KGB surveillance video shows the dramatic arrest of Adolf Tolkachev in June 1985. Tolkachev was an avionics engineer who volunteered to spy for the CIA in 1977. The Agency initially ignored his approaches, believing him to be a Soviet 'dangle', a common tactic to bait case officers into revealing themselves. Ultimately Tolkachev proved himself and a relationship began that would be incredibly valuable to the US government. The first face to face meeting with Tolkachev, after months of deliberation, was considered by CIA to be a watershed event. For seven years Tolkachev provided insights into Soviet research and development programs, including stealth technology, that led to him being known as the 'Billion-Dollar Spy' for the value of his intelligence. He conducted at least 25 high-risk, high-stakes personal meetings with different case officers over the years. Tolkachev was paid well for his efforts but explained via clandestine letters to his CIA handlers that he was a dissident who had fallen in love with the idea of America, though he had never seen it himself. He discussed the possibility of donating some of his remuneration to Soviet dissident groups, since he had no plans for a grand lifestyle. Tolkachev was ultimately betrayed by Aldrich Ames, a turncoat CIA employee in the Soviet division who in a single day turned over the names of every CIA asset in the Soviet Union. In the video footage you can see the KGB officers put their fingers into Tolkachev’s mouth to prevent him from swallowing a poison pill. He had been issued one by the CIA but left it at home that day. After months of harsh interrogation, he was given a one-day trial, found guilty, and executed all on the same day. For episode 11 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning author David E. Hoffman about his book “The Billion Dollar Spy”, the definitive work on Tolkachev’s incredible story. The episode is available now. #kgb #coldwar #cia #ussr #soviet youtube.com/watch?v=tIhN2fCK…

Started the day by shaving nearly 30 seconds off my 10K PR at the AIA Pink Race in Phnom Penh this morning! Typical hot and humid weather, and I really didn’t think I’d pull it off. But I finished in 52:16! I turn 49 in a few days, so I’m pretty proud of that!

Hey @grok, what is ONE THING that all theories on the construction of the Giza Pyramids FAIL to account for, and why do they all ignore it?

People who have never lived through a catastrophe love to ask why America spends billions of dollars building giant nuclear aircraft carriers. Tell them to ask the mothers of Banda Aceh, Indonesia what they saw on the ocean horizon in January 2005. When the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than two hundred thousand people, the entire coast of Sumatra was erased. Every bridge, road, and water pipe was gone. Tens of thousands of children were dying of thirst in the mud, and no truck on earth could reach them. Two thousand miles away in Hong Kong, the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was on holiday port call. Within hours of the news, young American sailors walked out of restaurants and hotels, left their vacation behind, ran back up the gangway, and pushed the ship's two nuclear reactors to flank speed. When the Abraham Lincoln dropped anchor off the shattered coast of Aceh, it did not launch a single fighter jet. Instead, the American sailors turned their nuclear warship into the largest floating water factory on earth. Using the ship's four massive steam distillation plants, the crew purified nearly 100,000 gallons of fresh drinking water from the sea every single day. For weeks without sleep, young sailors stood on the hangar deck filling five-gallon plastic jugs by hand, while seventeen Seahawk helicopters flew nonstop from sunrise to sunset. They flew more than 1,500 missions into jungle clearings, delivering over 400,000 gallons of pure water and nearly six million pounds of food and medicine to people of a different faith who had been taught for years to fear the United States. America did not ask for one barrel of oil or one dollar in return. When the local hospitals were running again, the giant gray ship quietly raised its anchor and sailed away. A small mind looks at an American aircraft carrier and sees only a weapon. A survivor looks at that flat gray deck and sees five thousand young Americans bringing water from the sea.

