Project Iceworm

If you’ve ever seen John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ the name perhaps conjures images of Kurt Russell burning Cthuloid monstrosities in the snow.

The truth is a different kind of horror.

Project Iceworm was the name given to a secret US project to build hidden nuclear missile launch sites beneath the Greenland ice sheet.

A US Army illustration of a launch site for cut down two-stage versions of the Minuteman missile.

On one level, it’s a clever idea. From Greenland medium-range missiles would be able to strike targets deep inside the Soviet Union. The Russians would have little warning.

The US Military had a longstanding presence on Greenland – Thule Air Base, which served as an early warning station to detect Soviet bombers or missiles coming over the North Pole, but there was a problem – Greenland was Danish territory, and they never signed up to hosting missile silos.

Thule is still there, but it’s not a popular posting for USAF crews, and it costs a lot to run.

The Department of Defense’s solution to a potential diplomatic problem was to lie to their NATO ally. They announced a cover story about ‘building affordable military outposts in the ice-cap’. The first was to be Camp Century, built in a blaze of publicity and expensively filmed. You can see it in all it’s glory on youtube…

They couldn’t expect the Danes not to notice construction at all, but you can get away with a lot on a frozen wasteland. The real project Iceworm was to consist of 2500 miles of tunnels housing 600 missiles.

Camp Century had to start small. Even when it was finished, from outside it didn’t look like much – just a few ramps leading down to holes in the snow. Inside, the tunnels were more impressive, stretching for more than two miles under the ice.

As well as being a cover story, Century served as a live test for the techniques to be used in Iceworm. The base consisted of 21 tunnels - key features including a chapel, library and a nuclear reactor.

This is the nuclear reactor going in. All the parts had to be towed 150 miles over snow on tracked vehicles from Thule Air Force Base. It was the only practical choice to power the base, because diesel generators would need regular re-supply of fuel – hard to do somewhere this remote.

As well as all the impressive engineering, the creation of Camp Century provided some fringe benefits for science – some of the first ever systematic core samples from the Greenland ice-sheet. Unfortunately, these samples revealed a massive flaw in Project Iceworm.

The ice was moving. Inhabitants of the camp soon saw tunnels were constantly narrowing, and ceilings started to collapse under the strain. Two years after its construction, the ceiling of Camp Century’s reactor room had dropped five feet. Gradually, the camp was abandoned.

Project Iceworm was impossible. The nightmare of a vast array of nuclear missiles at the North Pole never came true. It had been doomed from the start by a failure to do some basic science. Ice always moves.

And that wasn’t even the craziest thing about it.

The whole project had been pointless from the word ‘go’. By 1960, nuclear missile armed subs already existed, and the first intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Atlas series, were coming into service.

Even if you thought nuking Russians was a great idea, there was no added value in Project Iceworm.

So why did the whole mess happen? Why spend millions of dollars and send hundreds of servicemen into the Arctic snow?

One possible answer is inter-service rivalry within the US military.  In 1960 nuclear missiles were the future of warfare. Missile subs belonged to the Navy, and the ICBM’s and the bombers belonged to the Air Force. The Army was left out of the big game. Project Iceworm would get them in.

An early model Atlas takes off. A lot of them exploded on the launch pad.

But it didn’t work, and even the brief experiment of Camp century left behind radioactive waste, 200,000 litres of toxic chemicals and 24 million litres of untreated sewage buried in the ice. As global temperatures rise, it could soon start to leak out.

Probably a heating cylinder associated with the power plant.

Like so many of the messes from the Cold War, this one is still with us. Give me the homicidal alien shapeshifter any day.

Flight of The Penguin

I don’t do a lot of WW2 history. On the whole, it’s just a bit too straight to fire my imagination, but the other day on Twitter, someone posted this image of a curious movie credit, which reminded me how much I like Q-ships, and prompted me to do a little dive into one of the weirder ways navies wage war.

Put simply, a Q-ship is a nautical wolf in sheep’s clothing –  an innocent-looking merchant vessel packed with concealed weaponry.

I don’t know this particular ship, but anything that looks like that is going to be in trouble if a U-boat gets near it.

