Latest / Ridiculous History / Knitting as Espionage, Part Two: Legendary Spies -- and One Traitor

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Knitting as Espionage, Part Two: Legendary Spies -- and One Traitor · Ridiculous History

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  Speaker 1: Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: tuning in. Previously on Ridiculous History, we examined the phenomenal
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: story of people conducting trade craft of people conducting espionage
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: and acts of spying through something as humble as knitting crafts.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: Crafts.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there, we draft perfect, and we want to give
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a shout out to our big homie, our super producer,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Max Crochet.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Croquet Croquette. Wait a minute, different things, Williams. That is
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: Bizar Falcons.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: We also have lightly pitched the idea of a Falcon
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: tsar to ourselves off air. We took, we took a
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: quick break, but through the magic of editing, we are
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  Speaker 1: rejoining you today. Let's hear it for none other than
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: the one and only mister Noel Brown.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Does I tis you?
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: My friends, they called me Ben Bullen in this neck
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: of the global woods for tax purposes. You can obviously
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: communicate my comings and goings through a v or a
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: pearl in a scarf.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: I'll bring a scarf right now because it's kind of
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: got chilli today. It's unpredictable. I walked out, and I
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: yelled at the sky, what that is such an old
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: man thing to do with you been, and I'm here
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: for it. I mean, you shake your fist.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: This is the thing, though, nol So we all reside
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: in the Atlanta metro area, and everybody in Atlanta, if
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: you've never had the privilege to visit, please please let
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: us know and we'll hang out. But everybody in Atlanta
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  Speaker 1: will tend to speak to you as though they know
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  Speaker 1: you and you're vaguely related. So this is a true story.
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  Speaker 1: This morning when I walked out and as he said, Noel,
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: the weather totally did a one to eighty on us.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: I yelled what because I was aggravated. It was very
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: early in the morning, and there was a guy walking
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: through the parking lot who turned around and said, I.
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  Speaker 2: Know, I said, seriously, I think I maybe did shake
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: my fist a little bit. But then, as promised in
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: our previous exploration of the nuts and bolts, the pearls
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  Speaker 2: and stitches, warp and weft, there you go of knitted coding,
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  Speaker 2: we are going to present you with a hand full
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  Speaker 2: of real life examples of folks doing this very thing
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  Speaker 2: in the service of various war efforts. So what do
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: you say, we jump right into it. We got the spies,
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  Speaker 2: you knit it the Big Three, the Big Three.
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  Speaker 1: Yes, And this comes to us again courtesy of our
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  Speaker 1: research associate Maria. So let's start with Molly Rinker. Molly
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: old Mom Rinker. That's a street name.
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  Speaker 2: Okay.
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  Speaker 1: So this takes place way before World War One and
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: World War Two. This is what the US calls the
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Revolutionary War. Rinker is an innkeeper in Philadelphia and she's
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  Speaker 1: one of those we're all big fans of RPGs and
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  Speaker 1: gaming and stuff, so she's to the powers of the beach.
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  Speaker 1: She's one of those n PCs at the local tavern.
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  Speaker 2: But they usually have some good intel for you, those
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: bar maids and tavern keepers. Right, Yeah, you got to
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: run out all the dialogue options. Quick pro tip from handkeepers.
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  Speaker 2: You get what I'm talking. Yeah, we got to run
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  Speaker 2: out all of the dialogue tree options to get to
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  Speaker 2: get the goods.
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  Speaker 1: So, because people were often ignoring women at this time,
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  Speaker 1: Molly Rinker was able to be around people that didn't
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  Speaker 1: really treat her as a person, and she used that
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  Speaker 1: to her advantage. She would gather intel eavesdropping on her
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  Speaker 1: tavern guest, specifically her British tavern guest, and.
