Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Previously on Ridiculous History, we examined the phenomenal story of people conducting trade craft of people conducting espionage and acts of spying through something as humble as knitting crafts.
Crafts.
Yeah, there, we draft perfect, and we want to give a shout out to our big homie, our super producer, Max Crochet.
Croquet Croquette. Wait a minute, different things, Williams. That is Bizar Falcons.
We also have lightly pitched the idea of a Falcon tsar to ourselves off air. We took, we took a quick break, but through the magic of editing, we are rejoining you today. Let's hear it for none other than the one and only mister Noel Brown.
Does I tis you?
My friends, they called me Ben Bullen in this neck of the global woods for tax purposes. You can obviously communicate my comings and goings through a v or a pearl in a scarf.
I'll bring a scarf right now because it's kind of got chilli today. It's unpredictable. I walked out, and I yelled at the sky, what that is such an old man thing to do with you been, and I'm here for it. I mean, you shake your fist.
This is the thing, though, nol So we all reside in the Atlanta metro area, and everybody in Atlanta, if you've never had the privilege to visit, please please let us know and we'll hang out. But everybody in Atlanta will tend to speak to you as though they know you and you're vaguely related. So this is a true story. This morning when I walked out and as he said, Noel, the weather totally did a one to eighty on us.
I yelled what because I was aggravated. It was very early in the morning, and there was a guy walking through the parking lot who turned around and said, I.
Know, I said, seriously, I think I maybe did shake my fist a little bit. But then, as promised in our previous exploration of the nuts and bolts, the pearls and stitches, warp and weft, there you go of knitted coding, we are going to present you with a hand full of real life examples of folks doing this very thing in the service of various war efforts. So what do you say, we jump right into it. We got the spies, you knit it the Big Three, the Big Three.
Yes, And this comes to us again courtesy of our research associate Maria. So let's start with Molly Rinker. Molly old Mom Rinker. That's a street name.
Okay.
So this takes place way before World War One and World War Two. This is what the US calls the Revolutionary War. Rinker is an innkeeper in Philadelphia and she's one of those we're all big fans of RPGs and gaming and stuff, so she's to the powers of the beach. She's one of those n PCs at the local tavern.
But they usually have some good intel for you, those bar maids and tavern keepers. Right, Yeah, you got to run out all the dialogue options. Quick pro tip from handkeepers. You get what I'm talking. Yeah, we got to run out all of the dialogue tree options to get to get the goods.
So, because people were often ignoring women at this time, Molly Rinker was able to be around people that didn't really treat her as a person, and she used that to her advantage. She would gather intel eavesdropping on her tavern guest, specifically her British tavern guest, and.
Her methods weren't the most sophisticated in terms of the types of crafty trade craft that we're talking about here, but it did still involve knitting supplies. She didn't encode messages, however, inside of her knitting, what she did do was deliver messages to George Washington, the General and the cotton An
Army concealed inside balls of yarn. Yeah. So she would sit outside Reakerwood and she's knitting, and then when she saw Patriot couriers or Patriot troops pass by American forces, she would toss out small balls of yarn, just casually, like, well, here you go. You guys need yarn, right, you need a.
Lot of stuff in general, which was true, but she had stuffed these small balls of yarn with wartime secrets on small scraps of paper. So it's kind of like how you have a message in a fortune cookie, or it's kind of like how you have soup in a dumpling.
Right yeah, or you know the new git inside of the delicious sweet retreat, right. And her efforts were and are considered to have been absolutely as you like to say, Ben mission critical during these seventeen seventy seven to seventeen seventy eight Philadelphia campaign.
Beautiful, thank you, Rinker. There are a lot of American heroes who don't get the credit they are due. So you want to shout you out.
And then we also want to travel again in time. Let's go to what he say? May nineteen forty four. Oh, why the heck not? We're talking about Phyllis Pippolatour Doyle, a twenty three year old South African born British secret agent who parachuted into Nazi occupied Normandy in May of nineteen forty four. So hard, unbelievable, it's so.
Cool, and she was not alone, right and all. She's one of thirty nine female secret agents who served in one of the coolest secret armies of the entirety of World War Two. Forget oss, folks, if you haven't heard about it before, we are so thrilled to introduce you to Winston Churchill's secret army, something called the Special Operations Executive.
