MOVIE QUOTATIONS
KILGORE
(to Willard)
We'll come in low out of the rising
sun -- We'll put on the music about
a mile out.
WILLARD
Music?
KILGORE
Yeah. Classical stuff -- scares
the hell out of the slopes -- the
boys love it.
JIM ... some story ... the whole thing. It's like it never happened.
X It never did.
Greed is good. Greed is right.Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of it's forms - greed for life, for money, knowledge -
has marked the upward surge of mankind.
Badges? We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
Someday, and that day may never come,
I'll call upon you to do a service for me.
Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to
your daughter... 's wedding... on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child
be a masculine child.
The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly.
The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield.
What we got here is failure to communicate,
Gort. Klaatu Barada Nikto.
It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
Don't forget the cannoli.
How's Paully?
Oh Paully... won't see him no more. .
I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. -- THE DEPARTED
Badges? We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
---GOODFELLAS
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
Butch: What're you looking at, friend?
Vincent: I ain't your friend, palooka.
Butch: What did you say?
Vincent: I think you heard me just fine, punchy.
What we got here is failure to communicate
--COOL HAND LUKE
I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
---ARTHUR
Butch: What're you looking at, friend?
Vincent: I ain't your friend, palooka.
Butch: What did you say?
Vincent: I think you heard me just fine punchy.
---PULP FICTION
Badges? We ain't got no badges.
We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
---THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE 1948
It's his ship now, his command. He's in charge, the boss, the head man, top dog, big cheese, head honcho, number one
---AIRPLANE
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
---GOODFELLAS
It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your daughter... 's wedding... on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child will be a masculine child.
Someday, and that day may never come,
I'll call upon you to do a service for me.
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
---THE GODFATHER
Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted.
---George F will
Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.
---PATTON (GEORGE C. SCOTT)
Hamburgers. The cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast
---PULP FICTION
The world is full of complainers.
But the fact is, nothing comes with
a guarantee. I don't care if you're
the Pope of Rome, President of the
United States, or even Man of the
Year--something can always go wrong.
And go ahead, complain, tell your
problems to your neighbor, ask for
help--watch him fly. Now in Russia,
they got it mapped out so that
everyone pulls for everyone else--
that's the theory, anyway. But what
I know about is Texas..and down here
you're on your own.
---BLOOD SIMPLE
There's an old Italian saying: you fuck up once, you lose two teeth.
----THE SOPRANOS
I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
---SCARFACE
"You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God.."
---DEVIL'S ADVOCATE
you can't find your waitress with a Geiger counter
---TOM WAITS
"Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God." -AMADEUS, THE VOICE OF GOD
"You smell that? Do you smell that? ... Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like ... victory. Someday this war's gonna end
Gunnery Sgt. Hartman's (R. Lee Ermy) degrading, intimidating introductory speech to new inducted recruits at Parris Island: ("If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human, fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian s--t. Because I am hard you will not like me. But the more you hate me the more you will learn. I am hard, but I am fair! There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you maggots understand that?")
The point is, ladies and gentleman, is that greed - for lack of a better word - is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms - greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind. And Greed - you mark my words - will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.")
("We believe nature is solid, and time a constant. Matter has substance and time a direction. There is truth in flesh and the solid ground. The wind may be invisible, but it's real. Smoke, fire, water, light -- they're different! Not as to stone or steel, but they're tangible. And we assume time is narrow because it is as a clock -- one second is one second for everyone! Cause precedes effect -- fruit rots, water flows downstream. We're born, we age, we die. The reverse NEVER happens... None of this is true! Say goodbye to classical reality!"
...")Austrian court composer Antonio Salieri's (F. Murray Abraham) blissful, amazed narration while examining Mozart's sheet music for Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments: ("Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God.")
.I had to start braising the beef, pork butt and veal shanks for the tomato sauce. It was Michael's favorite. I was making ziti with the meat gravy and I'm planning to roast some peppers over the flames and I was gonna put on some string beans with some olive oil and garlic, and I had some beautiful cutlets that were cut just right, that I was going to fry up before dinner just as an appetizer. So I was home for about an hour. Now my plan was to start the dinner early so Karen and I could unload the guns that Jimmy didn't want, and then get the package for Lois to take to Atlanta for her trip later that night..."); the monologue ends when Henry is busted by the DEA, and he coolly says with relief: ("For a second, I thought I was dead, but when I heard all the noise I knew they were cops. Only cops talk that way. If they had been wiseguys, I wouldn't have heard a thing. I would've been dead.")
Hitman Jules Winnfield's (Samuel L. Jackson) Bible quote: ("The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.")Larry Flynt's
Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer..
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms."
.“That's what makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. And we'll go on forever, Pa... 'cause... we're the people.”The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
”"There's an old joke: Two elderly women are at a Catskill Mountain resort. And one of 'em says: 'Boy, the food in this place is really terrible.' The other one says: 'Yeah, I know. And such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."Annie Hall (1977)
Greetings, my friends! We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friends; future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable; that is why you are here. And now for the first time we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that faithful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friends, we can not keep this a secret any longer; let us punish the guilty, let us reward the innocent. My friends, can your heart stand the shocking facts about the grave robbers from outer space?"
In a powerful speech spoken directly into the camera on his television show See It Now, legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) attacked Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's (Himself) methods: ("...We must not confuse dissent from disloyalty. We must remember always, that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another, we will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, we will remember we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who dared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular...The actions of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And who's fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear -- he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and good luck")
("In the end, they put candles on the bodies, so's their friends -- if they had any -- could know them in the dark. The city did this free of charge. It was four days and nights before the worst of the mob was finally put down. We never knew how many New Yorkers died that week before the city was finally delivered. My father once told me we was all born of blood and tribulation; so then, too, was our great city. But for those of us who had lived and died in them furious days... it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away. And no matter what they did to build this city back up again -- for the rest of time -- it would be like nobody even knew we was ever here"), followed by the astonishing "time passage" sequence which shows the development of Lower Manhattan from 1863 through to pre-9/11 while U2's Hands That Built America plays.
"You get to know a lot butchering meat. We're made up of the same things - flesh and blood, tissue, organs. I love to work with pigs. The nearest thing in nature to the flesh of a man is the flesh of a pig...This is the liver. The kidneys. The heart. This is a wound -- the stomach will bleed and bleed. This is a kill. This is a kill. Main artery. This is a kill")
100 Great Movie Lines We Can't Live Without
Famous quotes and great lines of dialogue from 75 years of sound films come from speeches, one-liners, quips, punchlines, statements and insults. Here are some more examples of the most memorable movie quotes and lines of dialogue.
See also, "Greatest Last Film Lines and Quotes" with some of the greatest curtain-call lines ever.
100 GREAT MOVIE LINES WE CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT
Selected by Premiere Magazine (in their August 2000 issue)
Hint: Move your mouse pointer over the yellow star next to each quote to identify the source of the film quote (some of the stars are linked to the film's identification and a detailed description of the film).
"I'll make him an offer he can't refuse."
"I just want to say one word to you - just one word.... 'plastics.'"
"Michael...we're bigger than U.S. Steel."
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms."
."
"
"...I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
"Go ahead, make my day."
Gort. Klaatu Barada Nikto. It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
It's his ship now, his command. He's in charge, the boss, the head man,
top dog, big cheese, head honcho, number..
I lost it at the movies. ( title of book by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael)
Don't forget the cannoli.
How's Paully?
Oh Paully... won't see him no more. .
Someday, and that day may never come,
I'll call upon you to do a service for me.
"You owe me money!"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country
Arthur I'm so rich, I wish I had a dime for every dime I had.
Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to
your daughter... 's wedding... on the day of your daughter's wedding. And I hope their first child
be a masculine child.
But, I'm funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?
Badges? We ain't got no badges.We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.
My father made him an offer he couldn't refuse.. .
Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him,
that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
Now I know we're not in Kansas anymore.
"Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"
"Gentlemen. You can't fight in here. This is the War Room!"
- "Tell me, how did you find America?"
- "Turn left at Greenland."
"You don't understand! I could've had class. I could've been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it......It was you, Charley."
"I'll be back."
"If you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, do you know what's gonna happen to you?...You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company."
"Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!"
"Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
"I stick my neck out for nobody."
"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."
"They call me Mister Tibbs."
"Show me the money!"
- "Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you."
- "Shut up and deal!"
"You're tearing me apart!"
"Then close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself, 'There's no place like home'."
"Here's looking at you, kid."
"That is one nutty hospital."
"...Bond. James Bond."
"We find the defendants incredibly guilty."
- "You want answers?"
- "I want the truth!"
- "You can't handle the truth!"
"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
"You talkin' to me?"
"What do you mean, I'm funny?...You mean the way I talk? What?...Funny how? I mean, what's funny about it?...But I'm funny how? I mean, funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to f--kin' amuse you? What do you mean, funny? Funny how? How'm I funny??...How the f--k am I funny? What the f--k is so funny about me? Tell me? Tell me what's funny!..."
"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, that is, depending on the breaks."
"The horror...the horror."
"We belong dead."
"Get away from her, you bitch!"
"We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."
"Last night I saw a flying object that couldn't have possibly been from this planet...But I can't say a word! I'm muzzled by army brass!"
"All you of Earth - are idiots!"
- "He was from my village. He was the village idiot!"
- "Yeah, what'd you do, place?"
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it."
"
FIVE EASY PIECES
- "Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules."
- "You want me to hold the chicken, huh?"
- "I want you to hold it between your knees."
A FEW GOOD MEN. Col. Nathan R. Jessup's (Jack Nicholson) courtroom tirade: ("You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know - that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall. We use words like "honor," "code," "loyalty." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!")
JFK "Now I can give you the background, but you have to find the foreground, the little things. Keep digging. Remember, you're the only person to bring a trial in the murder of John Kennedy. That's important, it's historic...You don't have a choice anymore. You've become a significant threat to the national security structure. They would have killed you already but you got a lot of light on you. Instead, they're trying to destroy your credibility. They already have in many circles in this town. Be honest, your only chance is to come up with a case. Something, anything. Make arrests, stir the s--t storm, hope to reach a point of critical mass that'll start a chain reaction of people coming forward, then the government will crack.")
GOODFELLAS "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster" monologue in the opening: ("As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States...Even before I first wandered into the cabstand for an after-school job, I knew I wanted to be a part of them. It was there that I knew that I belonged. To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies. They weren't like anybody else. I mean, they did whatever they wanted. They double-parked in front of a hydrant and nobody ever gave them a ticket. In the summer when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops")
Col. Kurtz' (Marlon Brando) 'horror' speech about hacked-off arms of inoculated children: ("I've seen the horror. Horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me... It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies...")
THIEF Nobody's fucking indespersible.
THE SHINING "Wendy, let me explain something to you. Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you're breaking my concentration. You're distracting me. And it will then take me time to get back to where I was. Understand?...I'm gonna make a new rule. Whenever I'm in here, and you hear me typing, whether you don't hear me typing, whatever the f--k you hear me doing in here, when I'm in here, that means that I am working. That means don't come in. Now do you think you can handle that?...Why don't you start right now and get the fuck out of here?")
BLADE RUNNER "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die"
Friday, April 15, 2011
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Carlin retraction?
Actually, none of the words belong on the list, but you can understand why some of them are there. I am not completely insensitive to people's feelings. You know, I can dig why some of those words got on the list...like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are...those are heavy-weight words. There's a lot going on there, man. Besides the literal translation and the emotional feeling. They're just busy words. There's a lot of syllables to contend with. And those K's. Those are aggressive sounds, they jump out at you. CocksuckerMotherfuckerCocksucker. It's like an assault, on you. So I can dig that.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Lenny Bruce Thank you Maskman
THANK YOU, MASK MAN
By Lenny Bruce
Arranged by the NOT BORED! Radio Players
Narrator: Here's a bit. It's about a good man, a man who was better than Christ and Moses: The Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger was so good that he never waited for a "Thank You." He cleaned up the whole town for you and split --
Mask Man (in the background): Hi Ho, Silver!
Dominic: What's with that putz? The schmuck didn't wait! Mamma made coffee and cake and everything. What is the hell is with that guy? I got my hand out like some jackoff and he's already on his horse already!
Person 2: Yeah, yeah: "The Lone Ranger" -- so what the hell does that make him?
Dominic: What an asshole! Is he kidding, that guy? Schmuck! I'm standing there like this with the Mayor and a plaque and everything. . . . I'm going to punch the shit out of him if I ever see him again!
Person 1: Take it easy, Dominic. . . .
Dominic: Take it easy, my balls! Is that guy kidding me?
Person 2: Look, he's the Lone Ranger. He's a good-natured schmuck, he ain't got a quarter. [Pause.] You don't know about him? He's got a problem and goes to analysis. He can't accept love.
Dominic: Eh?
Person 2: We don't even need him any more. He comes around here -- we recognize the mask with snot all over it. It's disgusting! But he likes to go through it so we play it out for him, ya know. Here's his favorite bit.
Person 3: Hey you! What'd ya have a mask on for? Are you an outlaw?
Person 2: This makes him really crazy.
Mask Man: I'm an outlaw! I'm an outlaw! You should be an outlaw the way I am an outlaw!
Person 3: So why do you wear a mask?
Mask Man: Never mind! I'm an outlaw. Get away from me kids, I hurt people.
Person 2: Is that believable? "I'm an outlaw"?!
Mask Man (to himself): Get a kick in the ass for being nice to people?! I'm out for Number One from now on, brother. No one is going to shit on me. I'm out for Number One, boy; Number One is the one and then they get, later.
