A secret women kept for a long time: We're good at keeping secrets
Don't take it from me: this is official MI5 guidance. Or at least it was in 1945, when Charles Henry Maxwell Knight – the spymaster thought to have inspired 'M' in the James Bond books – recommended that the secret services should employ more women.
'It is frequently alleged that women are less discreet than men,' he wrote, in a memo currently on display in an exhibition about the history of MI5. 'My own experience has been very much to the contrary. During the present war, M.S. [a section of MI5] has investigated probably hundreds of 'loose talk' [cases]. In by far the greater proportion of these, the offenders were men.'
Maxwell Knight had a theory about why men were so prone to blabbing. 'Indiscretions are committed from conceit,' he proposed. The fragile male ego is too easily tempted by the feeling of importance that comes with revealing a juicy secret. 'A man's conceit will often lead him to indiscretion, in an endeavour to build himself up among his fellow men.'
That has the ring of truth about it, although I don't believe it's an especially male weakness. The currency of gossip is nowhere more powerful than among teenage girls. Indeed, my own theory is that women are better at keeping secrets because we start young and get lots of practice. Whether for innate or cultural reasons, girls tend from an early age to have more intense, confiding friendships than boys do. Sharing secrets is an exercise in trust. When it goes wrong – as it often does, because keeping a secret is hard – the ensuing maelstrom of rumour, ridicule, fury and shame gives everyone concerned a hard lesson in the importance of discretion.
It may take multiple betrayals – by you, as well as of you – but eventually you learn to master temptation. I have found that keeping a secret is like giving up smoking: whenever a craving strikes, just wait five minutes and it will pass. Each craving is weaker than the last, until eventually the longing to tell dissipates altogether. My head is stuffed with secrets that once seemed impossible to contain, but are now old and boring and covered in dust.
It used to be thought that men were more discreet than women, because they tended to talk less. But being taciturn is not at all the same as being trustworthy. Precisely because of all the gossiping and confiding we do, women develop the mental muscles required to keep the important things to ourselves. We are good at winkling out secrets, but also at storing them.
It's a neat coincidence that Maxwell Knight's memo went on display in the same week as the death of Charlotte 'Betty' Webb. Just 18 when she ditched a domestic science course to work as a secret codebreaker at Bletchley Park, Webb decoded German messages revealing the start of the Holocaust, and was later seconded to America to help decipher Japanese military code.
For 30 years after the war, Webb didn't tell a soul what she had done. She worked as a school secretary, and resisted the promptings of conceit. It was, she admitted, a huge relief when the government lifted the omertà on Bletchley Park and she was finally able to talk about it. Alas, by then her parents were dead – and 'my husband wasn't particularly interested'.
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National Geographic
11 hours ago
- National Geographic
Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi puppet—and his famous flight was overrated. Here's why.
Charles Lindbergh standing in front of his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, which he used on his transatlantic flight. Photograph by Bridgeman Images The aviator was so impressed by German propaganda that he grossly overestimated Hitler's airpower. I have to declare a personal stake that shapes my opinion as I write this story. It has its origins in 1940, 85 years ago this month. I was seven years old, living near London. I watched the choreography of a great battle underway, etched in vapor trails high above in the crisp blue sky of summer, the combat that became known as the Battle of Britain. I wasn't scared. I watched with the detached excitement of a child unaware of how perilous those days were for us. That understanding would come later, from my work as a journalist, spending years discovering how closely fought that famous victory was. Had that battle been lost it is doubtful that Britain, then alone as most of Western Europe fell to Hitler, could have survived, as it did, until Pearl Harbor made American intervention inevitable. As things have turned out, one of my most unsettling discoveries has been that a man long hailed as an American legend, Charles Lindbergh, worked avidly with the Germans to undermine the chances of a British victory. Much has long been known about Lindbergh's alliance with American fascists between 1939 and 1941, and particularly his speech in Des Moines, Iowa in September 1941, in which he blamed three groups—the Roosevelt administration, the British and the Jews—for pressing the nation to confront Hitler. Much less known is the role Lindbergh played in England during the 1930s as Hitler's useful idiot, spreading the idea that Nazi Germany had become an invincible air power. The first Nazi to spot and exploit Lindbergh as an effective agent of German disinformation was Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy and head of his air force, the Luftwaffe. Goering recognized that Lindbergh's celebrity gave him oracular authority on aviation—whether justified or not. Portrait of Charles Lindbergh Photograph by The Stapleton Collection, Bridgeman Images A decade after Lindbergh's epic solo flight across the Atlantic, on October 16, 1937, the Nazis made their master move, allowing him into their secret test field at Rechlin, near the Baltic coast. Virtually all the Luftwaffe's future aircraft were revealed to him. Credulous and convinced that no other European power rivaled Germany in the air, Lindbergh thereafter became a powerful influence on the 'peace at any price' factions in Britain and France. Lindbergh had no background in military aviation, but when he spoke on the subject of anything with wings, a lot of important people listened. There were numerous reports of Lindbergh pressing his views on leading European politicians, some of whom found them unnerving and demoralizing. For example, the British military attaché in Paris, seeing how rattled the French were by Lindbergh's assessments, reported to London, '…the Fuhrer found a most convenient ambassador in Colonel Lindbergh.' Limited Time: Bonus Issue Offer Subscribe now and gift up to 4 bonus issues—starting at $34/year. Lindbergh's impact in Britain was equally effective. In a single meeting he could turn a stern patriot into an abject appeaser. In 1938 a highly influential Tory, Thomas Jones, noted in his diary that before listening to Lindbergh he had been for standing up against Hitler but: 'Since my talk with Lindbergh I've sided with those working for peace at any cost in humiliation, because of the picture of our