The more innocuous the name, the more sinister the plot. In France right during World War Two, she posed as a young woman with the cover name of Genevieve and she was actually assigned to the SOE Scientist Circuit where she was able to gather intelligence to help the RAF bombing missions, that's the Royal Air Force. She transmitted one hundred and thirty five coded messages Morse coded messages to be precise to Allied forces with her handy dandy wireless
radio and of course her hairtyme. How's that work? Ben?
Right?
Yeah?
Do you morse code in the hairtie? She embeds these messages in the lace of her hair tie and get this, folks. She lives. Latour lives until two thousand and twenty three, and she will talk about her war efforts. She was speaking to New Zealand Army News about how she concealed her codes. She said, quote, I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoelace that I used to tie up my hair.
Tricky, tricky. Sending coded messages took her around thirty minutes from her wireless radio, and it took the Germans ninety minutes to get a bead on where she actually was to trace the location of the signal that it was sent from. So the odds are certainly in her favor to make a clean getaway by the time the Germans knew what was up, yeah.
At least for the first few iterations restaurant, because you have a window of time in which you need to move quickly. But the German intelligence community was, you know, they're not knuckle heads. They're not good people, but they're not knuckleheads, and they they start to clock the unusual activities of this person, so they interrogator, they detain her, and at least one time they strip searcher, but she
always was able to slip the noose. She continually avoided detection because they would have to have looked in depth at the lace of her hairtie to figure out any coded information, and they just didn't because again, not to sound too soapboxy, they did not take women seriously.
Well, yeah, and it was just it was literally a needle in a haystack, at least a needle and a hairtie kind of situation. And until they had gotten wind of this type of covert activity, they wouldn't have even thought to have looked in something like that. But you're absolutely right, Ben. There was a lot of dismissal involved as well. She never talked about her work much, if at all, and her own family never knew until very
late in her life. She passed away in twenty twenty three at the age of one hundred and two years old, and it kept a lag a low until it became like a deathbed confession your real one, Tovo.
We've got another person we want to introduce. We tease this a little bit in the first part of this series, Elizabeth Bentley.
Elizabeth Bentley cooked up a plot to steal a lector cryptographic device from the Soviets and then sell it back to them. That's actually the plot of From Russia with Love. Sorry, I had to, I had to drop that one in there. A good one, Maria, but her actual story makes that kind of mix up a whole lot of sense, mixing up her plot with the plot of a Russian spy thriller. Elizabeth Bentley was born in Connecticut. She went to Vassar and Columbia. No slouch academically speaking, and she was in
fact an American communist m M yeah. Since in a twist, coming Ben card carrying yeah, she was known as the Red Spy Queen, and we're getting a lot of this from the official CIA website CIA dot gov. Check out Red Spy Queen, a biography of Elizabeth Bentley by Catherine s Olmsted. Coming to us out of University of North Carolina. So she considered herself more of and this is a
quote a communist June Cleaver. So for seven years she worked as what we call a contact woman, which meant she gothered covert information, primarily Washington, DC, and then she would pass it along to her Soviet handler. That's correct, folks, this is an American, as you said, highly born in our socio economic pyramid. She was an American who spied for the other side, kind of like the Cambridge five, Say it ain't so, Lizzie, say it ain't so. Yeah.
This is a thing that I think a lot of people miss when we're talking about the basics of tradecraft. It's not necessarily the shadowy guy in a nice suit that you have to be worried about. Right in a foreign hotel, It's going to be the people who are admin the people who are in housekeeping, the bartender, the bartender of people, the concierge. They're hearing all the d I met a few of them, Yeah, the people who surprisingly seemed to know four languages, You know what I mean.
I've met a few. They're cool people. Just stay on their good side and be honest with yourself about why they're talking to you. All right, Okay, so here's another twist, like you were kind of teasing.
There and all. A second twist, A second twist, almost as though we're making a not in fabric. The communist June Cleaver, as she styled herself, her activities, her early activities end in nineteen forty five, she goes to Uncle Sam and she outs herself to the FBI as fact. Yeah, and they they.
Do what any smart intel agency will do. They say, Okay, we'll just work for us. We're not the double cross. Yeah, the double cross. Heck, yeah, she turned double agent. And she said that she did this because she had become disillusioned by the party. As we know we often talk about, especially on our sister show stuff.
