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Speaker 3: Okay, okay, we got that.
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Speaker 2: Out of the way, and again, welcome to the first time listener today's show. We're gonna be talking about the book Globe Master down with the author Todd Robertson, who has joined me.
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Speaker 3: Welcome to the show.
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Speaker 4: Thank you very much.
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Speaker 2: You're super cool bro. So heyng ty, I'm gonna read your bio. Okay, so stand by, here we go. Todd Robertson is a Politzer Prize winning journalist who has spent over twenty five years as a foreign correspondent. He has covered wars throughout Latin America, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and has provided guests commentary for CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, which is MPR Love, NPR, SKY News, Telemundo Love Telemundo. Robertson holds a master's degree in arab studies from Georgetown University and has won awards for investigative journalism and reporting on international human smuggling rings. He has lived in Lebanon, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, Columbia, and the United Kingdom, and speaks Spanish and Arabic. All right, did I is that a good way to introduce you?
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Speaker 4: You got it all? You got it all?
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Speaker 2: Oh well, shudkin. I think that's how you say thank you at Arabic shukran, shukran. Hat's going all right, souk out? Well, thank you, okay, and thank you very much, and welcome to the show, dude.
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Speaker 3: Thanks for wanting to be on.
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Speaker 4: I'm thrilled to be here.
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Speaker 3: Here, well, I'm thrilled to have you.
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Speaker 2: I mean, okay, here, let's go back to Todd the seventeen year old. Okay, let's just crack that open. What was Todd the seventeen year old thinking about doing in his life?
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Speaker 3: Wow.
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Speaker 5: By the time Todd reached seventeen, he had already been through a number of hair raising incidents, including an encounter at age five with a guy a group of guys with bows and arrows who were threatening to shoot us my brother and me at close range if we didn't hand over I think some birds nests that we found or something like that. I fell off the garage roof at age seven onto solid concrete.
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Speaker 4: Spent some time in the hospital.
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Speaker 5: I was shot at when I was a freshman in high school while riding my bicycle home from a friend's house at night, and I took a short cut that apparently somebody didn't want me to take. And let's see, then I got lost in the mountains my junior year of high school, in between my junior and senior year of high school, and they had to launch a big rescue operation in Colorado to find me and bring me back.
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Speaker 4: So, yeah, by.
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Speaker 5: Age seventeen, I clearly had a bent for adventure, and I clearly was someone who was both interested in the in the headlines and making headlines.
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Speaker 2: So the lost in the Colorado Mountains being lost, you were literally lost though, right.
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Speaker 4: Yes, in between Durango and Silverton.
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Speaker 5: I always knew where I was, but nobody else knew where I was. And so I found my way back to where I knew they would find me, and they sent in a helicopter and found me.
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Speaker 2: How many days were you in the mounta It was just a day, or just like did mom and dad say, hey, where's Todd?
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Speaker 4: It was two days?
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Speaker 3: Two days, two days?
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Speaker 4: I was gone.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, So there was a search and rescue expedition sent out for you.
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Speaker 3: Mom and dad were like, where are you? Yeah.
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Speaker 5: Launch launched by the sheriff in in Silverton, Colorado.
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Speaker 2: Thank you Silverton, Colorado Sheriff's Department. We appreciate your effort and going into the backwoods and rescuing individuals who decide to go out on their own. Yeah, at sixteen years year old, seventeen years.
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Speaker 4: Old, kids don't do this.
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Speaker 3: Were you a boy scout at all? Did you ever go through Scouts or anything like that.
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Speaker 5: I was a boy scout, Yes, I didn't make it to Actually I was a cub scout.
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Speaker 4: I never made it to boy Scouts.
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Speaker 5: My brother did, My oldest brother did, but I never made it that far.
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Speaker 2: But you had some scouting, you know, Hey, this is how we kind of get along. I get that. I'm just trying to put this young man in perspective. Here for folks like you know, we've all gone off. I go hiking in the mountains with my family wife. It's like, but for two days, how did you survive that? I know that we have a book to talk about, but I'm curious, how did you survive that two days?
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Speaker 3: Well?
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Speaker 5: I I had no food, no water, and uh and I was pretty delirious by the end of it all. But luckily I had enough of my my mental faculties to know that I needed to get to an open place where the rescuers could find me. Uh And it was very hard because I had badly injured my right foot and uh and and so I kind of limped over to where I knew.
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Speaker 4: My sister and brother.
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Speaker 5: Uh My my sister and her boyfriend at the time were camping with me, and I I got separated from them and uh uh and and yeah that's so.
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Speaker 4: So I just they they went out to get help.
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Speaker 5: And when I got back, they had left the campsite exactly intact, believing that I would find my way back, and sure enough I did, but they were gone by the time I got there. And I actually I was up very high on a mountain and saw them leaving and I was shouting down to them, don't leave, don't leave, and I couldn't get down in time because I had hurt my foot.
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Speaker 4: So that's what happened.
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Speaker 5: But the bottom line is I knew from that point forward I was a survivor and I was an adventurer. The very next summer went, I bought quality camping gear and quality boots and went back and got back on that horse and continued a life of adventure after that.
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Speaker 2: Okay, and that's the podcast, everybody. That is the harrowy story that we were just here to crack today. I had no idea that is amazing. First of all, I can only imagine I would maybe cry a little bit and realize, Okay, they just left me.
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Speaker 3: Now I'm all by myself.
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Speaker 2: I probably have a little emotional breakdown, and then I had to group and'd be like, okay, it's me, me, myself and I and get down. However, like you said, you were injured. Holy cow, that's really cool. So did that?
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Speaker 3: Oh man? I got so many questions off of this.
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Speaker 2: So Todd, when you are now senior in high school, you've gone through this ordeal of being lost in the woods, and you know everybody's come to their senses. Their mom and dad aren't mad anymore at your sister, okay, or her boyfriend, and not at you, and everybody's all happy. What took you to, you know? Being like the resume that I just read to you. You know, it says you're a prize a political prize winning journalist, you spent over twenty five years or fourth correspondent. What took you into that path of the foreign correspondent?
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Speaker 3: You know? And how old were you when that happened?
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Speaker 4: Well, I was involved in journalism in high school.
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Speaker 5: I was the sports editor of the high school yearbook. And I had known since third grade that I was a good writer. My my third grade teacher, Miss Bittner, held up an essay that I wrote and read it out to the class and said, this is an example of excellent writing. And and ever since then I knew that I could write well. Got into college and didn't really know what to do with my life. I was going to the University of Texas, and back then you didn't declare a major until the end of your sophomore year. So I went in to see a counselor not really sure what to do, and he said, well, what do you think you want to do And I said, I don't know, be an English major, and he goes, yeah, well, let's talk about job prospects for English majors. There's not really a lot you can do with an English degree. And at the time, you know, it was the Woodward and Bernstein era. Watergate was hot in the news. And he said, you know you're a writer. Why don't you try journalism? And I said, I don't know, and he goes, well, I got to tell you you're already listed as a journalism major. Maybe it's a computer glitch or something, but that's what your major has already set on my files. And he said, just give it a try. Take journalism one O one and see how you do. And it instantly clicked. And so the professor again, you know, held out my work as the best in the class. And that summer I decided to go up and to love at Texas and hang out with my brother.
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Speaker 4: We roofed houses for the summer, and.
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Speaker 5: Then we came home one day and there was a fire at one of the fraternities at Texas Tech fraternity houses and so I just grabbed a notepad and a pencil and walked over there, fresh with my grimy clothes from roofing houses in one hundred and seven degree heat, and I interviewed the fire chief, looked around the ruins of the fire, walked into the school newspaper and said, did you have anybody covering this?
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Speaker 4: And they said no one.
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Speaker 5: I said, well, I can write a story and they said yes.
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Speaker 4: So I sat down on the.
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Speaker 5: Spot, wrote a story for them, and then landed a job on the university newspaper and just decided I would stay at Texas Tech.
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Speaker 3: So I just came then, I riding that wave.
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Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, and I within within eight months I had won national, state, and regional awards in journalism top awards, and so I knew I was in the right place.
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Speaker 2: That's awesome. And so you've just been trucking along in journalism. Uh, you know, you've been all over the world covering all sorts of different types of conflicts, and you know, is there anything that just you know, other than Globe Maaster Down, which we're going to talk about, which.
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Speaker 3: Is your book.
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Speaker 2: Go check it out if you really want to know what we're going to talk about. It is Globe Maastered Down. Okay, right, okay, But I just want to know. Was there anything that just really stood out to you that you covered that was just like, you know, I can't believe I'm actually covering this situation.
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Speaker 5: That's that might be the topic for yet another interview.
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Speaker 3: Oh, yes, yes, I know.
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Speaker 5: I covered El Salvador Lebanon, the Afghan War, Israel, Palestine. I spent gobs of time covering the Iran Iraq War. I was the last Washington Post correspondent in Iraq before the bombs started falling in nineteen ninety one.
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Speaker 4: And I can tell you I'll list some of the highlights for you.
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Speaker 5: El Salvador the Salvador and military invaded a little town called Arkatau to capture me along with a photographer and a BBC correspondent. They invaded and I've got a recording of the bullets hitting the mud hut where we were hitting. We were hiding. They captured us, took us back for interrogation, and then took our notes, film and recordings, went back and killed four people in the village who had talked to us.
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Speaker 4: So that was El Salvador Lebanon.
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Speaker 5: I was kidnapped by Hesbelah back when nobody who knew who.
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Speaker 3: Hesbola was right, right, right right.
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Speaker 5: And uh and and uh I escaped. It was a very short, uh little experience, like I said, this is the stuff for maybe.
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Speaker 3: Another Yeah, no, I love it. Oh my gosh, it's real stuff.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 5: And and so there was that, and then UH, let's see uh Panama, I caught a fugitive from the United States who had built a bunch of people out of a bunch of money, and UH.
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Speaker 4: Wrote a story about it.
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Speaker 2: Uh.
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Speaker 5: The US extra died him the very next day, and then he sued me for one billion dollars.
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Speaker 2: There billion dollars and then and then uh Afghanistan.
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Speaker 4: Uh.
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Speaker 5: Just a few months after nine to eleven, I was hanging out with a guy who was posing as a special operator and a guy named Jonathan Keith Edema, otherwise known as Jack and a lot of your listeners who have experienced in Afghanistan might very well have heard of him. And we got into a discussion about someone I knew in El Salvador that he knew, and I was talking about going out and interviewing the FMLN in El Salvador and then getting captured and and he said he said something to the effect of, well, if I ever find out that you're out interviewing the Tala Bonner al kaieda, I'm gonna I'm gonna kill you, and I interrupted him to make a clarification on something, and the next thing I knew, boom, he had pulled out a gun from his ankle holster and shot me, and the bullet went that far from my shoulder, in through a couch and into the wall behind me. I realized he was upset that I had interrupted him, so I sat forward and with a totally straight face, trying not to show that my heart was beating so hard it was going to pop out of my chest, and I said, I'm sorry I interrupted you. And there was another a real special operator in the room who said, that was the coolest thing.
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Speaker 4: You ever saw.
