Thursday, July 30, 2020

ANOTHER WONDERMENT

Have all the Walkers and whossnames perished who gave the Soviet Union access to Task Group Orestes? I wonder because one of the questions we might now know the answer to is, did the USSR collapse after finally learning what the hell we really are which is what they would finally have learned after reading our daily Top Secret radio traffic and realizing that never in a million years could they be as good as we used to be on a bad day? While I'm not vengeful I hope they linger here yet since they still owe a great deal of suffering. They didn't sell out the country to convince the Soviets that winning was only slightly more impossible then simply keeping up. They sold out for money.

6 comments:

Tom Murin said...

Thanks to them - I got the bums rush and was made a CMS Custodian. Even worse, I was pretty good at it - passed the no notice inspection with flying colors and was rewarded with doing for almost my entire initial 30 months sea tour.

I was ASWO officer. We had a briefing at CINCLANT that was "Top Secret - code word" clearance. It concerned tracking Soviet subs and was eye opening to say the least. The Ruskies didn't have a prayer. Unfortunately, it was in the mid-80's. The high water mark.

bouff said...

Google is be making this a little hard to look up unless you add spying or spy case to Task Group Orestes

HMS Defiant said...

Exactly how I entered the crypto world. I did it at 3 different commands after that despite the revised guidance on sequential tours as CMS Custodian.

HMS Defiant said...

Would it bother you if I said that sometimes I write cryptically? :)

capt fast said...

back in the day, in USAF, it was always assumed we were being moused and the advisary knew what we knew when we spoke about it over technical means.
one evening in any service clubs with ears open would be enlightening to any person concerned about opsec. I actually caught myself walking over to an adjacent table in a club and saying "shut the fuck up you idiots". At the time, I considered my tender young ass to have been on the line and these folks were not helping my mellow.
the idea that there were Walkers amongst us was something many did not consider to be a possibility. responsibility for the Walker family and their ilk's activities knows no limit in pay grade or rank.

HMS Defiant said...

My favorite was taking an eclectic bunch of sailors of many ratings and putting them into a mini combat information center with sonar, radars, radios and crypto. The crypto was properly locked up and it wasn't the issue. The problem came when certain people learned that we had petty officers in the space in which we were monitoring Fleet Tactical and had OTCIXS up and running and on the AQA-5 and SQR-17 display had grams from sonar that were annotated by the on-watch ST or Sonarman and ooooofff did they scream when they released that guy on the radar scope was a construction mechanic and had no clearance and ditto for many of the other watch standers. TPTB did decide that we only had to get SECRET clearance for people inside because OTCIXS only displayed SECRET and nobody could really follow the TS portions since they weren't audibles.
They didn't know we'd hung a long life bouy about 30 feet astern of USS ALABAMA when it was doing a crew swap in Pearl Harbor. That would have freaked them out for sure. The fun bit is that the sonobuoy data is transmitted in the clear.