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  Speaker 2: Her methods weren't the most sophisticated in terms of the
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  Speaker 2: types of crafty trade craft that we're talking about here,
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  Speaker 2: but it did still involve knitting supplies. She didn't encode messages, however,
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  Speaker 2: inside of her knitting, what she did do was deliver
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  Speaker 2: messages to George Washington, the General and the cotton An
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  Speaker 2: Army concealed inside balls of yarn. Yeah. So she would
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  Speaker 2: sit outside Reakerwood and she's knitting, and then when she
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  Speaker 2: saw Patriot couriers or Patriot troops pass by American forces,
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  Speaker 2: she would toss out small balls of yarn, just casually, like, well,
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  Speaker 2: here you go. You guys need yarn, right, you need a.
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  Speaker 1: Lot of stuff in general, which was true, but she
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  Speaker 1: had stuffed these small balls of yarn with wartime secrets
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  Speaker 1: on small scraps of paper. So it's kind of like
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  Speaker 1: how you have a message in a fortune cookie, or
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  Speaker 1: it's kind of like how you have soup in a dumpling.
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  Speaker 2: Right yeah, or you know the new git inside of
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  Speaker 2: the delicious sweet retreat, right. And her efforts were and
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  Speaker 2: are considered to have been absolutely as you like to say,
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  Speaker 2: Ben mission critical during these seventeen seventy seven to seventeen
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  Speaker 2: seventy eight Philadelphia campaign.
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  Speaker 1: Beautiful, thank you, Rinker. There are a lot of American
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  Speaker 1: heroes who don't get the credit they are due. So
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: you want to shout you out.
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  Speaker 2: And then we also want to travel again in time.
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  Speaker 2: Let's go to what he say? May nineteen forty four. Oh,
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: why the heck not? We're talking about Phyllis Pippolatour Doyle,
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  Speaker 2: a twenty three year old South African born British secret
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  Speaker 2: agent who parachuted into Nazi occupied Normandy in May of
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  Speaker 2: nineteen forty four. So hard, unbelievable, it's so.
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  Speaker 1: Cool, and she was not alone, right and all. She's
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  Speaker 1: one of thirty nine female secret agents who served in
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  Speaker 1: one of the coolest secret armies of the entirety of
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  Speaker 1: World War Two. Forget oss, folks, if you haven't heard
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  Speaker 1: about it before, we are so thrilled to introduce you
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  Speaker 1: to Winston Churchill's secret army, something called the Special Operations Executive.
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  Speaker 2: The more innocuous the name, the more sinister the plot.
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  Speaker 2: In France right during World War Two, she posed as
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  Speaker 2: a young woman with the cover name of Genevieve and
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  Speaker 2: she was actually assigned to the SOE Scientist Circuit where
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  Speaker 2: she was able to gather intelligence to help the RAF
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  Speaker 2: bombing missions, that's the Royal Air Force. She transmitted one
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  Speaker 2: hundred and thirty five coded messages Morse coded messages to
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  Speaker 2: be precise to Allied forces with her handy dandy wireless
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  Speaker 2: radio and of course her hairtyme. How's that work? Ben?
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  Speaker 3: Right?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah?
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  Speaker 1: Do you morse code in the hairtie? She embeds these
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  Speaker 1: messages in the lace of her hair tie and get this, folks.
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  Speaker 1: She lives. Latour lives until two thousand and twenty three,
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  Speaker 1: and she will talk about her war efforts. She was
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  Speaker 1: speaking to New Zealand Army News about how she concealed
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  Speaker 1: her codes. She said, quote, I always carried knitting because
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  Speaker 1: my codes were on a piece of silk. I wrapped
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  Speaker 1: the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put
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  Speaker 1: it in a flat shoelace that I used to tie
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  Speaker 1: up my hair.