The idea is, they lure in a sub or small warship that'll be careless, expecting an easy kill, then blow the shit out of it. The concept is hundreds of years old - in the seventeenth century the English navy sailed disguised warships through the Med to lure Barbary Corsairs, but it went big in WW1 as an attempt to counter U-Boat attacks. At the time, it was damn near impossible to sink a sub while it was underwater. The solution? Tempt it to the surface.

Ships like HMS President (still moored on the Thames today!) were bait. Torpedoes were expensive, and subs could only carry a limited number of them, so, for easy targets like this little steamer, U-boats would surface and use their deck gun. The Q-Ship would let them get close, then BAM!

HMS President, still in disguise a century later.

Panels slid aside to reveal hidden guns, and the U-Boat got a taste of its own medicine.

Sounds cool, but like many clever ideas, it didn’t work terribly well in practice.

This picture is from a 1915 newspaper story headlined ‘Mystery Ship Trapping German Submarines’. Kind of a naval warfare variation on the ‘Man Bites Dog’ story.

To look like slow, unmanoeuvrable merchant vessels, the Q-ships had to be converted from actual slow vulnerable unmanoeuvrable vessels, and even after you put guns on them, they were still slow and unmanoeuvrable. A lot were sunk.

BUT, like most ideas, whether it’s good or bad depends on execution, and one man, Ernst-Felix Krüder, made the Q-ship concept look like genius.

A dangerous man.

For the Germans, things had to work differently. Their Q-ships existed not to hunt subs, but to sneak into allied shipping lanes in disguise.

Krüder’s vessel was called the Pinguin. In June 1940, a day after German troops marched triumphantly through Paris, this very ordinary-looking ship sailed north up the Norwegian coast at the start of one of the most devastating raids of all time.

Pinguin in the Indian Ocean, a few days before she met her fate.

In an empty fjord, the Pinguin’s crew painted her hull black, and added a hammer and sickle so she looked like a Soviet freighter. She would later adopt three more false identities – as Greek freighter Kassos, the cargo liner Trafalgar, and Norwegian tanker Tammerlane.

From that lonely Fjord, Pinguin sailed west through the Denmark strait, south along the coast of Africa, across the Indian ocean to the coast of Australia, then back to the South Atlantic and Antarctic waters. On this single cruise, she sank 28 allied ships.

Krüder was insanely skilled at seizing their cargoes intact, sending thousands of tons of precious oil and metal back to Germany. Just before Christmas 1940, Pinguin captured an entire Norwegian whaling fleet of fifteen ships and sent them back to Bordeaux.

In the waters between Indonesia and Australia, Pinguin captured a Norwegian tanker, Storstad, and, like something out of the A-team, converted her into a minelaying vessel.

Storstad was known and expected to be in these waters, so could sail near allied ports. Her mines sank another four allied ships.

They added rails at the stern to act as a mine delivery system - they slide off into the sea.

For 207 days, Pinguin defied the odds and inflicted massive damage on the allied war effort, but on the 7th of May, 1941, she ran into trouble in the Indian Ocean. A British tanker managed to broadcast a frantic SOS before being sunk with torpedoes.

The signal was heard as far away as London, and a British heavy cruiser, HMS Cornwall, came to investigate. Pinguin tried to maintain her disguise, but the cruiser ordered her to submit to inspection. Krüder allowed the warship to close within 4 miles before revealing his true colours and opening fire.

This is actually HMS Cornwall’s sister ship, HMAS Australia, but as County class cruisers, they’re identical.

The sudden broadside surprised the British, and inflicted heavy damage, but it was an uneven fight. HMS Cornwall was faster, tougher and had bigger guns. In the end, even the greatest Q-ship of all time suffered the same problem as all Q-ships; it was slow and unmanoeuvrable – an easy target.

So, that’s why Q-ships aren’t a thing any more. Of course you still have disguised naval vessels – the old Soviet trawlers doing electronic surveillance, all kinds of shenanigans around the Korean peninsular, but generally not much fighting in disguise any more, which is probably a good thing really.

Who Dares Ask Why?

If you lived through the eighties, images of the Iranian embassy siege were wallpaper.

Black clad figures burst through the windows of a Kensington mansion. Glass shatters. Smoke billows from an explosion inside. A terrified man emerges onto the balcony and makes a desperate dash for freedom.

Sim Harris, a BBC sound recordist, was in the embassy to pick up a visa when the terrorists struck.

