Everybody knows the "secret" but us

[JHB]

I was googling around loooking for something on the Sovietologists' old trick of guessing who was in favor at the Kremlin by the seating arrangements for the May Day parade, and found an article (at the CIA site!) about the Soviet "Culture of Secrecy" (http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/fall_winter_2001/article05.html)
Here's a sidebar anecdote to that article:

Secrecy: Going to Ridiculous Extremes

The Soviet regime developed the culture of secrecy to the point of absurdity, as illustrated by the following anecdote:

The library of the Mikoyan Design Bureau, which produced MIG fighter planes, received an American aviation magazine that all employees of the Bureau were permitted to read. One day an issue arrived carrying a story about the people who had designed the MIG aircraft. The article contained a small map that showed the area in Moscow where the Design Bureau was located. Each of the structures in this area, including all of the Bureau’s buildings, were labeled, as was a photo of the Bureau’s main entrance.

Design Bureau employees had previously been told that the Bureau’s exact location was a military secret. Many of them guffawed when they saw that this “secret” information was readily available to the American public. Senior officials ordered that this issue of the magazine be moved immediately to the Bureau library’s spetskhran (a secure room or section with restricted access, in which designated persons could read foreign material on issues deemed “sensitive” by Soviet authorities.)

Doesn't this kind of BS sound strangely familiar these days?

"Information wants to be free... So crush it mercilessly!" -- Motto of KGB Agents for Comrade Bush and Comrade Cheney '04 and More

[Racenut20]

1. Sort of like Jeb threatening Disney ?????

[FreakinDJ]

2. How about this little secret......

In the 1970s, Idaho Senator Frank Church's investigatory committee established that the CIA also engaged in so-called "benign" operations including rigging elections. The agency used the term "demonstration elections" - elections that are superficially democratic but the results manipulated by the CIA.

The Company did everything from stuffing ballot boxes, creating political parties, merging smaller political parties into large coalitions as in Uno in Nicaragua, paying death squads to intimidate voters and the occasional use of computer fraud. In the mid-80s, the Reagan and Bush administration used a computer to help their "man in Panama" and CIA asset Manuel Noriega gain electoral support; they backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos when he brought in the pre-programmed election tapes in the middle of an election to turn his sure defeat into a fixed victory. The people of the Philippines didn't accept the computer results as credible, but Reagan and Bush argued it was necessary to preserve our "traditional" relationship with the brutal dictator. Remember, his political opponent, Senator Aquino was shot to death after disembarking from an airplane to run against Marcos.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00046.htm

Kinda makes you wonder doesn't it.....