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  Speaker 2: Tricky, tricky. Sending coded messages took her around thirty minutes
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  Speaker 2: from her wireless radio, and it took the Germans ninety
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  Speaker 2: minutes to get a bead on where she actually was
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  Speaker 2: to trace the location of the signal that it was
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  Speaker 2: sent from. So the odds are certainly in her favor
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  Speaker 2: to make a clean getaway by the time the Germans
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  Speaker 2: knew what was up, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: At least for the first few iterations restaurant, because you
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: have a window of time in which you need to
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  Speaker 1: move quickly. But the German intelligence community was, you know,
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  Speaker 1: they're not knuckle heads. They're not good people, but they're
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: not knuckleheads, and they they start to clock the unusual
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  Speaker 1: activities of this person, so they interrogator, they detain her,
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  Speaker 1: and at least one time they strip searcher, but she
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  Speaker 1: always was able to slip the noose. She continually avoided
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  Speaker 1: detection because they would have to have looked in depth
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  Speaker 1: at the lace of her hairtie to figure out any
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  Speaker 1: coded information, and they just didn't because again, not to
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  Speaker 1: sound too soapboxy, they did not take women seriously.
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  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and it was just it was literally a
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  Speaker 2: needle in a haystack, at least a needle and a
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  Speaker 2: hairtie kind of situation. And until they had gotten wind
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  Speaker 2: of this type of covert activity, they wouldn't have even
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  Speaker 2: thought to have looked in something like that. But you're
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  Speaker 2: absolutely right, Ben. There was a lot of dismissal involved
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  Speaker 2: as well. She never talked about her work much, if
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  Speaker 2: at all, and her own family never knew until very
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  Speaker 2: late in her life. She passed away in twenty twenty
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  Speaker 2: three at the age of one hundred and two years old,
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  Speaker 2: and it kept a lag a low until it became
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  Speaker 2: like a deathbed confession your real one, Tovo.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: We've got another person we want to introduce. We tease
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  Speaker 1: this a little bit in the first part of this series,
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  Speaker 1: Elizabeth Bentley.
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  Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bentley cooked up a plot to steal a lector
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  Speaker 2: cryptographic device from the Soviets and then sell it back
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  Speaker 2: to them. That's actually the plot of From Russia with Love. Sorry,
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  Speaker 2: I had to, I had to drop that one in there.
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  Speaker 2: A good one, Maria, but her actual story makes that
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  Speaker 2: kind of mix up a whole lot of sense, mixing
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  Speaker 2: up her plot with the plot of a Russian spy thriller.
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  Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bentley was born in Connecticut. She went to Vassar
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  Speaker 2: and Columbia. No slouch academically speaking, and she was in
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  Speaker 2: fact an American communist m M yeah. Since in a twist,
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  Speaker 2: coming Ben card carrying yeah, she was known as the
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  Speaker 2: Red Spy Queen, and we're getting a lot of this
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  Speaker 2: from the official CIA website CIA dot gov. Check out
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: Red Spy Queen, a biography of Elizabeth Bentley by Catherine
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  Speaker 2: s Olmsted. Coming to us out of University of North Carolina.
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  Speaker 2: So she considered herself more of and this is a
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  Speaker 2: quote a communist June Cleaver. So for seven years she
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  Speaker 2: worked as what we call a contact woman, which meant
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  Speaker 2: she gothered covert information, primarily Washington, DC, and then she
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  Speaker 2: would pass it along to her Soviet handler. That's correct, folks,
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  Speaker 2: this is an American, as you said, highly born in
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  Speaker 2: our socio economic pyramid. She was an American who spied
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  Speaker 2: for the other side, kind of like the Cambridge five,
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  Speaker 2: Say it ain't so, Lizzie, say it ain't so. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: This is a thing that I think a lot of
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  Speaker 2: people miss when we're talking about the basics of tradecraft.
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  Speaker 2: It's not necessarily the shadowy guy in a nice suit
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  Speaker 2: that you have to be worried about. Right in a
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  Speaker 2: foreign hotel, It's going to be the people who are
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  Speaker 2: admin the people who are in housekeeping, the bartender, the
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  Speaker 2: bartender of people, the concierge. They're hearing all the d
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  Speaker 2: I met a few of them, Yeah, the people who
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  Speaker 2: surprisingly seemed to know four languages, You know what I mean.
