Roosevelt’s Secret War–FDR, Stalin, and Churchill

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The interactions of the “Big Three” have inspired several books, but once again the book by Joseph E. Persico ties what I see as the complete story together nicely. FDR had a much stronger affinity for Stalin than to Churchill.  He confided to Joseph Kennedy, his ambassador to Great Britain, that he had never liked Churchill from the beginning.  Churchill was open in his desire to maintain the British Empire, and Roosevelt was strongly opposed to imperialism. I was startled to read a quote from him in the book that he told Admiral Godfrey, the U.S. is going “…to show the Brits, Portuguese, and Dutch how to take care of those West Indies Islands. Every n—-r will have his two acres and a sugar patch.” On the other hand Roosevelt was strangely able to overlook the atrocities committed under Stalin. He knew that large numbers of people Stalin decided he couldn’t trust were summarily executed and millions of Ukrainians were intentionally starved.  Both Roosevelt and Churchill knew that Stalin had ordered the execution of thousands of Polish officers, but covered it up. FDR was somehow persuaded that he could work with Stalin and trust him.

Roosevelt early and often acted according to Stalin’s wishes. He had established diplomatic relations with the Soviets, and apparently was willing to accept the large numbers of spies that action brought into the country and his administration. He released Earl Browder, the head of the U.S. Communist party who had been convicted of passport violations. He took that action to placate Stalin, and it restored a key link in Russia’s spy chain in America. One of the strangest actions he took involved 1500 pages of Soviet cryptographic material and a codebook that had been sold to the Office of Strategic Service by Finland. FDR ordered the information to be returned to the Soviets without copying it, and there is a dispute whether it was copied or not. There is no dispute the Soviets were absolutely baffled about why the Americans had returned the information.  Secretary of State Edward Stettinius was said to have explained that FDR ordered to action because he wanted to do nothing to arouse Stalin’s suspicions.  

 Continue reading →

History of the Global Warming Theory

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The history of how we have arrived at the current “consensus” that man-made carbon dioxide is causing or will cause catastrophic climate change is interesting. The idea isn’t new.  A Time Magazine article published in 1972 describes how, “As they review the  bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.”  The conditions that caused concern included a six year drought in Africa, record rains in the U.S., Pakistan, and Japan, a poor wheat harvest in Canada, dry conditions in Britain, and bitter winters in some areas while other parts of the globe where having the mildest winters in anyone’s recollection. Those words could come from the headlines today about the certainty that we are in a period of global warming. However, read on in the article. It says that meteorologists “…find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing…the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” (emphasis added) We still have a “consensus” that there will be climate change, but the certainty of global cooling has somehow transitioned into global warming.

There was a politician credited with the transition from believing that global cooling was a certainty to the current belief that global warming is a certainty, and that politician was Margaret Thatcher. I’m certain many readers thought they were going to read Al Gore’s name, but he came late to the party. Ms Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979, and she believed coal miner strikes were crippling the English economy.  She wanted to promote nuclear power as a replacement for coal, and began committing large amounts of government money to researchers charged with investigating climate change caused by the carbon dioxide that is emitted when coal is burned. Temperatures began to creep up, and researchers who had advocated global cooling adjusted their computer models or created new ones to arrive at the conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions were going to cause global warming.

Scientists have been debating the effect of carbon dioxide on climate since the late 1800s. Savante Arrheius, a Swedish scientist, is credited by some as being the first to theorize in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion would eventually result in global warming. The theory lay more or less dormant until the flood of government grant money began by Margaret Thatcher and then made available to researchers in the U.S. created opportunity for those who found a connection between carbon dioxide and temperatures.  Of course the research might not even involve that direct relationship.  It might involve the effect of increased carbon dioxide on the growth rate of hickory trees, and rapid increases in squirrel populations because there were more hickory nuts (as an example that I just invented).  However, studies that came to a dire prediction followed by the consistent conclusion “that more study is needed,” were more likely to be given news coverage followed by more government grant money. The Environmental Protection Agency has joined the party by finding that carbon dioxide is a toxic pollutant, but that is the subject of another posting.