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Speaker 5: So so what I would say for your for your listeners, though, is we probably all have something in common. There is there are certain people who when they experience high levels of pressure and danger, their alert system comes into play and they they actually do the opposite of panic. They focus really well. And I feel like I've got that ability. I didn't panic in under any of these situations, kept calm, stayed organized, stayed focused, and that's how I survived to be able to do this interview today.
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Speaker 2: I see a new shirt, stay Calm, organized and focused. Okay, that's it, the stay calm shirt or carry on organized and focused, stay organized and focus.
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Speaker 3: Let me write that down organized.
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Speaker 2: That's a great organized and focused like I'm going to do right now for the rest of this show.
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Speaker 3: Stayed organized and focused. Okay.
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Speaker 2: Now, thank you for bringing me into that world of your past just for a little bit and giving us a glimpse of what you've been involved with. Now, let's let's transition into globe master down. Okay, and if I could just kind of surmise or you know, just get a small little zee summarize. Yes, it's uh, you know, aircraft carrying people with you know, an atomic bomb of sorts on it that went down, and it's in you know.
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Speaker 3: The World War two era, right.
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Speaker 4: Almost?
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Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, please please?
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Speaker 5: So what happened was this is post World War two, the Cold War is beginning, and the United States recognizes that Russia has not demobilized from World War Two. All the other belligerents in World War Two had either been defeated or were rapidly drawing down their forces, bringing their troops home. They people just wanted to enjoy normal life, and you know, husbands and brothers and fathers wanted to get back to their families. So the United States was pulling troops out of Europe, Britain was pulling its troops back home, and they were doing troop assessments of Soviet forces and realized they still had more than a million troops on the front lines between western and Eastern Europe. They were not demobilizing in any way, and so the commanders began doing assessments of, well, what happens next if the Communists decided that they're going to take over Europe. So they began doing these these very serious assessments of it, and the more they assessed it, the more convinced they were that in fact, Stalin had every intention of moving into Europe and possibly going as far as taking over Britain. And so they began holding a series of meetings to discuss how to respond to this, how to prepare for this. And so they knew that they needed to get US atomic forces into Britain. They just didn't know how to do it because nobody, none of the leaders in Europe was as the world saw the images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They knew that no European nation would openly, you know, publicly say yes, United States, bring in your atomic weapons. That's exactly what we need. It just wasn't going to happen. It was politically unpalatable. So they began looking at other ways of deploying, and they realized that the easiest method, which was just to load atomic bombs into B twenty nine's in the United States and flying them over to attack the Soviets, was not viable because if the Soviets actually invaded en mass with a million troops, they were going to have already swept across the continent before the US planes were in the air.
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Speaker 4: And they also assessed that.
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Speaker 5: We can drop five ten atomic bombs on them, and that's still not going to stop them. They can survive that, and they will continue to hold ground and they will be harder to uproot than.
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Speaker 4: It was to get Hitler out.
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Speaker 5: So they knew that they needed to come up with another plan, and they came up with a secret plan, a top secret plan, to put US atomic forces in Britain. And so the Strategic Air Command, which was commanded by a General Curtis LeMay began drawing up plans to do this, and so they they formalized the plans and then named a commander named Paul T. Cullen to open up the first strategic Air Command base in Britain. But it was still not officially announced that this would be an atomic air base.
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Speaker 4: It was just going to be a strategic Air command base.
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Speaker 5: The only problem was the strategic Air comp and didn't do anything else other than deliver atomic bombs, and so, uh it was pretty apparent what the mission was. This plane, Globe Master uh OF is which is a C one four a triple decker plane, a cargo plane. It was the largest plane in existence at the time, uh and and the tail number was four nine two four four.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: Uh.
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Speaker 5: They loaded it up with fifty three crew members as well as atomic attack specialists and including the general who's gonna.
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Speaker 3: Cut yeah, Brigadier right, and they they they.
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Speaker 5: They engaged in a number of flights domestically before they took off over the Atlantic. And their cargo consisted of two KB twenty nine fuel tanks which would enable be twenty nine to refuel in the air, plus a cargo that weighed ten thousand three hundred and ninety five pounds. A fat Man bomb or the fat Man bomb that they dropped on Nagasaki weighed ten thousand, three hundred pounds, so there was only a ninety five pound difference between that cargo and the cargo was the weight of the cargo was in addition to those KB twenty nine tanks. So so this book examines what that cargo might have been and what the mission was, and so we can get into that.
00:22:41
Speaker 3: That's that's awesome.
00:22:42
Speaker 2: Now I'm here in Utah, that's where I live, and we have Windover, which is the airbase just out here, which is a huge pivotal, you know, role in all of this, I have to say, with dropping on the first bomb, the second bomb, you know on Japan, the Doolittle raid. There's a road out here the desert that we go and do wargames on dool Little Road. Okay, I'm just kind of bringing this into you know, like you said, this is that same timeframe, and so Bro, the funny thing is is I own a building just outside Hill Air Force Base. Okay, it's a ten thousand square foot warehouse. I have a I do wargames in there, and it's literally across the street from the base, and where my parking lot was was where they kept the B twenty nine's and the city I'm in needed a road, and they said, okay, hey, we'll back the fence line up for the base and give the city a road so they can incorporate themselves as a city and give this road. And so I'm literally right there where that took place. The people that would fly on those planes would get a paycheck. They would come into my shop at the time and cash those paychecks because it was a grocery store. The shop I bought was the nineteen forty four grocery store outside the base.
00:23:51
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:23:52
Speaker 2: So I feel a whole lot of like doo little guys have come through that facility looking for something to eat. There's I have the columns in my shop like a store for ales, you know, and it's just like they're so.
00:24:04
Speaker 3: And then and then of.
00:24:05
Speaker 2: Course having having the wind Over, you know, segment of it right out ninety miles ninety minutes away from us.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: I've been there several times, just just for.
00:24:13
Speaker 5: Your listener's enjoyment. Uh and and and information. Windover plays a key role in the early part of this book. Because that's where UH Colonel Paul Tibbet's and and the five oh ninth uh uh UH, the five oh ninth UH composite wing UH trained UH with with dummy batman bombs to to UH to perform the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My wife's grandfather trained there and lived there, and my wife's father lived.
00:24:51
Speaker 4: At wind Windover in those early days. Oh wow, yes, And and so this UH that plays into the entire story that.
00:25:02
Speaker 5: And it is it unfolds in Globe Master down in the early part, and it connects to everything that happened afterwards. But Doolittle plays a role in it. Tibbets plays a role in it. My wife's grandfather was on the Globe Master, so I didn't get to finish the actual what happened. The Globe Master made it two thirds of the way across the Atlantic, and then, without any radio communication or any indication of any problem, took a sharp right turn, went three hundred miles due south way off course, and ditched in the middle of the Atlantic. The all fifty three on board disappeared, the cargo disappeared, and the plane. The only contents of the plane were a few splintered wooden pieces from the cargo deck and a briefcase from one of the passengers. It contained some magazine and some other stuff. And that's all they found of the entire mission. And it wasn't until twenty sixteen when the United States publicly aired some current concerns that it had existed for a long time. Was that A this was an act of sabotage, and b they believed the Soviets might have had a role in it, because they believed that the Soviets had ships and submarines in the very area where the plane went down.
00:26:26
Speaker 3: There.
00:26:27
Speaker 2: Let me ask you this, Todd, the three hundred miles off course, where would that kind of put them with their lost this lost broken arrow?
00:26:37
Speaker 3: Really? Yes?
00:26:38
Speaker 5: Yeah, if yes, it would have put them about six hundred and fifty miles south west of the coast of Ireland.
00:26:49
Speaker 3: Wow. Wow, And I know that.
00:26:52
Speaker 2: Researching our conversation just a little bit prior to us, I found out there was a few broken arrows that the government well knowledge, Like in Fayeville, North Carolina, there's some type of a broken arrow, and then there's another one that's lost, and there's one like Georgia.
00:27:07
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, and then there's there's one off the coast of Spain, and and there This is a little little known fact, but the United States has listed broken arrows that were recovered. What they will not tell you is the number and location of the broken arrows that were never recovered. And writing this book was particularly difficult because there are thousands of pages of top secret documents that have not been declassified and I could not access them, and and I set off alarm bells when I asked for them, because I was told by an archivist at the National Archives, if.
00:27:57
Speaker 4: If an atomic weapon has been.
00:27:59
Speaker 5: Lost and has not been recovered, the documents related to that cannot be released. And that was because I posed a question to her, and I said, I'm not hanging up until I get an answer to this. After seventy five years, you there's something still so secret that you can't release it.
00:28:19
Speaker 4: And she said correct, and then she explained it.
00:28:24
Speaker 3: That's just mind blows.
00:28:25
Speaker 2: I mean, I get top secret, I get secret, secret, super secret, Okay, squirrel secret, oss secret, you know, Winston Churchill secret.
00:28:32
Speaker 3: I get all the secrets, right, I get it. I get it.
00:28:35
Speaker 2: But bro like plutonium just out there, you know, you know, yeah, I've seen movies in the eighties about platonium. Okay, come on now, bro, that's plutonium out there, and I guess it's good to keep that a secret from our adversary so that they can't you know, where are we trying to recover it from or anything like that, and so they can get it because everybody wants a little platonium. We all see back to the future. Come on now, yes, platonium doc what so so okay, So for my listener, a broken arrow. I kind of just threw that out there. It's where we've lost a nuclear or atomic bomb.
00:29:17
Speaker 3: Right.
00:29:17
Speaker 2: That's specifically like a broken arrow, is that it's a broken arrow somewhere.
00:29:22
Speaker 3: It's got to be recovered.
00:29:23
Speaker 2: It's been stolen, it's been whatever the case lost crashed and see am I hitting that right?
00:29:29
Speaker 3: Yes?
00:29:30
Speaker 5: Now, the in this case, I tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and there are some missing pieces of the puzzle because they're in those classified documents that they will not release. But I've you know, established the weight of the cargo. I've established the nature of the mission. I've established what was going on in terms of training operations involving fat Man dummy bombs over Europe at the exact moment this plane was in the air. And so the question is would the United States regard a fat man that didn't contain a nuclear core as an atomic weapon? And the answer is yes, they did. In fact, there were number of cases before and after this where the US lost fat Man bombs without the nuclear core, and they listed that as a broken arrow incident, a lost atomic bomb. So by the US government's own definition, this was this could have been a lost bomb. But I don't call it a broken arrow in the book just because those missing pieces in it. I'm a journalist and I can't say something is true and I don't don't have confirmation of it.
00:30:56
Speaker 2: I love that, and I love you for being that kind of journalist. Okay, I aspire to you and the Christina Amipor's and all of that out there. That's I appreciate the honesty and integrity that you bring to your journalism, and we just need to know that that exists. And and I just want you to know I'm also of that saying I want to be of that same cloth as you. Now, it seems to me that this mission, this globe mastered down situation that they were trying to, you know, get over to England and you know, be prepared, was maybe, you know, compromised from the get go.
00:31:31
Speaker 3: It was like, you know, it just doesn't seem like what do you think of that?
00:31:37
Speaker 4: Well, so why was it compromised from the get go?