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  Speaker 1: I've met a few. They're cool people. Just stay on
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  Speaker 1: their good side and be honest with yourself about why
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  Speaker 1: they're talking to you. All right, Okay, so here's another twist,
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  Speaker 1: like you were kind of teasing.
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  Speaker 2: There and all. A second twist, A second twist, almost
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  Speaker 2: as though we're making a not in fabric. The communist
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  Speaker 2: June Cleaver, as she styled herself, her activities, her early
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  Speaker 2: activities end in nineteen forty five, she goes to Uncle
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  Speaker 2: Sam and she outs herself to the FBI as fact. Yeah,
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  Speaker 2: and they they.
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  Speaker 1: Do what any smart intel agency will do. They say, Okay,
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  Speaker 1: we'll just work for us. We're not the double cross. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: the double cross. Heck, yeah, she turned double agent. And
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  Speaker 1: she said that she did this because she had become
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: disillusioned by the party. As we know we often talk about,
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: especially on our sister show stuff.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: They don't want you to know. Communism seems great on paper,
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  Speaker 2: but the inherent corruptibility of human beings tends to not
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: make it work out so great in practice. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: The issue with communism as a theory is like you said,
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  Speaker 1: communism in practice is something that maybe the human brain
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  Speaker 1: in society hasn't evolved for yet, you know. But there's
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  Speaker 1: there's another factor here. Our character Bentley feels the walls
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  Speaker 1: closing in like she's Han Solo and Star Wars. She
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  Speaker 1: thinks the FBI is hot on her heels. She's just
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  Speaker 1: being paranoid. History will prove later she is not actually
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  Speaker 1: on the FBI's radar. She was incorrect in that assumption.
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  Speaker 1: But it's a very scary time and it's also very
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  Speaker 1: frightening and anxiety inducing to have to function as a spy.
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  Speaker 1: And then a third factor, Look, folks, not the soapbox here,
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  Speaker 1: but tradecraft is pretty brutal, and you are only you
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: as an individual, are only worth the actions you can
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: do in any kind of arrangement. As soon as you're
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: done with those actions, as soon as your value is
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  Speaker 1: no longer relevant.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: They might kill you.
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  Speaker 1: She was worried that the Soviets would kill her because
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: she had exhausted whatever her value was, and it turned
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: out that bit of paranoia was true, so her going
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: to the FBI may have been less of an altruistic
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: crossroads moment for her it may have been something much
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: more like self preservation.
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  Speaker 2: It's a good point, I mean, is it's a good
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: story to you know, frame it in terms of she
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: saw the lights or what have you. That, as we
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: all know, in these types of situations, when you start
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: thinking that maybe the walls are closing in, sometimes making
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: a deal is the best move that you have.
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  Speaker 1: And so it comes to pass in the United States
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  Speaker 1: that Bentley the communist June Cleaver testifies in numerous very
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: high profile investigations that Uncle Sam is conducting. This is
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: also you know, shadows of the Red Scare, right, She's
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: testified in communist influence investigations. She is a huge part
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: in kicking off the second Red Scare. This is when,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: as we all recall, you could have your life and
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: your career ruined because you went to the wrong meeting one.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: Time or Carthyism right, or you knew the wrong person. Yeah,
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: you get pulled up in front of the House an
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: Americans Committee and didn't get blacklisted from Hollywood. A lot
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: of writers got thrown under the bus for previous membership
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: in the US version of the Communist Party. It was
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: it was not good. It was very much a witch hunt.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, very much so. And the House on American Volcanic Ready, yeah,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: the House on American Activities Committee. I love that you're
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: mentioning that. A lot of people don't know that they
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: started in nineteen thirty eight, but they continued all the
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: way up until nineteen seventy five.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: Wow. I know they kind of went a little more underground, right,
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  Speaker 2: But they were weren't they keeping tabs on like John
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: Lennon and stuff as well?
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Sure, everybody, Arthur Miller, anybody they could touch, so in these.