Person 4: Nice guy?! How come the asshole leaves bullets then?
Person 1: I don't know. That is kinda weird.
Person 4: Sure he's nice: the asshole leaves bullets for kids to fool around with!
Person 2: I told you what the innuedo is: Dr. Ehrlich the Magic Bullet.
Person 4: What's that?
Person 2: Syphillis.
Person 4: Eh?
Person 2: He's telling you in his own special way that the whole world has syphillis.
Person 1: Dr. Ehrlich the Magic Bullet! Of course.
Person 2: Why do you think he rides off with his mouth closed?
Mask Man (in background): Hmmm hmmmm hmm-hmmmm!
Person 4: Are you kidding with that?
Person 2: Of course, when he's outta audible range he's goes on and on about how he thinks he might of caughta dose.
Dominic: Oh, yeah? Well, I'm going to beat the shit outta him. Get the horses ready: I'm gonna punch them first.
Sound of horses.
Sheriff: Hold the fire on the North ridge! Hold it!
Dominic: OK, Mask Man: I'm gonna whup the shit outta you, buddy, right now.
Sheriff: Whew! God-damn, it took us about 15 minutes -- boy, you think you're pretty god-damn smart. You're hot shit, aintcha, buddy?
Dominic: Look at these kids here, they made cookies and wrote a song called "Thank You, Mask Man." There's your hero! The man too good to accept a "Thank You" from little children, little children in the crey-paper costumes. Right now, buddy, you're going to explain or I'm going to whup the hell outta you, you hear?
Mask Man: I'll explain if you get your god-damn hands offa me, you barbarian! You see, the reason I never wait for "Denk you" izzat I put two boys true college.
Sheriff: What's that?
Mask Man: Dot's right! I put two boys true college and I don' even get a "Denk you"!
Sheriff: A "Denk you"?! Oi veys mir! The Mask Man's a Jew!
Mask man: Of course, schmuck! Dot's why I never talk on the radio show -- all you ever heard me say on the radio show was "Hi Ho Silver!" -- dot's all! You see. . . . Some goyim are coming? Zugnish! Don't zay a void! . . . OK. You I tell. The reason I never wait for a thank you is that -- well, supposing that I did wait for a thank you. Just for a supposition.
Little boy or girl: Thank you, Mask Man.
Mask Man: What's that?
Little boy or girl: Thank you, Mask Man.
Mask Man: "Thank you, Mask Man"? Who the fuck said that?
Little boy or girl: I said it. Thank you, Mask Man.
Voices (in background): Help! Help! Mask man! Mask man!
Mask Man: Just a moment, getting a few thank-yous here.
Voices (in background): Mask man! Mask man! Help! Help!
Mask Man: Don't break my balls, now! I've done you people a whole lotta good and now I wanna get a few thank-yous in return.
Little boy or girl: Thank you, mask Man.
Mask Man: "Thank you, Mask Man." Is zis vot I've been running away from all deese years? What a god-damn fool I've been to run away from a sound like dis. It's beautiful! Let me hear it again!
Voices (in background): Help! Mask Man! Mask man! Help!
Mask Man: Not you, you miserable ingrates! I mean you, wit da babyface.
Little boy or girl: Thank you, mask Man.
Mask Man: "Thank you, Mask Man." Isn't that something? I'm going to get a "Thank you, Mask man" every god-damn day! I'll put 'em all down in a book: It'll say" Thank you, Mask Man." Do you think that I've always worked at this fucking hardware store? Hey, you see that? You see what it says right there?
Everybody: Thank you, Mask Man!
Mask Man: -- It's signed "People of Syosset, Long Island." Izzn't dot something? When I'm old, I can lean back on my book of "Thank You, Mask Man"s. Yes, it's true I can't ride anymore, but would you like to see a little something that I did? Look at that.
Woman formerly in distress: Thank you, mask Man.
Mask Man: Then one day, it's almost five o'clock. Where is the "Thank You Mask Man" Man? Has the "Thank You Mask man" Man been here today? You do have a "Thank You, Mask man" for me, don't you? I thought it would last forever. I've led a very flamboyant existence: I've pissed all my "Thank You's" away. You don't have have any, do you? Just gimme one, so I can make it to the next town. One "Thank You, Mask man"?
The Prophet (booming): There are no more "Thank You, Mask Man"s. The Messiah came during the night. All is pure. [Pause.] You're in the shithouse.
Mask man: The Messiah? But what has this to do with me?
The Prophet: Well, you see -- you are like men such as Jonas Salk, Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover. These men thrive upon the continuance of disease, segregation, and violence. The purity they do profess a need for, they just feed upon.
Mask Man: You mean?
The Prophet: Yes! Without polio, Salk is a putz.
Mask Man: Well, then, I'll make trouble. Because I'm geared for it. And I must have a "Thank you, Mask Man," at all costs. . . . You see, this way what I don't have, I don't miss -- that's why I always ride off without waiting for a thank you.
City official: God-damn it, Mask Man! Whoo-wee! You can sure talk your ass off! What the fuck you talkin' about? All this Commie horseshit: "Thank you, Mask Man." The kids fell asleep. Wilbur's got blue balls, he's got to get back to the base! He's got me dizzy with all that bullshit: "Thank you, Mask Man." Look, buddy, I'm here -- I'm working for the City, you know what I'm saying? I'm just here to take a photo with you for the Daily News, and then get the hell outta here. C'mon now, shape up and accept a present, and then we can haul ass.
Mask Man: A present? For the children? Alright I'll do it -- no ashtrays, though. . . . Gimme the Indian over there!
City official: Who, Tonto?
Mask Man: Yes, I want Tanta, or whatever the spic-half-bred's name is. I'll take him.
City official: Spic half-bred?! God-damn, you can't have Tonto.
Mask man: Bullshit! You made the deal, and that's what I want: I want Tanta the Indian!
City official: Look, buddy, his name ain't Tanta, its Tonto and you can't have Tonto.
Mask man: Bullshit! I want Tanta, I want Tanta the Indian!
City official: God-damn you, you hippy freak, I wanna tell you -- What the hell do you want Tonto for, anyway?
Mask Man: To perform an unnatural act.
City official: What?
Mask Man: You heard me: to perform an unnatural act.
City official: The Mask Man is a fag! God-damn! The Mask Man is a fag! The masked Fag Man! Oh, Lord! I'm getting dizzy. Don't look at him kids! The bad Fag Man. Oh! {Spluttering.] The Masked Bad Fag Damn Man. You fag bastard, you! God-damn it, kids! Mask Man, I never knew you were that way!
Mask Man: I'm not a fag, but I've heard so much about it, I've read a lot of exposes on how bad it is, and I want to try it, just once. . . . You know? I like what they do with fags in this country: the punishment is quite correct and consistent with the rest of the law: lock 'em up with a bunch of other men -- hmmm, very clever. . . . Uh, wash him up and get him ready! And, uh, I tell you what, uh -- give me that white horse, too.
City official: [Pause.] What do you want that horse for?
Mask man: For the act.
City official: You twisted fag bastard! The horse for the act!
The horse: Nay-ay-ay-ay!
City official: Get off him, Tanta, that's terrible!
Mask Man (riding off): Hi ho, Silver!
sound of horses and then a recording of "The William Tell Overture" by Rossini, to end
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ISSN 1084-7340.
Snail mail: POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
By Lenny Bruce
Arranged by the NOT BORED! Radio Players
Narrator: Here's a bit. It's about a good man, a man who was better than Christ and Moses: The Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger was so good that he never waited for a "Thank You." He cleaned up the whole town for you and split --
Mask Man (in the background): Hi Ho, Silver!
Dominic: What's with that putz? The schmuck didn't wait! Mamma made coffee and cake and everything. What is the hell is with that guy? I got my hand out like some jackoff and he's already on his horse already!
Person 2: Yeah, yeah: "The Lone Ranger" -- so what the hell does that make him?
Dominic: What an asshole! Is he kidding, that guy? Schmuck! I'm standing there like this with the Mayor and a plaque and everything. . . . I'm going to punch the shit out of him if I ever see him again!
Person 1: Take it easy, Dominic. . . .
Dominic: Take it easy, my balls! Is that guy kidding me?
Person 2: Look, he's the Lone Ranger. He's a good-natured schmuck, he ain't got a quarter. [Pause.] You don't know about him? He's got a problem and goes to analysis. He can't accept love.
Dominic: Eh?
Person 2: We don't even need him any more. He comes around here -- we recognize the mask with snot all over it. It's disgusting! But he likes to go through it so we play it out for him, ya know. Here's his favorite bit.
Person 3: Hey you! What'd ya have a mask on for? Are you an outlaw?
Person 2: This makes him really crazy.
Mask Man: I'm an outlaw! I'm an outlaw! You should be an outlaw the way I am an outlaw!
Person 3: So why do you wear a mask?
Mask Man: Never mind! I'm an outlaw. Get away from me kids, I hurt people.
Person 2: Is that believable? "I'm an outlaw"?!
Mask Man (to himself): Get a kick in the ass for being nice to people?! I'm out for Number One from now on, brother. No one is going to shit on me. I'm out for Number One, boy; Number One is the one and then they get, later.
Person 4: Nice guy?! How come the asshole leaves bullets then?
Person 1: I don't know. That is kinda weird.
Person 4: Sure he's nice: the asshole leaves bullets for kids to fool around with!
Person 2: I told you what the innuedo is: Dr. Ehrlich the Magic Bullet.
Person 4: What's that?
Person 2: Syphillis.
Person 4: Eh?
Person 2: He's telling you in his own special way that the whole world has syphillis.
Person 1: Dr. Ehrlich the Magic Bullet! Of course.
Person 2: Why do you think he rides off with his mouth closed?
Mask Man (in background): Hmmm hmmmm hmm-hmmmm!
Person 4: Are you kidding with that?
Person 2: Of course, when he's outta audible range he's goes on and on about how he thinks he might of caughta dose.
Dominic: Oh, yeah? Well, I'm going to beat the shit outta him. Get the horses ready: I'm gonna punch them first.
Sound of horses.
Sheriff: Hold the fire on the North ridge! Hold it!
Dominic: OK, Mask Man: I'm gonna whup the shit outta you, buddy, right now.
Sheriff: Whew! God-damn, it took us about 15 minutes -- boy, you think you're pretty god-damn smart. You're hot shit, aintcha, buddy?
Dominic: Look at these kids here, they made cookies and wrote a song called "Thank You, Mask Man." There's your hero! The man too good to accept a "Thank You" from little children, little children in the crey-paper costumes. Right now, buddy, you're going to explain or I'm going to whup the hell outta you, you hear?
Mask Man: I'll explain if you get your god-damn hands offa me, you barbarian! You see, the reason I never wait for "Denk you" izzat I put two boys true college.
Sheriff: What's that?
Mask Man: Dot's right! I put two boys true college and I don' even get a "Denk you"!
Sheriff: A "Denk you"?! Oi veys mir! The Mask Man's a Jew!
Mask man: Of course, schmuck! Dot's why I never talk on the radio show -- all you ever heard me say on the radio show was "Hi Ho Silver!" -- dot's all! You see. . . . Some goyim are coming? Zugnish! Don't zay a void! . . . OK. You I tell. The reason I never wait for a thank you is that -- well, supposing that I did wait for a thank you. Just for a supposition.
Little boy or girl: Thank you, Mask Man.
Mask Man: What's that?
Little boy or girl: Thank you, Mask Man.
Mask Man: "Thank you, Mask Man"? Who the fuck said that?
Little boy or girl: I said it. Thank you, Mask Man.
Voices (in background): Help! Help! Mask man! Mask man!
Mask Man: Just a moment, getting a few thank-yous here.
Voices (in background): Mask man! Mask man! Help! Help!
Mask Man: Don't break my balls, now! I've done you people a whole lotta good and now I wanna get a few thank-yous in return.
Little boy or girl: Thank you, mask Man.
Mask Man: "Thank you, Mask Man." Is zis vot I've been running away from all deese years? What a god-damn fool I've been to run away from a sound like dis. It's beautiful! Let me hear it again!
Voices (in background): Help! Mask Man! Mask man! Help!
Mask Man: Not you, you miserable ingrates! I mean you, wit da babyface.
Little boy or girl: Thank you, mask Man.
Mask Man: "Thank you, Mask Man." Isn't that something? I'm going to get a "Thank you, Mask man" every god-damn day! I'll put 'em all down in a book: It'll say" Thank you, Mask Man." Do you think that I've always worked at this fucking hardware store? Hey, you see that? You see what it says right there?
Everybody: Thank you, Mask Man!
Mask Man: -- It's signed "People of Syosset, Long Island." Izzn't dot something? When I'm old, I can lean back on my book of "Thank You, Mask Man"s. Yes, it's true I can't ride anymore, but would you like to see a little something that I did? Look at that.
Woman formerly in distress: Thank you, mask Man.
Mask Man: Then one day, it's almost five o'clock. Where is the "Thank You Mask Man" Man? Has the "Thank You Mask man" Man been here today? You do have a "Thank You, Mask man" for me, don't you? I thought it would last forever. I've led a very flamboyant existence: I've pissed all my "Thank You's" away. You don't have have any, do you? Just gimme one, so I can make it to the next town. One "Thank You, Mask man"?
The Prophet (booming): There are no more "Thank You, Mask Man"s. The Messiah came during the night. All is pure. [Pause.] You're in the shithouse.
Mask man: The Messiah? But what has this to do with me?
