Volunteers, this book festival l has been going on for ten years. When you see them, please give them a thank you to. Silence all of your devices. We hope youre following the festival on facebook, twitter and instead graham. If you post about the festival, please use the hash tag. Your feedback is very important. Surveys are available at the tent and on the website. By submitting a survey you will be entered into a drawing for a 100ft visa gift card. This is a free event but it does help if you buy more books. The more sold the more the publishers will want to send their offers to speak with us. Purchasing from politics and prose folks who support one of the best independent bookstores that benefits the local economy, supports local jobs and of course books make the best tgifts. If youn enjoy this program and you are in a position to do so, please buy your books here today. As i said inai the beginning, im jealous of the city and the book festival. Jealous and a good a way as i am pleased to see a body come together to support a great idea. As we all know that does not always happen. When it does, everybody when especially the community. The author we are going to hear from this morning is a historian and curator of the International Spy museum. He writes of intelligence plans but went from conception to planning to testing to cancellation. What was most interesting to me is how outofthebox these ideas were, how potentially catastrophic something could have been a. Using an iceberg as a floating airfield remember, this is during world war ii and the cold war, not now with global warming. And good atomic power be used for something more than bomb. Remember the stories are mind boggling and in c some cases, md blowing. Take away for me a a former history major and reader of lots is what makes a bold idea and outofthebox strategic Intelligence Mission worthy of risking. Thank you and give a round of applause for our speaker. [applause] thank you. I appreciate that. T. Didnt know i was going to be introduced by the mayor but its an honor for me. If you were here for the last speaker or kind of wandering around at the end, what an inspiration, such an inspirational speaker brought tears to your eyes about the power of coming together. I would like to say now on to completelsomething completely d. This is not that. This book was a bit of a passion project for me. I just wrote a book for the University Press and thought i have to do something thats going to get me out of wanting toat rip my eyes out and i wantd to write something that could be read by academic history is important we need people to understand the world around it, but it is so combining to those that have the time to go through footnotes and read through what my advisor would say is dont use any adjectives because theres always a balance that will workre for you and i thougt i cant imagine the cure for insomnia that your books must be. Sorry. I love you. [laughter] i wanted to write something that also coincided withnc the openig of the museum. If you dont know if just reopened. Weve been down for a little while and we spent five plus so come check it out. It is a great complement to that museum, the idea that a fun book that you can read chapter by chapter every night if you wanted to does have a real purpose andmi meaning. I wanted to write a book that made you laugh and kind of smile and say oh my god. I realized though that there was a bigger point to all this. Before we get there, the book is split into four sections and this wasnt on purpose as a result of the research i did before this. I kept running into stories that would make my eyes open and my jaw drop. I kept thinking im going to win a Pulitzer Committee are going to make this into a movie, im going to have an oscar because there was a crazy plan no one had ever heard of so i would spend a couple of days like forget the Dissertation Research im going t to follow this to is natural and then i realized was canceled before it actually happened. If you heard somebody throwing out expletives at the top of their t long that was me when i found out it was going up a goie window and i was going out the window and i was going to be stuck with another program that doesnt exist. But after i kept seeing more and more of these and realized how much money and resourcesaf we spent some of the kind of personalities that were involved in planning some of these extraordinary missions in Technology Observations i said there is a book here not that i have time to write a book, but in l the back of my mind i stard down these policies and said when i have time, i will start writing this and innocence i didnt mean to write this when i did. I wrote a podcast that was weakly related to sit down with offers and be on the other side of this, former directors of the agencies, people i find interesting. I was talking to one of them and she said to you have any ideas for books. You have to talk to my agent. So i talked to her agent in four days later, we had a proposal and then i had a book deal. Of course i told everyone i am writing this book. A lot of it was coming in early and staying in late. I have a lot of wonderful people that helped me and told me what worked and what different because i am not a canadian, i am a historian and i guess im kind of cool tha but in normal peoples realms im not so derisive of does this joke work, no, dont do that. That might work in your head but it doesnt work in reality, so i ended up turning it f into four sections of the first is on animals and it was was a beluge story about the size and i will go check it out but actually happened. They turned a beluga whale into some kind of a covert operator. For us it detected in norway and wanted freedom in the west. So, not only human spies and animals are not objecting to the west. So thats kind of spurred these ideas and what you see in the book are several attempts where we try to turn animals into our allies and we talk about operations and technologies