Image Property of Universal Studios
The US Government works really hard to keep their secrets to themselves. And why shouldn’t they? Everybody wants a piece of the military intelligence pie, but you can’t let everybody in on what’s happening behind the shroud.
Except sometimes, the secrets have a funny way of getting out. And not from spies or enemy intelligence operatives. From artists…just trying to do their job.
(Of course, artists are known for doing anything to procrastinate from doing actual art, so it wouldn’t surprise me if someone devoted their life to intelligence infiltration just to avoid writing another paragraph.)
Over the years, a few artists have come stunningly close to just guessing at state secrets by combining their keen powers of observation with impeccable logic and impressive acumen. Or they just kinda read a few articles here and there and looked at some pictures that literally everyone else on the planet had access to. All before telling the world something that Uncle Sam would greatly prefer be kept quiet.
In some cases, the leaks are dumb luck. In others, they are reasonable guesses based on available evidence. And in some cases, an artist is a psychotic perfectionist who is dedicating their life to being so precise that they can’t live with themselves until they figure out what nobody in government wants them to know because their art has to be real, dang it!
It really makes you wonder what exactly it is that we are spending billions of dollars for if a bored guy with a laptop can just kinda stumble onto some of the world’s best-kept secrets and turn them into a Hollywood movie seen by millions of people.
Oppenheimer Production Still Property of Universal Studios
That Time a Science Fiction Magazine Revealed the Atomic Bomb
Like many of you, I have partaken of one half of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. And I was not wearing pink.
The new Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer, tells the mostly true story of how scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer organized a cavalcade of scientists to create a weapon that would end the war in Europe and prevent the Nazis from exterminating their enemies en masse.
One of the key elements of the story is the extreme measures that the US Government undertook in order to keep the bomb and everything related to it a secret. There were those inside who even believed that Oppenheimer himself was a security risk given his “left-leaning” politics.
What nobody counted on was a nerdy sci-fi writer with uncanny powers of precognition.
“You think anybody will catch on to what we’re doing here?” (Photo From Wiktionary)
In 1943, Cleve Cartmill discussed the idea of a super bomb relying on atomic fission with the editor of Astounding, a sci-fi anthology magazine. I’m sure this editor, John W. Campbell, thought it would be a funny little story that audiences would find interesting, especially as they were sitting in the middle of World War II.
Except the first people to visit Mr. Campbell after the story published just happened to be the FBI.
See, they had questions about how Mr. Cartmill had so many details on an atom-splitting bomb in the first place. Who had he been talking to? Who were his sources?
Thankfully, Mr. Campbell was able to convince the FBI that Cartmill had gathered all of his ideas from what was publicly available information. No subterfuge or espionage was afoot. And if it was, why would he publish it for everyone to see?
You wouldn’t. Because that would be stupid.
I used to wonder how it was possible for an author to gather enough information to write something like this, but then there’s a scene in the Oppenheimer movie where a scientist decides to split the atom in his lab after reading a newspaper article about someone on the other side of the world doing it first.
So…maybe that’s kinda plausible?
The story doesn’t exactly end there, though. See, there was some information that Campbell did not disclose to the FBI. Namely, that he also figured the atom bomb was being built at some kind of secret facility near Los Alamos, NM.
How did the super spy editing a sci-fi magazine figure out what everyone else in the world was dying to figure out?
Perhaps it had something to do with how many of his subscribers, who happened to be among the most prominent physicists and chemists in the world, suddenly changed their mailing addresses to Los Alamos, NM.
(Image Property of Sony Pictures/Stanley Kubrick Productions and taken from the Department of Defense website. Seriously.)
Kubrick Figures Out the B-52 Because It “Made Sense”
If you’re even remotely aware of film history, you probably know that Stanley Kubrick was an insufferable perfectionist.
He made Shelley Duvall cry on the set of The Shining when he would demand an outrageous number of takes, topping out at 127 takes of one scene where Duvall had to threaten film-husband Jack Nicholson with a baseball bat.
Given his lack of regard for living actors and their pitiful “feelings”, we shouldn’t be too surprised that he had minimal concern for military secrets.
When Kubrick filmed Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace dramatically long titles, he was given zero assistance by the US Air Force.
For obvious reasons, of course. Kubrick was making a masterful black comedy that would terrify Americans if they ever thought it was going to really happen. And, then there’s the red menace. We couldn’t risk those dastardly Russians getting their hands on a movie like Dr. Strangelove and perhaps parsing out the way an American fist-alert bomber might really function.
So…Kubrick and his set designer, Ken Adam, just kinda guessed.
They had one photo of a B-52 cockpit, and then estimated the rest of the set from declassified B-29 Superfortress designs.
“You think we can figure this thing out? Ah, we’ll just…wing it.” (Photo from Wikipedia)
Apparently, Kubrick and Adam were very good at their jobs, because there was some genuine consternation among airmen. And famously, Kubrick was exactly right about where the “little black box” known as the CRM was located in the secret plane.
Some in the military believed that they must have somehow infiltrated a B-52 base with the level of accuracy they attained.
There are some pretty crazy unconfirmed rumors out there about this movie’s reception and Kubrick’s own paranoia after the fact. There are rumors that Kubrick feared the FBI would investigate him and his production team. There are rumors that the movie might be banned for being “too accurate.”