The Prophet: Well, you see -- you are like men such as Jonas Salk, Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover. These men thrive upon the continuance of disease, segregation, and violence. The purity they do profess a need for, they just feed upon.
Mask Man: You mean?
The Prophet: Yes! Without polio, Salk is a putz.
Mask Man: Well, then, I'll make trouble. Because I'm geared for it. And I must have a "Thank you, Mask Man," at all costs. . . . You see, this way what I don't have, I don't miss -- that's why I always ride off without waiting for a thank you.
City official: God-damn it, Mask Man! Whoo-wee! You can sure talk your ass off! What the fuck you talkin' about? All this Commie horseshit: "Thank you, Mask Man." The kids fell asleep. Wilbur's got blue balls, he's got to get back to the base! He's got me dizzy with all that bullshit: "Thank you, Mask Man." Look, buddy, I'm here -- I'm working for the City, you know what I'm saying? I'm just here to take a photo with you for the Daily News, and then get the hell outta here. C'mon now, shape up and accept a present, and then we can haul ass.
Mask Man: A present? For the children? Alright I'll do it -- no ashtrays, though. . . . Gimme the Indian over there!
City official: Who, Tonto?
Mask Man: Yes, I want Tanta, or whatever the spic-half-bred's name is. I'll take him.
City official: Spic half-bred?! God-damn, you can't have Tonto.
Mask man: Bullshit! You made the deal, and that's what I want: I want Tanta the Indian!
City official: Look, buddy, his name ain't Tanta, its Tonto and you can't have Tonto.
Mask man: Bullshit! I want Tanta, I want Tanta the Indian!
City official: God-damn you, you hippy freak, I wanna tell you -- What the hell do you want Tonto for, anyway?
Mask Man: To perform an unnatural act.
City official: What?
Mask Man: You heard me: to perform an unnatural act.
City official: The Mask Man is a fag! God-damn! The Mask Man is a fag! The masked Fag Man! Oh, Lord! I'm getting dizzy. Don't look at him kids! The bad Fag Man. Oh! {Spluttering.] The Masked Bad Fag Damn Man. You fag bastard, you! God-damn it, kids! Mask Man, I never knew you were that way!
Mask Man: I'm not a fag, but I've heard so much about it, I've read a lot of exposes on how bad it is, and I want to try it, just once. . . . You know? I like what they do with fags in this country: the punishment is quite correct and consistent with the rest of the law: lock 'em up with a bunch of other men -- hmmm, very clever. . . . Uh, wash him up and get him ready! And, uh, I tell you what, uh -- give me that white horse, too.
City official: [Pause.] What do you want that horse for?
Mask man: For the act.
City official: You twisted fag bastard! The horse for the act!
The horse: Nay-ay-ay-ay!
City official: Get off him, Tanta, that's terrible!
Mask Man (riding off): Hi ho, Silver!
sound of horses and then a recording of "The William Tell Overture" by Rossini, to end
[AUDIO RECORDINGS] [BACK ISSUES] [HOME] [LINKS] [SCANNER ABUSE] [SELECTED TEXTS] [TRANSLATIONS]
[LETTRIST INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE] [SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE]
To Contact Us:
Info@notbored.org
ISSN 1084-7340.
Snail mail: POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
Friday, March 27, 2009
Open the pod bay-doors, HAL."
Open the pod bay-doors, HAL."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
More Paranoia
A few days ago, I wrote that the “paranoid style” has been a continual temptation and danger for modern conservatives (whom Hofstadter called “pseudo-conservatives,” owing to their radicalism in wanting to overturn existing laws and institutions). Several readers expressed disbelief that I didn’t mention their left-wing counterparts, and Jonah Goldberg criticized me on The Corner for the same reason. Goldberg accurately brings up various recent left-wing conspiracy theorists, from Naomi Klein to Spike Lee (he might have mentioned Michael Moore as well), and concludes, “By all means, dust off your dog-eared copies of “The Paranoid Style.” But spare me the lectures if you can only find things to worry about to your right.”
There’s plenty of criticism of Klein, Moore, Nicholson Baker, and other paranoid stylists of the left in my book on Iraq, “The Assassins’ Gate.” I didn’t mention them in discussing Hofstadter and the current reaction to Obama for this reason: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck have far more power in the Republican Party (it sometimes seems to include veto power) than Klein, Lee, and Moore have in the Democratic Party. The views of right-wing commentators in the grip of the paranoid style (Obama is a stealth radical, the Democrats are imposing socialism) are much closer to mainstream conservative and Republican belief than the views of their counterparts on the left (the levees in New Orleans were blown up by the government, the White House had something to do with 9/11) are to mainstream liberal and Democratic belief. The reasons are complex, but I would list these: the evangelical and occasionally messianic fervor that animates a part of the Republican base; the atmosphere of siege and the self-identification of conservatives as insurgents even when they monopolized political power; the influence of ideology over movement conservatives, and their deep hostility to compromise; the fact that modern conservatism has been a movement, which modern liberalism has not.
This is not to say that the more destructive forms of populism and outright paranoia can’t appear on the left. They have, they do, and they will, especially in times of extreme distress like these. It’s only to say that the infection has been more organic to the modern right.
Goldberg would have even more basis for his complaint if I were the author of a book called “Conservative Fascism” and he were not the author of a book called “Liberal Fascism.”
There’s plenty of criticism of Klein, Moore, Nicholson Baker, and other paranoid stylists of the left in my book on Iraq, “The Assassins’ Gate.” I didn’t mention them in discussing Hofstadter and the current reaction to Obama for this reason: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck have far more power in the Republican Party (it sometimes seems to include veto power) than Klein, Lee, and Moore have in the Democratic Party. The views of right-wing commentators in the grip of the paranoid style (Obama is a stealth radical, the Democrats are imposing socialism) are much closer to mainstream conservative and Republican belief than the views of their counterparts on the left (the levees in New Orleans were blown up by the government, the White House had something to do with 9/11) are to mainstream liberal and Democratic belief. The reasons are complex, but I would list these: the evangelical and occasionally messianic fervor that animates a part of the Republican base; the atmosphere of siege and the self-identification of conservatives as insurgents even when they monopolized political power; the influence of ideology over movement conservatives, and their deep hostility to compromise; the fact that modern conservatism has been a movement, which modern liberalism has not.
This is not to say that the more destructive forms of populism and outright paranoia can’t appear on the left. They have, they do, and they will, especially in times of extreme distress like these. It’s only to say that the infection has been more organic to the modern right.
Goldberg would have even more basis for his complaint if I were the author of a book called “Conservative Fascism” and he were not the author of a book called “Liberal Fascism.”
OBAMA DOESN'T NAIL IT
It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.
THAT IS SO TRUE. I'VE BEEN SUCH A SELFISH WRETCH. NOT LIKE THIS BRAVE AND BRILLIANT NEW PRESIDENT, THIS DOMESTIC WARRIOR THIS ANGEL SENT TO HEAL AMERICA. BUT NO, ALL I COULD SEE WAS MY NARROW INTERESTS.
GOD DAMNED FUCKING CREEP. WHO COULD SAY THINGS LLIKE THAT AND NOT BE AN ARROGANT STUPID CREEP?!
ONLY AN ARROGANT CREEP COULD LET HIMSELF SAY SUCH WORTHLESS STUPID CRAP.
THAT IS SO TRUE. I'VE BEEN SUCH A SELFISH WRETCH. NOT LIKE THIS BRAVE AND BRILLIANT NEW PRESIDENT, THIS DOMESTIC WARRIOR THIS ANGEL SENT TO HEAL AMERICA. BUT NO, ALL I COULD SEE WAS MY NARROW INTERESTS.
GOD DAMNED FUCKING CREEP. WHO COULD SAY THINGS LLIKE THAT AND NOT BE AN ARROGANT STUPID CREEP?!
ONLY AN ARROGANT CREEP COULD LET HIMSELF SAY SUCH WORTHLESS STUPID CRAP.
MORE ONION POSTERS
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Congress Forced To Watch Training Video About Bipartisan Cooperation
Onion News Network:
Rep. Gary Nelson (R-CT) Introduces The Gary Nelson Personal Pay Raise Bill 11.22.07
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Senate Carpool 'Forgets' To Pick Up Feingold Again 10.07.06
WASHINGTON—In an effort to stimulate discussion, resolve party conflicts, and increase legislative productivity, members of the 111th Congress were once again required to watch an instructional video on bipartisan collaboration this week.
Enlarge Image
Senators reluctantly watch the section on "non-vitriolic communication."
"Since both House and Senate seem unable or unwilling to compromise on several issues regarding tax money, earmarks, or even seating arrangement, we have decided to take drastic action," Vice President Joe Biden told a special joint session of Congress Monday. "Hopefully this will give you some tools you can use to lend a hand, and maybe an ear, across the aisle."
"And please, no talking on cell phones during the video," Biden added. "I'm looking at you, Senator Reid."
Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution specifies that the legislative branch must watch the instructional training film "A Vote For Understanding" once every six years. The 30-minute video was made in 1976 and stars former Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who guides viewers through a series of short lessons about the importance of listening to the opposition without interrupting, yelling, or filibustering.
Enlarge Image
At this point, the film is meant to be paused for a joint-resolution exercise.
After calling the mandatory session to order, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wheeled in a cart with a television and VCR and instructed Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to dim the lights.
The film opens with a dramatization of two legislators tugging at opposite ends of the same bill, until Proxmire steps into frame and freezes the action by calling a "time out." While an up-tempo synthesizer track plays in the background, Proxmire teaches the bitterly divided congressmen to look at each other, open their minds, and work together instead of relying on threats and walkouts.
Another scene revolves around a heated appropriations dispute, and encourages lawmakers to always "S.H.I.N.E." by using the five steps of legislative cooperation: "Show respect, Hold back anger, Identify common ground, Nation first! and Emerge with compromise."
At another point, a split screen depicts two congressmen—a Democrat and Republican wearing blue and red hats, respectively—engaged in a shouting match over a bill's rider. The screen dissolves to reveal the two men facing away from each other, yelling in opposite directions. Proxmire then rotates the legislators' chairs around and switches their hats, teaching both a profound lesson in seeing government through the eyes of the opposition.
Despite the video's distinct message of compromise, cooperation, and not completely ignoring and then vilifying members of an opposing party, many lawmakers called it "unrealistic and outdated." Some claimed their time would have been better spent arguing over provisions of the upcoming health care reform bill.
"That's great: Here we are dealing with the worst recession since World War II and we have to watch a friggin' bipartisanship video," Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) said. "What a waste of time. I already saw that back in '97 when I first took office."
"This kind of Democratic grandstanding is exactly why I didn't read a single clause in the economic stimulus package before I voted against it," Enzi added.
Most lawmakers sat with members of their own party during the mandatory screening and spent the entirety of the afternoon slumped over in their chairs. While both sides mostly kept to themselves, there was one moment of bipartisanship during a scene in which Proxmire tells viewers to take a moment to cross the aisle and introduce themselves—to which someone loudly replied, "Yeah right," causing both parties to burst into laughter.
"I don't need some boring movie to teach me about partisanship," said Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ), adding that he could not believe the junior senator from Alaska was actually taking notes. "I'm one of the most partisan people around. Ask anyone."
Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) was also dismissive of the instructional film, saying that if he ever actually went along with its "corny" message of tolerance, he would lose the respect of everyone in Washington.
Said Risch, "Ooh, I just can't wait to listen to Democrats! I'm totally going to consider their feelings and long-term initiatives before voting. Pff. As if."
A small group of legislators, however, said they appreciated the viewing experience.
"I think it was pretty good," said Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who appeared in the film with a thick head of brown hair. "I wouldn't mind watching it a second time."
There are a number of other videos Congress is bound by law to watch periodically. The most commonly shown films include "Commerce Regulation And You," "Budgets Made Easy," "So You've Been Re-Elected…," and "Drunk Driving: Dying Under The Influence."
Upon conclusion of the video, Democratic and Republican leaders went out onto the National Mall for a smoke break and, after some levelheaded discussion, determined everything was the executive branch's fault.
Laid-Off Ford Employee Decides To Start Own Car Company
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HAPEVILLE, GA—Calling his recent layoff "just the kind of a kick in the pants" he needed, former Ford Motor Company autoworker Chris Thaney announced the creation of the Thaney Motor Company Monday.
Enlarge Image
Thaney at Thaney Motor Company HQ.
"Losing my job was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," said the 34-year-old Thaney, who made $57,000 on the production line as a door fitter until the Hapeville plant closed down last month. "I know cars. I've been around cars for nearly a decade now. I don't need to work for a big, corporate auto manufacturer to do what I love."
"It's going to be great," Thaney continued. "Finally I get to be my own boss, set my own hours, and make my own cars."
Headquartered in Thaney's home garage and financed mainly through his unemployment compensation and United Auto Workers layoff benefits, the new company's credo is, according to Thaney, to "design affordable, versatile and easy-handling cars for ordinary Americans." Saying that his time at Ford taught him "what not to do," Thaney explained that his car company will not be the victim of overproduction and other inefficient practices that have resulted in intensifying competition and declining profits.
"Today's consumers want something made with precision and care," Thaney said. "Not something that was spit out in 58 seconds by a thousand people and some machines."
Enlarge Image
Preliminary designs for Thaney Motor Company's first model, the Centaur.
Thaney said his cars will be a hit with the public because he will "spare no expense," while still managing to avoid stifling bureaucracy, overpaid executives, and cost overruns.