00:31:41
Speaker 5: There were a number of possibilities as well as one absolute certainty. And I'll do the possibilities first, because the absolute certainty is bizarre. So the possibilities are that the entire Manhattan Project had already been infiltrated by Soviet spies. Klaud Fuchs just one of several who were feeding information directly to Joseph Stalin. And so when Harry Truman pulled Stalin aside to tell him the United States was about to launch a big attack on Japan to end the war, and he told Stalin it was an atomic bomb, Stalin didn't react. This is according to Truman's own memoirs. Stalin didn't react. He just went, oh, that's nice, and then he just moved on because Stalin already knew and so US nuclear the most secret aspect of the entire war, had already been compromised. And Stalin seemed to make it his mission in life to show the United States, no matter what you do, I can infiltrate you and get your secrets, so don't try it. And uh so there was as as I unfolded the book, there was a good reason to believe that that, uh, that this mission and and the conversations that Curtis la May was having at the time with his commanders about Europe had already been compromised. In fact, Curtis Lamay and his memoirs uh raised the possibility that they had already been infiltrated, and he was he was cracking down. But those were early in the days. I mean when when he established his Strategic Air Command. Uh his base as well as wind Over didn't even have fences around them, right, so you know, so so they needed.
00:33:43
Speaker 3: To out on the salt flats.
00:33:45
Speaker 2: They're like, we're in the middle of the salt flats exactly, We're in the middle of nowhere. Don't need to Yeah, this is desolate, it's air. There's no fresh water day, it's all saltwater. If you dig down, and it's like, yes, okay, we didn't need a fence, We're our own fence.
00:33:58
Speaker 5: So they put in fences. You know around the time that the Globe Master took off. But but so they were already worried about security. And when the Globe Master took off, there were a number of documents that that you know, I was able to get a hold of where the pilots and crew of of all these aircraft were being warned ahead of time. You know, there there are enemy forces out there, and they could attempt at any time to sabotage, to shoot you down, to to divert you, to capture you. And these are the procedures that you must undertake if this happens. So they were already aware that the enemy, the Soviets, were highly capable of intervening in this this as well as other operations that were going on at the time. They had demonstrated it by shooting down privateer spyplanes that were supposedly, you know, collecting weather data off the coast of Scandin and they shot them down and captured their crew. And and uh so this was you know, for for all they they call it a cold war, it was getting to the point of being a hot war. And on top of this you have Korea and and uh so, so the le Maay and and the other commanders were absolutely convinced that Korea was designed by the Soviets as a diversionary tactic. That it was the idea was to suck US forces into Asia so that he then had an open door to go into Europe.
00:35:36
Speaker 4: And so that was part of the urgency.
00:35:39
Speaker 5: Le May felt to get the atomic weaponry and and attack forces into Europe ahead of time. So then we get to the real security compromise here, which was that the commander Uh that I mentioned.
00:35:59
Speaker 3: Thank you dude. I was just gonna think, like, you know, oh, we'll catch you, trap you. Oh, I know how you can catch and trap a guy.
00:36:06
Speaker 5: So Brigadier General Paul Tuh Right after, right after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States launched up Operation Crossroads to UH test nuclear weapons over the Marshall Islands, Bikinia toll And. During that operation, which my wife's grandfather was a part of, he was operations commander for that Operations Officer uh Cullen was there and he met a Red Cross girl who was on the scene at the time named Reva Joy Hurwitz and and they fell in love. They had an affair, and everybody knew about it and uh, And the affair continued after Operation Crossroads. And what Cullen apparently didn't tell anybody at the time is that he was already married and had been married for sixteen years, and his wife was back in Washington waiting for him, and Cullin snuck away with Reaver Hurwitz to Mexico and I got a copy of their marriage for Mexico and they got married, which meant that Cullen was at Yeah.
00:37:23
Speaker 2: Excuse me, sorry, it's in my head. He's a big a miss Yeah, sorry, polygamist.
00:37:29
Speaker 5: So absolutely under military law, military law at the time as well as military law today as well as civilian law, that was a prosecutable criminal offense, and he he should have rightfully been drummed out in the military, but they didn't do any background checks on him, and so they didn't know even though there were people in his circle of commanders who knew that something strange was going on with him, they didn't do the necessary background check. And that, you know, anybody who's been in the military knows, you know, the enemy when when they're looking to gain intelligence, they look for vulnerabilities, and this was a blatant vulnerability, a because you know, they could blackmail him. B All they had to do was was find out you know the Bridge club these women were hanging out at, or you know where they were shot exactly, yes, and just strike up a conversation.
00:38:28
Speaker 4: Hey, you know anything going on?
00:38:30
Speaker 5: And they both knew about the plan to deploy these atomic forces over to Britain. In fact, they've been told pack your stuff, we're moving to Britain and so.
00:38:45
Speaker 3: So. So it was.
00:38:46
Speaker 5: It was a major security breach and and it went undetected for years afterwards. Well no, I should should not say that went undetected until the plane went down and then.
00:38:58
Speaker 4: Both wives I've sought survivor.
00:39:02
Speaker 5: Benefits and that's how it was exposed that he was married to women at the same time.
00:39:06
Speaker 3: Bro Mickey and Maud. Dude, He's just like, uh, what do I do? Well, yeah, he got read sparrowed.
00:39:12
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's a real term, but there's a movie about it where you know, they trained the women in Russia to come over to get what they need from the guys. We might be seeing it today in our current society. You know, you just never know, You just never know. So uh yeah, because the power of a woman is awesome. Yes, and the guy really wants to have some of that power of that woman. And you know, especially been gone for some desolate place and now all of a sudden you meet somebody and you can't send a text to your wife in DC.
00:39:44
Speaker 3: Back then, there's no hey babe, how you doing? You know, how can we talk?
00:39:48
Speaker 2: No, It's like, let me write you a letter, my dearest Cynthia today, the day is the day, you know, that's.
00:39:53
Speaker 3: How you're writing a letter.
00:39:54
Speaker 2: It gets there two weeks later, so it's like, you know, nobody's really fact checking him like we can't today. You know, it's like a media fact check, Facebook, Instagram, you know, all these different social medias. Here you are here, Here, you are here. Reen cameras caught you walking across the front lawn, you know.
00:40:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, back then there was nothing like that.
00:40:11
Speaker 2: No, no, wow, wow. So we might have the reason why, but we're not sure. But in your book you get into all of this and it really dives in too. You know how this mission seems compromised just from the get go in my opinion, you know, from a perspective, here it's psyches and where did I mean if they found a briefcase okay, and there were some things in it, but they never found the plane.
00:40:39
Speaker 5: No, never found the plane, nor the contents nor there and and there were survivors.
00:40:46
Speaker 4: They were spotted by multiple.
00:40:50
Speaker 5: Rescue planes in the hours following the ditching, which which A indicates if the plane ditches, then it hadn't been disabled in the air. Because to be able to ditch a c one, like I said, a triple deck or plane on open water.
00:41:12
Speaker 4: Took considerable talent.
00:41:15
Speaker 5: But to be able to survive that means it had to have been a relatively smooth landing for them to be able to then get the doors open and escape.
00:41:26
Speaker 3: As if they were landing right.
00:41:28
Speaker 2: They came into the approach as if, okay, we're gonna have to land on the water exactly as best we can and try to set.
00:41:34
Speaker 5: It and get the hell out of there as fast as you can. And so that there were survivors. They were spotted from the air. The survivors disappeared. Now now the existed that the existing orders at the time were if if you're on a secret mission and you you're you're you have in your possession sensitive material that the enemy might try to capture, you are obligated to blow it up, and they they the very orders at the time told them you must blow it up by by whatever means necessary to destroy it. And and so there's a possibility that they sank their own plane to keep it away. If they knew that the Soviets were in the area, then then they destroyed it. It's also possible the plane just would totally broke up on landing and they just narrowly escaped.
00:42:34
Speaker 4: And it disappeared under the water.
00:42:36
Speaker 2: But if you think about modern today landing on a water, like when solely the pilot that landed the plane in the Hudson River, Okay, he was able to land that plane without a breaking up and everybody was on the wings like kind of waiting for.
00:42:51
Speaker 3: Salvation to come and rescue them, you know.
00:42:55
Speaker 2: So it seems like if you have a talented pilot that and a navigator or whatnot, and you can land that plane into the water. Now mind you it might be sea. It's the seas, so there's high seas. You know, there's like, you know, who knows what the waves are doing when they hit. But I mean, it is possible to land the plane to get out, like you said, open the doors and get out. But did anybody ever get recovered? Can you tell me about that or do we need to read the door.
00:43:20
Speaker 4: Nothing was really hick. Nothing was recovered, But I do recommend reading the book.
00:43:24
Speaker 3: No, No, I agree, I agree, I agree. Don't tell me more, tell me all of it.
00:43:27
Speaker 4: No, nothing was recovered.
00:43:29
Speaker 5: And what's interesting is, you know on the flight manifest, this one hundred, this ten thousand, three hundred and ninety five pounds of cargo consisted of engine parts and you know, assorted items, plus some medical equipment that included eight thousand surgical sponges. Eight thousand surgical sponges sponges, which I write in the book is like eight thousand rubber duckies. They should have floated, They should have floated straight to the surface because they're highly boand and yet not one was found, not one.
00:44:05
Speaker 2: Of those sponges that would be like just sitting there, like you found a briefcase.
00:44:09
Speaker 3: I mean, there's a briefcase. There was some wood that was floating. Okay.
00:44:13
Speaker 5: So what the book makes very clear, based on actual documents, is that they were fledging flight manifests left and right during this time because what they were actually doing was flying nuclear components and atomic attack specialists over to Europe, and they did not want a record of what was actually being flown over there, and so they were making up cargo manifests and putting them into the record. So in all likelihood, this cargo manifest was bogus.
00:44:50
Speaker 3: Yes, it was just a facade. Yeah.
00:44:52
Speaker 5: And so again in this whole question of the KB twenty nine, because some of the wooden wreckage that was recovered was of those KB twenty nine fuel tanks that were aboard, and that's key to this whole thing, because the KB twenty nine, if you're trying to hide a fat Man bomb, the KB twenty nine was designed to fit into the expanded cargo hold of a B twenty nine that at the time was called a silver plate B twenty nine. The cargo hold itself was top secret because that was a modified B twenty nine that was made specifically to load a fat Man bomb, and so they had to make the car the bombay door much bigger than normal, and so the KB twenty nine was meant to fit through that exact same bombay, except it was slightly larger than fat Man, meaning you could fit a fat Man inside a KB twenty nine. If your whole goal was to fly it over to Britain and unload it from this cargo plane, without all the British eyes on you seeing what you're unloading, it would just look like a fuel take exactly exactly. And so uh so there there was good reason to believe they were using this to disguise the actual cargo because there they knew there were there were enemy eyes all over the place in Britain that that was documented, and so so they knew they.
00:46:26
Speaker 2: To me the year again, tell me the year that this is transforting.
00:46:29
Speaker 3: To the year again.
00:46:30
Speaker 4: This is nineteen fifty one, nineteen fifty one.
00:46:33
Speaker 5: In fact, last week last week, March twenty third, actually this week March yeah, yeah, yeah, we're March yeah, was the exact seventy fifth anniversary of the time going down.
00:46:46
Speaker 3: Seventy fifth anniversary.