and finally Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear weapons are my passion project thatcl tells you a lot f things may be bad things about me that im somewhat obsessed with this topic. But, so many things went awry when we started talking about what we could possibly do with Nuclear Weapons and i will talk about why as it gets a little further on but i want to give you an insight into what you are going to see inside of this book. As the mayor mentioned the first chapter is a personal favorite of mine and its one that ive told multiple times any chance i get. For adults, kids come anyone in between, i get to tell the story of the official project an attempt by the agency in the 1960s to turn a house packed into a covert listening device. [laughter] and this doesnt mean just putting a collar around its neck with a tag it means cutting open the cat, putting a power packed inside, running up wires where the microphones were given during its tail into the antenna. [laughter] you laugh and read this and think out of the know. They are real documents that detail. To take a step back it sounds ridiculous now, the idea probably came from where the soviet embassy was a somewhat open and it was difficult because we were not good at infiltrating human sources inside butan what an american sy noticed his stray cats would wander in and out of the soviet embassy sometimes even in spite of the buildings are the courtyard and would sit down and get scratched behind the ears by the soviet diplomats were military personnel and in some cases with jump on the lap of the officers and someone said i wondered if we can do something with this and the idea kind of filtered back to the agency and this is the time when they were making big things. We can do big things with science. Part of this was a program to have heard of it because they had to do mind control usually using lsd and other hallucinogenic drugs to understand how the brain works withti electronic stimulation. A lot oin the experiments were g done on animals. The idea was to test if trained or do i what he wants them to d. They said we are going to train a cat to a be a spy. The idea was good we combine this knowledge of animal brain and ability to use electronic stimulation to overcome them with a cat that is essentially not trainable. But the part about the stories you dont actually know how when it. We have two versions of how it ended. One comes from a friend of mine that is a former director of the office of Technical Services at the cia, if you see the james bond movie, he was a cia q. s top engineer scientist at the cia and he came in after. He ha handled his access to classified data and sends it didnt work out all that well, they realized they wasted too much money and cancel the program, great story, its probably a true story but the only one that wouldnt end up in this book. Trust me that would be pretty boring. The other was a highlevel cia executives who got very disillusioned with the agency had left and wrote a book called the cult of intelligence which gives you an idea about the effect of the a book. He talked about it in a very different way. He said they trained caret when they have a natural instinct to wander off in search of food. They would rewire the brain to overcome its instinct to the plaintiff could actually do a fullfledged Laboratory Test according to what the cia wanted. Now we need to do a full scale test. Apparently it took place in northwest dc where they drove and had a secret spy van. Insulated home of the electronics you could do and lights blinking and switches and a telescope in the corner doing whatever it does making and they osaid as two men sitting on the bench, just randomly there for the day that we are going to see if our cats can listen to the conversation so theye click some buttons and push some lights, opened the door, pu, put the kiy on thtv onthe street and hit th. To their amazement of the acoustic kitty made a beeline straight for the man on a park bench. You have to understand thes that these are tech guys, my kind of people sitting in the van probably say i cant believe this is working. We are g going to get a raise, e one vacation, im going to get to ride a harley i always wanted so the operations guy was a darn cool. Now as they are thinking that they may not have been paying attention to the traffic patterns that were going on. And our hero got halfway across the road and then run over. That is how one side of the story in because this is how it ends in the documents and that t is when my mind takes overr and thanks they are sitting there and only getting their harley but they have their acoustic road to smoking in the middle of connecticut avenue and they had to run out there and scrape off the pavement before the soviets to see it osee it or the god foe Washington Post gets wind of what they are doing. That is an example of the kind of stories that are inside of this book. Another interesting one goes back to world war ii, and that is the primary focus, world war ii and the cold war. This is a time after pearl harbor most americans, patriotic ones weree trying to figure out ways to help the government in the country when the war. He had grand ideas and passion he has ideas for how to help theyll move faster and it was the most genius idea at all to create a Fried Chicken vending machine and that kind of cheap gas doesnt come around every day. But the idea was spurred out by listening to the attack with most americans did at the time on the radio. R after vacation to southwestern United States, he spent several days going in and out of the system is in the southwest United States looking at the back that existed in the southwest United States and something clicked. Something in his mind clicked. Ive been looking at that and i understand that. It will always try to find warm, dark places to go to the day. When in doubt, the instinct is to find a close cozy place to hide out then they had a Second Thought japan is made