Perhaps the best story surrounding the movie’s supposed accuracy was the one detail that they absolutely got wrong for the sake of art. When Ronald Reagan was elected President, he demanded to see the secret war room underneath the White House.
The only problem? It doesn’t exist.
When President Reagan was told this, he supposedly quipped, “Yes, there is! I saw it in Dr. Strangelove!”
(Image Taken from Wikipedia)
Bumbling Spies Are a Danger in Real Life
In my humble opinion, Mel Brooks’ Get Smart is one of the funniest shows ever made.
While you are entitled to your opinion and are free to disagree, I also retain the right to deny all respect for you should you disagree with my assertion.
While it’s true that I am far too young to have seen the show when it first aired, I was raised on TV Land. In the smattering of Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Leave it to Beaver reruns I familiarized myself with was the golden goose of comedy, the show that has been spoofed and remade and satirized and tangentially animated ever since its inception.
Similarly to the previously mentioned Dr. Strangelove, one of the calling cards of Get Smart was how it satirized Cold War paranoia at a time when people were genuinely terrified of being incinerated by the most terrifying weapons in mankind’s history. We needed a release in the worst way, and Agent Maxwell Smart was there to provide it.
The real measuring stick of a good spy show is the gadgets. James Bond has Q Branch, cranking out such ingenious devices as watch lasers and cars with rocket launchers.
Smart had a shoe phone.
Between the always malfunctioning “Cone of Silence” and the ridiculous robot, Hymie, Get Smart was rife with incredible devices that operated at varying levels of success. They were mostly useless, though. Because how funny would it be if the high-tech gadget actually worked the way it was intended to?
According to the FBI, though, there wasn’t anything funny at all about the gadgets on the show. Not that the FBI is really considered a bastion of humor, of course.
The problem? Apparently the devices they created were too plausible.
So either the American intelligence apparatus was worried that Hollywood’s writers were secretly being fed state secrets for the purpose of a comedy show, or…they were jealous that these writers thought up cooler gadgets than they could.
I’m not sure which position is funnier, but picturing J. Edgar Hoover ripping a bunch of agents over why they hadn’t installed a Cone of Silence in his office brings a certain smile to my face.
(NOTE: I distinctly remember seeing a TV segment as a kid where one of the writers or producers said they had to start giving the CIA a list of gadgets from upcoming episodes to get approval to use them, precisely because they had stumbled onto one too many actual devices in use behind the Iron Curtain, but I can’t find any other sources to corroborate that one. So…we’ll call it 50/50?)
Image Property of 20th Century Fox
Holy Toledo! John McClane’s Return Really Bothered the FBI
I’m starting to think that the FBI should just have a “Script and Screenwriting” division with how much time they spend investigating these things.
On the other hand, I guess we should be glad to know that the FBI is keeping a watchful eye on those dissidents and weirdos who deign to call themselves “writers.” At least we’re safe from the real threats in the world!
This time, the lurking danger was none other than Die Hard 3: Die Hard With a Vengeance. Personally, I felt much more victimized by paying to see Die Hard 5, but I guess the FBI doesn’t care about that.
Die Hard 3 has everything you need for a great action film! It has explosions, witty one-liners, Samuel L. Jackson. There are even copious scenes dedicated to children’s riddles! Now if that doesn’t get you excited…
The central plot of the movie involves a band of exceptional thieves breaking into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to steal billions of dollars in gold bars and sinking the world’s economies into oblivion.
When Jonathan Hensleigh was writing the screenplay for his installment in the popular Die Hard series, he really went the extra mile on his research.
He went to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and toured the facility, he looked at the construction plans, he did the legwork. Hensleigh did just about everything short of hiring a grizzled crew to do the job with him.
“We’re gonna read a lot of books. We’re gonna work really hard. And, if everything goes right, we might just get investigated by the FBI!” (Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash)
So it should come as no surprise that the FBI got a hold of the script and realized just how plausible this harebrained heist plot really was.
It seemed that there really was a subway line right next to the vaults in the Federal Reserve Bank with walls that were thin enough to tunnel through. Their set really was a nearly identical replica of the actual Federal Reserve Bank’s vault. There really were aqueducts in the city big enough to drive stolen dump trucks through.
(No mention was ever made of whether or not there were actual Germans who sounded suspiciously like Scar from The Lion King.)
Apparently Hensleigh was quite worried that he was going to get arrested at one point, but he was able to sweet talk the FBI. Especially when he explained to the Feds that one of his sources was literally an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Not exactly “Classified Top Secret” material, there.
In all honesty, Hensleigh should be honored. This investigation may be the only time in recorded history that someone looked at a Die Hard movie and said, “Hey! This is too realistic!”
Hey! If you enjoyed this little piece on how movies, TV, and books revealed government secrets, you might also happen to enjoy the two books I’ve got for sale right now. Click on over to the Books tab and check out my work. Or you can just go straight over to Amazon and buy one today! I have a horror-western novel called Black Star for sale, along with a collection of short stories called The Call of the Mountains.
And of course there are plenty of other interesting articles on my website, such as this recent foray into the inexplicable world of country music sequel songs. Because that’s a thing that exists.
And before you ask, I did not reveal the hidden location where the government buried Jimmy Hoffa in this book. At least…I don’t think I did.