00:46:48
Speaker 2: Well, okay, good timing, okay, Because you have this book, okay, Globe Bastard down, all right, and I mean that I want everyone to go check it out and and and again let me just kind of like pitch your book a little bit. If you go and buy the book glob Master down online at any of these retailers leave a comment for the author down below, you know, like leave a comment where you bought the book. It really goes a long way. And also rate the book on the place and the platform that you purchased it. Whether you buy you know, Todd's book, or you go and buy another book. It's always nice to leave the authors a review. And I just want to encourage you, my listener, to do that. Right, even if it's just one of you out there that goes and buys this book, leave them a review for it, okay, because it matters a lot. And you know, I'm sure supporting local is always going to be what I say. First, go to your local mom and pop book shops that have been around and you know, stood the test of time to continue to have books on the shelf so we can go in and just touch them and hold them and open them.
00:47:41
Speaker 3: And read them.
00:47:42
Speaker 2: And then that goes and helps them keep themselves open. So buy local first. Otherwise, just buy it wherever you can download it. And I want you to read this book. Globe Master down the Soviets, man, I mean really, there's like so much is going on, Dolittle the wind Over. I just was I just wanted to bring up wind over to you, because I'm here. I go to it all the time. I see Windover all we go out. So you got a couple casinos out there now. And I tell my wife, you know, and friends when I go out there.
00:48:09
Speaker 3: You know, this is only here because of the military, right, Like, what do you mean.
00:48:12
Speaker 2: I'm like, well, that water tower up on the peak over there, that's probably just installed by the military. Everything here, this whole town, this whole community here is because of that runway. And when you're traveling on I eighty, which is the freeway that goes between California New York. You're on I eighty going west or east, you can look over to the south and you can see the runway out in the salt flats. You can see the whole thing. I've been there for air shows. I've seen Harrier jets take off. I've you know, they film movies out there. Con Air was filmed out there with Nicholas Cage. They did oh this last one, Fallout, the TV series Fallout. They use the Windover airfield, but today they're actually what's the word when you take something and you refurbish it, it's like the bomb loading doors or something like that they're like this this pit right here that we're standing in is being re refurbished.
00:49:03
Speaker 3: It's like the most important little pitch.
00:49:05
Speaker 4: And so it's is what it is.
00:49:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, And so our local news here Fox thirteen has gone out and done a story on that just yesterday, and that's probably because it's the seventy fifth anniversary. I mean, no, they're just talking about Windover, I think, and the airfield and its significance in the military's might because.
00:49:23
Speaker 3: It was a secret air base. Yeah, it wasn't supposed to be known about. It was supposed to be a secret airbase.
00:49:29
Speaker 2: I mean they were running to do little rate from Hill Air Force Base two Windover and back and forth, and then they'd come into my shop and buy some bread and some candy and go back to bed, you know.
00:49:38
Speaker 3: And so that's the invisible strings.
00:49:42
Speaker 2: My wife always talks about invisible strings out there, you know, and how this stuff all pulls together. And that's so wild, dude. And then your grand your wife's grandfather. I mean, there's just so many invisible strings right here, and you're awesome. That's another invisible string. Holy canoli, dude, Holy cow. Well that's kind of Glowmaster down. That's all I gotta say.
00:50:06
Speaker 5: That's kind of kind of how I got into the book is is my father in law from age ten, uh, you know, didn't have a father, and and this flight took place over the Easter weekend and and apparently his father, just before he got on the plane, popped an Easter card to the family in the mail and then got on the plane and took off. So they get news that the plane has disappeared, and they get news there were no survivors, and then this letter arrives, this Easter card arrives saying Jim, have a have a happy Easter, I love you, et cetera. And he went through his life believing his father was still alive, because well, I've got this letter, you know, he must still be alive. And and so you know, he spent deck aids kind of obsessed with this, but never able to fully explain what happened. They know that the Air Force lied to them about how the plane disappeared and what happened.
00:51:13
Speaker 3: And so.
00:51:17
Speaker 5: Several years ago a group of other surviving family members began collecting whatever documents they could and exchanging them because the Internet enabled them to do that. And he collected all this stuff and then he started showing it to me, and he just he didn't know what to do with it, and so I gathered it and then I did my own research, took a trip to Washington, and spent three days at the National Archives or Library of Congress, i should say.
00:51:50
Speaker 4: And that's how this book came about.
00:51:54
Speaker 2: You're just trying to give some closure to the situation and find out the actual truth to give them, And that's very cool of you to do so, and use your skill set that you have and your your thoughts to try to bring some closure and you were able to put it into a book.
00:52:10
Speaker 3: Now, so now you have Globe Master down right.
00:52:12
Speaker 2: I just can't help us say it because now the C five is an aircraft in the Air Force which is called the Globe Master, right, or is that the C seventeen. No, the C seventeen is the Globe Master. The C five is a galaxy. So they gave the C seventeen the Globe Master nickname. Yeah, that's the I'm just I'm putting together, right, because yes, yes, yes, yes, because I just had a C seventeen Globe Master pilot on yesterday and they're.
00:52:36
Speaker 4: Just massive, massive planes.
00:52:38
Speaker 3: Huge.
00:52:39
Speaker 5: The Globe Master is huge. It doesn't fly anymore, but yeah, just absolutely huge. And the wings the wings were hollowed out so that that crew members in flight could could crawl through these tubes in the wings to access the engines, and the pilot would shut down engine number three, and then the remember, we'll go in and change the spark plugs on the engine and then get out of there and then crank up the engine again. And they became adept at doing this kind of stuff, engine maintenance in the air.
00:53:12
Speaker 3: That guy, whoever that guy was, that's not me. I'm six five.
00:53:15
Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm crawling into the wing maybe if it was bigger than No, the guy that's crawling into that wing, you know, it's like someone five to five, someone five four two five two get in there and go bend your wrist and change the sprocket.
00:53:31
Speaker 3: The spark plugs. Man, Holy cow, wow, holy cal well.
00:53:35
Speaker 2: First, I want to say rest in peace to the souls that were lost on that aircraft. Okay, as much as I'm smiling and talking about this in history, it's a real thing that affects obviously family, and you know, I don't want to, like, I want to set a tone of like, you know, respect for them, okay, and just put that out there for everybody that lost their lives.
00:53:56
Speaker 3: That's a sad thing.
00:53:58
Speaker 2: You know, you've obviously in a war conflict area and war as hell, and you've seen that you've been chased yourself by people who just wanted the truth to be stopped, you know, chased, cannapped, the whole nine yards. So you know, props to you for your diligence in continuing on with just giving facts and straight truth about your your journalistic experiences. So I just want to say thank you for doing that. And I just want to kind of say to your family, you know, sorry for your loss. And you know, I'm glad you guys got that Easter card and that's a very sweet thing to have had come home. And that's kind of how I feel about it. So aside from all the laughing and joking and like, oh the espionage and everything and all of the suspense, these were people's lives that are gone that you know, you are one of the fifty threes relatives trying to figure it out.
00:54:51
Speaker 3: There's other relatives who just were.
00:54:53
Speaker 2: Just told and they just had to take it on the chin, like, oh, it's a training accident quote unquot. You know it's like, that was not a training accident. My dad was a Green Beret. When you talking about training accident, I know there's more to this, or my dad was a pilot or whatever the case is. You know, it's like, yeah, wow, and thank you for coming on to software up and sharing that with us here on my podcast. I'm really honored to have you on the show. Happy to do it invisible strings of a pulitzer prise.
00:55:22
Speaker 3: Maybe you know what I mean.
00:55:25
Speaker 2: So listen, I just want to say thank you. I've had you for an hour. I'm sure my listener is like, no, there's more, rad and there is.
00:55:31
Speaker 3: There's so much more. But it's in the book Globe.
00:55:34
Speaker 2: Master down and you can go find that anywhere, hopefully at the airport, hopefully anywhere that it's going to be at. Get it, buy it, leave a comment on the review for it, and you know, just share the book with a friend.
00:55:47
Speaker 3: Even there.
00:55:48
Speaker 2: I'm just put it out there for you. I think that you should just have a really cool Everybody should just go buy your book. That's what I want to say. If I can make that happen. There's my magic wand actually it's a pencil. It's the David Letterman theory.
00:56:00
Speaker 3: You're welcome.
00:56:01
Speaker 2: See if you have a pencil, it's like I'm taking notes, you see, And honestly, honestly, I am taking notes.
00:56:08
Speaker 3: Four nine zero two four four you see. Yeah, I got that. That's a tail number of that plane.
00:56:14
Speaker 2: Okay, organize and focus, Organize and focus play number you see I do. I want you to know and you matter, and thank you for everything and to your family and everybody that supports you.
00:56:29
Speaker 3: Just don't get don't get lost in the woods. Yeah.
00:56:35
Speaker 2: Now I will just wind this down like I just have and say thank you again to Todd robertson his book.
00:56:41
Speaker 3: Is Globe Master down. Go check that out.
00:56:43
Speaker 2: Hopefully it becomes some type of a TV show or a Netflix series or something that we can actually like watch and and you know and also see it that way in that adaptation.
00:56:53
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:56:53
Speaker 2: So if there's anybody knocking on your door, I hope so if not, and you're listening to this to knock on his door.
00:56:58
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:56:59
Speaker 2: So with that said, I want to say thanks to Ann I think who arranged us to meet. This is our first time ever having a conversation. And I want to show people that you can have a polite conversation with a stranger in today's society and not be at each other's throats about ideals. You can seriously talk it out and just have a nice conversation. And I hope that you listen to this and realize that you can have a nice conversation with someone a stranger. Just meet them and say hi, say hello. If someone's looking at you, say hi, watch what they say back. Maybe they'll say hi too. Okay, don't be like, oh, you're looking at me?
00:57:30
Speaker 3: What what?
00:57:32
Speaker 2: Anyways, that's just my own soapbox, and talk about spread some kindness out there. It's infectious and it just goes a long way. And on behalf of Todd Robertson who joined us today on his busy schedule, on.
00:57:44
Speaker 3: Behalf of his book Globe Master Down.
00:57:46
Speaker 2: Okay, go check that out, And on behalf of Soft Rep and Brandon Webb my guy in the background, and Callum my producer, and logan and everybody that's always Rubik's cubing us to have this great platform.
00:57:57
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for your hard work, and that I.
00:58:00
Speaker 2: Just want to say thank you again to Todd for being on the show and to everybody that helped put you here.
00:58:05
Speaker 3: And this is rad saying peace.
00:58:23
Speaker 1: You've been listening to your self, Red Ladio
Speaker 1: Lute force. If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. You're listening to Software Radio, Special Operations, Military Nails and straight talk with the guys in the community.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: Hey, what's going on? It's rad I am the host of soft Rep Radio. Hey, thanks for tuning in and I have a wonderful show to discuss with you today. But first, before I introduce you to my guest. Again, you already know who it is because you clicked on the link. But first, I'm trying to be suspenseful here, So before I introduce you to him, let me tell you a little bit about the merchre.
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00:01:41
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Speaker 2: So the folks here at softwap dot com, all the operators behind the scenes, have curated this book club for you who they think would like you know what they picked out, So go check out soft rep dot com forward slash book hyphen Club.
00:01:54
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, we got that.
00:01:56
Speaker 2: Out of the way, and again, welcome to the first time listener today's show. We're gonna be talking about the book Globe Master down with the author Todd Robertson, who has joined me.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: Welcome to the show.
00:02:06
Speaker 4: Thank you very much.