"As long as I'm in charge, that's the Thaney Motor Company pledge," he added.
"At Ford it was all about the bottom line," said Thaney, who is currently on the lookout for a good source of Italian leather for the upholstery. "With me, the customer will always come first. Well, after the cars."
Thaney said Thaney Motor Company will "go out of its way" to show that its commitment to new ideas and innovation extends all the way to the top of the organization.
"Where Ford went wrong was not going on the Internet to find engines and other parts," Thaney said. "They could have joined one of those online car clubs and swapped stuff for practically nothing, without compromising on quality. "
Already, Thaney is hard at work building his first model, the Thaney Centaur, a four-door station wagon based on his wife's 1999 Ford Taurus four-door station-wagon, whose platform he considers "an American classic in need of some minor retooling." He also has plans to create models patterned closely after the Ford Focus engine, the Dodge Neon chassis, and a friend's 1990 Pontiac Grand Prix paint job. In a nod to his old assembly-line position, the models will boast well-fitted doors and multiple side-mounted mirrors.
Though he didn't want to get his hopes up, Thaney admitted the initial planning phases have left him "very optimistic" and said that he already has several friends and relatives lined up who said they would "definitely" drive a car manufactured by him.
"I'm still trying to figure out how to install airbags, CD changers, GPS systems, steering wheels, and trunks," Thaney said. "But once I learn these things, I'll craft them with precision and care, not like some of the stuff you see coming out of Detroit."
Everything Taking Too Long
March 24, 2009 | Issue 45•13
WASHINGTON—An overwhelming sense of restlessness and impatience engulfed the U.S. this week when citizens determined that everything—the morning commute, phone conversations, getting a table at Chili's, making coffee, commercial breaks, everything—was taking entirely too long.
"This is ridiculous," said Boston resident Joe Sosnoff, waiting for a subway train running behind schedule. "I don't have time for this. I seriously do not have time for this."
"Oh, for crying out loud," said Atlanta native Ashley Rose, standing in line at a local Rite Aid pharmacy. "Open up another register if you have to. What are these people doing? Hanging out?"
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At this rate, Americans reported, it would've been faster to take the goddamn stairs.
Between eye rolls, sighs, and repeated glances at wall clocks, a majority of Americans are reporting that the nation badly needs to pick up the pace. In some cases, including those where things are taking so long that it's not even funny, citizens urged all present to hurry the hell up.
According to the latest time estimates, if everything continues to move along at this intolerable pace, Americans will be left with no other choice but to scream.
"You've got to be kidding me," San Francisco market researcher Tim Martin told reporters while waiting for ESPN.com to load on his desktop computer. "Come on."
A CBS News/New York Times poll revealed Tuesday that Americans are split into three separate camps when it comes to the growing national frustration: Those who think everything is taking too long; those who think everything is taking too goddamn long; and a third fringe group that believes everything is taking fucking forever.
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Millions of Americans can just forget about the fucking bus ever showing up when it's fucking supposed to.
Further analysis revealed that 54 percent of respondents are not getting any younger over here. Nearly 10 percent don't understand what the big holdup is. And 23 percent are not only ready, but have been ready for the past half hour, so let's go already.
Several thousand respondents hung up their telephones before answering all of the poll's questions.
While citizens said that a few things, such as lunch, dinner, and sleep, could afford to go on for much longer, everything else reportedly needs to get moving pronto as people have places to be.
A Department of the Interior report released Wednesday stated that there are 6 trillion such instances that could not possibly go any slower if they tried, some of which include budget meetings, shaving, the act of waiting, upward mobility, microwaving that lasagna, settling down and starting a family, walking from one place to another, searching for a misplaced item, returning to the place you initially walked from, air travel, 2009, and the time it takes for a sent e-mail to arrive in someone's inbox.
"Nope," said 37-year-old Glenn Costabile, who entered and then immediately exited a crowded emergency room in downtown Detroit. "No fucking way."
At a press conference, President Obama offered little comfort to the impatient nation, claiming that the number of things that take all freaking day is only expected to rise.
WASHINGTON—An overwhelming sense of restlessness and impatience engulfed the U.S. this week when citizens determined that everything—the morning commute, phone conversations, getting a table at Chili's, making coffee, commercial breaks, everything—was taking entirely too long.
"This is ridiculous," said Boston resident Joe Sosnoff, waiting for a subway train running behind schedule. "I don't have time for this. I seriously do not have time for this."
"Oh, for crying out loud," said Atlanta native Ashley Rose, standing in line at a local Rite Aid pharmacy. "Open up another register if you have to. What are these people doing? Hanging out?"
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At this rate, Americans reported, it would've been faster to take the goddamn stairs.
Between eye rolls, sighs, and repeated glances at wall clocks, a majority of Americans are reporting that the nation badly needs to pick up the pace. In some cases, including those where things are taking so long that it's not even funny, citizens urged all present to hurry the hell up.
According to the latest time estimates, if everything continues to move along at this intolerable pace, Americans will be left with no other choice but to scream.
"You've got to be kidding me," San Francisco market researcher Tim Martin told reporters while waiting for ESPN.com to load on his desktop computer. "Come on."
A CBS News/New York Times poll revealed Tuesday that Americans are split into three separate camps when it comes to the growing national frustration: Those who think everything is taking too long; those who think everything is taking too goddamn long; and a third fringe group that believes everything is taking fucking forever.
Enlarge Image
Millions of Americans can just forget about the fucking bus ever showing up when it's fucking supposed to.
Further analysis revealed that 54 percent of respondents are not getting any younger over here. Nearly 10 percent don't understand what the big holdup is. And 23 percent are not only ready, but have been ready for the past half hour, so let's go already.
Several thousand respondents hung up their telephones before answering all of the poll's questions.
While citizens said that a few things, such as lunch, dinner, and sleep, could afford to go on for much longer, everything else reportedly needs to get moving pronto as people have places to be.
A Department of the Interior report released Wednesday stated that there are 6 trillion such instances that could not possibly go any slower if they tried, some of which include budget meetings, shaving, the act of waiting, upward mobility, microwaving that lasagna, settling down and starting a family, walking from one place to another, searching for a misplaced item, returning to the place you initially walked from, air travel, 2009, and the time it takes for a sent e-mail to arrive in someone's inbox.
"Nope," said 37-year-old Glenn Costabile, who entered and then immediately exited a crowded emergency room in downtown Detroit. "No fucking way."
At a press conference, President Obama offered little comfort to the impatient nation, claiming that the number of things that take all freaking day is only expected to rise.
Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany... Anything new here? Don't get your hopes up.
By NOEL ANNAN
W.W. Norton & Company
CHAPTER ONE
The Mystery in the Soul of State
They were playing cards or cleaning equipment in the hut that served as a barrack room when the sergeant came in and pinned a notice on the door. The officer cadets crowded round. But it was only a list of the names of those who had admitted they spoke foreign languages. They were ordered to report to the orderly room to show how well they knew them.
`What do they ask one?' I said to Peter Webber, who had been a contemporary of mine at King's, Cambridge and had studied modern languages.
`Oh, the same old phrases. In French "Tell him to wait until I come".'
`I see, the subjunctive.'
`In German you might get "I was at the meeting when the speaker was speaking", or possibly "I ought to have done it". This is the fourth time I've been tested since I joined the Field Security Police, and they never vary.'
Never was cynicism more accurate. At the interview next morning I was asked to translate every one of those phrases. `But your German is much better than you said it was,' said my examiner.
Two months later at the end of the course in December 1940 the cadets again gathered round the door. Which regiment had they been posted to? I had hopes of being commissioned in the Rifle Brigade. To my dismay I found against my name something called the Intelligence Corps. Hardly anyone had heard of it -- which was not strange, since it had been formed only that month.
`I'm told it has quite a nice cap badge,' said a school friend, John da Silva -- who was in fact to spend his life in Intelligence. I thought that a frivolous observation.
It was now nearly Christmas, and the new officers were all sent on leave over the holiday before they joined their units. One day just before the New Year I was lunching with my father at our club where he introduced me to a member called Carl Sherrington. He was the son of a famous Cambridge physiologist who had won the Nobel Prize with E.D. Adrian, and made a living as a railway economist. He knew the capacity -- that is to say how many trains a day could be run -- of every railway line in Europe and America. Hearing that I was expecting to be posted to the depot of the Intelligence Corps, he said, `But Kenneth Strong is itching to get his hands on people like you.'
Two days later I got a letter telling me to report to a Captain Sanderson at the War Office. He wore the ribbons of a veteran of the 1914-18 war and, characteristic of those days, had a moustache. He looked like a friendly, alert terrier. In a corner of the room sat a young officer peering into an epidiascope examining air photographs.
`I understand you know about railways,' said Sanderson, and looked somewhat disconcerted when I said I didn't. `Well, then, your father does.' I recollected that at some time before 1914 my father had been associated with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. `Ah, that must have been it,' said Sanderson, relieved that he now had a cast-iron case for getting me transferred to his department. `Can you read German? Tell me what this means,' he said, thrusting into my hands a long report. At this point his phone rang, and while he answered it I was able to get the gist of the article.
`It's to do with transport in Europe,' I began.
`Excellent,' he said, without troubling me further. `I am hoping you will hear from us soon.' Next week I found myself back in that room, having been ordered to fill a post in MI14. I was twenty-four years old.
The reason Captain Sanderson was so ready to recruit me was simple. MI14 was the German department in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Office. It was still a tiny unit, and even when I left two years later it numbered no more than twenty officers. The staff had hardly the time to wade through the torrent of paper that fell over their desks. For they were expected to advise the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) what Hitler would do next. The Military Intelligence Directorate contained such well-known departments as MI5 (Security) and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service); and certain other sections specialised in obtaining information from a specific source -- one, for example, interrogated prisoners of war and, having bugged their rooms, listened to their talk. But there was one department which nearly all the others served. That was MI3. It concerned itself with operational intelligence: it collected and interpreted all information from whatever source about the military forces and intentions of other countries -- 3a dealt with Iraq, Iran and the Near East; 3b with Italy; 3c with the Soviet Union.
The German section had once been part of MI3, but it was now so important that it had broken away to become MI14. In MI14 one unit led by the second in command assessed German strategy and intentions. Another worked on what could be discovered about the operations of the German secret services, the Abwehr, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst. (Its head was a theatrical character, Brian Melland, and he was aided by Leo Long, an efficient young officer who was to be shamed years later when he was identified as one of the Cambridge spies. Long was a pupil of Anthony Blunt: self-confident, masterful and dismissive of fools.) Another section, vital for Bomber Command, identified the whereabouts and strength of the German anti-aircraft or Flak regiments. It was led by a former England cricket captain, G.O. `Gubby' Allen. Crucial to the enterprise was the German Order of Battle section, which tried to estimate the number and character of the German divisions, and identify their commanders. Where were these divisions, and were they stationary or moving? The section I joined tried to answer the second of these questions.
After the spit and polish of my officer cadet training, the atmosphere of MI14 was anything but regimental. This was not surprising. It contained only three regular officers, and the only thing that was regimental about its chief, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong, was his tartan trews. He looked like a beaver -- an eager beaver bursting out of his uniform, with dark hair, a fine forehead, clever, shifty eyes and so chinless that he came to be known as the hangman's dilemma. Strong had been assistant military attache in Berlin before the war, spoke German well and knew several of his contemporaries and elders on the German General Staff. His reports from Berlin were so impressive that they were one of the factors, it was said, that persuaded Chamberlain to introduce conscription.(1) Strong won his reputation as an intelligence officer when he predicted the Germans would attack through the Ardennes in 1940. The French -- our senior ally militarily and in intelligence work -- scouted this bizarre idea.(2) Yet before the war, so Strong recalled, the senior officer present at the end of any lecture he gave would warn the audience against being over-influenced by his words on the strength of the German army; and he was forbidden at the Imperial Defence College to suggest that the German air force might give close support to their troops in the field.(3)
Strong's task was enormous. He had to build an organisation almost from scratch and shoulder a multitude of tasks, such as teaching the Military Operations departments what kind of army they were facing and how it would fight. He was tireless in explaining how the German General Staff was drilled in the tactic of the Schwerpunkt, or sudden concentration of armour and infantry to punch a hole in the enemy's line and exploit the breakthrough. He knew how efficient the German army was: `You need three British battalions to equal one German. When will people learn this?' he used to say. But now his most pressing problem was to gauge how likely Hitler was to invade England. The unit in MI14 which I joined was there to put the evidence before him.
Captain Sanderson, the head of the unit, collated this evidence. But the crucial figure in the room was the man of my own age whom I had seen studying air photographs when I was first interviewed. This was Peter Earle, one of only three regular officers in the British Army who at the beginning of the war knew how to interpret air photographs; it was he who assessed the most crucial evidence by counting the fluctuating number of barges and other craft assembled in the Channel ports. If Strong made one think of a beaver, Earle had the air of a greyhound. He was lean and sensitive, with delicate hands and a quizzical expression. He was one of those Etonians who appear to be indolent but in fact develop curious talents and interests. Like Strong he was not a stereotyped regular officer. He disliked horses -- `nasty, unpredictable animals' -- but knew a lot about fast cars. However squalid our conditions became (we were soon moved underground) his own corner of the room somehow conveyed the calm of a country house. If some vulgarian patronised or oiled to him, his expression never changed; only his nostrils quivered. He was highly strung yet imperturbable -- a quality much needed when later he became military assistant to the formidable and alarming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke. He was later to tell me that my predecessor was a devious, bone-idle and bad-tempered officer whom Strong had sacked by the well-used method of getting him appointed at a higher rank to a department in Military Operations, whence he departed by being again promoted to the rank of major in some other long-suffering organisation.