The same sequence of shots ran in every compilation, every retrospective of the year, of the decade. Even years later, it was still part of title sequences for news shows, and then as the nineties dawned, the footage became history instead of current affairs, and was endlessly recycled in documentaries.

I’d been watching that sequence for about twenty years by the time I had to collate the footage myself for one of my first TV research jobs. I learned in forensic detail about everything that happened in and around the embassy, but it wasn’t until after I’d finished the job that I started asking why.

The footage gave ordinary people their first glimpse of counter-terrorist warfare. Movies were greenlit, toys went into mass production. The archetype of the special ops soldier entered the popular consciousness. It all started here, with a bang, but the action was so compelling, so hypnotic, somehow nobody needed the reasons for it.

People hadn’t seen gear like this before - the gas masks and hoods, the accessorised MP5 SMG’s, and it’s all happening two weeks before the UK release of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.

It turns out the why is pretty complicated.

The terrorists were members of a group called Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA). They were Iranian Arabs who’d participated in the 1979 revolution against the Shah, but wanted autonomy from the Persian majority who backed the new theocracy.

The exixtence of Arabistan (highlighted) is not universally accepted, even in the Arab world, but men were willing to die for its liberation.

Their attempted uprising, one of several across Iran that year, was bloodily put down by the Ayatollah Khomenei’s forces. The DRFLA planned to seize the Iranian embassy in London to force their own government to release 92 political prisoners.

The six terrorists entered the UK on Iraqi passports, and collected weapons smuggled into the country in an Iraqi diplomatic bag. In fact, the DRFLA was entirely funded by Iraq, who offered support to any opponent of the Ayatollah’s regime.

On April 30, they seized the embassy, easily overpowering the single armed Met Police officer on duty. The siege ensued when their demands were refused. Over six days, negotiators secured the release of several hostages while the Met made preparations for a violent outcome.

PC Trevor Lock, seen here leaning out of the window, later played a key role in the embassy assault.

Specialist surveillance officers drilled holes in the embassy walls from next door to implant microphones. The terrorists heard something, but Trevor Lock managed to convince them the sounds were mice. The police arranged for British Gas to drill on the road outside to cover the noise, but the conspicuous activity so nearby alarmed them. The Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR), which had convened to handle the crisis, arranged for flights to be diverted overhead instead.

Negotiations secured the release of five hostages, but at 13:45 on May 5, the terrorists shot their first victim. Abbas Lavasani was the embassy’s press officer, and a devout believer in the Ayatollah’s revolution. He frequently antagonised the hostage-takers. Some believe he wanted to be martyred. The shots that killed him were the trigger for SAS action.

Lavasani’s body was thrown out of the front door. Volunteer officers went to collect it.

Today the operation is rightly remembered as a tactical triumph. Only one hostage was killed during the SAS assault, and two wounded. Five of the six terrorists were killed, the other arrested. It all sounds like an action movie, but the reality inside the embassy was messier, because reality always is.

One of the SAS soldiers abseiling in through the front windows got stuck in his ropes. The flash from a stun grenade ignited the curtains, and the resulting fire burned his legs badly. Another soldier was dragging one of the terrorists outside to shoot him, until a colleague pointed out he was on camera.

I’ve heard (but cannot authoritatively source) a credible story that a trooper detailed with clearing the embassy’s basement became convinced terrorists were hiding in the bins, and shot several rubbish receptacles.

None of this is to diminish what those soldiers achieved on May 5th, 1980. They were taking split-second decisions under unimaginable stress, in fear for their lives. They weren’t playing Call of Duty or Rainbow Six. There was no save function. It was real life, and success always includes mistakes.

Only one hostage was killed during the assault, and two wounded. The SAS had estimated eight deaths as a likely outcome.

After the siege, the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan pretty much disappeared from history. The one surviving terrorist served 27 years in prison, then could not be returned to Iran because he’d be killed. So he lives in Peckham under a new identity.

The Sun did an expose of him, revealing his current name and likeness, so it’s actually relativaly easy to find pictures of him as he is now.

Iran blamed the US and Britain for the attack on its embassy, which sounds mad, until you realise that four months after the siege, Iraq invaded Iran, with US backing. If the terrorists had launched their attack a couple of years later, it could have been CIA money funnelled through Iraq funding it.