00:02:08
Speaker 2: You're super cool bro. So heyng ty, I'm gonna read your bio. Okay, so stand by, here we go. Todd Robertson is a Politzer Prize winning journalist who has spent over twenty five years as a foreign correspondent. He has covered wars throughout Latin America, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and has provided guests commentary for CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, which is MPR Love, NPR, SKY News, Telemundo Love Telemundo. Robertson holds a master's degree in arab studies from Georgetown University and has won awards for investigative journalism and reporting on international human smuggling rings. He has lived in Lebanon, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, Columbia, and the United Kingdom, and speaks Spanish and Arabic. All right, did I is that a good way to introduce you?
00:02:50
Speaker 4: You got it all? You got it all?
00:02:53
Speaker 2: Oh well, shudkin. I think that's how you say thank you at Arabic shukran, shukran. Hat's going all right, souk out? Well, thank you, okay, and thank you very much, and welcome to the show, dude.
00:03:05
Speaker 3: Thanks for wanting to be on.
00:03:07
Speaker 4: I'm thrilled to be here.
00:03:08
Speaker 3: Here, well, I'm thrilled to have you.
00:03:11
Speaker 2: I mean, okay, here, let's go back to Todd the seventeen year old. Okay, let's just crack that open. What was Todd the seventeen year old thinking about doing in his life?
00:03:20
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:03:21
Speaker 5: By the time Todd reached seventeen, he had already been through a number of hair raising incidents, including an encounter at age five with a guy a group of guys with bows and arrows who were threatening to shoot us my brother and me at close range if we didn't hand over I think some birds nests that we found or something like that. I fell off the garage roof at age seven onto solid concrete.
00:03:48
Speaker 4: Spent some time in the hospital.
00:03:51
Speaker 5: I was shot at when I was a freshman in high school while riding my bicycle home from a friend's house at night, and I took a short cut that apparently somebody didn't want me to take. And let's see, then I got lost in the mountains my junior year of high school, in between my junior and senior year of high school, and they had to launch a big rescue operation in Colorado to find me and bring me back.
00:04:19
Speaker 4: So, yeah, by.
00:04:20
Speaker 5: Age seventeen, I clearly had a bent for adventure, and I clearly was someone who was both interested in the in the headlines and making headlines.
00:04:35
Speaker 2: So the lost in the Colorado Mountains being lost, you were literally lost though, right.
00:04:41
Speaker 4: Yes, in between Durango and Silverton.
00:04:44
Speaker 5: I always knew where I was, but nobody else knew where I was. And so I found my way back to where I knew they would find me, and they sent in a helicopter and found me.
00:04:58
Speaker 2: How many days were you in the mounta It was just a day, or just like did mom and dad say, hey, where's Todd?
00:05:04
Speaker 4: It was two days?
00:05:07
Speaker 3: Two days, two days?
00:05:07
Speaker 4: I was gone.
00:05:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, So there was a search and rescue expedition sent out for you.
00:05:12
Speaker 3: Mom and dad were like, where are you? Yeah.
00:05:14
Speaker 5: Launch launched by the sheriff in in Silverton, Colorado.
00:05:20
Speaker 2: Thank you Silverton, Colorado Sheriff's Department. We appreciate your effort and going into the backwoods and rescuing individuals who decide to go out on their own. Yeah, at sixteen years year old, seventeen years.
00:05:32
Speaker 4: Old, kids don't do this.
00:05:34
Speaker 3: Were you a boy scout at all? Did you ever go through Scouts or anything like that.
00:05:37
Speaker 5: I was a boy scout, Yes, I didn't make it to Actually I was a cub scout.
00:05:43
Speaker 4: I never made it to boy Scouts.
00:05:44
Speaker 5: My brother did, My oldest brother did, but I never made it that far.
00:05:48
Speaker 2: But you had some scouting, you know, Hey, this is how we kind of get along. I get that. I'm just trying to put this young man in perspective. Here for folks like you know, we've all gone off. I go hiking in the mountains with my family wife. It's like, but for two days, how did you survive that? I know that we have a book to talk about, but I'm curious, how did you survive that two days?
00:06:08
Speaker 3: Well?
00:06:08
Speaker 5: I I had no food, no water, and uh and I was pretty delirious by the end of it all. But luckily I had enough of my my mental faculties to know that I needed to get to an open place where the rescuers could find me. Uh And it was very hard because I had badly injured my right foot and uh and and so I kind of limped over to where I knew.
00:06:38
Speaker 4: My sister and brother.
00:06:40
Speaker 5: Uh My my sister and her boyfriend at the time were camping with me, and I I got separated from them and uh uh and and yeah that's so.
00:06:55
Speaker 4: So I just they they went out to get help.
00:06:58
Speaker 5: And when I got back, they had left the campsite exactly intact, believing that I would find my way back, and sure enough I did, but they were gone by the time I got there. And I actually I was up very high on a mountain and saw them leaving and I was shouting down to them, don't leave, don't leave, and I couldn't get down in time because I had hurt my foot.
00:07:20
Speaker 4: So that's what happened.
00:07:22
Speaker 5: But the bottom line is I knew from that point forward I was a survivor and I was an adventurer. The very next summer went, I bought quality camping gear and quality boots and went back and got back on that horse and continued a life of adventure after that.
00:07:45
Speaker 2: Okay, and that's the podcast, everybody. That is the harrowy story that we were just here to crack today. I had no idea that is amazing. First of all, I can only imagine I would maybe cry a little bit and realize, Okay, they just left me.
00:07:56
Speaker 3: Now I'm all by myself.
00:07:57
Speaker 2: I probably have a little emotional breakdown, and then I had to group and'd be like, okay, it's me, me, myself and I and get down. However, like you said, you were injured. Holy cow, that's really cool. So did that?
00:08:09
Speaker 3: Oh man? I got so many questions off of this.
00:08:11
Speaker 2: So Todd, when you are now senior in high school, you've gone through this ordeal of being lost in the woods, and you know everybody's come to their senses. Their mom and dad aren't mad anymore at your sister, okay, or her boyfriend, and not at you, and everybody's all happy. What took you to, you know? Being like the resume that I just read to you. You know, it says you're a prize a political prize winning journalist, you spent over twenty five years or fourth correspondent. What took you into that path of the foreign correspondent?
00:08:39
Speaker 3: You know? And how old were you when that happened?
00:08:41
Speaker 4: Well, I was involved in journalism in high school.
00:08:43
Speaker 5: I was the sports editor of the high school yearbook. And I had known since third grade that I was a good writer. My my third grade teacher, Miss Bittner, held up an essay that I wrote and read it out to the class and said, this is an example of excellent writing. And and ever since then I knew that I could write well. Got into college and didn't really know what to do with my life. I was going to the University of Texas, and back then you didn't declare a major until the end of your sophomore year. So I went in to see a counselor not really sure what to do, and he said, well, what do you think you want to do And I said, I don't know, be an English major, and he goes, yeah, well, let's talk about job prospects for English majors. There's not really a lot you can do with an English degree. And at the time, you know, it was the Woodward and Bernstein era. Watergate was hot in the news. And he said, you know you're a writer. Why don't you try journalism? And I said, I don't know, and he goes, well, I got to tell you you're already listed as a journalism major. Maybe it's a computer glitch or something, but that's what your major has already set on my files. And he said, just give it a try. Take journalism one O one and see how you do. And it instantly clicked. And so the professor again, you know, held out my work as the best in the class. And that summer I decided to go up and to love at Texas and hang out with my brother.
00:10:19
Speaker 4: We roofed houses for the summer, and.
00:10:23
Speaker 5: Then we came home one day and there was a fire at one of the fraternities at Texas Tech fraternity houses and so I just grabbed a notepad and a pencil and walked over there, fresh with my grimy clothes from roofing houses in one hundred and seven degree heat, and I interviewed the fire chief, looked around the ruins of the fire, walked into the school newspaper and said, did you have anybody covering this?
00:10:51
Speaker 4: And they said no one.
00:10:52
Speaker 5: I said, well, I can write a story and they said yes.
00:10:55
Speaker 4: So I sat down on the.
00:10:56
Speaker 5: Spot, wrote a story for them, and then landed a job on the university newspaper and just decided I would stay at Texas Tech.
00:11:04
Speaker 3: So I just came then, I riding that wave.
00:11:06
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, and I within within eight months I had won national, state, and regional awards in journalism top awards, and so I knew I was in the right place.
00:11:25
Speaker 2: That's awesome. And so you've just been trucking along in journalism. Uh, you know, you've been all over the world covering all sorts of different types of conflicts, and you know, is there anything that just you know, other than Globe Maaster Down, which we're going to talk about, which.
00:11:39
Speaker 3: Is your book.
00:11:40
Speaker 2: Go check it out if you really want to know what we're going to talk about. It is Globe Maastered Down. Okay, right, okay, But I just want to know. Was there anything that just really stood out to you that you covered that was just like, you know, I can't believe I'm actually covering this situation.
00:11:54
Speaker 5: That's that might be the topic for yet another interview.
00:11:57
Speaker 3: Oh, yes, yes, I know.
00:12:01
Speaker 5: I covered El Salvador Lebanon, the Afghan War, Israel, Palestine. I spent gobs of time covering the Iran Iraq War. I was the last Washington Post correspondent in Iraq before the bombs started falling in nineteen ninety one.
00:12:20
Speaker 4: And I can tell you I'll list some of the highlights for you.
00:12:26
Speaker 5: El Salvador the Salvador and military invaded a little town called Arkatau to capture me along with a photographer and a BBC correspondent. They invaded and I've got a recording of the bullets hitting the mud hut where we were hitting. We were hiding. They captured us, took us back for interrogation, and then took our notes, film and recordings, went back and killed four people in the village who had talked to us.
00:12:58
Speaker 4: So that was El Salvador Lebanon.
00:13:02
Speaker 5: I was kidnapped by Hesbelah back when nobody who knew who.
00:13:05
Speaker 3: Hesbola was right, right, right right.
00:13:09
Speaker 5: And uh and and uh I escaped. It was a very short, uh little experience, like I said, this is the stuff for maybe.
00:13:17
Speaker 3: Another Yeah, no, I love it. Oh my gosh, it's real stuff.
00:13:22
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:13:23
Speaker 5: And and so there was that, and then UH, let's see uh Panama, I caught a fugitive from the United States who had built a bunch of people out of a bunch of money, and UH.
00:13:35
Speaker 4: Wrote a story about it.
00:13:37
Speaker 2: Uh.
00:13:37
Speaker 5: The US extra died him the very next day, and then he sued me for one billion dollars.
00:13:46
Speaker 2: There billion dollars and then and then uh Afghanistan.
00:13:53
Speaker 4: Uh.
00:13:55
Speaker 5: Just a few months after nine to eleven, I was hanging out with a guy who was posing as a special operator and a guy named Jonathan Keith Edema, otherwise known as Jack and a lot of your listeners who have experienced in Afghanistan might very well have heard of him. And we got into a discussion about someone I knew in El Salvador that he knew, and I was talking about going out and interviewing the FMLN in El Salvador and then getting captured and and he said he said something to the effect of, well, if I ever find out that you're out interviewing the Tala Bonner al kaieda, I'm gonna I'm gonna kill you, and I interrupted him to make a clarification on something, and the next thing I knew, boom, he had pulled out a gun from his ankle holster and shot me, and the bullet went that far from my shoulder, in through a couch and into the wall behind me. I realized he was upset that I had interrupted him, so I sat forward and with a totally straight face, trying not to show that my heart was beating so hard it was going to pop out of my chest, and I said, I'm sorry I interrupted you. And there was another a real special operator in the room who said, that was the coolest thing.