For fourteen years, everyone thought U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant John Chapman died in the first two minutes on top of a freezing 10,000-foot mountain in Afghanistan. Then modern image technology unlocked the thermal camera footage recorded by a Predator drone circling high in the clouds on March 4, 2002. When Pentagon investigators watched the enhanced screen, hardened combat generals broke down in tears. Because the video proved that after everyone else had left the mountain peak, John Chapman woke up alone in the snow and fought an entire army by himself. That night on the peak of Takur Ghar, thirty-six-year-old Chapman, a father of two little girls from Connecticut, had charged uphill through thigh-deep snow alone to silence an enemy bunker and save his pinned-down team. Hit from a second bunker, he fell motionless. Believing he was dead, the surviving team was forced to retreat down the ridge. Chapman was not dead. The drone footage showed him regaining consciousness in the pitch-black snow, surrounded on three sides by enemy fighters, with nine separate wounds in his body. In total darkness, with no comrade beside him and nobody on earth watching except a silent camera in the sky, he refused to surrender. For more than an hour, he fought from inside the bunker, killing an enemy fighter in bare-handed close combat when they tried to rush him. Then, at dawn, Chapman heard the heavy thump of rotor blades in the mist. An American Chinook helicopter carrying twenty-three U.S. Army Rangers was flying straight toward the peak to rescue him, right into the sights of an enemy rocket launcher. Chapman knew that if he stayed safe inside the rock bunker, those twenty-three young Americans in the helicopter would be blown out of the sky. So on the thermal video, investigators watched John Chapman deliberately climb out of the bunker, stand up tall in the open snow, and fire into the enemy positions to draw every machine gun on the mountain onto his own chest. He died in the snow as the sun rose, shielding the incoming helicopter with his life. True bushido is what a warrior does when he thinks nobody will ever know his story. The sky was watching, John. And America will remember your name forever.

This escalated way too quickly 💀

In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis. The British turned him down. So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war. It worked better than anyone could have imagined. His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination. The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies. He didn't go to Britain. He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up. Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports. He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine. The Germans loved him anyway. Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of. The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London. Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world. Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents. When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow. Who also didn't exist. Then came D-Day. Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant. Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton. That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him. German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came. The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross. A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire. He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war. After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop. For decades the world thought he was dead. In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches. Some of them thanked him.

The same campaign that killed China's sparrows built a hundred dams across one province of Henan in ten years, the hydrologist who said the dams were too many and too weak was removed from the project, and in August 1975 sixty-two of them failed in a single night and drowned more people than any dam failure before or since. Banqiao was the showpiece, finished in 1952 to harness the Huai River, and when the Great Leap began in 1958 the slogan over it was water accumulation first. Reservoirs went up everywhere, built by peasants with baskets and shovels on the same timetable as the furnaces and the sparrow drives, to the same reporting standard. Chen Xing, the engineer who knew the basin best, said the province was building so many that it was raising the water table into the fields and the salt into the soil, and that Banqiao needed twelve sluice gates to pass a flood. It was given five. He was a rightist. He was sent away. The dam was called the Iron Dam. Typhoon Nina came up from Taiwan in the first week of August 1975 and stalled against a cold front over the Huai basin, and a year's rain fell in a day. Banqiao's five gates could not pass it. The water came over the top an hour after midnight, the dam dissolved, and a wall of water six miles wide and seven metres high went down the valley at the speed of a car, taking the next dam with it, and the next, until more than sixty had gone. Whole towns were under water before anyone had lit a lamp. The official figure for the flood is twenty-six thousand dead; the figure that includes the famine and the typhoid in the weeks after, when a province sat in standing water with the dead floating in it, runs to a hundred and seventy thousand, and some put it over two hundred. The Party kept it secret for thirty years. Chen Xing was brought back after the famine to say what he had said before, and brought back again after the flood. A sparrow weighs an ounce and a dam weighs a mountain, and the same men measured both by the number they could report, with the same result.