relative unpreparedness in the air…' (How the Battle of Britain changed the war—and the world—forever) Lindbergh also had a willing ear in the American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy. In 1938 he told Kennedy that Germany was then able to produce 20,000 military airplanes a year and gave a dark prediction of likely British defeat in the air. (In October 1938 Goering, on behalf of Hitler, awarded Lindbergh the Service Cross of the German Eagle.) In fact, Lindbergh's numbers were absurdly inflated. They were, literally, being used by the Nazis as a force multiplier. Moreover, Lindbergh's propaganda had masked a systemic weakness in the organization of German aircraft production. It was far from being a model of Teutonic efficiency. Production was dispersed among many manufacturers competing for resources and slowed by supply chain bottlenecks. In contrast, British aircraft production was far more rigorously directed and resourced from a central command. Charles Lindbergh receiving the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hermann Goering on behalf of Adolf Hitler Photograph by SZ Photo/Scherl, Bridgeman Images More crucially, Lindbergh had no inkling of a game-changing technical leap in the deployment of air power that the British pioneered, the world's most advanced radar-based early warning system. Incoming waves of bombers could be pinpointed and tracked before they reached the British coast. Their size, direction and altitude were precisely plotted on a map in a central operations room, enabling the Royal Air Force (R.A.F) to deploy its precious hundreds of advanced fighters and pilots sparingly in the most efficient and deadly way. Britain's 'finest hour' At the outbreak of war, in September 1939, Germany did have a clear lead in numbers: 2,893 available front-line airplanes versus 1,600 in Britain. But by July, 1940, when the Battle of Britain began, the difference had narrowed. Britain had 644 front-line fighters to 725 German (with their time over England critically limited by fuel). By the end of September, when the RAF's famous victory was achieved, they had 732 fighters available while the Luftwaffe was reduced to 438. Weeks before the battle in the air began, Britain's expeditionary army in France had been nearly wiped out, saved only by the evacuation at Dunkirk. Few foresaw that its air force, the most scientifically advanced of its forces, was actually capable of saving the day. But—a point mostly overlooked by historians—Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fighting off a last-ditch resistance by appeasers, made his confidence in the R.A.F's strengths the bulwark of his case for carrying on the war. (Searching for the remains of two early transatlantic pilots) This is testament to Churchill's remarkable openness, at the age of 65, to technical transformation: As a young man he had served in the army, and had then twice served as First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1911 and 1939, running the Royal Navy. But, as much as he loved Britain's imperial-scale navy, he understood in 1940, ahead of many others, that the island nation's last line of defense was now in the air. On June 18, 1940, in one of his greatest speeches, Churchill warned, 'The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us…if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.' Yet, if Britain prevailed, the world would say, 'This was their finest hour.' The battle engaged remarkably low numbers of men in combat, only a few hundred on each side, almost like medieval knights, each alone in a cockpit. 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His airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, was a one-off bespoke model built for only one purpose: for one man to safely cross the Atlantic. It was not in any way a precursor. The science necessary to carry passengers safely across any ocean was an American achievement, developed mainly in a wind tunnel at Caltech in California, where two companies, Boeing and Douglas, created the first twin-engine all-metal airliners. In fact, the need for a larger, twin-engine airplane to cross oceans was foretold by two British military aviators, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, who were the first to actually fly across the Atlantic, 1,890 miles, from Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919, in a converted World War I bomber. They landed, unheralded, in a field and came to rest, nose down, in a bog, not like Lindbergh on a floodlit runway with the whole world listening on radio. As a result, to this day few people realize who was first. 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New York Post
a day ago
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At least 3 killed and others injured in train derailment in southern Germany
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Newsweek
2 days ago
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Tears As Doorbell Cam Captures Mailman Bringing Dog Home for 'Last Time'
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I took her to the ER vet again," Klapatauskas said. "An ultrasound revealed a large tumor on her spleen and her abdomen filled with blood as one of the tumors had ruptured." Klapatauskas was left facing an unimaginable choice: have Stoli put to sleep that day, or have her undergo surgery, which would, at best, give her six more months. "I was not going to put her through that," Klapatauskas said. "She was way too good of a best friend for me to allow that to happen. I knew that I had to be the one to bear the pain of losing her." It is a pain Klapatauskas has found difficult to bear. "She was my heart dog," she said. "She was my constant source of unconditional love and acceptance. She saw me through breakups, a career change, a move and a major medical diagnosis." When a beloved pet like Stoli passes, you aren't just mourning the loss of a four-legged friend, you are mourning a death in the family. That is a sentiment backed up by science. 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That heartbreaking delivery and the emotional exchange that followed was captured on Klapatauskas's doorbell camera, with the footage later posted to her TikTok @krysk710. At the time of writing, it has been watched almost 3 million times, with Malachi's simple act of kindness touching so many. "We just sat and cried and talked about how much it sucked that she was gone," said Klapatauskas. "He knew it was going to be a very rough time for me, and he chose to sit with me and be a source of comfort. My mom had been on her way to my house and pulled up to Malachi and I sitting on the porch together. I'm thankful he stayed until she got there." There was something so gut-wrenching about seeing Stoli, her big bundle of love, reduced to a small box. "She hasn't fit in my lap since she was a puppy," Klapatauskas said. "That thought broke me." But she wasn't alone at that moment, thanks to Malachi. 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