Just to be clear, there’s no reason to believe the US backed the attack on the embassy – it was Iraqi-backed Iranians lashing out at the Ayatollah’s regime, but the world is a messy place, and so much comes down to timing.

All He Needs Is Love

As the year drags on, we’re bombarded with more and more lists of the books we should read.

‘Should’ is a killer. It’s like anti-marketing, but it didn’t stop the world’s top publisher pushing this out the other day https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/may/20-books-to-read-by-40.html?

I mean, I like Nick Hornby as much as the next guy, but my goodness, could that list be any more normal? I suppose Cloud Atlas is a little strange - the structure is unconventional and it has that SF thread running through it, but where are we if that’s the outlier of weirdness?

So, in the spirit of embracing the weird, here’s something conspicuous by its absence from any list, despite having sold more than a million copies - Saddam Hussein's opus 'Zabibah and the King'. It’s a love story set in 8th century Tikrit. To avoid accusations of favouritism, the dictator published it anonymously three years before his downfall.

Here we have the two bestselling versions side by side. The original cover was created by Canadian artist Jonathon Earl Bowser, who was never paid for his work, but doesn’t seem too bothered about it. He takes the view that copyright violation is important, but still minor compared to genocide. Disney could take a leaf out of his book. On the other hand, the English language edition is really something. I'm not sure this cover works for Romance, but what do I know?

Another dictator, another failed artist (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the anonymous publishing didn’t work as planned, or rather that it worked exactly as planned). What does that tell us about these people? What does it tell us about the creative act?

Some of the answers are straightforward - just like dictators, artists want attention. Apart from the other obvious historical example, it’s hard not to think about Boris Johnson’s novel ‘72 Virgins’, and his rejected screenplay that wasn’t even a screenplay. What’s really striking is that Boris and Saddam both possessed a powerful desire to put their stories into the world, but were unwilling, or more likely unable, to do the work. They both took the bizarre route of attaining fame and power, then leveraged it into getting published.

It’s almost as if getting their stories out there was the point of it all.

What kind of emotional damage does it take to leave someone with such a powerful compulsion, and none of the tools to fulfil it? I don’t actually know much about Johnson’s upbringing, but Saddam’s was heartbreaking. Cancer killed his father and brother while he was still in the womb. His pregnant mother was so depressed she tried to abort him. When the abortion failed and baby Saddam was born, she wanted nothing to do with him, so he went to live with an uncle. Could Boris have suffered as badly?

I hope not.

Lockdown For Beginners

I first wrote this in late March, when we were being told the Covid-19 lockdown would last three weeks. At the time, this little story seemed apposite - who doesn’t want to emulate the good cheer and stoicism of the Apollo astronauts?

Two months later, well, perhaps I’d have done better to tell the story of Sergei Krikalyev, who was stuck in space for for 311 days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union left him with no base to come home to (Baikonur Cosmodrome was in the newly independent Kazakhstan).

Still, the Apollo quarantine remains an interesting little vignette of space history, so here it is.

The handshake from the Tricky Dick had to wait. NASA also had to argue hard to keep him from having dinner with the astronauts before they set off. He didn’t buy into the whole quarantine thing.

For the first 88 hours after returning to earth Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were confined to a single modified Airstream Trailer.

The fear was that they’d bring back a bug from the lunar surface and the human immune system would be completely unprepared for any extra-terrestrial pathogen. It would make the Black Death look like a summer cold. NASA assessed the risk of anything nasty coming back to earth as low, but the potential damage was immense. So, the astronauts weren’t getting hugs with the wife & kids when they got home.

This ‘face-to-face’ with the Apollo families happened in Hawaii, hence the flower garlands.

Instead, they got to look at their nearest and dearest through a small window in the trailer, known as the mobile quarantine facility. Today, the original is still held and exhibited by the Smithsonian. It was modified to have a lower air pressure than outside, so any pathogens would stay in.

The first stages of the quarantine process were the hardest. The Apollo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific, so the astronauts had to be whisked into the trailer on board aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Until they were inside, they wore sealed suits to avoid contaminating the ship’s crew. The suits weren’t carried for the whole trip. A swimmer had to jump out of the helicopter and throw them in through the capsule’s hatch. It would have been impossible in bad weather.