They don't want you to know. Communism seems great on paper, but the inherent corruptibility of human beings tends to not make it work out so great in practice. Yeah.
The issue with communism as a theory is like you said, communism in practice is something that maybe the human brain in society hasn't evolved for yet, you know. But there's there's another factor here. Our character Bentley feels the walls closing in like she's Han Solo and Star Wars. She thinks the FBI is hot on her heels. She's just being paranoid. History will prove later she is not actually on the FBI's radar. She was incorrect in that assumption.
But it's a very scary time and it's also very frightening and anxiety inducing to have to function as a spy. And then a third factor, Look, folks, not the soapbox here, but tradecraft is pretty brutal, and you are only you as an individual, are only worth the actions you can do in any kind of arrangement. As soon as you're done with those actions, as soon as your value is no longer relevant.
They might kill you.
She was worried that the Soviets would kill her because she had exhausted whatever her value was, and it turned out that bit of paranoia was true, so her going to the FBI may have been less of an altruistic crossroads moment for her it may have been something much more like self preservation.
It's a good point, I mean, is it's a good story to you know, frame it in terms of she saw the lights or what have you. That, as we all know, in these types of situations, when you start thinking that maybe the walls are closing in, sometimes making a deal is the best move that you have.
And so it comes to pass in the United States that Bentley the communist June Cleaver testifies in numerous very high profile investigations that Uncle Sam is conducting. This is also you know, shadows of the Red Scare, right, She's testified in communist influence investigations. She is a huge part in kicking off the second Red Scare. This is when, as we all recall, you could have your life and your career ruined because you went to the wrong meeting one.
Time or Carthyism right, or you knew the wrong person. Yeah, you get pulled up in front of the House an Americans Committee and didn't get blacklisted from Hollywood. A lot of writers got thrown under the bus for previous membership in the US version of the Communist Party. It was it was not good. It was very much a witch hunt.
Oh, very much so. And the House on American Volcanic Ready, yeah, the House on American Activities Committee. I love that you're mentioning that. A lot of people don't know that they started in nineteen thirty eight, but they continued all the way up until nineteen seventy five.
Wow. I know they kind of went a little more underground, right, But they were weren't they keeping tabs on like John Lennon and stuff as well?
Sure, everybody, Arthur Miller, anybody they could touch, so in these.
But they weren't calling people publicly in front of their committee. They were just sort of operating a little more in the shadows. After that period, Yeah, they wouldn't.
They wouldn't really pull people out into the public eye unless they felt they had some kind of evidence. In Bentley's testimony, often would consist of them saying, Hey, do you know this person in your work as a spy? Did you ever contact this person? Did you ever hear this code name or whatever? And I'm sure it got ridiculous at some point and they said, you know, have you ever interacted with the insert famous Hollywood screenwriter here or something like that.
And know what was it? Dalton Trumbo was a big one that got railroaded. And lest we cast her in some kind of like, you know, again, we've already sort of couched it. This may well not have been some sort of moral about face, but less we cast her as some sort of you know, hero coming back and working for Uncle Sam. A lot of her testimony resulted in some people being very unfairly targeted and railroaded themselves as a direct result of her testimony. Oh yeah, man,
one hundred percent. Her counter espionage was responsible for the conviction of party leaders eleven real life proven Communist Party leaders. But to your point, her testimonies also lit a match under that growing America paranoia of the Cold War. You know, who isn't a communist? Yeah, name names, report on your neighbors. It's very much like a similar situation with what was
going on during the Cold War in Berlin. You know that was depicted in the film The Lives of Others, where you know, kids were even like reporting on their parents and all kinds of stuff like that, really really dirty, unclean stuff. As you would say, Ben, we're talking classified documents that she got her hands on, pieces of microfilm. She delivered information to the Soviets about Allied force plans
regarding the invasion of Normandy. And she kept a lot of this stuff hidden in her knitting bag, which no one ever thought to dig through for information about what the B twenty nine bomber was going to be doing, but they really should have because that was definitely in there. Yeah, she kind of got that far.
Yes, specifically, she got the antela the B twenty nine.
And when she testifies, she becomes a celebrity. For a time, She's all over the headlines. She is a.