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  Speaker 2: But they weren't calling people publicly in front of their committee.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: They were just sort of operating a little more in
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: the shadows. After that period, Yeah, they wouldn't.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: They wouldn't really pull people out into the public eye
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: unless they felt they had some kind of evidence. In
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: Bentley's testimony, often would consist of them saying, Hey, do
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: you know this person in your work as a spy?
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Did you ever contact this person? Did you ever hear
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: this code name or whatever? And I'm sure it got
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: ridiculous at some point and they said, you know, have
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: you ever interacted with the insert famous Hollywood screenwriter here
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: or something like that.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: And know what was it? Dalton Trumbo was a big
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: one that got railroaded. And lest we cast her in
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: some kind of like, you know, again, we've already sort
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: of couched it. This may well not have been some
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: sort of moral about face, but less we cast her
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: as some sort of you know, hero coming back and
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: working for Uncle Sam. A lot of her testimony resulted
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: in some people being very unfairly targeted and railroaded themselves
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: as a direct result of her testimony. Oh yeah, man,
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: one hundred percent. Her counter espionage was responsible for the
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: conviction of party leaders eleven real life proven Communist Party leaders.
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  Speaker 2: But to your point, her testimonies also lit a match
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: under that growing America paranoia of the Cold War. You know,
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: who isn't a communist? Yeah, name names, report on your neighbors.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: It's very much like a similar situation with what was
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: going on during the Cold War in Berlin. You know
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: that was depicted in the film The Lives of Others,
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: where you know, kids were even like reporting on their
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: parents and all kinds of stuff like that, really really dirty,
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: unclean stuff. As you would say, Ben, we're talking classified
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: documents that she got her hands on, pieces of microfilm.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: She delivered information to the Soviets about Allied force plans
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: regarding the invasion of Normandy. And she kept a lot
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: of this stuff hidden in her knitting bag, which no
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: one ever thought to dig through for information about what
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: the B twenty nine bomber was going to be doing,
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: but they really should have because that was definitely in there. Yeah,
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: she kind of got that far.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Yes, specifically, she got the antela the B twenty nine.
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  Speaker 2: And when she testifies, she becomes a celebrity. For a time,
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: She's all over the headlines. She is a.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: Legit, actual facts, public figure, as our friend Lauren would say.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: But as the years wend on and the news cycle
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: and public attention shifts, her story falls into obscurity. Knitting
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: espionage was so effective that multiple countries, including the United
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: States Office of Censorship, restricted the international of knitting patterns.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: They did this in nineteen forty two. Because let's say
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: you have correspondence right with a friend in Vienna who
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: doesn't have a friend in Vienna, a.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: Friend in Vienna as a as a friend of mine.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: Doesn't it that it sounds like a weird album name.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: What band would have an album called a Friend in Vienna?
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Would it be Mountain goats, Billy Joe Joel.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: He has a song called Vienna Early Billy Joel slaps
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: by the way, Oh yeah yeah. He was much more
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: of a Leonard Cohen type figure early days, like really
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: literate poetic song story type stuff, and Vienna is one
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: of my favorites. Then I think we're about to reach
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: the tangents and trivia part of our story, wherein we
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: can set the record straight first and first and foremost,
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: I think we owe this to the ridiculous historians out
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: there to describe the difference between crocheting and knitting. They
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: are not the same. They are not the same, and
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: I know people were yelling at their podcast devices, but
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: they are in fact distinctly different crafts. Knitting uses two
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: needles to create much more stretchy and draping fabrics that
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: might be better used for garments, while crocheting uses a
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: hook and in order to produce a thicker and sturdier,
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: a little rougher hewn fabric that might be better for
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: blankets and the aforementioned little characters, little toys that your
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: girlfriend and my kiddo like to craft. Knitting focuses much
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: more on what's called live stitches, whereas crochet completes each
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: stitch individually. Yeah. Yeah, and let's go over to Max
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: as well, because Max, you wanted to clear the record
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: on not just crochet, but also croquet croquette. Yeah.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: I've always had an issue with this one where I'm like,
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: what's the difference between croquet, crochet, croquette? What is all
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: these things? So obviously crochet is what we're talking about today,
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: which is knitting, which is not to be confused with
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: the sport croquet, which is an out of our game
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: played on grass where players use malice to hit balls
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: through a series of hoops, but also not to be
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: confused with a croquette, which is a small breaded, fried
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: and delicious.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: Which is what is it? Isn't it Cuban in origin?
