Tea at Trianon: The Secret History of a Cold War Mastermind

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 2, 2020

The Secret History of a Cold War Mastermind

From Wired:

Soon after Weiss’ obituary appeared in the Post, Keup received a call from the wife of one of Weiss’ old intelligence community colleagues: “After what he and my husband did to the Soviets,” she said stiffly, “there’s no way they would let that pass. If you think Gus committed suicide, then you believe in fairy tales.”

In March 2004, months after Weiss’ death, former Air Force secretary and Reagan adviser Thomas C. Reed published a memoir entitled At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War. In one passage Reed describes Weiss’ role as the architect of an unprecedented program of Cold War tech sabotages that culminated with the destruction of a gas pipeline deep in the wilds of Siberia. According to Reed’s book, the blast, classified by NORAD as the largest non-nuclear explosion in recorded history, had gone unreported for 20 years.

A handful of news outlets, including Reuters and WIRED, immediately picked up the remarkable tale, though not without a note of skepticism. The story of the pipeline operation gathered momentum. William Safire, Weiss’ old Nixon administration colleague, wrote a column in The New York Times describing his friend Gus’ genius. A Canadian filmmaker made a documentary about the caper. Tim Weiner, New York Times correspondent, wrote about the operation in his national book award winning CIA history A Legacy of Ashes and then again, years later, for Reuters. (Read more.)