4 Government Secrets that Slipped Out in Cartoonish Ways

4 The Soviets Left Obvious Signs Pointing Out Their Secret Underwater Cable

Back before we had phones and satellites sending invisible signals through the air, wiretapping exclusively meant placing physical taps on physical wires. In 1971, the CIA and the NSA wanted to tap cables that the Soviets were using to communicate. It would be a secret mission — so secret that even most of the men on the ship (a submarine called the U.S.S. Halibut) didn’t know what the mission was. They were given a cover story about the sub venturing into Soviet waters to retrieve bits of a missile. 

The Soviets had a base on a peninsula, while the headquarters were on the mainland, and it seemed a fair bet that the two would be connected by an underwater communications line. Exactly where the line was, however, the U.S. didn’t know, and it would be tricky to find. The body of water they were searching, the Sea of Okhotsk, stretched over more than half a million square miles. 

But then they scanned the coast. They found that the Soviets had erected big signs on a beach, warning people not to launch ships from there because an underwater communications line ran nearby. Yeah — when we referred to “obvious signs” in the title of this section, we meant that literally. 

So, the sub found the line easily after that and tapped it successfully. As for those missile parts that they were only pretending to find, they actually managed to find those as well, and they reassembled them back at home. It was the weirdest bit of serendipity since the Navy pretended to be searching for the Titanic to cover up a secret mission and then, in the process, actually did find the Titanic. 

3 China Took Over a British Sub and Then Wrote About It in a Magazine

Forty years before the Halibut, the British had a submarine in the Pacific named the HMS Poseidon, and its story didn’t end happily. It crashed into a Chinese ship, and it took on water, sinking to the seabed. 

British naval policy at the time said that sailors in such a predicament should sit tight and wait for help, and the Navy did indeed have enough ships in the area that help arrived in the end. But they didn’t come very quickly, so 21 in the crew died. The Navy now changed their policy to, “Actually, when your submarine is sinking, get out of there and get to the surface as quickly as possible.” 

That was the end of the Poseidon’s adventures, as far as British military records went. But then came the 1970s, and as we’ve learned, the 1970s were a great time for salvaging stuff from the ocean. The Chinese found the Poseidon, raised it, patched it up and pressed it back into service. Naturally, they didn’t tell the British, and we’d probably never know anything about it, because we knew very little about China’s day-to-day submarine operations.

But in 2005, a Chinese magazine named Modern Ships reported on the story. We don’t know what’s more surprising — that the Chinese authorities, despite their reputation for regulating the press, allowed this story to be published or that China had an entire magazine devoted to modern ships. But an American researcher, Steven Schwankert, got his hands on the article, and he shared it with the parts of the world that didn’t regularly read Chinese watercraft periodicals. 

Confronted now about whether they’d found any human remains in the wreckage, and had discarded them while laughing, China now said they hadn’t. The dead sailors’ relatives were pretty sure that was a lie. We’re now browsing issues of Desecration Monthly for confirmation one way or the other.

2 The Stealth Bomber Slipped into an Employment Brochure

The Chinese aren’t the only ones who will just freely publish military secrets. In 1988, the defense contractor Northrop stuck a picture of the Air Force’s B-2 Stealth Bomber in a recruitment brochure. By the end of the year, the military would unveil the plane to the world, but thanks to that brochure, people got an early look at it — and we don’t just mean people Northrop recruited.

The California advertising firm Rubin Postaer and Associates saw the brochure, and they used the image to build their own model bomber. Then they used this model in magazine ads advertising the Honda CR-X. They also put out a TV ad showing the car and plane together. The Honda is on the screen for only 10 seconds of the minute-plus ad, which is otherwise spent showing off the (agency’s model of the) unannounced stealth bomber.

The Air Force didn’t have everyone involved in this campaign put to death. They did ask if they could have the model afterward, to display it at Ellsworth Air Force Base. Honda said sure, as it had completed its purpose of advertising the CR-X. We don’t fully understand why seeing it next to the CR-X made anyone want to buy the far less impressive CR-X, but marketing is complicated.

1 A Secret Government Bunker Was Uncovered When a Plane Crashed by It

On December 1, 1974, two different Boeing 727s crashed in the U.S., each killing everyone aboard. One of them had just three people in it, the crew members, as it was being chartered and was on its way to pick up the entire Baltimore Colts team. The other held 92 people, all of whom died. And yet, the death toll wasn’t the craziest part of that second crash, as revealed by this lede that the AP went with:

You might not have been sure before today that “supersecret” is a valid word, but it is, and it applied in this case. The (previously) supersecret installation in question was the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. It was a weather station for a while, like its name suggests. Then the government used the underground cave complex for stashing conscientious objectors during World War II. Then, in the 1950s, they built the underground part into “Area B,” whose goal was stashing important members of the government if nuclear bombs ever dropped. 

When Flight 514 crashed into Mount Weather, the press were able to figure out the basics of how the complex was a secret bunker designed for continuity of government during the nuclear apocalypse. It would take another couple of decades to find out enough details that the government had to formally admit this role. 

It would later turn out that this wasn’t some task that was dropped after the Cold War. Politicians were moved to Mount Weather on 9/11. That was a questionable choice. If you’re looking for locations where crashing airplanes don’t show up, this isn’t the right place. 

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