00:15:27
Speaker 4: You ever saw.
00:15:30
Speaker 5: So so what I would say for your for your listeners, though, is we probably all have something in common. There is there are certain people who when they experience high levels of pressure and danger, their alert system comes into play and they they actually do the opposite of panic. They focus really well. And I feel like I've got that ability. I didn't panic in under any of these situations, kept calm, stayed organized, stayed focused, and that's how I survived to be able to do this interview today.
00:16:12
Speaker 2: I see a new shirt, stay Calm, organized and focused. Okay, that's it, the stay calm shirt or carry on organized and focused, stay organized and focus.
00:16:24
Speaker 3: Let me write that down organized.
00:16:26
Speaker 2: That's a great organized and focused like I'm going to do right now for the rest of this show.
00:16:30
Speaker 3: Stayed organized and focused. Okay.
00:16:33
Speaker 2: Now, thank you for bringing me into that world of your past just for a little bit and giving us a glimpse of what you've been involved with. Now, let's let's transition into globe master down. Okay, and if I could just kind of surmise or you know, just get a small little zee summarize. Yes, it's uh, you know, aircraft carrying people with you know, an atomic bomb of sorts on it that went down, and it's in you know.
00:17:02
Speaker 3: The World War two era, right.
00:17:05
Speaker 4: Almost?
00:17:06
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, please please?
00:17:10
Speaker 5: So what happened was this is post World War two, the Cold War is beginning, and the United States recognizes that Russia has not demobilized from World War Two. All the other belligerents in World War Two had either been defeated or were rapidly drawing down their forces, bringing their troops home. They people just wanted to enjoy normal life, and you know, husbands and brothers and fathers wanted to get back to their families. So the United States was pulling troops out of Europe, Britain was pulling its troops back home, and they were doing troop assessments of Soviet forces and realized they still had more than a million troops on the front lines between western and Eastern Europe. They were not demobilizing in any way, and so the commanders began doing assessments of, well, what happens next if the Communists decided that they're going to take over Europe. So they began doing these these very serious assessments of it, and the more they assessed it, the more convinced they were that in fact, Stalin had every intention of moving into Europe and possibly going as far as taking over Britain. And so they began holding a series of meetings to discuss how to respond to this, how to prepare for this. And so they knew that they needed to get US atomic forces into Britain. They just didn't know how to do it because nobody, none of the leaders in Europe was as the world saw the images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They knew that no European nation would openly, you know, publicly say yes, United States, bring in your atomic weapons. That's exactly what we need. It just wasn't going to happen. It was politically unpalatable. So they began looking at other ways of deploying, and they realized that the easiest method, which was just to load atomic bombs into B twenty nine's in the United States and flying them over to attack the Soviets, was not viable because if the Soviets actually invaded en mass with a million troops, they were going to have already swept across the continent before the US planes were in the air.
00:19:57
Speaker 4: And they also assessed that.
00:19:59
Speaker 5: We can drop five ten atomic bombs on them, and that's still not going to stop them. They can survive that, and they will continue to hold ground and they will be harder to uproot than.
00:20:11
Speaker 4: It was to get Hitler out.
00:20:13
Speaker 5: So they knew that they needed to come up with another plan, and they came up with a secret plan, a top secret plan, to put US atomic forces in Britain. And so the Strategic Air Command, which was commanded by a General Curtis LeMay began drawing up plans to do this, and so they they formalized the plans and then named a commander named Paul T. Cullen to open up the first strategic Air Command base in Britain. But it was still not officially announced that this would be an atomic air base.
00:20:55
Speaker 4: It was just going to be a strategic Air command base.
00:20:57
Speaker 5: The only problem was the strategic Air comp and didn't do anything else other than deliver atomic bombs, and so, uh it was pretty apparent what the mission was. This plane, Globe Master uh OF is which is a C one four a triple decker plane, a cargo plane. It was the largest plane in existence at the time, uh and and the tail number was four nine two four four.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: Uh.
00:21:30
Speaker 5: They loaded it up with fifty three crew members as well as atomic attack specialists and including the general who's gonna.
00:21:40
Speaker 3: Cut yeah, Brigadier right, and they they they.
00:21:46
Speaker 5: They engaged in a number of flights domestically before they took off over the Atlantic. And their cargo consisted of two KB twenty nine fuel tanks which would enable be twenty nine to refuel in the air, plus a cargo that weighed ten thousand three hundred and ninety five pounds. A fat Man bomb or the fat Man bomb that they dropped on Nagasaki weighed ten thousand, three hundred pounds, so there was only a ninety five pound difference between that cargo and the cargo was the weight of the cargo was in addition to those KB twenty nine tanks. So so this book examines what that cargo might have been and what the mission was, and so we can get into that.
00:22:41
Speaker 3: That's that's awesome.
00:22:42
Speaker 2: Now I'm here in Utah, that's where I live, and we have Windover, which is the airbase just out here, which is a huge pivotal, you know, role in all of this, I have to say, with dropping on the first bomb, the second bomb, you know on Japan, the Doolittle raid. There's a road out here the desert that we go and do wargames on dool Little Road. Okay, I'm just kind of bringing this into you know, like you said, this is that same timeframe, and so Bro, the funny thing is is I own a building just outside Hill Air Force Base. Okay, it's a ten thousand square foot warehouse. I have a I do wargames in there, and it's literally across the street from the base, and where my parking lot was was where they kept the B twenty nine's and the city I'm in needed a road, and they said, okay, hey, we'll back the fence line up for the base and give the city a road so they can incorporate themselves as a city and give this road. And so I'm literally right there where that took place. The people that would fly on those planes would get a paycheck. They would come into my shop at the time and cash those paychecks because it was a grocery store. The shop I bought was the nineteen forty four grocery store outside the base.
00:23:51
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:23:52
Speaker 2: So I feel a whole lot of like doo little guys have come through that facility looking for something to eat. There's I have the columns in my shop like a store for ales, you know, and it's just like they're so.
00:24:04
Speaker 3: And then and then of.
00:24:05
Speaker 2: Course having having the wind Over, you know, segment of it right out ninety miles ninety minutes away from us.
00:24:11
Speaker 3: I've been there several times, just just for.
00:24:13
Speaker 5: Your listener's enjoyment. Uh and and and information. Windover plays a key role in the early part of this book. Because that's where UH Colonel Paul Tibbet's and and the five oh ninth uh uh UH, the five oh ninth UH composite wing UH trained UH with with dummy batman bombs to to UH to perform the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My wife's grandfather trained there and lived there, and my wife's father lived.
00:24:51
Speaker 4: At wind Windover in those early days. Oh wow, yes, And and so this UH that plays into the entire story that.
00:25:02
Speaker 5: And it is it unfolds in Globe Master down in the early part, and it connects to everything that happened afterwards. But Doolittle plays a role in it. Tibbets plays a role in it. My wife's grandfather was on the Globe Master, so I didn't get to finish the actual what happened. The Globe Master made it two thirds of the way across the Atlantic, and then, without any radio communication or any indication of any problem, took a sharp right turn, went three hundred miles due south way off course, and ditched in the middle of the Atlantic. The all fifty three on board disappeared, the cargo disappeared, and the plane. The only contents of the plane were a few splintered wooden pieces from the cargo deck and a briefcase from one of the passengers. It contained some magazine and some other stuff. And that's all they found of the entire mission. And it wasn't until twenty sixteen when the United States publicly aired some current concerns that it had existed for a long time. Was that A this was an act of sabotage, and b they believed the Soviets might have had a role in it, because they believed that the Soviets had ships and submarines in the very area where the plane went down.
00:26:26
Speaker 3: There.
00:26:27
Speaker 2: Let me ask you this, Todd, the three hundred miles off course, where would that kind of put them with their lost this lost broken arrow?
00:26:37
Speaker 3: Really? Yes?
00:26:38
Speaker 5: Yeah, if yes, it would have put them about six hundred and fifty miles south west of the coast of Ireland.
00:26:49
Speaker 3: Wow. Wow, And I know that.
00:26:52
Speaker 2: Researching our conversation just a little bit prior to us, I found out there was a few broken arrows that the government well knowledge, Like in Fayeville, North Carolina, there's some type of a broken arrow, and then there's another one that's lost, and there's one like Georgia.
00:27:07
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, and then there's there's one off the coast of Spain, and and there This is a little little known fact, but the United States has listed broken arrows that were recovered. What they will not tell you is the number and location of the broken arrows that were never recovered. And writing this book was particularly difficult because there are thousands of pages of top secret documents that have not been declassified and I could not access them, and and I set off alarm bells when I asked for them, because I was told by an archivist at the National Archives, if.
00:27:57
Speaker 4: If an atomic weapon has been.
00:27:59
Speaker 5: Lost and has not been recovered, the documents related to that cannot be released. And that was because I posed a question to her, and I said, I'm not hanging up until I get an answer to this. After seventy five years, you there's something still so secret that you can't release it.
00:28:19
Speaker 4: And she said correct, and then she explained it.
00:28:24
Speaker 3: That's just mind blows.
00:28:25
Speaker 2: I mean, I get top secret, I get secret, secret, super secret, Okay, squirrel secret, oss secret, you know, Winston Churchill secret.
00:28:32
Speaker 3: I get all the secrets, right, I get it. I get it.
00:28:35
Speaker 2: But bro like plutonium just out there, you know, you know, yeah, I've seen movies in the eighties about platonium. Okay, come on now, bro, that's plutonium out there, and I guess it's good to keep that a secret from our adversary so that they can't you know, where are we trying to recover it from or anything like that, and so they can get it because everybody wants a little platonium. We all see back to the future. Come on now, yes, platonium doc what so so okay, So for my listener, a broken arrow. I kind of just threw that out there. It's where we've lost a nuclear or atomic bomb.
00:29:17
Speaker 3: Right.
00:29:17
Speaker 2: That's specifically like a broken arrow, is that it's a broken arrow somewhere.
00:29:22
Speaker 3: It's got to be recovered.
00:29:23
Speaker 2: It's been stolen, it's been whatever the case lost crashed and see am I hitting that right?
00:29:29
Speaker 3: Yes?
00:29:30
Speaker 5: Now, the in this case, I tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and there are some missing pieces of the puzzle because they're in those classified documents that they will not release. But I've you know, established the weight of the cargo. I've established the nature of the mission. I've established what was going on in terms of training operations involving fat Man dummy bombs over Europe at the exact moment this plane was in the air. And so the question is would the United States regard a fat man that didn't contain a nuclear core as an atomic weapon? And the answer is yes, they did. In fact, there were number of cases before and after this where the US lost fat Man bombs without the nuclear core, and they listed that as a broken arrow incident, a lost atomic bomb. So by the US government's own definition, this was this could have been a lost bomb. But I don't call it a broken arrow in the book just because those missing pieces in it. I'm a journalist and I can't say something is true and I don't don't have confirmation of it.
