Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy by Len Deighton

1958 The first prototype ammonia maser in front of its inventor Charles H. Townes. The ammonia nozzle is at left in the box, the four brass rods at center are the quadrupole state selector, and the resonant cavity is at right. The 24 GHz microwaves exit through the vertical waveguide Townes is adjusting. At bottom are the vacuum pumps.

This story is set in the 1970s, near as I can tell.

I'm gonna give this book a 4. I was gonna give it a solid 3.5, but goodreads doesn't allow half points. First off, I was able to read the whole thing in four days. Given that it often takes me months to get through a book, that's pretty good. Of course, time spent reading the book depends on whether the story gets a hold of me or not. This one has espionage, a doll, a dollop of science, and a heaping spoonful of the KGB (Soviet secret police), so yeah, right up my alley.

The story tells us of Bekuv, a Soviet MASER expert defecting to the USA, his wife and the CIA agents and MI6 agent assigned to pick him up. They pick him up in the Sahara desert, take him to Washington D. C. Talking to Bekuv, our agents start to hone in on a leak somewhere in the US government. Eventually their focus lands on one guy and the whole story explodes. There is a hostage scene at the airport that makes no sense, but then maybe if you are suddenly feeling this extreme pressure, you wouldn't be making any sense either. So maybe realistic. Probably wouldn't be handled like this now, but we've had fifty years of studying hostage situations, so we might do better.

Now we're back in the Sahara desert at a secret Soviet satellite communications station. The Soviets have set up shop in an old fortress with sixty foot walls. Inside the fort are two satellite antennas, each sixty feet in diameter, along with a helicopter. I'm thinking such an establishment would need to be at least 500 feet square. I looked for old fortress and satellite stations and found plenty of old satellite stations and plenty of old forts, so many that I haven't been able sort them all out. Did not find a Russian satellite station set up in an old fort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Both the US and Soviet governments want Bekuv because his knowledge of MASERs, but his interest lies entirely in communicating with alien civilizations. Quasar CTA-102 get mentioned on page 52. Look it up on Wikipedia and we find this line:

"In 1963 Nikolai Kardashev proposed that the then-unidentified radio source could be evidence of a Type II or III extraterrestrial civilization on the Kardashev scale."

Algeria
Blue are mentioned in the book. Purple are old fortresses.

I made a map with all the places mentioned in the book, well, at least all of the ones I made note of. The map also has a couple of giant Soviet radio telescopes cause that's what our man Bekuv would have liked to get his hands on.

Notes:

• Chapter 1 Page 1 Adrar Algeria
• Chapter 3 

GAZ-69



• Page 13 GAZ 59A Russian four-wheel drive field car does not exist so we have GAZ-69 
• Page 16 Dornier Skyservant

Desert Tour in a VW Bus

• Page 17 bright new VW bus marked Dempsey Desert Tours
• Chapter 4 
• Page 19 Washington Square New York University

Fats Waller plays Alligator Crawl (piano solo, 1935)
gullivior
• Page 23 Alligator Crawl

Chinoiserie

• Page 23 "it was all chinoiserie and high camp, with lanterns and gold-plated Buddhas"
• Chapter 6 

Dmitri Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2
The Wicked North

• page 43 Shostakovich. Soviet composer and pianist.

Pulsar P3 - When a Digital Watch cost more than a Rolex - 1970s LEDs
Techmoan

Page 49 Pulsar wrist watch

Blazar CTA 102

• Page 52 Quasar CTA-102, 
• Page 52 1924 Society - There are a bunch of 1924 Societies, but no UFO related ones. However, 1924 is the year Edwin Hubble proved there were other galaxies outside of the Milky Way. Gawd, why do we have such a pansy ass name for our galaxy? Shouldn't it be something like 'The God King Galaxy', but in Latin so it's impressive.
• Chapter 12 'No Extradition' graffiti in Ireland. It was frequently used to protest the transfer of Republican prisoners from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland to prisons in the United Kingdom.
• Chapter 14

Perry Point VA Medical Center

• page 127 Commodore Perry US Navy psychiatric hospital

Ilyushin Il-62

• Page 192 Ilyushin airliner

أم كلثوم - فكروني - بعد ما اتعودت بعدك غصب عني [Umm Kulthum – Remind Me – After I Had Grown Accustomed to Your Absence, Against My Will]
Rasha Gamal

• Page 195 Om Kalsum the Ella Fitzgerald of Arab pop
• Page 198 the Atlas Mountains and then the Ouled Nail and then Loghouat
• Page 206 In-Salah, Adrar, Reggane, Timbuktu

AKMS machine pistol

• Page 214 AKMS machine pistol

I'm thinking I need to look into this business of Soviet satellite communications stations and old forts in the Sahara. And MASERs. We shall see.