The unsung hero of this operation is the engineer who also had to jump out of the helicopter so he could power down the command module’s systems before it was taken on board. The process only took a few minutes, but his exposure to potential pathogens meant he had to join the astronauts for their entire 3 week quarantine.

On board the Hornet, the quartet was joined by a doctor, who also had to serve the full sentence while he monitored their (very healthy) vitals. The only way to get them home without breaking quarantine was to carry the whole trailer. A C141 military transport airlifted it from Hawaii.

The journey ended at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston. For the final transfer, the astronauts had to wear the sealed suits again, which can’t have been fun.

This is actually the guys getting into the trailer on board Hornet, but it was the best pic of the suits,

The Apollo crew and their entourage spent the remaining 21 days of quarantine under constant medical supervision.

Nasa maintained precautions against an extra-terrestrial plague for the next three missions before eventually deciding isolation was unnecessary. The idea of space quarantine hasn’t completely gone away though. These days the concern goes the other way - NASA takes extreme measures to avoid contaminating potentially life-bearing worlds with Earth bacteria. When the Galileo probe reached the end of its life, they deliberately crashed it into Jupiter to keep any aliens on Europa or Ganymede safe from any bugs it might be carrying. I hope whatever’s living in the icy brine is suitably grateful.

Neil Armstrong had to celebrate his 39th birthday with a random assortment of doctors and scientists, but he doesn’t look to unhappy about it. The cake is vanilla.

Capitalism Goes Bananas

Few people realise bananas shaped the course of the Cold War.

It happened in Guatemala - the original banana republic - a little country about the size of Ireland, but with four times the population, a quarter of the GDP., and no luck. It had no oil to attract the dangerous attention of superpowers, not much in the way of mineral wealth, just incredible scenery and a whole lot of jungle that’s only really good for growing fruit.

Antigua, the former Spanish colonial capital of Guatemala. Today, it’s a tourist destination.

The trouble started because the Guatemalan people didn’t own their own bananas. In the early twentieth century, US entrepreneurs started buying up the best growing land, and by 1944, around 40 percent of it belonged to one corporation - the United Fruit Company.

In theory, United Fruit was supposed to provide infrastructure in exchange for land. In practice, no.

While the rest of the world was busy fighting Nazis, Guatemala decided to experiment with democracy. They kicked out the dictatorship that had run the country as a personal piggy bank since 1823, and brought in crazy ideas like universal education, and land reform.

“Land reform - ugh!” I hear you.

Bear with me. Crimes and covert ops are coming.

Tell me these guys aren’t the coolest looking revolutionaries you’ve ever seen. They’re standing in the square outside the cathedral in Guatemala City.

Guatemala started buying back all its prime banana growing land. The problem was, the price they paid was based on the valuation the owners had reported in their tax returns. United Fruit didn’t like tax. For decades they’d valued their land at a dollar an acre to avoid paying any.

“A dollar!” You can imagine how well this offer was received at Fruit HQ, but they couldn’t argue against Guatemalan law in Guatemala, so the corporation turned to the US government for help.

Why should the US government care about a tax squabble in a banana republic?

‘Investment in infrastructure’ = donkeys

It’s a good question. In a sane world, this issue would not require action by a military superpower, but we live in the crazy timeline. The Eisenhower administration was initially reluctant to get involved, until the fruit guys said the magic word…

‘Communism.’

It was the fifties. That word was enough to make America reach for its guns. A socialist state on the southern border was the stuff of nightmares for most of Washington DC, and United Fruit waged a PR campaign to make them vivid. Adam Curtis touched on the story in his documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares’. If anything, he underplayed it.

The number of Communists in the US was tiny, but hey, let’s make a feature film about an imaginary threat anyway.

They convinced President Eisenhower that Guatemala was flying the red flag, and could be the first domino, toppling the rest of Latin America into communism.

It was utter insanity. It’s hard to say now whether the lobbyists believed their own lies, but it worked.

The truth matters less than who you know, and United Fruit had friends in very high places. US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was a partner in a law firm that worked for them. Eisenhower’s personal secretary happened to be the wife of United Fruit’s CEO.

The reluctant president didn’t want a full-on war, but he authorised a CIA covert Op. The CIA was run by a guy called Allen Dulles. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the Secretary of State’s little brother.

