“A Bridge of Spies” if realistic and factual is a great Tom Hanks movie about “Wild Bill” Donovan, Francis Gary Powers, KGB Colonel Rudolph Abel, the Berlin Wall, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady. The movie starts off with Col. Abel performing the acquisition of a KGB left dead drop of a message carrying fake coin and a little later getting picked up for espionage by FBI counterintelligence agents. Anyway to cut to the chase and getting to point of this blog entry, Francis Gary Powers, an Air force officer, along with other Air Force officers meet in a no tell motel with a CIA agent to be clandestinely inducted into the CIA as “drivers” (pilots) of “The Article” (CIA lingo for Clarence “Kelly” Johnson’s famous Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady). Meeting away from CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, gave the CIA plausible deniability if one of the drivers was captured. Of course, on Mayday, May 1, 1959, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union from an altitude of 70,000+ feet by a very high-flying Surface to Air Missile (SAM) developed by the U.S.S.R. He failed to destroy his “Article” via the self-destruct switch which was to be activated before ejection from the U-2. Another failure was that Captain Powers did not eat his cyanide pill hidden away in a coin on his person. Anyway, the story has a happy ending with Francis Gary Powers being swapped for Col. Abel on the “Bridge of Spies” near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Please watch the movie for more detail. I just wrote this blog entry to display one method of CIA maintaining plausible deniability.
Author: jamespatewilliamsjr
My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.
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Numerical Explorations 