Bonus. 2nd thing that popped up when I searched for Ouled Nail.

Dance of the Ouled Nail
MosaicDanceTheaterCo

Previous post about this book.

Life Imitates Art

Rédoine Faïd Wanted Poster

GQ has the story. Rédoine Faïd, a real life master criminal and jailbreak artist got his schemes from the movies. Great stuff. Rédoine has appeared here before. Now that I know he is from Algeria, he reminds me of the movie A Prophet, likewise about an Algerian immigrant in France who becomes a master criminal.

Via Schneier on Security

Radioactive

Dust filled sky over Lyon France
Reminds me of forest fire season here

Irony as Saharan dust returns radiation from French nuclear tests in the 1960s by  Rafael Cereceda

Excerpt:

Dust from the Sahara Desert blown north by strong seasonal winds to France did not only bring stunning light and sunsets - it also carried abnormal levels of radiation.

That's according to French NGO Acro (Association for Control of Radioactivity in the West), which monitors levels of radiation.

The radiation is not considered dangerous for human health but it did arrive in France with a big dollop of irony.

Acro said it comes from nuclear tests carried out by France in the Algerian desert at the beginning of the 1960s, when the North African country was a French overseas territory.

It claims a “boomerang” effect has brought back caesium-137, a product of nuclear fission created in nuclear explosions.

Acro said it did tests on recent Saharan dust that it collected in the area of Jura, near the French border with Switzerland.

“Considering homogeneous deposits in a wide area, based on this analytical result, Acro estimates there was 80,000 bq per km2 of caesium-137,” it said in a statement.

80,000 Bq? What the heck is a Bq? I've never heard of it before, so off to  Wikipedia   I go.

Henri Becquerel 1852 - 1908

Bq is short for becquerel, a unit of measure for radiation, named after Henri Becquerel , who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903.

One becquerel corresponds to one atomic nucleus decaying in one second. Stable material will decay slowly and have a lower becquerel number, and a larger quantity will have a higher number.

It is kind of an esoteric value. It doesn't tell you how much or what kind of radiation is being produced, which is what you need to know in order to determine how dangerous it is.

"For practical applications, 1 Bq is a small unit. For example, the roughly 0.0169 g of potassium-40 present in a typical human body produces approximately 4,400 disintegrations per second or 4.4 kBq of activity."

So the radiation they detected in France, measured in Bq per square kilometer, is roughly the same amount of radiation produced by 20 normal people. Not very much.

   

1960 Gerboise Bleue Atom Bomb Test

The Gerboise Bleue was France's first atom bomb test. It produced a blast equivalent to approximately 70 kilotons of TNT, the biggest bomb produced by anyone up to that time. France tested several other atomic bombs in Algeria, but most of those were underground tests. They did set off three more bombs above ground there, but these were small bombs with a yield of only 5 kilotons.

Jerboa

The bomb was named after the Jerboa, a hopping, desert mouse.

So, atomic bombs, nuclear physics, radiation are rattling around in my brain and what does it kick out? This tune:

The Firm-Radioactive
PlageBonaRien

From 1985. Same year I got married. Huh.

Via ZeroHedge

Hidden (Caché)

Hidden / Caché (2005) - Trailer (English Subs)
UniFrance
We saw this once before, possibly when it came out. It's been long enough that I didn't remember the title but as soon as I saw them rewind the surveillance video tape I knew exactly what it was, and what it was is a creepy little visit to a nice normal household when a little bit of serious crazy brushes up against them. There are long scenes where nothing happens, well, maybe not that long, just long enough to make you wonder what's going to happen, because surely something will happen, it's a movie after all. So the pacing is unusual, but then the story is unusual as well, so maybe they suit each other.

One thing that gets mentioned is an altercation in Paris in 1961 when 200 Algerians drowned in the Seine. I totally missed that the first time I saw this movie.

BluRay DVD in French, English subtitles.

Arab News Competition Heating Up

Around 100 foreigners out of 132 hostages seized by a terrorist group that attacked the Tiguentourine gas plant on Wednesday have been freed APS reported. (Reuters)

Al Jazeera seems to be gaining a little traction in the news business in spite of Georgie's snide remarks a few years ago. Today I stumbled over an Al Arabiya story about the oil workers taken hostage in Algeria. Never heard of Al Arabiya before. Looks like Al Jazeera has got some competition. I am pretty sure this is a good thing. With the proliferation of the internet and the availability of cheap computers, maybe the Arab Spring will have a chance of making some significant, enduring changes in the Arab world.


Gas Site of Tiguentourine. View Larger Map
Update September 2018 replaced missing image.