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: It is South American.
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: Let's see, it's.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: A little pastry. It's a little savory pastry. I think
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: it's everywhere it is. I guess, I guess where I
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: typically see it is in.
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: It's French.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: French, but the process of frying food is pretty common,
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: especially with some bread crumbs. Yeah. No, it's a really
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: good point. It also is another product of colonialism, where
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: you will see potato croquettes and other types of croquettes
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: very popular in some South American cuisine. I want to say,
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: what is poppies. That's a Cuban, isn't it poppies the restaurant? Yeah, yes, yes,
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: that's a place here at Balanta. Yeah.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: And I find all this so interesting and so insightful,
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: and I will forget it within an hour.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: That's okay, man, We'll have this episode out as long
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: as society doesn't collapse, and maybe even a little bit after.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: And forgive me. The Caribbean and South American version of
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: that food would typically be pronounced croquetas, but it very
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: much comes from the same background and from that French
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: culinary tradition, where you're going to see in Brazil, for example,
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: yucca and mandioca croquettes, various fillings depending on the region
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: that you're getting them from, and also differences in preparation.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: But just like we see the incredibly fantastic bond me
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: sandwich in Vietnamese cuisine, you're going to see that French
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: bread influence from the old colonial days of French influence
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: over that region.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: And we have a proposition for you, folks. I have
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: something we have to mention Just because knitting is no
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: longer considered a very successful form of trade craft, like
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: enemy forces know what to look for, it doesn't mean
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: that other innocuous things are not being used to communicate
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: secret messages. One of the most interesting recent examples comes
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: from our sister show stuff They Don't Want You To Know?
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: Where was truly Nolan, Our pal Matt Frederick learned that
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: the CIA was communicating secret messages through You'll Love this
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: facs through purposefully dumb looking Star Wars fan sites.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: Oh god, I love it. It's such. It's another perfect
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: example of this kind of stuff, things that are dismissed
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: and hidden in planes like whoever you know? No one
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: ever expects the the GeoCities Star Wars fan sites of old.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: But that is exactly what the covert agencies of the
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: United States government were depending on when they used them
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: as ways to communicate with their assets in the field. Yeah,
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: did you ever hear about that with Max? No?
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: But I don't spend much time on Star Wars fans
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: dice because I spent all my time on.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: I'm kidding, that's not true. I'm gonna get canceled like
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: Timothy Shallamy being dismissed of opera. Oh that was weird. No, no, no,
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: much love to the Star Wars fan community out there.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: I guess the point, though, Ben, is that there were
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: just a lot of them because it is so popular,
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: and the lights we're talking about were like the bad ones,
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: the low quality ones. You know.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's how they split it in so that
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: that is the thing. History repeats itself quite often. So
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: if just because knitting is no longer you know, a
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: gold standard way of secretly communicating intelligence, that doesn't mean
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: that other things like that don't exist. Crappy, purposely crappy
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: websites are I would propose a version of this same tactic.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: And you know what got me here, maybe we can
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: start to end on this.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: Guys.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: What got me here is we're talking a little bit
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: off air and when our research associate Maria first pitched
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: this idea, it reminded me of another way of encoding
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: messages through fabric. This is a true story, folks.