My prime task was to collate the evidence we got on the movement of German troops. What kind of evidence could we hope to get?
• Military intelligence, so goes the well-worn joke, is a contradiction in terms. In fact it resembles a fountain, the jets of evidence spurting from different pipes. Air photographs; prisoner of war interrogations; captured documents; the reports of our own, and the gossip of foreign, diplomats; the observations of businessmen and industrialists travelling abroad, and the stories filed by foreign correspondents whose sources of information could be more reliable than those of our own diplomats. We studied newspapers, broadcasts and dozens of specialised periodicals that, unknown to their editors, rendered up secrets. Two organisations produced the most intriguing material. The first was MI6, whose spymasters recruited agents in Europe and elsewhere. The second was the by now famous, but then deadly secret, Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where the radio messages sent between units of the German armed forces were decyphered.
Someone has to put all this information together and make sense of it if he can. It is not an academic exercise, although academic skills and techniques come in handy. The War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Planning Staff wanted quick answers to the questions they asked. What would be Hitler's next move? How strong would the German forces be were we to land in Sardinia -- and how quickly could they be reinforced? To answer such questions a staff had to be set up in each of the service ministries to estimate how many divisions, air squadrons, U-boats and capital ships the enemy possessed; where they were located and employed tactically; how many divisions were armoured, motorised or horsedrawn, and which squadrons were fighters, medium or heavy bombers. Almost anything that told us about the enemy's army was grist to the mill. And when -- as was often the case -- one source said one thing and another the opposite, we had to judge which was the more reliable.
Other ministries in Whitehall were expected to help the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry in their work: the Foreign Office injected political intelligence, the newly created Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) informed them about enemy production of weapons and identified bottlenecks or weaknesses in his economy. So a handful of officers and officials, each a spider, sat at the centre of their web and as each fly or item of intelligence got caught on a strand, they scuttled down to inspect and devour it, hoping that one day a fat bumblebee of information would land on the web and reveal what the other insects were about.
At the beginning of the war the British secret service stood higher in the imagination of foreigners than in Whitehall. The prestige of spies had waned. The masterful agent, who purloins the draft of a secret naval treaty from the private residence of a senior civil servant in the Admiralty, existed only in the imagination of the authors of thrillers. Foreigners took at face value the yarns of dozens of writers from Kipling and Buchan to Dornford Yates in which lean, bronzed British officers, often in disguise, outwitted the other side in the `game': the Great Game. `The only game in the world worth playing,' in Jim Maitland's words.(4) So much so that any event which thwarted their own plans was apt to be attributed to the British secret service. The reality was, alas, somewhat different. Sir Stewart Menzies, the legendary `C', had no second-in-command to organise his office, with the result that he worked late hours and had had no leave for two years. The heads of the espionage and counter-espionage sections hated each other and were not on speaking terms. None of the staff of MI6 was a university graduate. Hugh Trevor-Roper left a memorable account of the power struggles in MI6 during the war(5) and of the egregious characters who worked there; Graham Greene wrote of futile days in East Africa spent controlling agents whom he knew to be unreliable and corrupt and who provided worthless information. The tales of John le Carre told of a world of mirrors in which no one could be certain on which side agents were operating. These gifted writers turned MI6 into a black comedy. From the days when Sir Mansfield Cumming (the original `C') set it up in 1909 its leaders rejoiced in sobriquets like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair).(*)
Between the wars MI6's tiny staff was mainly engaged in identifying Soviet attempts to cause mutinies in the armed forces and to capture the leadership of the left and the trade unions. That famous clubland hero Bulldog Drummond was portrayed by Sapper as the leader of the Black Gang, a set of ex-army officers clandestinely kidnapping Soviet agents as they were infiltrated into Britain under the direction of the greatest of all villains, Carl Peterson. Intellectuals, horrified by Sapper's vision of life, denounced the gang as a bunch of fascists, but in fact they were pursuing a quarry that existed in real life. Christopher Andrew, the doyen of scholars of the intelligence community, concluded that the Zinoviev letter was not a forgery, even though the action of MI5 in briefing Admiral Blinker Hall to leak the letter to the Daily Mail was inexcusable.(+)(6)
The zeal of the intelligence services in such anti-Soviet activities was their undoing. Lloyd George sacked the head of Special Branch, Baldwin treated them with disdain (though his eminence grise J.C.C. Davidson employed retired MI5 officers to infiltrate Labour Party headquarters), and Chamberlain distrusted the former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart's claims that an opposition existed in Germany waiting to overthrow Hitler on a sign from Britain. When members of this opposition came to London to meet Chamberlain, he said they reminded him of Jacobites in the reign of William III.
Intelligence is not the road to promotion in the armed services. Before 1914 only that outrageous Admiral Lord Charles Beresford understood its value to the navy, and got the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, to establish the Naval Intelligence Department in 1886. (In revenge the Admiralty cut the salaries of those who served in it.) As a result the Admiralty's record in the First World War was miserable, misreading intercepts and misleading Jellicoe and Beatty in action in the North Sea. The Commander in Chief of the army, Queen Victoria's cousin the Duke of Cambridge, Buller in the Boer War, and Haig and Henry Wilson in the First World War thought intelligence unnecessary. General French nearly lost the war in August 1914 by refusing to believe reports of the great enveloping movement by Kluck on the right wing of the German armies.
Nor was Whitehall much better prepared in 1939. The War Office and the Air Ministry had no technological sections. The War Office was informed that 1400 medium German tanks were in service: in fact only 300 existed. It was part of Hitler's propaganda to exaggerate the size of the German air force, and the Air Ministry fell for his boast that aircraft production would soar from 700 to 1500 a month: in fact in December 1940 only 780 aircraft were produced. This vast air force was intended, so it was put about, to flatten British cities as the Germans had destroyed Guernica, whereas in fact many of the aircraft were Stukas intended to give close air support to the army. Naval intelligence was much more accurate. Hitler began the war with fifty-seven U-boats, and the navy's estimate was only nine more.(7)
The estimates of Germany's economy were again wide of the mark. It was thought to be near collapse through overstrain. Goering's exhortation `Guns before butter' was taken at face value, and the German people were pictured as having tightened their belts so far that they could hardly tighten them further in order to re-arm. Only a Hungarian refugee don at Balliol, Thomas Balogh, questioned these conclusions: in an article in the Economic Journal in September 1938 he argued that the sacrifice made by the German civilian population was much less than was imagined.(8)
The organisation of intelligence was not much better. Intelligence reports are misleading unless they are analysed and interpreted. Yet even when they have been analysed, intelligence is still a mine of controversy unless there is a single body to resolve the different interpretations which each ministry will put forward. In 1936 Sir Maurice Hankey set up the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to give such a unified view, but the Planning Staff ignored it, and the Directors of Intelligence and the three armed services sent only their deputies to its meetings. Not until February 1940 were the Directors of Military, Naval and Air Intelligence all at the same meeting.(9) Each was briefed by his own staff, and each thought his own view of the situation was the most sagacious, so they did not bother to summon meetings of the JIC or ask it to provide an appreciation. The Foreign Office for long refused to share its political intelligence with the armed forces: indeed, it did not distinguish intelligence from the advice it gave to the Cabinet on foreign affairs. To diplomats intelligence and advice were a seamless garment.
The JIC was also burdened with too many responsibilities.(10) It dealt with plans to deceive the enemy, with internal security, with propaganda, with the treatment of prisoners of war, and with topographical intelligence. It jibbed only when it was proposed that it should mastermind the running of double agents. Too many summaries circulated, and a body on future operations duplicated its work. Much of its time was spent in struggling with the administration of intelligence, and it had no secretariat. Until the fall of France the JIC met the Chiefs of Staff only once, and it was never invited to join the Planning Staff in the War Cabinet Office.(11)
As war drew near, MI6's sources of information began to dry up. When Hitler marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 the SIS network of agents in Vienna and Prague unravelled. Until 1937 our military attaches in Berlin had been able to glean considerable information about German military organisations and equipment: after that year their old haunts and contacts were sealed off. The British network in Holland was penetrated by the Abwehr in 1935, and there was no advance warning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. There were indeed warnings from MI6 and the Foreign Office of the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, but earlier that month the War Office had brushed them aside. Paul Thummel, an old-guard member of the Nazi Party and a captain in the Abwehr, was MI6's most prized agent in the Czech network, but he could give no warning of the German attack through the Ardennes though a woman in the Polish underground did. Whether it was this that alerted Strong I do not know, but it did not convince the French. By mid-1940 the military operations branch in the War Office did not believe what the intelligence sections told them, and hardly ever bothered to meet them.
Nevertheless, hope for the intelligence community was on the horizon. Even before war was declared some of the First World War veterans of Blinker Hall's Room 40 in the Admiralty began to recruit for the Government Code and Cypher School which had recently moved to Bletchley Park. Two classics dons were asked to select likely colleagues. Professor F.E. Adcock at Cambridge was diligent, Professor Last at Oxford was not, with the result that many of the earliest members came from Cambridge. Adcock was a fellow of King's, where I had been an undergraduate. He lured so many of the dons I knew best there -- for instance the devotee of Horace, Patrick Wilkinson, and my own director of studies in history, Christopher Morris -- that it did not require much imagination to guess what was going on. The staff was recruited by unabashed nepotism. Nigel de Grey and Dilly Knox of Room 40 days did not hesitate to recruit their sons; Evelyn Sinclair was the sister of `Quex' Sinclair, a former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. The dons were told to say that they were engaged on research into the civil air defence of London. It is certainly true that had security depended on the normal apparatus of passes and sentries, the secret would have not been kept long. One member of the staff who left his pass at home wrote on the temporary pass he was given the name `Heinrich Himmler' and was admitted without demur.
Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief (`C') of MI6, under whom Bletchley nominally operated, once said that the best guarantee of security was to employ kinsmen of those known personally. Today such faith in the integrity of the old boy network may be met with sneers and the mention of Burgess and Blunt; indeed the `fifth man', John Cairncross, did for a short time penetrate the organisation. Yet the secrecy of the work at Bletchley was preserved because the staff, realising how important it was not to gossip, were fanatically loyal to the institution. No one knew the whole story. Few knew, or had time to know, what the others were working on; and the various processes were so complicated that an individual had only `tunnel vision' of the work on which he was personally engaged. At their peak the staff numbered 9000, but for thirty-five years none breathed a word to the media until F.W. Winterbotham wrote his book The Ultra Secret in 1974. Bletchley's success depended on one word: security. The work of the dazzling mathematicians and cryptographers would have gone for nothing had the Germans discovered that we had broken the secret of the Enigma machine.
The material which the cryptographers at Bletchley dissected was gathered by hundreds of men and women at listening posts scattered throughout the country. They worked in six-hour shifts listening to German radio operators sending messages by wireless telegraphy. It was slogging, unrewarding work to record a lot of unintelligible letters in morse. They came to recognise the individual operators by their quirks and idiosyncrasies in transmitting messages, by the frequencies they used and by their call signs. They could tell who sent an unsigned message from the style of the operators chatting to each other. Sometimes they could sense something fishy: in June 1941 the call signs of two construction companies, known to be in Holland, were transmitted from Poland, yet copious transmissions were still coming from Holland, and very few from Poland. The deduction was clear. The construction companies had moved to Poland and the transmissions from Holland were being faked.(12)
The unintelligible messages logged by our radio operators were sent to Bletchley where the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8 got to work on them. The cryptographers had spotted the weaknesses in the Enigma machine, and the carelessness of those who operated it. They searched for cribs -- some repetition, such as a weather report transmitted in much the same words at the same time of day week in, week out. With these and other devices they put together what they called a menu and fed this into the `bombes' -- electro-mechanical engines, the brain-child of a fellow of King's, Alan Turing. Turing and Gordon Welchman built on the work of the Poles and the French, and Turing was to invent the first automatic electronic digital computer that could store programmes.(13)
The bombes determined the wheel settings of the Enigma machines. When the German navy in February 1942 added a fourth wheel to the machines installed in U-boats, the bombes could not perform, and it was not until December 1942 that the cryptanalysts broke the new Enigma settings. Meanwhile the sinkings by U-boats of Allied convoys soared. This reverse in the Battle of the Atlantic was to have a profound effect on Allied strategy.
The bombes were dispersed over the countryside and serviced by a flotilla of 2000 Wrens. Year after year, with little chance of promotion, they worked, whey-faced, for four weeks of eight-hour shifts followed by four days' leave, getting electric shocks from the bombes and living in hideous conditions. Some collapsed, others had nightmares of breaking security, but they kept going by knowing that what they were doing was vital, in the way that most war work was not.
When the bombes had done their work and found the solution through permutation to the key on the Enigma machine which had been chosen for that day's transmission, what emerged were puzzling messages in German telegraphese. These were sent to Hut 3. If Bletchley had a centre it was there, where the second echelon of the staff got to work. Inevitably the books on Ultra concentrate on the triumphs of the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8, but Ralph Bennett is right to point out that Hut 3 made the decrypts intelligible.(14) Linguists translated and emended the messages, and intelligence officers made sense of them. Some of the best linguists were schoolmasters accustomed to give top marks only to those boys who presented meticulously accurate translations. The intelligence officers were often dons who elucidated obscurities, abbreviations and map references. If a text was corrupt, they had to make sense of it. The duty officers in Hut 3, who worked an eight-hour shift, then had to paraphrase the Enigma translations into Ultra, so that if the Germans broke our own cypher they would not identify it as an Enigma message.(15) Only then did WAAFs teleprint the messages to the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry; and from to army group and army commanders in the field.