How’s that for cosy?

Oh, and he was a former board member of United Fruit.

Eisenhower with John Foster Dulles. I genuinely don’t think Ike was malevolent, but he didn’t realise how unscrupulous so many of the people around him were.

Little brother’s CIA puts together a mercenary army, including a few WW2-vintage planes to overwhelm Guatemala’s barely existent air force. They pick out an ambitious Colonel from the Guatemalan army to lead a ‘revolution’ against the ‘tyranny’ of the country’s democratic government.

The P47 Thunderbolt was obselete by 1954, but that doesn’t matter when the enemy has no planes.

Around 400 men and a few old planes is all it takes to end Guatemala’s ten year flirtation with democracy. The colonel, Castillo Armas, becomes El Presidente. The country sinks into a civil war that lasts for 36 years, but United gets its bananas and the imaginary Red Menace is defeated.

I wish I could say there was a happy ending, but there really isn’t. Their Guatemalan experiment in regime change (hot on the heels of their Iranian op) gives the CIA an appetite for more. It inspires all the disastrous interventions of the following decades – Cuba, South-East Asia etc…

Prisoners after the failed ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba. If Guatemala hadn’t happened first, they’d never have tried it. For better or worse, the Cubans were a tougher proposition.

The CIA was only seven years old when it started the banana war. The ‘success’ built the careers and reputations of a generation of spooks who learned the wrong lessons and took them all over the world, right up to Iraq in 2003. All because one corp didn’t want to pay tax.

And the United Fruit Company – what happened to those guys?

They must have received some karmic payback by now, right?

Nope. They’re basically still around, re-branded as Chiquita. The lady doesn’t look like a killer, but those are some expensive bananas.

There's a Nuclear Reactor On The Moon

Sometimes I’m just stacking the dishwasher, or weeding the garden, and the thought comes to me unbidden. I’ll never get over it. At least I hope I never do.

Charles Conrad and Alan Bean put it there. They were the men on the ground for Apollo 12. Alan was a regular interviewee for NASA’s Unexplained Files. He always talked about what he’d done as if it was normal. He was the fourth human to walk on the moon.

Alan putting in the plutonium, as you do…

When you look at it in context, it’s staggering. In the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong and Aldrin dug some holes, took samples, planted a flag and took pictures.

OK, what’s next, boss?

Assemble a nuclear reactor, while wearing a space suit.

That right there is your giant leap.

Don’t get me wrong – the Apollo 11 guys were BUSY, and every space mission has to hit insane schedules, but the reactor just seems next level to me.

It was built to power a package of sensors and experiments. With the moon in darkness for 14 days out of 28, solar power wasn’t an option.

This is the SNAP-27 generator they assembled. Technically, I shouldn’t call it ‘a reactor’, because it uses atomic decay (rather than a reaction) to generate heat. It still counts in my book.

And that's not all Charles and Alan had to do. Apollo 12 landed close to Surveyor 3, an unmanned spacecraft that collected the first lunar soil samples. The astronauts had to dismantle it, and bring parts back to earth for analysis.

Surveyor 3 had been on the moon for a couple of years, and the idea was to find out how well the tech stood up to the strains of lunar exposure - extreme temperature variations and radiation. But when scientists analysed the Surveyor 3 camera, they got a surprise.

The landing site for Apollo 12 was chosen to be within walking distance of Surveyor

They found something alive - traces of a bacteria called Streptococcus Mitis. This should be impossible. At the time, it was believed nothing could survive in space, and yet apparently bugs on Surveyor 3's lens lived through two years of lunar radiation. How?

Nobody had ever heard of Tardigrades in 1969, so the very idea of any life in space was a big deal. NASA concluded that the bugs hitched a ride after contaminating the equipment pre-launch, but later studies contradicted this finding. It remains controversial.

Perhaps something happened during Apollo 12’s journey home? Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

The astronauts were supposed to document everything with the first ever colour TV camera taken to the moon, but after just a few minutes of filming, Alan accidentally pointed it at the sun and fried the sensor. He was absolutely frank about how he’d messed up. That’s one of the striking things about astronauts - they don’t really do arse-covering - it’s not a useful activity in space. Thankfully, the mistake didn’t end Alan’s spaceflight career. He went on to fly in Skylab.