Legit, actual facts, public figure, as our friend Lauren would say. But as the years wend on and the news cycle and public attention shifts, her story falls into obscurity. Knitting espionage was so effective that multiple countries, including the United States Office of Censorship, restricted the international of knitting patterns. They did this in nineteen forty two. Because let's say you have correspondence right with a friend in Vienna who doesn't have a friend in Vienna, a.
Friend in Vienna as a as a friend of mine.
Doesn't it that it sounds like a weird album name. What band would have an album called a Friend in Vienna? Would it be Mountain goats, Billy Joe Joel.
He has a song called Vienna Early Billy Joel slaps by the way, Oh yeah yeah. He was much more of a Leonard Cohen type figure early days, like really literate poetic song story type stuff, and Vienna is one of my favorites. Then I think we're about to reach the tangents and trivia part of our story, wherein we can set the record straight first and first and foremost, I think we owe this to the ridiculous historians out there to describe the difference between crocheting and knitting. They
are not the same. They are not the same, and I know people were yelling at their podcast devices, but they are in fact distinctly different crafts. Knitting uses two needles to create much more stretchy and draping fabrics that might be better used for garments, while crocheting uses a hook and in order to produce a thicker and sturdier, a little rougher hewn fabric that might be better for blankets and the aforementioned little characters, little toys that your
girlfriend and my kiddo like to craft. Knitting focuses much more on what's called live stitches, whereas crochet completes each stitch individually. Yeah. Yeah, and let's go over to Max as well, because Max, you wanted to clear the record on not just crochet, but also croquet croquette. Yeah.
I've always had an issue with this one where I'm like, what's the difference between croquet, crochet, croquette? What is all these things? So obviously crochet is what we're talking about today, which is knitting, which is not to be confused with the sport croquet, which is an out of our game played on grass where players use malice to hit balls through a series of hoops, but also not to be confused with a croquette, which is a small breaded, fried and delicious.
Which is what is it? Isn't it Cuban in origin? It is South American.
Let's see, it's.
A little pastry. It's a little savory pastry. I think it's everywhere it is. I guess, I guess where I typically see it is in.
It's French.
French, but the process of frying food is pretty common, especially with some bread crumbs. Yeah. No, it's a really good point. It also is another product of colonialism, where you will see potato croquettes and other types of croquettes very popular in some South American cuisine. I want to say, what is poppies. That's a Cuban, isn't it poppies the restaurant? Yeah, yes, yes, that's a place here at Balanta. Yeah.
And I find all this so interesting and so insightful, and I will forget it within an hour.
That's okay, man, We'll have this episode out as long as society doesn't collapse, and maybe even a little bit after.
And forgive me. The Caribbean and South American version of that food would typically be pronounced croquetas, but it very much comes from the same background and from that French culinary tradition, where you're going to see in Brazil, for example, yucca and mandioca croquettes, various fillings depending on the region that you're getting them from, and also differences in preparation.
But just like we see the incredibly fantastic bond me sandwich in Vietnamese cuisine, you're going to see that French bread influence from the old colonial days of French influence over that region.
And we have a proposition for you, folks. I have something we have to mention Just because knitting is no longer considered a very successful form of trade craft, like enemy forces know what to look for, it doesn't mean that other innocuous things are not being used to communicate secret messages. One of the most interesting recent examples comes from our sister show stuff They Don't Want You To Know?
Where was truly Nolan, Our pal Matt Frederick learned that the CIA was communicating secret messages through You'll Love this facs through purposefully dumb looking Star Wars fan sites.
Oh god, I love it. It's such. It's another perfect example of this kind of stuff, things that are dismissed and hidden in planes like whoever you know? No one ever expects the the GeoCities Star Wars fan sites of old. But that is exactly what the covert agencies of the United States government were depending on when they used them as ways to communicate with their assets in the field. Yeah, did you ever hear about that with Max? No?
But I don't spend much time on Star Wars fans dice because I spent all my time on.
I'm kidding, that's not true. I'm gonna get canceled like Timothy Shallamy being dismissed of opera. Oh that was weird. No, no, no, much love to the Star Wars fan community out there. I guess the point, though, Ben, is that there were just a lot of them because it is so popular, and the lights we're talking about were like the bad ones, the low quality ones. You know.