Among the first Enigma settings to be broken were those used by the German air force; and many of the messages that were decrypted came from `Flivos', air force liaison officers attached to armoured divisions. What Flivos reported was of intense interest to MI14. In the first year of the war, however, the security surrounding Ultra sometimes defeated those whom it was meant to help. To explain how these German messages had been received, Bletchley invented a ubiquitous, highly-placed agent with the code name of `Boniface', and displayed singular ingenuity in producing convincing situations in which this source might have got hold of the message that was passed to us in MI14: `Source was able to look over the shoulder of GOC of X Fliegerkorps and read . . .' Once bad weather made an Enigma message almost unintelligible since several groups of numbers in the original signal had not been picked up, but the staff at Bletchley excelled themselves: `Source was able to retrieve from a waste paper basket a badly charred document . . .' When such messages were first received the intelligence staffs gave no more credence to them than they would have to the utterances of a chuckle-headed spy. The navy, on the other hand, insisted on the original messages being sent to the Admiralty, but the intelligence staff there were as sceptical as the army about Ultra, and the muddles between the Home Fleet and the Admiralty remind one of the calamities of the Battle of Jutland, when the outnumbered German fleet inflicted heavy casualties on the Royal Navy. Struggles for turf were also inevitable. When Rommel landed in North Africa in February 1941, Bletchley Park (under the nominal supervision of Stewart Menzies) cut red tape, and Hut 3 communicated direct to Wavell's headquarters in Cairo. Sure enough in the winter of 1941-42 the War Office and Air Ministry tried to assert their control at a time when the battles between Eighth Army and the Afrika Korps were fierce and fluctuating. In the end MI6 won out, and the intellectuals were surprised to find a businessman, E.M. Jones, appointed as head of Hut 3, and even more surprised to find that his sagacity in reorganising duties relieved them of chores and gave them more time to do their own work.(16) Similarly, in Whitehall intelligence staffs became more professional and came to recognise how valuable Ultra could be as the numbers of messages they received multiplied. During 1943 the decrypts rose from 30,000 to 90,000, and in the last five months of the war over 45,000 went to the Western and Italian fronts. By that time 9000 people were employed at Bletchley Park. Long before then, `Source Boniface' had faded away.(*)
Ultra was only one of the Bletchley products. Some staff worked on V cyphers, others extracted information about German troop movements from railway cyphers, which revealed consignment numbers -- tedious hack-work, but ultimately rewarding. Dilly Knox broke hand cyphers, which the Abwehr used. These were invaluable to Melland and Long in MI14(d). Patrick Wilkinson worked on the book code of the Italian navy, an old-fashioned cypher that was far harder to break than machine cyphers. Late in the war Bletchley built the first true electronic computer, Colossus, that enabled the British at last to read messages sent by the German High Command, the OKW, to theatre commanders.
Bletchley was a community where age, sex, rank and appearance were irrelevant. The atmosphere was like a senior common room in one of the less stuffy Oxford or Cambridge colleges. Only those with sensitivity to the life of the intellect, like Hugh Alexander or Commander Travis, could succeed in the art of managing the menagerie of talent. There was only one criterion: could you do the job you were assigned? Women were treated as the equals of men -- except, typical of Treasury rules, as regards pay: they were sometimes enrolled as linguists rather than cryptographers in order to get them equal pay. Many of them worked in dull routine jobs, like compiling the Index -- a vast compendium of cross-references so that any message or unit or event could be traced in an instant. They could hold their own if challenged. Jean Howard, one of three women in the liaison section, was not to be cowed when a group of generals came to inspect the war map of the Russian border in early June 1941 and ridiculed the number of pins representing the massed German divisions: surely there were too many? They were taken aback when she replied that her training as an opera singer ill-equipped her to invent an order of battle.
The fact that so many at Bletchley knew each other had advantages. Patrick Wilkinson judged that the friendship between the two chess-players Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry, or between Gordon Welchman and John Jeffries, prevented rivalry between sections that might have been at each other's throats because they were competitors. The young and obscure chalked up successes. Donald Michie, a classics specialist without mathematical training, straight from Rugby School, made a mark as an analyst and later became a professor of machine intelligence at Edinburgh. Mavis Batey decyphered the Italian Fleet signal that told Admiral Cunningham what he needed to know to win the Battle of Matapan. Peter Calvocoressi, whose sole virtue seemed to be that he could read upside down, and who was rated by the War Office as `no good not even for intelligence',(17) was another success, along with his friend Jim Rose, the future literary editor of the Observer and chairman of Penguin Books. F.L. (Peter) Lucas, another King's don, wrote analyses of campaigns that were full of hints and hypotheses: they jogged the mind out of its rut.
Even more remarkable was Harry Hinsley, who had a sixth sense for deducing from the traffic and decrypts if something was up. In the spring of 1940 he tried to get the Admiralty to understand the significance of some decrypts that revealed that heavy ships were leaving the Baltic. He was ignored -- until the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious was sunk off Narvik. From then on Hinsley, still an undergraduate, with an astonishing shock of hair and a cheeky grin, was persona grata at Scapa Flow and at the Admiralty.
Nearly everyone wore civilian clothes: some, Turing among them, were scruffy. The story circulated that when Churchill visited Bletchley in 1941 he met Turing and, turning to Alistair Denniston, said: `I told you to leave no stone unturned in recruiting the best people, but I did not expect you to take me literally.'
One man transformed the standing of intelligence in Whitehall and throughout the armed services. That was Winston Churchill. From his experience at the Admiralty in the First World War Churchill was almost alone among politicians in understanding the value of intelligence. A cardinal rule of intelligence is never to allow officers, however exalted their rank, to see messages sent by top-grade sources before they have been interpreted by the intelligence staff. The CIGS never saw Ultra himself. Nor did Montgomery. Churchill, however, insisted that he be shown all Ultra messages of interest. Stewart Menzies, who had virtually nothing to do with the running of Bletchley, realised that his prestige and power as head of MI6 rested on serving up what the Prime Minister called the golden eggs, and he saw that he got them with his breakfast. As a result Churchill sometimes startled his Chiefs of Staff -- not yet briefed by their Directors of Intelligence -- by referring to some piece of news they had not heard.
Churchill paid several visits to Bletchley, one of which was to have a sequel. In November 1941, maddened by the inability of the administration at Bletchley to persuade Whitehall to exempt some young experts there from military service and to allow them to recruit twenty women clerks and some typists, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Stuart Barry wrote a long personal letter to Churchill explaining their needs and why, for lack of them, the decrypting of Enigma, vital in the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, was being delayed. Churchill immediately dictated a minute to General Ismay in the War Cabinet Offices: `Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.'(18)
Churchill recognised that the problem was not so much the collection of information as the way to use it. Within a week of taking office as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, he ordered the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a new directive for the JIC in which they were bidden to `take the initiative in preparing at any hour of the day or night, as a matter of urgency papers on any particular development'.(19) The JIC soon found their conclusions subjected to scrutiny by Churchill's personal staff. On 5 July 1940 `The Prof' Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, correctly challenged the Air Ministry estimate, endorsed by the JIC, that the German air force could deliver 4800 bombs a day. The tone of the Prime Minister's directive showed he wanted instant action. Like Ezekiel, Churchill breathed life into the dry bones of the JIC. Early in 1939 the War Office had proposed that the chairman of the JIC should be the Foreign Office representative, the ostensible reason being that a neutral civilian would see fair play between the three armed services. The less charitable view of this decision was that the War Office was determined not to allow the Admiralty to take the chair. No wonder: Admiral Godfrey was the one Director full of ideas. His biographer, however, admits that he was not a man to conceal his contempt for less gifted colleagues, in particular the charming courtier and Guardsman, General Beaumont-Nesbit. But the War Office had not reckoned with the young man whom the Foreign Office appointed, William Cavendish-Bentinck. As the youngest of the JIC members, and a civilian, it took Cavendish-Bentinck time and patience to galvanise his colleagues, and only when Churchill spoke could he at last set up a secretariat under an elusive, secretive barrister, Denis Capel Dunn, and impose some sort of discipline upon them.
• Such was the situation when I joined MI14. When I look back on those days and the years that followed, I see not only the remarkable stream of information that came from Ultra and many other sources. I also see the influences -- some beneficent, some malign -- that affected the interpretation of the evidence. I see the inevitable distortions and the immense efforts made by the operational intelligence staffs to produce a coherent explanation of the evidence that would convince army commanders, Supreme Headquarters, the Chiefs of Staff, the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. The Joint Intelligence Committee embodied an ideal: that each ministry would lay on the table its interpretation of the evidence, and after discussion a unanimous report would be signed which the Planners and the Chiefs of Staff could use. The ideal was frustrated. The War Office and the Air Ministry were both in the grip of what might be called an ideology -- a theory of how the war could be won. The ideology was not constant: it fluctuated according to the fortunes of war. Indeed, within each ministry different interpretations were held, and the director of intelligence would be canvassed by one or other faction. Dejection in defeat affected the appreciation which Auchinleck and his staff made when the Eighth Army was driven back by Rommel to El Alamein. They looked over their shoulder and saw the German army advancing into the Caucasus, so they drew up plans to evacuate the Nile Delta and send troops a thousand miles to the north to protect the oil in Iraq and Iran. Per contra, the euphoria of victory in Normandy blinded Montgomery and his staff: they neglected the evidence from Ultra that the Germans were determined to hold on to the Scheldt estuary and stop Antwerp operating as a port.(20) I was to learn time and again that those of us who served in operational intelligence and tried to make sense of the information got it wrong. Had I been years older I might have felt as Shakespeare's Henry IV did:
O God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent --
Weary of solid firmness -- melt itself
Into the sea...
O! if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.
But this happy youth had no intention of doing so. On that Christmas of 1940, like everyone else, I was full of boundless, unreasonable optimism.
W.W. Norton & Company
CHAPTER ONE
The Mystery in the Soul of State
They were playing cards or cleaning equipment in the hut that served as a barrack room when the sergeant came in and pinned a notice on the door. The officer cadets crowded round. But it was only a list of the names of those who had admitted they spoke foreign languages. They were ordered to report to the orderly room to show how well they knew them.
`What do they ask one?' I said to Peter Webber, who had been a contemporary of mine at King's, Cambridge and had studied modern languages.
`Oh, the same old phrases. In French "Tell him to wait until I come".'
`I see, the subjunctive.'
`In German you might get "I was at the meeting when the speaker was speaking", or possibly "I ought to have done it". This is the fourth time I've been tested since I joined the Field Security Police, and they never vary.'
Never was cynicism more accurate. At the interview next morning I was asked to translate every one of those phrases. `But your German is much better than you said it was,' said my examiner.
Two months later at the end of the course in December 1940 the cadets again gathered round the door. Which regiment had they been posted to? I had hopes of being commissioned in the Rifle Brigade. To my dismay I found against my name something called the Intelligence Corps. Hardly anyone had heard of it -- which was not strange, since it had been formed only that month.
`I'm told it has quite a nice cap badge,' said a school friend, John da Silva -- who was in fact to spend his life in Intelligence. I thought that a frivolous observation.
It was now nearly Christmas, and the new officers were all sent on leave over the holiday before they joined their units. One day just before the New Year I was lunching with my father at our club where he introduced me to a member called Carl Sherrington. He was the son of a famous Cambridge physiologist who had won the Nobel Prize with E.D. Adrian, and made a living as a railway economist. He knew the capacity -- that is to say how many trains a day could be run -- of every railway line in Europe and America. Hearing that I was expecting to be posted to the depot of the Intelligence Corps, he said, `But Kenneth Strong is itching to get his hands on people like you.'
Two days later I got a letter telling me to report to a Captain Sanderson at the War Office. He wore the ribbons of a veteran of the 1914-18 war and, characteristic of those days, had a moustache. He looked like a friendly, alert terrier. In a corner of the room sat a young officer peering into an epidiascope examining air photographs.
`I understand you know about railways,' said Sanderson, and looked somewhat disconcerted when I said I didn't. `Well, then, your father does.' I recollected that at some time before 1914 my father had been associated with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. `Ah, that must have been it,' said Sanderson, relieved that he now had a cast-iron case for getting me transferred to his department. `Can you read German? Tell me what this means,' he said, thrusting into my hands a long report. At this point his phone rang, and while he answered it I was able to get the gist of the article.
`It's to do with transport in Europe,' I began.
`Excellent,' he said, without troubling me further. `I am hoping you will hear from us soon.' Next week I found myself back in that room, having been ordered to fill a post in MI14. I was twenty-four years old.
The reason Captain Sanderson was so ready to recruit me was simple. MI14 was the German department in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Office. It was still a tiny unit, and even when I left two years later it numbered no more than twenty officers. The staff had hardly the time to wade through the torrent of paper that fell over their desks. For they were expected to advise the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) what Hitler would do next. The Military Intelligence Directorate contained such well-known departments as MI5 (Security) and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service); and certain other sections specialised in obtaining information from a specific source -- one, for example, interrogated prisoners of war and, having bugged their rooms, listened to their talk. But there was one department which nearly all the others served. That was MI3. It concerned itself with operational intelligence: it collected and interpreted all information from whatever source about the military forces and intentions of other countries -- 3a dealt with Iraq, Iran and the Near East; 3b with Italy; 3c with the Soviet Union.