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: The Incan Empire the key poo. Yeah, the Incan Empire.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: Had a coding system that we still don't understand that
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: was entirely based upon notts.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: And shout out to our colleagues over it stuff to
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: blow your mind. Robert and Joe who have done an
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: extensive deep dive into the Keipoo on their podcast, Stuff
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: to Blow your Mind, So do check them out as well.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: That's right, Ben, pictograms that they encoded using knotted string devices.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so they were able to communicate similar to what
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: you were saying in part one of this series. They
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: were able to communicate pretty complex mathematical information that we
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: can prove, uh through through these knots. They just used
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: fleece and cotton and a lot of what modern society
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: has figured out about the kipoo is that it was
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: administrative stuff, census figures, tax allocation. You twist the strings,
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: you make the knot, you show the information.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Spreadsheets.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah you're making yeah, exactly, you're making a fabric spreadsheet
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: just so, and uh, this is this is bizarre because
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: I don't know about you guys, but Fellas to me,
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: it makes sense that you could do that with knots,
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: that you could do numerical information with knots, because it's
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: no different from a spreadsheet or an abacus.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Well, and maybe our boy Alan Turing, if he'd tried
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: his hand at cracking the key poos, maybe would have
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: had some success because, as we know, he famously cracked
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: one of the most impenetrable codes in history, the Enigma,
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: and also you know, won the war effort more or
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: less for the Allies. But to this day we know
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: some of what was encoded into these keipoos, but we
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: have not been able to fully crack that code, and
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: there are samples remaining today. A third of these devices,
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: the so called narrative keypoos, appear to contain encoded non
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: numerical narrative information, including names, stories, and even ancient philosophies.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: So if you're into puzzles and word games and things
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: like that, if kipoos are something that you might dig, absolutely, yeah.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: We wanted to mention this because, uh, it's it's still
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: a real rumpic abyza, you know, like it's it's still
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: a real head scratcher for people who, as you said,
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: love puzzles. How do you use a series of knots
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: to convey philosophy, to convey cultural myths or legend legendary traditions.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: We know you could spell a name right knitting figured
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: that out for us later, But this happened before what
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: we call Morse code. This happened before what we understand
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: as binary reasoning. So if you can check this out,
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: if you can help us solve the mystery of the
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: over one thousand kipoos that remain unexplained in the modern day,
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: that just like we say with the rational numbers, we
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: will take you on an all expense paid trip to
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: the David Busters of your choice asterisk, please keep it
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: in the Atlanta metro area.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there are maybe three to choose from, and they
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: are not all Dave and Busters are created equally, I
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: might argue. And you know, we've been talking a lot
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: about the kind of interchangeability of this type of coding
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: with the foundations of modern computing. Unless you think it's
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: just kind of parallel thinking, not entirely the case ben
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: it would appear. And if you want to read a
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: little further about this, we're going to hit you to
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: an article that the Jacquard loom, which is a form
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: of industrialized machine knitting, is actually considered a predecessor to
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: modern computing, the punch card system, that big old room
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: filling machines of the early days of computers. And you
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: can check out programming patterns the story of the Karde
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: loom Over at Science Industry Music Org dot UK. And
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: it makes sense right because it is a form of automation.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: It's a surprising story and perhaps a story for another day.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: I think it is.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, folks, thank you so much for tuning in, fellow
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: ridiculous historians. We hope this exploration finds you well and
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: a mid grand adventure. We also want to thank our
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: super producer, Max Croquet, Croquette, Crochet Williams.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: All different things. I do love a good game of croquet. Also,
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: Patnk he ever played paatenk but not play. It's very
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: similar to Bachi ball. I think French equivalent of boci ball,
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: very similar.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: I thought of a lot of patnks.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: I don't understand.
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: Oh, come on, you're the CLBs guy as well.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: I thought that that's right. There was a clarps I was.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: I was getting a Clarbscure reference in there. I need
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: to jump back into that game. What a what a
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: delet canvas? Oh boy?
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: Thanks as well to Alex william M, Max's biological brother
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: who composed this slap and bop Big Thanks to Rachel
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: Doctor Big Spinach Lance as well as aj Bahamas Jacob's
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: the Puzzler.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: And the rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. If you
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: dig our show, you're gonna dig theirs for sure. And
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: thanks again to our research associate, brand new research associate, Maria,
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: who absolutely knocked out of the park with this one.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: to your favorite shows.