In December 1958 the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let the sparrow killers onto its grounds, so the Chinese surrounded it with drummers and kept the drums going for two days until every bird sheltering in the garden had dropped dead from the air, and the diplomats cleared them up with shovels. That is how thorough it was. The campaign had been running since the spring. Every village, school and factory was turned out with gongs, pans and firecrackers to keep the sparrows flying until their hearts gave out. Nests were torn from eaves, eggs smashed, chicks killed, and children went through the fields with slingshots and were paid by the bird. The dead came in by the basket, strung on wires, piled on carts, and the totals went up the chain as a harvest. Something close to two billion sparrows in two years. The embassy garden was the last place in the capital with birdsong in it, and the drums got that too. A zoologist called Zhu Xi had told them before it started that a king had tried this and lost. Frederick the Great of Prussia had put a bounty on sparrows in the 1740s to save his grain and his cherries, and the sparrows went, and the caterpillars they had been eating stripped his orchards to the stalk, and the king cancelled the bounty and paid to have sparrows brought back from neighbouring states and let loose. The whole episode was in the library. The ministry had a figure for what a sparrow ate and no figure for what it did, and a man with the second figure was told to sit down. The locusts arrived on schedule. Then the grain borers. A sparrow takes a few grains from a field in autumn and feeds its chicks nothing but insects all spring, and with the sparrows gone the insects had the rice and the wheat to themselves. The counties with the most sparrows to lose saw their grain fall the furthest, and the rice and wheat that had been holding the country up went down together. That was 1959, and the state took its grain quota anyway, on the harvest that had been reported. What was left in the villages was not enough, and the famine that followed over the next three years is the largest in human history: tens of millions dead, the estimates running from fifteen million to forty-five, whole counties in Anhui and Sichuan where the living could not bury the dead. The sparrows were one cause among several and the economists who have gone back to the county records put the bird's share at something over two million people, with another four hundred thousand never born. Two million, from a campaign against a thing that weighs an ounce. By 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng, who had been cutting open dead sparrows and counting the insects in their stomachs, got the bird struck off the list and bed bugs put in its place. There were almost no sparrows left in China to pardon. So the government did what Prussia had done two centuries before: it bought a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union and shipped them east in crates, to be released into a country that had drummed every one of their relatives out of the sky. The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost. Take the sheep off a chalk down and the orchids are under scrub in twenty years. Fence the cattle off a Welsh hill and the bracken takes it. Empty a savannah of its herds and the grass goes to fire. All of it written down, all of it in the library, all of it available to the next committee with a figure for what a cow eats. Beijing paid Moscow for the birds in hard currency. The men who had said so in 1958 were still not allowed to say so in 1960.

Attempted hijacking Pinetown, 3 hijackers unalived.

Friday we posted the video about the guy’s @Tesla saving him from prison… 4 days and 8M views later, the cop has now been fired.

🇮🇩 Brazilian woman caught smuggling  8 POUNDS of LIQUID COCAINE into Bali. Airport footage shows police inspecting her luggage and uncovering cocaine disguised as everyday personal-care products. Police said the 36-year-old told investigators she was promised $50,000 to deliver the drugs to someone on the island. If convicted, she could face life imprisonment or the death penalty under Indonesian law. No executions in years, but the country still threatens drug smugglers with the firing squad. Literally. Source: Globo / Writer: Marie

NJ Gov. Mikie Sherrill on the execution of Nidal Hasan: "The thing that just keeps breaking my heart: imagine the 20-year-old, maybe the 18-year-old that stepped up to serve, that gets orders and says, you’re going to go shoot this guy who’s in a wheelchair."

A 5-year-old girl plunged 49 feet from a moving cruise ship into the open ocean. Her father heard his wife screaming and raced toward the railing, only to discover that their daughter was gone. It happened aboard the Disney Dream near the Bahamas, where a family vacation took a terrifying turn when the little girl fell from the ship’s fourth deck. When her father realized what had happened, he jumped overboard after her, plunging nearly 50 feet into the ocean. But when he surfaced, he couldn’t see his daughter anywhere. He began desperately calling out for her, searching the water until he finally heard her calling back. He swam toward her and managed to reach her, but they were still stranded in the open ocean as the massive cruise ship began turning around. For roughly 20 minutes, he kept his little girl afloat, holding her above the water until a rescue boat finally reached them and brought them back to safety. Both survived, although the father suffered two fractures in his spine from the fall. It takes an incredible amount of courage to jump nearly 50 feet into the open ocean, not knowing what awaits you below. But this father didn’t hesitate to put his own life on the line for his little girl. Thank God they both made it home.