The German section had once been part of MI3, but it was now so important that it had broken away to become MI14. In MI14 one unit led by the second in command assessed German strategy and intentions. Another worked on what could be discovered about the operations of the German secret services, the Abwehr, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst. (Its head was a theatrical character, Brian Melland, and he was aided by Leo Long, an efficient young officer who was to be shamed years later when he was identified as one of the Cambridge spies. Long was a pupil of Anthony Blunt: self-confident, masterful and dismissive of fools.) Another section, vital for Bomber Command, identified the whereabouts and strength of the German anti-aircraft or Flak regiments. It was led by a former England cricket captain, G.O. `Gubby' Allen. Crucial to the enterprise was the German Order of Battle section, which tried to estimate the number and character of the German divisions, and identify their commanders. Where were these divisions, and were they stationary or moving? The section I joined tried to answer the second of these questions.
After the spit and polish of my officer cadet training, the atmosphere of MI14 was anything but regimental. This was not surprising. It contained only three regular officers, and the only thing that was regimental about its chief, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong, was his tartan trews. He looked like a beaver -- an eager beaver bursting out of his uniform, with dark hair, a fine forehead, clever, shifty eyes and so chinless that he came to be known as the hangman's dilemma. Strong had been assistant military attache in Berlin before the war, spoke German well and knew several of his contemporaries and elders on the German General Staff. His reports from Berlin were so impressive that they were one of the factors, it was said, that persuaded Chamberlain to introduce conscription.(1) Strong won his reputation as an intelligence officer when he predicted the Germans would attack through the Ardennes in 1940. The French -- our senior ally militarily and in intelligence work -- scouted this bizarre idea.(2) Yet before the war, so Strong recalled, the senior officer present at the end of any lecture he gave would warn the audience against being over-influenced by his words on the strength of the German army; and he was forbidden at the Imperial Defence College to suggest that the German air force might give close support to their troops in the field.(3)
Strong's task was enormous. He had to build an organisation almost from scratch and shoulder a multitude of tasks, such as teaching the Military Operations departments what kind of army they were facing and how it would fight. He was tireless in explaining how the German General Staff was drilled in the tactic of the Schwerpunkt, or sudden concentration of armour and infantry to punch a hole in the enemy's line and exploit the breakthrough. He knew how efficient the German army was: `You need three British battalions to equal one German. When will people learn this?' he used to say. But now his most pressing problem was to gauge how likely Hitler was to invade England. The unit in MI14 which I joined was there to put the evidence before him.
Captain Sanderson, the head of the unit, collated this evidence. But the crucial figure in the room was the man of my own age whom I had seen studying air photographs when I was first interviewed. This was Peter Earle, one of only three regular officers in the British Army who at the beginning of the war knew how to interpret air photographs; it was he who assessed the most crucial evidence by counting the fluctuating number of barges and other craft assembled in the Channel ports. If Strong made one think of a beaver, Earle had the air of a greyhound. He was lean and sensitive, with delicate hands and a quizzical expression. He was one of those Etonians who appear to be indolent but in fact develop curious talents and interests. Like Strong he was not a stereotyped regular officer. He disliked horses -- `nasty, unpredictable animals' -- but knew a lot about fast cars. However squalid our conditions became (we were soon moved underground) his own corner of the room somehow conveyed the calm of a country house. If some vulgarian patronised or oiled to him, his expression never changed; only his nostrils quivered. He was highly strung yet imperturbable -- a quality much needed when later he became military assistant to the formidable and alarming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke. He was later to tell me that my predecessor was a devious, bone-idle and bad-tempered officer whom Strong had sacked by the well-used method of getting him appointed at a higher rank to a department in Military Operations, whence he departed by being again promoted to the rank of major in some other long-suffering organisation.
My prime task was to collate the evidence we got on the movement of German troops. What kind of evidence could we hope to get?
• Military intelligence, so goes the well-worn joke, is a contradiction in terms. In fact it resembles a fountain, the jets of evidence spurting from different pipes. Air photographs; prisoner of war interrogations; captured documents; the reports of our own, and the gossip of foreign, diplomats; the observations of businessmen and industrialists travelling abroad, and the stories filed by foreign correspondents whose sources of information could be more reliable than those of our own diplomats. We studied newspapers, broadcasts and dozens of specialised periodicals that, unknown to their editors, rendered up secrets. Two organisations produced the most intriguing material. The first was MI6, whose spymasters recruited agents in Europe and elsewhere. The second was the by now famous, but then deadly secret, Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where the radio messages sent between units of the German armed forces were decyphered.
Someone has to put all this information together and make sense of it if he can. It is not an academic exercise, although academic skills and techniques come in handy. The War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Planning Staff wanted quick answers to the questions they asked. What would be Hitler's next move? How strong would the German forces be were we to land in Sardinia -- and how quickly could they be reinforced? To answer such questions a staff had to be set up in each of the service ministries to estimate how many divisions, air squadrons, U-boats and capital ships the enemy possessed; where they were located and employed tactically; how many divisions were armoured, motorised or horsedrawn, and which squadrons were fighters, medium or heavy bombers. Almost anything that told us about the enemy's army was grist to the mill. And when -- as was often the case -- one source said one thing and another the opposite, we had to judge which was the more reliable.
Other ministries in Whitehall were expected to help the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry in their work: the Foreign Office injected political intelligence, the newly created Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) informed them about enemy production of weapons and identified bottlenecks or weaknesses in his economy. So a handful of officers and officials, each a spider, sat at the centre of their web and as each fly or item of intelligence got caught on a strand, they scuttled down to inspect and devour it, hoping that one day a fat bumblebee of information would land on the web and reveal what the other insects were about.
At the beginning of the war the British secret service stood higher in the imagination of foreigners than in Whitehall. The prestige of spies had waned. The masterful agent, who purloins the draft of a secret naval treaty from the private residence of a senior civil servant in the Admiralty, existed only in the imagination of the authors of thrillers. Foreigners took at face value the yarns of dozens of writers from Kipling and Buchan to Dornford Yates in which lean, bronzed British officers, often in disguise, outwitted the other side in the `game': the Great Game. `The only game in the world worth playing,' in Jim Maitland's words.(4) So much so that any event which thwarted their own plans was apt to be attributed to the British secret service. The reality was, alas, somewhat different. Sir Stewart Menzies, the legendary `C', had no second-in-command to organise his office, with the result that he worked late hours and had had no leave for two years. The heads of the espionage and counter-espionage sections hated each other and were not on speaking terms. None of the staff of MI6 was a university graduate. Hugh Trevor-Roper left a memorable account of the power struggles in MI6 during the war(5) and of the egregious characters who worked there; Graham Greene wrote of futile days in East Africa spent controlling agents whom he knew to be unreliable and corrupt and who provided worthless information. The tales of John le Carre told of a world of mirrors in which no one could be certain on which side agents were operating. These gifted writers turned MI6 into a black comedy. From the days when Sir Mansfield Cumming (the original `C') set it up in 1909 its leaders rejoiced in sobriquets like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair).(*)
Between the wars MI6's tiny staff was mainly engaged in identifying Soviet attempts to cause mutinies in the armed forces and to capture the leadership of the left and the trade unions. That famous clubland hero Bulldog Drummond was portrayed by Sapper as the leader of the Black Gang, a set of ex-army officers clandestinely kidnapping Soviet agents as they were infiltrated into Britain under the direction of the greatest of all villains, Carl Peterson. Intellectuals, horrified by Sapper's vision of life, denounced the gang as a bunch of fascists, but in fact they were pursuing a quarry that existed in real life. Christopher Andrew, the doyen of scholars of the intelligence community, concluded that the Zinoviev letter was not a forgery, even though the action of MI5 in briefing Admiral Blinker Hall to leak the letter to the Daily Mail was inexcusable.(+)(6)
The zeal of the intelligence services in such anti-Soviet activities was their undoing. Lloyd George sacked the head of Special Branch, Baldwin treated them with disdain (though his eminence grise J.C.C. Davidson employed retired MI5 officers to infiltrate Labour Party headquarters), and Chamberlain distrusted the former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart's claims that an opposition existed in Germany waiting to overthrow Hitler on a sign from Britain. When members of this opposition came to London to meet Chamberlain, he said they reminded him of Jacobites in the reign of William III.
Intelligence is not the road to promotion in the armed services. Before 1914 only that outrageous Admiral Lord Charles Beresford understood its value to the navy, and got the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, to establish the Naval Intelligence Department in 1886. (In revenge the Admiralty cut the salaries of those who served in it.) As a result the Admiralty's record in the First World War was miserable, misreading intercepts and misleading Jellicoe and Beatty in action in the North Sea. The Commander in Chief of the army, Queen Victoria's cousin the Duke of Cambridge, Buller in the Boer War, and Haig and Henry Wilson in the First World War thought intelligence unnecessary. General French nearly lost the war in August 1914 by refusing to believe reports of the great enveloping movement by Kluck on the right wing of the German armies.
Nor was Whitehall much better prepared in 1939. The War Office and the Air Ministry had no technological sections. The War Office was informed that 1400 medium German tanks were in service: in fact only 300 existed. It was part of Hitler's propaganda to exaggerate the size of the German air force, and the Air Ministry fell for his boast that aircraft production would soar from 700 to 1500 a month: in fact in December 1940 only 780 aircraft were produced. This vast air force was intended, so it was put about, to flatten British cities as the Germans had destroyed Guernica, whereas in fact many of the aircraft were Stukas intended to give close air support to the army. Naval intelligence was much more accurate. Hitler began the war with fifty-seven U-boats, and the navy's estimate was only nine more.(7)
The estimates of Germany's economy were again wide of the mark. It was thought to be near collapse through overstrain. Goering's exhortation `Guns before butter' was taken at face value, and the German people were pictured as having tightened their belts so far that they could hardly tighten them further in order to re-arm. Only a Hungarian refugee don at Balliol, Thomas Balogh, questioned these conclusions: in an article in the Economic Journal in September 1938 he argued that the sacrifice made by the German civilian population was much less than was imagined.(8)
The organisation of intelligence was not much better. Intelligence reports are misleading unless they are analysed and interpreted. Yet even when they have been analysed, intelligence is still a mine of controversy unless there is a single body to resolve the different interpretations which each ministry will put forward. In 1936 Sir Maurice Hankey set up the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to give such a unified view, but the Planning Staff ignored it, and the Directors of Intelligence and the three armed services sent only their deputies to its meetings. Not until February 1940 were the Directors of Military, Naval and Air Intelligence all at the same meeting.(9) Each was briefed by his own staff, and each thought his own view of the situation was the most sagacious, so they did not bother to summon meetings of the JIC or ask it to provide an appreciation. The Foreign Office for long refused to share its political intelligence with the armed forces: indeed, it did not distinguish intelligence from the advice it gave to the Cabinet on foreign affairs. To diplomats intelligence and advice were a seamless garment.
The JIC was also burdened with too many responsibilities.(10) It dealt with plans to deceive the enemy, with internal security, with propaganda, with the treatment of prisoners of war, and with topographical intelligence. It jibbed only when it was proposed that it should mastermind the running of double agents. Too many summaries circulated, and a body on future operations duplicated its work. Much of its time was spent in struggling with the administration of intelligence, and it had no secretariat. Until the fall of France the JIC met the Chiefs of Staff only once, and it was never invited to join the Planning Staff in the War Cabinet Office.(11)
As war drew near, MI6's sources of information began to dry up. When Hitler marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 the SIS network of agents in Vienna and Prague unravelled. Until 1937 our military attaches in Berlin had been able to glean considerable information about German military organisations and equipment: after that year their old haunts and contacts were sealed off. The British network in Holland was penetrated by the Abwehr in 1935, and there was no advance warning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. There were indeed warnings from MI6 and the Foreign Office of the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, but earlier that month the War Office had brushed them aside. Paul Thummel, an old-guard member of the Nazi Party and a captain in the Abwehr, was MI6's most prized agent in the Czech network, but he could give no warning of the German attack through the Ardennes though a woman in the Polish underground did. Whether it was this that alerted Strong I do not know, but it did not convince the French. By mid-1940 the military operations branch in the War Office did not believe what the intelligence sections told them, and hardly ever bothered to meet them.
Nevertheless, hope for the intelligence community was on the horizon. Even before war was declared some of the First World War veterans of Blinker Hall's Room 40 in the Admiralty began to recruit for the Government Code and Cypher School which had recently moved to Bletchley Park. Two classics dons were asked to select likely colleagues. Professor F.E. Adcock at Cambridge was diligent, Professor Last at Oxford was not, with the result that many of the earliest members came from Cambridge. Adcock was a fellow of King's, where I had been an undergraduate. He lured so many of the dons I knew best there -- for instance the devotee of Horace, Patrick Wilkinson, and my own director of studies in history, Christopher Morris -- that it did not require much imagination to guess what was going on. The staff was recruited by unabashed nepotism. Nigel de Grey and Dilly Knox of Room 40 days did not hesitate to recruit their sons; Evelyn Sinclair was the sister of `Quex' Sinclair, a former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. The dons were told to say that they were engaged on research into the civil air defence of London. It is certainly true that had security depended on the normal apparatus of passes and sentries, the secret would have not been kept long. One member of the staff who left his pass at home wrote on the temporary pass he was given the name `Heinrich Himmler' and was admitted without demur.
Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief (`C') of MI6, under whom Bletchley nominally operated, once said that the best guarantee of security was to employ kinsmen of those known personally. Today such faith in the integrity of the old boy network may be met with sneers and the mention of Burgess and Blunt; indeed the `fifth man', John Cairncross, did for a short time penetrate the organisation. Yet the secrecy of the work at Bletchley was preserved because the staff, realising how important it was not to gossip, were fanatically loyal to the institution. No one knew the whole story. Few knew, or had time to know, what the others were working on; and the various processes were so complicated that an individual had only `tunnel vision' of the work on which he was personally engaged. At their peak the staff numbered 9000, but for thirty-five years none breathed a word to the media until F.W. Winterbotham wrote his book The Ultra Secret in 1974. Bletchley's success depended on one word: security. The work of the dazzling mathematicians and cryptographers would have gone for nothing had the Germans discovered that we had broken the secret of the Enigma machine.
The material which the cryptographers at Bletchley dissected was gathered by hundreds of men and women at listening posts scattered throughout the country. They worked in six-hour shifts listening to German radio operators sending messages by wireless telegraphy. It was slogging, unrewarding work to record a lot of unintelligible letters in morse. They came to recognise the individual operators by their quirks and idiosyncrasies in transmitting messages, by the frequencies they used and by their call signs. They could tell who sent an unsigned message from the style of the operators chatting to each other. Sometimes they could sense something fishy: in June 1941 the call signs of two construction companies, known to be in Holland, were transmitted from Poland, yet copious transmissions were still coming from Holland, and very few from Poland. The deduction was clear. The construction companies had moved to Poland and the transmissions from Holland were being faked.(12)
The unintelligible messages logged by our radio operators were sent to Bletchley where the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8 got to work on them. The cryptographers had spotted the weaknesses in the Enigma machine, and the carelessness of those who operated it. They searched for cribs -- some repetition, such as a weather report transmitted in much the same words at the same time of day week in, week out. With these and other devices they put together what they called a menu and fed this into the `bombes' -- electro-mechanical engines, the brain-child of a fellow of King's, Alan Turing. Turing and Gordon Welchman built on the work of the Poles and the French, and Turing was to invent the first automatic electronic digital computer that could store programmes.(13)
The bombes determined the wheel settings of the Enigma machines. When the German navy in February 1942 added a fourth wheel to the machines installed in U-boats, the bombes could not perform, and it was not until December 1942 that the cryptanalysts broke the new Enigma settings. Meanwhile the sinkings by U-boats of Allied convoys soared. This reverse in the Battle of the Atlantic was to have a profound effect on Allied strategy.
The bombes were dispersed over the countryside and serviced by a flotilla of 2000 Wrens. Year after year, with little chance of promotion, they worked, whey-faced, for four weeks of eight-hour shifts followed by four days' leave, getting electric shocks from the bombes and living in hideous conditions. Some collapsed, others had nightmares of breaking security, but they kept going by knowing that what they were doing was vital, in the way that most war work was not.
When the bombes had done their work and found the solution through permutation to the key on the Enigma machine which had been chosen for that day's transmission, what emerged were puzzling messages in German telegraphese. These were sent to Hut 3. If Bletchley had a centre it was there, where the second echelon of the staff got to work. Inevitably the books on Ultra concentrate on the triumphs of the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8, but Ralph Bennett is right to point out that Hut 3 made the decrypts intelligible.(14) Linguists translated and emended the messages, and intelligence officers made sense of them. Some of the best linguists were schoolmasters accustomed to give top marks only to those boys who presented meticulously accurate translations. The intelligence officers were often dons who elucidated obscurities, abbreviations and map references. If a text was corrupt, they had to make sense of it. The duty officers in Hut 3, who worked an eight-hour shift, then had to paraphrase the Enigma translations into Ultra, so that if the Germans broke our own cypher they would not identify it as an Enigma message.(15) Only then did WAAFs teleprint the messages to the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry; and from to army group and army commanders in the field.
Among the first Enigma settings to be broken were those used by the German air force; and many of the messages that were decrypted came from `Flivos', air force liaison officers attached to armoured divisions. What Flivos reported was of intense interest to MI14. In the first year of the war, however, the security surrounding Ultra sometimes defeated those whom it was meant to help. To explain how these German messages had been received, Bletchley invented a ubiquitous, highly-placed agent with the code name of `Boniface', and displayed singular ingenuity in producing convincing situations in which this source might have got hold of the message that was passed to us in MI14: `Source was able to look over the shoulder of GOC of X Fliegerkorps and read . . .' Once bad weather made an Enigma message almost unintelligible since several groups of numbers in the original signal had not been picked up, but the staff at Bletchley excelled themselves: `Source was able to retrieve from a waste paper basket a badly charred document . . .' When such messages were first received the intelligence staffs gave no more credence to them than they would have to the utterances of a chuckle-headed spy. The navy, on the other hand, insisted on the original messages being sent to the Admiralty, but the intelligence staff there were as sceptical as the army about Ultra, and the muddles between the Home Fleet and the Admiralty remind one of the calamities of the Battle of Jutland, when the outnumbered German fleet inflicted heavy casualties on the Royal Navy. Struggles for turf were also inevitable. When Rommel landed in North Africa in February 1941, Bletchley Park (under the nominal supervision of Stewart Menzies) cut red tape, and Hut 3 communicated direct to Wavell's headquarters in Cairo. Sure enough in the winter of 1941-42 the War Office and Air Ministry tried to assert their control at a time when the battles between Eighth Army and the Afrika Korps were fierce and fluctuating. In the end MI6 won out, and the intellectuals were surprised to find a businessman, E.M. Jones, appointed as head of Hut 3, and even more surprised to find that his sagacity in reorganising duties relieved them of chores and gave them more time to do their own work.(16) Similarly, in Whitehall intelligence staffs became more professional and came to recognise how valuable Ultra could be as the numbers of messages they received multiplied. During 1943 the decrypts rose from 30,000 to 90,000, and in the last five months of the war over 45,000 went to the Western and Italian fronts. By that time 9000 people were employed at Bletchley Park. Long before then, `Source Boniface' had faded away.(*)
Ultra was only one of the Bletchley products. Some staff worked on V cyphers, others extracted information about German troop movements from railway cyphers, which revealed consignment numbers -- tedious hack-work, but ultimately rewarding. Dilly Knox broke hand cyphers, which the Abwehr used. These were invaluable to Melland and Long in MI14(d). Patrick Wilkinson worked on the book code of the Italian navy, an old-fashioned cypher that was far harder to break than machine cyphers. Late in the war Bletchley built the first true electronic computer, Colossus, that enabled the British at last to read messages sent by the German High Command, the OKW, to theatre commanders.
Bletchley was a community where age, sex, rank and appearance were irrelevant. The atmosphere was like a senior common room in one of the less stuffy Oxford or Cambridge colleges. Only those with sensitivity to the life of the intellect, like Hugh Alexander or Commander Travis, could succeed in the art of managing the menagerie of talent. There was only one criterion: could you do the job you were assigned? Women were treated as the equals of men -- except, typical of Treasury rules, as regards pay: they were sometimes enrolled as linguists rather than cryptographers in order to get them equal pay. Many of them worked in dull routine jobs, like compiling the Index -- a vast compendium of cross-references so that any message or unit or event could be traced in an instant. They could hold their own if challenged. Jean Howard, one of three women in the liaison section, was not to be cowed when a group of generals came to inspect the war map of the Russian border in early June 1941 and ridiculed the number of pins representing the massed German divisions: surely there were too many? They were taken aback when she replied that her training as an opera singer ill-equipped her to invent an order of battle.
The fact that so many at Bletchley knew each other had advantages. Patrick Wilkinson judged that the friendship between the two chess-players Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry, or between Gordon Welchman and John Jeffries, prevented rivalry between sections that might have been at each other's throats because they were competitors. The young and obscure chalked up successes. Donald Michie, a classics specialist without mathematical training, straight from Rugby School, made a mark as an analyst and later became a professor of machine intelligence at Edinburgh. Mavis Batey decyphered the Italian Fleet signal that told Admiral Cunningham what he needed to know to win the Battle of Matapan. Peter Calvocoressi, whose sole virtue seemed to be that he could read upside down, and who was rated by the War Office as `no good not even for intelligence',(17) was another success, along with his friend Jim Rose, the future literary editor of the Observer and chairman of Penguin Books. F.L. (Peter) Lucas, another King's don, wrote analyses of campaigns that were full of hints and hypotheses: they jogged the mind out of its rut.
Even more remarkable was Harry Hinsley, who had a sixth sense for deducing from the traffic and decrypts if something was up. In the spring of 1940 he tried to get the Admiralty to understand the significance of some decrypts that revealed that heavy ships were leaving the Baltic. He was ignored -- until the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious was sunk off Narvik. From then on Hinsley, still an undergraduate, with an astonishing shock of hair and a cheeky grin, was persona grata at Scapa Flow and at the Admiralty.
Nearly everyone wore civilian clothes: some, Turing among them, were scruffy. The story circulated that when Churchill visited Bletchley in 1941 he met Turing and, turning to Alistair Denniston, said: `I told you to leave no stone unturned in recruiting the best people, but I did not expect you to take me literally.'
One man transformed the standing of intelligence in Whitehall and throughout the armed services. That was Winston Churchill. From his experience at the Admiralty in the First World War Churchill was almost alone among politicians in understanding the value of intelligence. A cardinal rule of intelligence is never to allow officers, however exalted their rank, to see messages sent by top-grade sources before they have been interpreted by the intelligence staff. The CIGS never saw Ultra himself. Nor did Montgomery. Churchill, however, insisted that he be shown all Ultra messages of interest. Stewart Menzies, who had virtually nothing to do with the running of Bletchley, realised that his prestige and power as head of MI6 rested on serving up what the Prime Minister called the golden eggs, and he saw that he got them with his breakfast. As a result Churchill sometimes startled his Chiefs of Staff -- not yet briefed by their Directors of Intelligence -- by referring to some piece of news they had not heard.
Churchill paid several visits to Bletchley, one of which was to have a sequel. In November 1941, maddened by the inability of the administration at Bletchley to persuade Whitehall to exempt some young experts there from military service and to allow them to recruit twenty women clerks and some typists, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Stuart Barry wrote a long personal letter to Churchill explaining their needs and why, for lack of them, the decrypting of Enigma, vital in the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, was being delayed. Churchill immediately dictated a minute to General Ismay in the War Cabinet Offices: `Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.'(18)
Churchill recognised that the problem was not so much the collection of information as the way to use it. Within a week of taking office as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, he ordered the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a new directive for the JIC in which they were bidden to `take the initiative in preparing at any hour of the day or night, as a matter of urgency papers on any particular development'.(19) The JIC soon found their conclusions subjected to scrutiny by Churchill's personal staff. On 5 July 1940 `The Prof' Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, correctly challenged the Air Ministry estimate, endorsed by the JIC, that the German air force could deliver 4800 bombs a day. The tone of the Prime Minister's directive showed he wanted instant action. Like Ezekiel, Churchill breathed life into the dry bones of the JIC. Early in 1939 the War Office had proposed that the chairman of the JIC should be the Foreign Office representative, the ostensible reason being that a neutral civilian would see fair play between the three armed services. The less charitable view of this decision was that the War Office was determined not to allow the Admiralty to take the chair. No wonder: Admiral Godfrey was the one Director full of ideas. His biographer, however, admits that he was not a man to conceal his contempt for less gifted colleagues, in particular the charming courtier and Guardsman, General Beaumont-Nesbit. But the War Office had not reckoned with the young man whom the Foreign Office appointed, William Cavendish-Bentinck. As the youngest of the JIC members, and a civilian, it took Cavendish-Bentinck time and patience to galvanise his colleagues, and only when Churchill spoke could he at last set up a secretariat under an elusive, secretive barrister, Denis Capel Dunn, and impose some sort of discipline upon them.
• Such was the situation when I joined MI14. When I look back on those days and the years that followed, I see not only the remarkable stream of information that came from Ultra and many other sources. I also see the influences -- some beneficent, some malign -- that affected the interpretation of the evidence. I see the inevitable distortions and the immense efforts made by the operational intelligence staffs to produce a coherent explanation of the evidence that would convince army commanders, Supreme Headquarters, the Chiefs of Staff, the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. The Joint Intelligence Committee embodied an ideal: that each ministry would lay on the table its interpretation of the evidence, and after discussion a unanimous report would be signed which the Planners and the Chiefs of Staff could use. The ideal was frustrated. The War Office and the Air Ministry were both in the grip of what might be called an ideology -- a theory of how the war could be won. The ideology was not constant: it fluctuated according to the fortunes of war. Indeed, within each ministry different interpretations were held, and the director of intelligence would be canvassed by one or other faction. Dejection in defeat affected the appreciation which Auchinleck and his staff made when the Eighth Army was driven back by Rommel to El Alamein. They looked over their shoulder and saw the German army advancing into the Caucasus, so they drew up plans to evacuate the Nile Delta and send troops a thousand miles to the north to protect the oil in Iraq and Iran. Per contra, the euphoria of victory in Normandy blinded Montgomery and his staff: they neglected the evidence from Ultra that the Germans were determined to hold on to the Scheldt estuary and stop Antwerp operating as a port.(20) I was to learn time and again that those of us who served in operational intelligence and tried to make sense of the information got it wrong. Had I been years older I might have felt as Shakespeare's Henry IV did:
O God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent --
Weary of solid firmness -- melt itself
Into the sea...
O! if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.
But this happy youth had no intention of doing so. On that Christmas of 1940, like everyone else, I was full of boundless, unreasonable optimism.
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