00:30:56
Speaker 2: I love that, and I love you for being that kind of journalist. Okay, I aspire to you and the Christina Amipor's and all of that out there. That's I appreciate the honesty and integrity that you bring to your journalism, and we just need to know that that exists. And and I just want you to know I'm also of that saying I want to be of that same cloth as you. Now, it seems to me that this mission, this globe mastered down situation that they were trying to, you know, get over to England and you know, be prepared, was maybe, you know, compromised from the get go.
00:31:31
Speaker 3: It was like, you know, it just doesn't seem like what do you think of that?
00:31:37
Speaker 4: Well, so why was it compromised from the get go?
00:31:41
Speaker 5: There were a number of possibilities as well as one absolute certainty. And I'll do the possibilities first, because the absolute certainty is bizarre. So the possibilities are that the entire Manhattan Project had already been infiltrated by Soviet spies. Klaud Fuchs just one of several who were feeding information directly to Joseph Stalin. And so when Harry Truman pulled Stalin aside to tell him the United States was about to launch a big attack on Japan to end the war, and he told Stalin it was an atomic bomb, Stalin didn't react. This is according to Truman's own memoirs. Stalin didn't react. He just went, oh, that's nice, and then he just moved on because Stalin already knew and so US nuclear the most secret aspect of the entire war, had already been compromised. And Stalin seemed to make it his mission in life to show the United States, no matter what you do, I can infiltrate you and get your secrets, so don't try it. And uh so there was as as I unfolded the book, there was a good reason to believe that that, uh, that this mission and and the conversations that Curtis la May was having at the time with his commanders about Europe had already been compromised. In fact, Curtis Lamay and his memoirs uh raised the possibility that they had already been infiltrated, and he was he was cracking down. But those were early in the days. I mean when when he established his Strategic Air Command. Uh his base as well as wind Over didn't even have fences around them, right, so you know, so so they needed.
00:33:43
Speaker 3: To out on the salt flats.
00:33:45
Speaker 2: They're like, we're in the middle of the salt flats exactly, We're in the middle of nowhere. Don't need to Yeah, this is desolate, it's air. There's no fresh water day, it's all saltwater. If you dig down, and it's like, yes, okay, we didn't need a fence, We're our own fence.
00:33:58
Speaker 5: So they put in fences. You know around the time that the Globe Master took off. But but so they were already worried about security. And when the Globe Master took off, there were a number of documents that that you know, I was able to get a hold of where the pilots and crew of of all these aircraft were being warned ahead of time. You know, there there are enemy forces out there, and they could attempt at any time to sabotage, to shoot you down, to to divert you, to capture you. And these are the procedures that you must undertake if this happens. So they were already aware that the enemy, the Soviets, were highly capable of intervening in this this as well as other operations that were going on at the time. They had demonstrated it by shooting down privateer spyplanes that were supposedly, you know, collecting weather data off the coast of Scandin and they shot them down and captured their crew. And and uh so this was you know, for for all they they call it a cold war, it was getting to the point of being a hot war. And on top of this you have Korea and and uh so, so the le Maay and and the other commanders were absolutely convinced that Korea was designed by the Soviets as a diversionary tactic. That it was the idea was to suck US forces into Asia so that he then had an open door to go into Europe.
00:35:36
Speaker 4: And so that was part of the urgency.
00:35:39
Speaker 5: Le May felt to get the atomic weaponry and and attack forces into Europe ahead of time. So then we get to the real security compromise here, which was that the commander Uh that I mentioned.
00:35:59
Speaker 3: Thank you dude. I was just gonna think, like, you know, oh, we'll catch you, trap you. Oh, I know how you can catch and trap a guy.
00:36:06
Speaker 5: So Brigadier General Paul Tuh Right after, right after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States launched up Operation Crossroads to UH test nuclear weapons over the Marshall Islands, Bikinia toll And. During that operation, which my wife's grandfather was a part of, he was operations commander for that Operations Officer uh Cullen was there and he met a Red Cross girl who was on the scene at the time named Reva Joy Hurwitz and and they fell in love. They had an affair, and everybody knew about it and uh, And the affair continued after Operation Crossroads. And what Cullen apparently didn't tell anybody at the time is that he was already married and had been married for sixteen years, and his wife was back in Washington waiting for him, and Cullin snuck away with Reaver Hurwitz to Mexico and I got a copy of their marriage for Mexico and they got married, which meant that Cullen was at Yeah.
00:37:23
Speaker 2: Excuse me, sorry, it's in my head. He's a big a miss Yeah, sorry, polygamist.
00:37:29
Speaker 5: So absolutely under military law, military law at the time as well as military law today as well as civilian law, that was a prosecutable criminal offense, and he he should have rightfully been drummed out in the military, but they didn't do any background checks on him, and so they didn't know even though there were people in his circle of commanders who knew that something strange was going on with him, they didn't do the necessary background check. And that, you know, anybody who's been in the military knows, you know, the enemy when when they're looking to gain intelligence, they look for vulnerabilities, and this was a blatant vulnerability, a because you know, they could blackmail him. B All they had to do was was find out you know the Bridge club these women were hanging out at, or you know where they were shot exactly, yes, and just strike up a conversation.
00:38:28
Speaker 4: Hey, you know anything going on?
00:38:30
Speaker 5: And they both knew about the plan to deploy these atomic forces over to Britain. In fact, they've been told pack your stuff, we're moving to Britain and so.
00:38:45
Speaker 3: So. So it was.
00:38:46
Speaker 5: It was a major security breach and and it went undetected for years afterwards. Well no, I should should not say that went undetected until the plane went down and then.
00:38:58
Speaker 4: Both wives I've sought survivor.
00:39:02
Speaker 5: Benefits and that's how it was exposed that he was married to women at the same time.
00:39:06
Speaker 3: Bro Mickey and Maud. Dude, He's just like, uh, what do I do? Well, yeah, he got read sparrowed.
00:39:12
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's a real term, but there's a movie about it where you know, they trained the women in Russia to come over to get what they need from the guys. We might be seeing it today in our current society. You know, you just never know, You just never know. So uh yeah, because the power of a woman is awesome. Yes, and the guy really wants to have some of that power of that woman. And you know, especially been gone for some desolate place and now all of a sudden you meet somebody and you can't send a text to your wife in DC.
00:39:44
Speaker 3: Back then, there's no hey babe, how you doing? You know, how can we talk?
00:39:48
Speaker 2: No, It's like, let me write you a letter, my dearest Cynthia today, the day is the day, you know, that's.
00:39:53
Speaker 3: How you're writing a letter.
00:39:54
Speaker 2: It gets there two weeks later, so it's like, you know, nobody's really fact checking him like we can't today. You know, it's like a media fact check, Facebook, Instagram, you know, all these different social medias. Here you are here, Here, you are here. Reen cameras caught you walking across the front lawn, you know.
00:40:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, back then there was nothing like that.
00:40:11
Speaker 2: No, no, wow, wow. So we might have the reason why, but we're not sure. But in your book you get into all of this and it really dives in too. You know how this mission seems compromised just from the get go in my opinion, you know, from a perspective, here it's psyches and where did I mean if they found a briefcase okay, and there were some things in it, but they never found the plane.
00:40:39
Speaker 5: No, never found the plane, nor the contents nor there and and there were survivors.
00:40:46
Speaker 4: They were spotted by multiple.
00:40:50
Speaker 5: Rescue planes in the hours following the ditching, which which A indicates if the plane ditches, then it hadn't been disabled in the air. Because to be able to ditch a c one, like I said, a triple deck or plane on open water.
00:41:12
Speaker 4: Took considerable talent.
00:41:15
Speaker 5: But to be able to survive that means it had to have been a relatively smooth landing for them to be able to then get the doors open and escape.
00:41:26
Speaker 3: As if they were landing right.
00:41:28
Speaker 2: They came into the approach as if, okay, we're gonna have to land on the water exactly as best we can and try to set.
00:41:34
Speaker 5: It and get the hell out of there as fast as you can. And so that there were survivors. They were spotted from the air. The survivors disappeared. Now now the existed that the existing orders at the time were if if you're on a secret mission and you you're you're you have in your possession sensitive material that the enemy might try to capture, you are obligated to blow it up, and they they the very orders at the time told them you must blow it up by by whatever means necessary to destroy it. And and so there's a possibility that they sank their own plane to keep it away. If they knew that the Soviets were in the area, then then they destroyed it. It's also possible the plane just would totally broke up on landing and they just narrowly escaped.
00:42:34
Speaker 4: And it disappeared under the water.
00:42:36
Speaker 2: But if you think about modern today landing on a water, like when solely the pilot that landed the plane in the Hudson River, Okay, he was able to land that plane without a breaking up and everybody was on the wings like kind of waiting for.
00:42:51
Speaker 3: Salvation to come and rescue them, you know.
00:42:55
Speaker 2: So it seems like if you have a talented pilot that and a navigator or whatnot, and you can land that plane into the water. Now mind you it might be sea. It's the seas, so there's high seas. You know, there's like, you know, who knows what the waves are doing when they hit. But I mean, it is possible to land the plane to get out, like you said, open the doors and get out. But did anybody ever get recovered? Can you tell me about that or do we need to read the door.
00:43:20
Speaker 4: Nothing was really hick. Nothing was recovered, But I do recommend reading the book.
00:43:24
Speaker 3: No, No, I agree, I agree, I agree. Don't tell me more, tell me all of it.
00:43:27
Speaker 4: No, nothing was recovered.
00:43:29
Speaker 5: And what's interesting is, you know on the flight manifest, this one hundred, this ten thousand, three hundred and ninety five pounds of cargo consisted of engine parts and you know, assorted items, plus some medical equipment that included eight thousand surgical sponges. Eight thousand surgical sponges sponges, which I write in the book is like eight thousand rubber duckies. They should have floated, They should have floated straight to the surface because they're highly boand and yet not one was found, not one.
00:44:05
Speaker 2: Of those sponges that would be like just sitting there, like you found a briefcase.
00:44:09
Speaker 3: I mean, there's a briefcase. There was some wood that was floating. Okay.
00:44:13
Speaker 5: So what the book makes very clear, based on actual documents, is that they were fledging flight manifests left and right during this time because what they were actually doing was flying nuclear components and atomic attack specialists over to Europe, and they did not want a record of what was actually being flown over there, and so they were making up cargo manifests and putting them into the record. So in all likelihood, this cargo manifest was bogus.
00:44:50
Speaker 3: Yes, it was just a facade. Yeah.
00:44:52
Speaker 5: And so again in this whole question of the KB twenty nine, because some of the wooden wreckage that was recovered was of those KB twenty nine fuel tanks that were aboard, and that's key to this whole thing, because the KB twenty nine, if you're trying to hide a fat Man bomb, the KB twenty nine was designed to fit into the expanded cargo hold of a B twenty nine that at the time was called a silver plate B twenty nine. The cargo hold itself was top secret because that was a modified B twenty nine that was made specifically to load a fat Man bomb, and so they had to make the car the bombay door much bigger than normal, and so the KB twenty nine was meant to fit through that exact same bombay, except it was slightly larger than fat Man, meaning you could fit a fat Man inside a KB twenty nine. If your whole goal was to fly it over to Britain and unload it from this cargo plane, without all the British eyes on you seeing what you're unloading, it would just look like a fuel take exactly exactly. And so uh so there there was good reason to believe they were using this to disguise the actual cargo because there they knew there were there were enemy eyes all over the place in Britain that that was documented, and so so they knew they.
