out to really work, “Where is everybody?” becomes even scarier.

    • ckp says:

      EM drive doesn’t work

      • Xenophon Hendrix says:

        I don’t claim to know enough to be able to judge. I note that it appears to have gone beyond the raving crank stage to being tested seriously.

    • emdriveisnonsense says:

      The EM drives solves absolutely nothing as it still needs an energy source and the real problem with IS travel is that energy dense sources tend to produce high TW/PWs of energy in the form of uncharged particles, damaging the engine and heating the ship to the point of ridiculousness

      • Peter Lund says:

        It does solve something in the “local” part of the solar system (if it works, which it probably doesn’t) because there would be no need for reaction mass and solar panels could provide the energy.

    • st says:

      If EM drive works in space, it would work on Earth as well. Would it work on a car? So, goodbye to the oil based engines/economy then, rendering crude oil useless. Scary? Sending a spaceship to Pluto once or twice per year with an EM drive is no doubt exciting. Having it installed in every car would cause some serious changes in the course of human history with the magnitude of a phase transition.

  18. st says:

    Did you know this?




    Did you know of any institution already employing similar technology, say, for many years, for example, your “feds”? There are hints it does, BTW, in a slightly unexpected ways.
    It is an interesting name, Faception. If thuth, many businesses know more about genetics than a regular uni researcher, both in life and social sciences. WP seems to be buying whatever the company claims about frenology and genetics; Business seems to be ahead of scientific institutions in this regards. Why not the feds?

  19. pk says:

    When Greg talks about scary things he understands I assume it includes easy CRISPR abuses.

    Greg, I’m sure you don’t want to say much but is there any sci-fi that you think of as prescient? For me, there was something terrifying and not improbable about Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge.

    • melendwyr says:

      Interesting… I found Rainbows End to be depressingly optimistic, myself. Humans still have control over their own destiny in that work. I suspect that will be one of the first casualties of the emergence of true AI, ‘superhuman’ or not.

  20. Peter Akuleyev says:

    If there really are true “deep secrets” (extraterrestrials working with us in Area 54, some secret energy source that could disrupt the world economy, a council of wizards, or whatever), why on earth would the keepers of those secrets and administrators of the “deep state” share them with the President of the United States, who best case is a puppet the deep state has installed and worst case truly is a random unreliable politician who will go back to civilian life in 8 years? I would assume that keepers of “deep state” secrets would go to some lengths to make sure people outside the conspiracy, like freely (?) elected politicians, never know what is really going on.

    • ursiform says:

      If there really are true “deep secrets”, why on earth haven’t the keepers of those secrets used them to some obvious advantage to themselves?
      I’m guessing, based on what you say, that you’ve never dealt with real secrets, and don’t understand how the system really works.

  21. tommy says:

    if you had to entertain any conspiracy theories, which ones do you think would be the most plausible?

    • another fred says:

      Most plausible is that people at the highest levels of (some) governments all over the world know that we are headed for a population collapse (from war and disease) and are trying to manage their way through it, not prevent it.

    • Darien says:

      Several hundred of world’s most rich and powerful people, the 1% of 1% of 1%, are working together to get even more power and even more wealth. This is all what is there.

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