The How: We Never Went to the Moon pp. 56-59

 Last week I began with a comment about the layout of this book. I remarked that each chapter seems to be a small snippet of the theory and that the book lent itself to a chapter-by-chapter dissection. This would be a change from the previous works where the chapters were significantly longer, denser with conspiratorial content, and terrible writing. This chapter however decided to be more like we’ve been used to and now I have to split the chapter. It’s not a problem, it’s just frustrating because I had gotten used to it already.

This chapter is going to explain to us “how” NASA faked the Moon landing. The chapter begins with a quote from the book “Manhattan Project, the Untold Story.” Coincidentally, I believe that I read this book while I was in high school (I followed this with the 1995 Dark Sun, about the making of the hydrogen bomb). Originally it was published in 1967 (I read a revised edition for the 50th anniversary of the bomb), and is the story of the people who worked on the Atomic Bomb. This isn’t a conspiracy book, and while it seems like a non-sequitur to bring this up I get what Kaysing is doing and it’s a clever ploy.

The problems concerning the plausibility of the conspiracy are numerous, but the US government already had pulled off one conspiracy—the Manhattan Project. When people think of the project they think of the world’s best physicists and engineers getting together and creating the bomb. What people usually don’t consider is how much secrecy was needed. Obviously, you have to keep it secret from the Nazis and the Japanese, but it also needed to be kept secret from the Soviets. Soviet intelligence was everywhere, and everyone was trying to build an atomic weapon. The Nazis were probably the closest until the RAF shut down their heavy water plant (but the Nazis also lacked a significant number of resources as well). The secrecy was to keep everyone else from getting a good read on where the Americans were in development and to stop anyone from grabbing any of that research.

For the most part it was kept secret. The editor of “Astounding Science Fiction” was investigated because a story in the magazine “Deadline” seemed a little to on-the-nose about details of an atomic device. The editor explained that there was nothing in the story that couldn’t be understood from reading academic journals, he then added that he knew that the US was building the bomb in New Mexico because American Physicists suddenly began forwarding their subscriptions there. (I add this story because I think it’s funny)

The plan worked and the world entered the atomic age on July 16th, 1945, with the detonation of the Trinity bomb in New Mexico. I’ve done considerably more work than Kaysing in this brief description thus far. He doesn’t attach the explanation for the analogy, only that he claims that the US sometimes does secret things. For example, during WWII there was the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which then became the CIA after the war.

The CIA is always the conspiracy theorists’ boogeyman, and most of the legend of the CIA is built around these conspiracy theories. If they are, what the conspiracy theorists think they are, it wouldn’t have taken them a thousand tries to fail at killing Castro. They wouldn’t have been surprised at the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, or the Iranian revolution, or the Cuban Revolution. Kaysing includes a list of the CIA’s covert and unconstitutional activities, “the U-2 episode, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Pueblo, Tonkin Gulf, My Lai and Watergate.”

This is an absurd list. Kaysing could have said the U-2 program, but instead he uses the word “episode.” He’s no doubt referring to the Francis Gary Powers who was shot down over the USSR in a U2 spy plane. It was an embarrassment to the US as Eisenhower had to deny the program and everything involved in it, claiming that Powers was a piloting a weather plane…until the Soviet Union revealed that they had roughly the entire plane as Powers wasn’t able to destroy the U2. However, it was a successful program until that point.

The Bay of Pigs was a disaster with no single failure point. Russian spies found out ahead of time and warned the Cuban government. The maps were outdated, the mercenaries unreliable, the weather bad; it was a mess. The Pueblo was the capture of a US Navy ship by the North Korean army. I’m positive that Kaysing follows that with “The Gulf of Tonkin” incident, but he’s got it worded so strangely. This was the moment that thrust the US into Vietnam as two ships were “attacked” by the North Vietnamese. In reality, the first ship the Maddox, was shot at by North Vietnamese boats, but it was in defense of its coastal territory. The second incident, involving the Maddox and the Turner Joy was very likely the ships attacking the water in response to weather messing up sensory equipment. While the Navy reported that three torpedo boats had been sunk, there was no evidence that any ships were involved. My Lai concerns the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US forces on 16 March 1968. Finally, there is Watergate, the absolute farce of a break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters at the behest of Richard Nixon.

Kaysing writes about this list of events, “These cancerous outgrowths of the original intent of the National Security Act reveal that the CIA became the American Gestapo as well as a close copy of the dreaded Russian OGPU.” Here is the problem with this list: only the U2 spy plan program was run by the CIA. The CIA was involved in intelligence gathering in North Vietnamese waters, but that was a Navy operation. Some of the burglars at the Watergate hotel were former CIA, but that’s being generous.

“As such, they are more than capable of implementing and executing any covert event.” I will also point out that, with the exception of My Lai, all of these were failures. My Lai wasn’t even an operation, it was a mass murder by US Army troops. Not one of those incidents on that last were successful. They were also not successful at being kept covert, since they appear on this list.

The entire section here is just present to throw shade at the government and get the reader to nod along at the list of tragedies and travesties. It does not, however, prove anything. Instead, it actually argues the opposite. This is a list of things that the government couldn’t keep secret. It doesn’t matter if it’s the CIA, the DIA (the military’s version), or NASA. Kaysing should focus on the Manhattan project, but because it does not rile up the emotions. When Kaysing writes this book there isn’t a controversy concerning the use of the atomic bomb in WWII outside of anti-nuclear activists. Like all conspiracy theorists he knows that his belief isn’t going to have evidence supporting it, so he’s got to create a villain. While the villain here isn’t entirely fictional, he’s shooting at the wrong target.

He’s trying to establish that the CIA has been involved in some dirt, which is what makes the Moon Landing conspiracy theory plausible. Not only, as I have just demonstrated, has he failed to establish that; but he’s committed the primary error of failing to establish the CIA as being involved in the Apollo program at all. At least the Flat Earth conspiracy is coherent on this matter.