up of buildings and wood and paper from the cold dry dark places, wood and paper and explosives if we are going to fix an exclusive and drop it over japan it will find its way across the buildings and if it goes off on a timer if well bring them to the ground this was a plan that might have worked and w if we kw from some ofht the testing how r these wind that it had a pretty good chance of doing so. The first test they di did was a bit problematic. This is where the knowledge wasnt as high as we would like it to be even though the man ate was the top person whoco discovered the navigation using echolocation so the top person i cant figure out what word i want to use here. Anyway, itll come to me at some point. To drop the canister full of hibernating bats to cool them down and put them into the hibernation, they miscalculated so whenlc they drop the canister full of bats they didnt wake up in time and i dont care if you are lighter than air, he will hit its just as hard as if you invite you to the ground when we were asleep so the first test didnt work out well. But its not a failure it is a learning experience. They collected more and decided this time we are going to get it right. As they all come flying out of the truck the good news is they set up a fake japanese town as a test site and about half of them flew up into the attic and burned the test site to the ground like this works perfectly. The bad news is they went to a working u. S. Army airfield with the barracks and the towers and planes and burned back to the ground. Making matters worse, he didnt have the need to know. This was a topsecret program that he had no idea why. When he showedtm up at the Fire Department come he couldnt get in the gate to his own building because he was told was classified. He had to sit there and watch it burn. But in the end, it worked. We losing airfield here or the there. The u. S. Navthe u. S. Navy that o fund this fully and had to turn to the chief of Naval Operations who said we had a great plan thats going to win the war for us. I didnt tell you wha what tim period this was with the early summer of 1945 when e the admirl was told about this situation and said we had a great but is always bats in new mexico and training and testing and hes like i thought you were going to mention Something Else happening in new mexico because that is what is going to endur the war o we are not going to spend millions of dollars when we just spent 2 billion on building the atomic bombs are not a sake. As crazy as the plan was it wasnt because it was wacky or canceled because it was stupid, its because we were going to win the war another way and that is what is fundamentally found inside the stories. The vastem majority of them were not so crazy they didnt work for the majority of them worked so crazy somebody said no we are not going to do this. Most of them were canceled because they were superseded by events and som some of the technology came along that worked better becausthe workedb, because the coldus war ended so its not like we stepped up and someone said they are not going to spend money on that. It just went in a very different direction. So i want to make sure that i cover the topic the book is named after its like my dream of getting my oscar and once when i get laid off will be sitting here. This is the last chapter in the book and its a program that came after. And if yoin the book and its a program that came after. None of you were even remotely alive. Cspan isnt looking at the crowd. You are all in your 20s. Everyone looks to the United States and we built the first airplane and Chocolate Chip Cookie and microwave popcorn and the etchasketch. But now all of a sudden the soviets had beat us at our own game. A couple years later putting first manha into space Latin America Africa and east asia was looking for people to follow. What side we want to join up with . And to have all that technology and innovation to be part of the developed world even the soviets be to set her own game. We need something to show we are the talked on top dogs to say not so fast americans invent big things so it was truly a plan to detonate a small weapon on the moon and where the dark and light side of the moon meet each other so we would stare up at the Mushroom Cloud and this is the idea so what kind of crazy scientist would research . As one of the prominent scientist and with the Deputy Director of the Apollo Program in the 1980s and how to deal with the chernobyl attack. Anybody watching sports or the weather . And thenen to invent the tele straighter where people write on the tv screen. That was leonard rifle. He was an inventor and realw scientists. He understood and to discover the kuiper belt which is a string of i. C. E. And rocks outside of neptune. He had a young graduate School Student who was very good at math and looking at the way we looked like on the moon remember carl sagan and then try to help that program so talking about real scientists are not making this up Gerard Kuiper they are all involved in the air force program how to detonate a bomb on the moon. Does nobody really understand why it was canceled . Not to my satisfaction reading why it was canceled not a Single Person can to definitively lay out why. It seems as though this was the reason are apparently a was the reason why we heard it was the reason or somebody told me. Not Even Air Force documents it says it was, canceled. And a crazy plann. Like this, we dont know why it didnt happen. Because someone somewhere said you could not get a Mushroom Cloud on the moon so the whole big idea depends on an atmosphere like on earth. The reason you get a Mushroom Cloud is that gas and dust and debris kicked up you even need the nuclear to make a Mushroom Cloud and then it swished down. Then twisted aside in the air rises rapidly so it is sucked back in it is a vacuum already so we could spend billions of dollars putting a Nuclear Weapon on the moon only to have dust going and lots of direct