00:46:26
Speaker 2: To me the year again, tell me the year that this is transforting.
00:46:29
Speaker 3: To the year again.
00:46:30
Speaker 4: This is nineteen fifty one, nineteen fifty one.
00:46:33
Speaker 5: In fact, last week last week, March twenty third, actually this week March yeah, yeah, yeah, we're March yeah, was the exact seventy fifth anniversary of the time going down.
00:46:46
Speaker 3: Seventy fifth anniversary.
00:46:48
Speaker 2: Well, okay, good timing, okay, Because you have this book, okay, Globe Bastard down, all right, and I mean that I want everyone to go check it out and and and again let me just kind of like pitch your book a little bit. If you go and buy the book glob Master down online at any of these retailers leave a comment for the author down below, you know, like leave a comment where you bought the book. It really goes a long way. And also rate the book on the place and the platform that you purchased it. Whether you buy you know, Todd's book, or you go and buy another book. It's always nice to leave the authors a review. And I just want to encourage you, my listener, to do that. Right, even if it's just one of you out there that goes and buys this book, leave them a review for it, okay, because it matters a lot. And you know, I'm sure supporting local is always going to be what I say. First, go to your local mom and pop book shops that have been around and you know, stood the test of time to continue to have books on the shelf so we can go in and just touch them and hold them and open them.
00:47:41
Speaker 3: And read them.
00:47:42
Speaker 2: And then that goes and helps them keep themselves open. So buy local first. Otherwise, just buy it wherever you can download it. And I want you to read this book. Globe Master down the Soviets, man, I mean really, there's like so much is going on, Dolittle the wind Over. I just was I just wanted to bring up wind over to you, because I'm here. I go to it all the time. I see Windover all we go out. So you got a couple casinos out there now. And I tell my wife, you know, and friends when I go out there.
00:48:09
Speaker 3: You know, this is only here because of the military, right, Like, what do you mean.
00:48:12
Speaker 2: I'm like, well, that water tower up on the peak over there, that's probably just installed by the military. Everything here, this whole town, this whole community here is because of that runway. And when you're traveling on I eighty, which is the freeway that goes between California New York. You're on I eighty going west or east, you can look over to the south and you can see the runway out in the salt flats. You can see the whole thing. I've been there for air shows. I've seen Harrier jets take off. I've you know, they film movies out there. Con Air was filmed out there with Nicholas Cage. They did oh this last one, Fallout, the TV series Fallout. They use the Windover airfield, but today they're actually what's the word when you take something and you refurbish it, it's like the bomb loading doors or something like that they're like this this pit right here that we're standing in is being re refurbished.
00:49:03
Speaker 3: It's like the most important little pitch.
00:49:05
Speaker 4: And so it's is what it is.
00:49:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, And so our local news here Fox thirteen has gone out and done a story on that just yesterday, and that's probably because it's the seventy fifth anniversary. I mean, no, they're just talking about Windover, I think, and the airfield and its significance in the military's might because.
00:49:23
Speaker 3: It was a secret air base. Yeah, it wasn't supposed to be known about. It was supposed to be a secret airbase.
00:49:29
Speaker 2: I mean they were running to do little rate from Hill Air Force Base two Windover and back and forth, and then they'd come into my shop and buy some bread and some candy and go back to bed, you know.
00:49:38
Speaker 3: And so that's the invisible strings.
00:49:42
Speaker 2: My wife always talks about invisible strings out there, you know, and how this stuff all pulls together. And that's so wild, dude. And then your grand your wife's grandfather. I mean, there's just so many invisible strings right here, and you're awesome. That's another invisible string. Holy canoli, dude, Holy cow. Well that's kind of Glowmaster down. That's all I gotta say.
00:50:06
Speaker 5: That's kind of kind of how I got into the book is is my father in law from age ten, uh, you know, didn't have a father, and and this flight took place over the Easter weekend and and apparently his father, just before he got on the plane, popped an Easter card to the family in the mail and then got on the plane and took off. So they get news that the plane has disappeared, and they get news there were no survivors, and then this letter arrives, this Easter card arrives saying Jim, have a have a happy Easter, I love you, et cetera. And he went through his life believing his father was still alive, because well, I've got this letter, you know, he must still be alive. And and so you know, he spent deck aids kind of obsessed with this, but never able to fully explain what happened. They know that the Air Force lied to them about how the plane disappeared and what happened.
00:51:13
Speaker 3: And so.
00:51:17
Speaker 5: Several years ago a group of other surviving family members began collecting whatever documents they could and exchanging them because the Internet enabled them to do that. And he collected all this stuff and then he started showing it to me, and he just he didn't know what to do with it, and so I gathered it and then I did my own research, took a trip to Washington, and spent three days at the National Archives or Library of Congress, i should say.
00:51:50
Speaker 4: And that's how this book came about.
00:51:54
Speaker 2: You're just trying to give some closure to the situation and find out the actual truth to give them, And that's very cool of you to do so, and use your skill set that you have and your your thoughts to try to bring some closure and you were able to put it into a book.
00:52:10
Speaker 3: Now, so now you have Globe Master down right.
00:52:12
Speaker 2: I just can't help us say it because now the C five is an aircraft in the Air Force which is called the Globe Master, right, or is that the C seventeen. No, the C seventeen is the Globe Master. The C five is a galaxy. So they gave the C seventeen the Globe Master nickname. Yeah, that's the I'm just I'm putting together, right, because yes, yes, yes, yes, because I just had a C seventeen Globe Master pilot on yesterday and they're.
00:52:36
Speaker 4: Just massive, massive planes.
00:52:38
Speaker 3: Huge.
00:52:39
Speaker 5: The Globe Master is huge. It doesn't fly anymore, but yeah, just absolutely huge. And the wings the wings were hollowed out so that that crew members in flight could could crawl through these tubes in the wings to access the engines, and the pilot would shut down engine number three, and then the remember, we'll go in and change the spark plugs on the engine and then get out of there and then crank up the engine again. And they became adept at doing this kind of stuff, engine maintenance in the air.
00:53:12
Speaker 3: That guy, whoever that guy was, that's not me. I'm six five.
00:53:15
Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm crawling into the wing maybe if it was bigger than No, the guy that's crawling into that wing, you know, it's like someone five to five, someone five four two five two get in there and go bend your wrist and change the sprocket.
00:53:31
Speaker 3: The spark plugs. Man, Holy cow, wow, holy cal well.
00:53:35
Speaker 2: First, I want to say rest in peace to the souls that were lost on that aircraft. Okay, as much as I'm smiling and talking about this in history, it's a real thing that affects obviously family, and you know, I don't want to, like, I want to set a tone of like, you know, respect for them, okay, and just put that out there for everybody that lost their lives.
00:53:56
Speaker 3: That's a sad thing.
00:53:58
Speaker 2: You know, you've obviously in a war conflict area and war as hell, and you've seen that you've been chased yourself by people who just wanted the truth to be stopped, you know, chased, cannapped, the whole nine yards. So you know, props to you for your diligence in continuing on with just giving facts and straight truth about your your journalistic experiences. So I just want to say thank you for doing that. And I just want to kind of say to your family, you know, sorry for your loss. And you know, I'm glad you guys got that Easter card and that's a very sweet thing to have had come home. And that's kind of how I feel about it. So aside from all the laughing and joking and like, oh the espionage and everything and all of the suspense, these were people's lives that are gone that you know, you are one of the fifty threes relatives trying to figure it out.
00:54:51
Speaker 3: There's other relatives who just were.
00:54:53
Speaker 2: Just told and they just had to take it on the chin, like, oh, it's a training accident quote unquot. You know it's like, that was not a training accident. My dad was a Green Beret. When you talking about training accident, I know there's more to this, or my dad was a pilot or whatever the case is. You know, it's like, yeah, wow, and thank you for coming on to software up and sharing that with us here on my podcast. I'm really honored to have you on the show. Happy to do it invisible strings of a pulitzer prise.
00:55:22
Speaker 3: Maybe you know what I mean.
00:55:25
Speaker 2: So listen, I just want to say thank you. I've had you for an hour. I'm sure my listener is like, no, there's more, rad and there is.
00:55:31
Speaker 3: There's so much more. But it's in the book Globe.
00:55:34
Speaker 2: Master down and you can go find that anywhere, hopefully at the airport, hopefully anywhere that it's going to be at. Get it, buy it, leave a comment on the review for it, and you know, just share the book with a friend.
00:55:47
Speaker 3: Even there.
00:55:48
Speaker 2: I'm just put it out there for you. I think that you should just have a really cool Everybody should just go buy your book. That's what I want to say. If I can make that happen. There's my magic wand actually it's a pencil. It's the David Letterman theory.
00:56:00
Speaker 3: You're welcome.
00:56:01
Speaker 2: See if you have a pencil, it's like I'm taking notes, you see, And honestly, honestly, I am taking notes.
00:56:08
Speaker 3: Four nine zero two four four you see. Yeah, I got that. That's a tail number of that plane.
00:56:14
Speaker 2: Okay, organize and focus, Organize and focus play number you see I do. I want you to know and you matter, and thank you for everything and to your family and everybody that supports you.
00:56:29
Speaker 3: Just don't get don't get lost in the woods. Yeah.
00:56:35
Speaker 2: Now I will just wind this down like I just have and say thank you again to Todd robertson his book.
00:56:41
Speaker 3: Is Globe Master down. Go check that out.
00:56:43
Speaker 2: Hopefully it becomes some type of a TV show or a Netflix series or something that we can actually like watch and and you know and also see it that way in that adaptation.
00:56:53
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:56:53
Speaker 2: So if there's anybody knocking on your door, I hope so if not, and you're listening to this to knock on his door.
00:56:58
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:56:59
Speaker 2: So with that said, I want to say thanks to Ann I think who arranged us to meet. This is our first time ever having a conversation. And I want to show people that you can have a polite conversation with a stranger in today's society and not be at each other's throats about ideals. You can seriously talk it out and just have a nice conversation. And I hope that you listen to this and realize that you can have a nice conversation with someone a stranger. Just meet them and say hi, say hello. If someone's looking at you, say hi, watch what they say back. Maybe they'll say hi too. Okay, don't be like, oh, you're looking at me?
00:57:30
Speaker 3: What what?
00:57:32
Speaker 2: Anyways, that's just my own soapbox, and talk about spread some kindness out there. It's infectious and it just goes a long way. And on behalf of Todd Robertson who joined us today on his busy schedule, on.
00:57:44
Speaker 3: Behalf of his book Globe Master Down.
00:57:46
Speaker 2: Okay, go check that out, And on behalf of Soft Rep and Brandon Webb my guy in the background, and Callum my producer, and logan and everybody that's always Rubik's cubing us to have this great platform.
00:57:57
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for your hard work, and that I.
00:58:00
Speaker 2: Just want to say thank you again to Todd for being on the show and to everybody that helped put you here.
00:58:05
Speaker 3: And this is rad saying peace.
00:58:23
Speaker 1: You've been listening to your self, Red Ladio