That's yeah, that's how they split it in so that that is the thing. History repeats itself quite often. So if just because knitting is no longer you know, a gold standard way of secretly communicating intelligence, that doesn't mean that other things like that don't exist. Crappy, purposely crappy websites are I would propose a version of this same tactic. And you know what got me here, maybe we can start to end on this.
Guys.
What got me here is we're talking a little bit off air and when our research associate Maria first pitched this idea, it reminded me of another way of encoding messages through fabric. This is a true story, folks.
The Incan Empire the key poo. Yeah, the Incan Empire.
Had a coding system that we still don't understand that was entirely based upon notts.
And shout out to our colleagues over it stuff to blow your mind. Robert and Joe who have done an extensive deep dive into the Keipoo on their podcast, Stuff to Blow your Mind, So do check them out as well. That's right, Ben, pictograms that they encoded using knotted string devices.
Yeah, so they were able to communicate similar to what you were saying in part one of this series. They were able to communicate pretty complex mathematical information that we can prove, uh through through these knots. They just used fleece and cotton and a lot of what modern society has figured out about the kipoo is that it was administrative stuff, census figures, tax allocation. You twist the strings, you make the knot, you show the information.
Spreadsheets.
Yeah you're making yeah, exactly, you're making a fabric spreadsheet just so, and uh, this is this is bizarre because I don't know about you guys, but Fellas to me, it makes sense that you could do that with knots, that you could do numerical information with knots, because it's no different from a spreadsheet or an abacus.
Well, and maybe our boy Alan Turing, if he'd tried his hand at cracking the key poos, maybe would have had some success because, as we know, he famously cracked one of the most impenetrable codes in history, the Enigma, and also you know, won the war effort more or less for the Allies. But to this day we know some of what was encoded into these keipoos, but we have not been able to fully crack that code, and
there are samples remaining today. A third of these devices, the so called narrative keypoos, appear to contain encoded non numerical narrative information, including names, stories, and even ancient philosophies. So if you're into puzzles and word games and things like that, if kipoos are something that you might dig, absolutely, yeah.
We wanted to mention this because, uh, it's it's still a real rumpic abyza, you know, like it's it's still a real head scratcher for people who, as you said, love puzzles. How do you use a series of knots to convey philosophy, to convey cultural myths or legend legendary traditions. We know you could spell a name right knitting figured that out for us later, But this happened before what we call Morse code. This happened before what we understand
as binary reasoning. So if you can check this out, if you can help us solve the mystery of the over one thousand kipoos that remain unexplained in the modern day, that just like we say with the rational numbers, we will take you on an all expense paid trip to the David Busters of your choice asterisk, please keep it in the Atlanta metro area.
Yeah, there are maybe three to choose from, and they are not all Dave and Busters are created equally, I might argue. And you know, we've been talking a lot about the kind of interchangeability of this type of coding with the foundations of modern computing. Unless you think it's just kind of parallel thinking, not entirely the case ben
it would appear. And if you want to read a little further about this, we're going to hit you to an article that the Jacquard loom, which is a form of industrialized machine knitting, is actually considered a predecessor to modern computing, the punch card system, that big old room filling machines of the early days of computers. And you can check out programming patterns the story of the Karde
loom Over at Science Industry Music Org dot UK. And it makes sense right because it is a form of automation. It's a surprising story and perhaps a story for another day. I think it is.
Yeah, folks, thank you so much for tuning in, fellow ridiculous historians. We hope this exploration finds you well and a mid grand adventure. We also want to thank our super producer, Max Croquet, Croquette, Crochet Williams.
All different things. I do love a good game of croquet. Also, Patnk he ever played paatenk but not play. It's very similar to Bachi ball. I think French equivalent of boci ball, very similar.
I thought of a lot of patnks.
I don't understand.
Oh, come on, you're the CLBs guy as well.
I thought that that's right. There was a clarps I was. I was getting a Clarbscure reference in there. I need to jump back into that game. What a what a delet canvas? Oh boy?
Thanks as well to Alex william M, Max's biological brother who composed this slap and bop Big Thanks to Rachel Doctor Big Spinach Lance as well as aj Bahamas Jacob's the Puzzler.
And the rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. If you dig our show, you're gonna dig theirs for sure. And thanks again to our research associate, brand new research associate, Maria, who absolutely knocked out of the park with this one. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.