Spill the Beans

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The Phrase Finder describes that this expression means to divulge a secret either inadvertently or maliciously. One theory is that the expression had its origin with a voting system used in ancient Greece using white and black beans, with a single black bean preventing passage. If the collector spilled the beans before the vote was complete and a black bean was seen, the vote wasn’t counted. However, the phrase wasn’t recorded until in the early 20th century. “Spill was used in the 14th century with to mean spilling blood and killing, and it was used to mean divulge in the 16th century. It was used in U.S. in the 20th century to mean “spoil the beans” or “upset the applecart.”  It was first used in 1911 to mean upsetting a stable situation by talking out of turn.

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part II

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Part I of the review of this book by Joseph E. Persico was about how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This posting will focus on Roosevelt’s use of intelligence and intelligence services, and some of the impacts on the events of World War II.  Vincent Astor had become a friend and confidant of FDR after his crippling attack of polio. Astor and a group of wealthy friends had formed an organization to secretly collect gossip and informal intelligence that they called “The Room.”  One member was Kermit Roosevelt, the man who would engineer the CIA overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran in the early 1950’s.  Astor had done some amateur sleuthing in the Pacific for Roosevelt after FDR had become President, but the German attack of Poland brought Astor and The Room closer to FDR.  The group of adventure-seeking dilettantes reconstituted themselves as “The Club,” and began to increase their activities through various international banks.  This group appealed to FDR’s natural attraction to “cloak and dagger” intrigue.  FDR is characterized in the latter pages of the book as wanting to be like a secret agent who was “…a burglar with morals.”  He preferred to work with human sources over signals intelligence, or “humint” over “signit” in the shorthand of the trade.

Much of the book is about the various U.S. intelligence gathering services that seemed to spend almost as much effort trying to discredit the other organizations as they did trying to steal secrets from other countries.  Much of the in-fighting involved Bill “Wild Bill” Donovan. FDR had written a note in June 1941 authorizing a military central intelligence service with Donovan as the “coordinator of information,” or COI.  The organization was renamed Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.  It was the latest of 136 “emergency agencies” that FDR created.  However, this one began almost immediately to create friction with the other military intelligence agencies and J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Britain also wasn’t a fan of Donovan.  Continue reading →

The Climate is Changing

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Over it’s historical record, in January, Northern Hemisphere snow cover averages 47 million square kilometers (18.1 million square miles), and in February it averages 46 million square kilometers (17.8 square miles)—approximately 45 to 46 percent of the land area in the region. While sea ice extent was below average for January 2011, this month had the sixth-largest snow cover extent since the record started in 1966, at 49 million square kilometers (18.9 million square miles). Snow was unusually widespread over the mid-western and eastern United States, eastern Europe, and western China. Snow cover in February remained above average at 47.4 million square kilometers (18.3 million square miles), with more snow than usual in the western and central U.S., eastern Europe, Tibet and northeastern China.

Reduced sea ice extent and extensive snow cover are not contradictory, and are both linked to a strong negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation (see our January 5, 2011 post). A strongly negative AO favors outbreaks of cold Arctic air over northern Europe and the U.S., as many people experienced first-hand these last two winters. Whether this is a trend, or in any way linked to ongoing climate warming in the Arctic, remains to be seen.

Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.

Mrs. Thatcher could not have promoted the global warming issue without the support of her UK political party. And they were willing to give it. Following the General Election of 1979, most of the incoming Cabinet had been members of the government which lost office in 1974. They blamed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) for their 1974 defeat. They, therefore, desired an excuse for reducing the UK coal industry and, thus, the NUM’s power. Coal-fired power stations emit CO2 but nuclear power stations don’t. Global warming provided an excuse for reducing the UK’s dependence on coal by replacing it with nuclear power.

 

Fed Up

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The Phrase Finder says that the expression means is to be tired of, bored with, annoyed with or in general to have enough of something or someone. There is an old English proverb that “enough is as good as a feast.” “Fed up” probably comes from the unpleasant feeling that comes from eating more than is good for us. The expression dates back to the 19th century when overfed aristocrats were compared to farm animals that were force fed to make them plump for market. There was a cynical section of an English newspaper article in The Middlesex Courier published in 1832 that argued a Duke could not have hanged himself, because he could not have possibly stood on a chair and tied the knot.  The writer observed about such aristocrats, ” Every thing being done for them, they never learn to do anything; they are fed up…”  Sometimes the expression is used in the extended forms “fed up to the eyeballs,” or “fed up to the back teeth.”