This is a still image from Apollo 12’s Hasselblad cameras, but I imagine the moment before Alan fried the TV camera looked something like this.

The scarcity of images from Apollo 12 has made the mission undeservedly obscure. Perhaps that’s why Alan spent his post-NASA years painting what he saw on the moon. This (below) was what he always looked like when we turned up for interviews. The first time we showed up, the director made the mistake of asking him to change into something else, and Alan very politely told him where to get off. Interviews were always on his terms, which takes some getting used to for producers accustomed to controlling what they shoot, but the content he gave us was always gold.

This old guy in a smock built a nuclear reactor on the moon.

A Whole New World

Aladdin’s nemesis, Jafar, is one of the all-time great villains – ruthless, manipulative, terrifying. You might not be surprised to know he’s based on a real historical figure, but there’s a twist…

The real Jafar was the good guy.

History does not record whether he really had a parrot.

The story of Aladdin is one of many to filter into popular culture from the collection of Arab poems known as the 1001 nights. Sinbad is perhaps the most famous of the others. The narrator of the poems is a young queen, Scheherazade.

Scheherazade is the bride of a ruthless king, Shahryar, who has sworn to wed a new virgin every day and behead the previous day’s consort (charming, right?). To buy time, she tells him stories, and eventually they change his view on life, so he spares her. One of those tales is the story of Aladdin.

Shahryar looking distinctly hipster, Scheherazade rocking the pre-Raphaelite vibe.

The 1001 nights were compiled into books for western audiences in the 18th century, but the stories are much older. Much of the inspiration, & key characters like Jafar, come from a golden age in Arab history – the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Abbasid Caliphate was a vast empire stretching from the shores of North Africa to the borders of India. Its rulers claimed descent from the prophet Mohammed’s uncle. They were ruthless warriors, but they allowed non-muslims, known as Dhimmis, to practice their faiths.

It was Abbasid scholars who translated ancient Greek works of philosophy, science and medicine, preserving them for posterity. Without them, the knowledge could have been lost forever. The Renaissance, which was built on the rediscovery of these texts, might never have happened.

And it is from the height of the Abbasid empire that the story of Aladdin comes. The greatest Abbasid king, or Caliph, was Harun al-Rashid (AD786-809). He didn’t murder wives on the regular like the fictional Shahryar, but he was pretty brutal, and dedicated his life to war.

Emissaries from the Frankish emperor Charlemagne pay tribute to Harun.

His mentor was one of his father’s advisor’s, a formidable intellectual known as Yahya the Barmakid. Yahya was from eastern Persia, and had grown up Buddhist, but converted to Islam to serve the Abbasids. Yahya’s son became best friends with the young Harun.

Yahya’s son was called…

Jafar.

When Harun became Caliph, Yahya served as his vizier, a position of enormous power for a ruler who avoided public exposure.

Yahya the Barmakid holds court.

Harun preferred to walk incognito through the bazaars, accompanied only by Jafar and a bodyguard. As Yahya aged, Jafar naturally took on more of his father’s duties. Under the the guidance of the Barmakids, the empire flourished, but a disagreement with the Caliph threatened everything.

The Abbasids had many enemies. Their preferred approach for dealing with them was violent murder, but Yahya and Jafar could see this was spawning bloodfeuds which could last centuries, and attempted a policy of reconciliation with rebels & supporters of previous regimes.

This may have been the right thing to do, but it’s not a way to stay alive when you are the servant of a tyrant. In 803, Harun al-Rashid, incensed by his advisors walking in on him unannounced, ordered the executions of both Yahya and Jafar - mentor and best friend.

An honourable death was one in which no blood was shed.

At the end of the Aladdin movie, Jafar gets his comeuppance when he’s tricked into becoming a genie. His insatiable lust for power is his undoing. The King is just a friendly guy who had the wool pulled over his eyes by the evil manipulator.

Phenomenal cosmic power!

At a distance of 1000 years, it’s impossible to say what anyone was really like. From the facts we have, it looks an awful lot like the much-loved fairytale is a masterwork of political spin, portraying the oppressor as the victim.

Just, whatever you do, don't tell these guys…

A whole new world, built on the lies of your father, the mass murderer.