by Lewis, Dan
Today, Winston is best known as the county that seceded from the Confederacy (even though it did not), and is often referred to as “the Republic of Winston” or “the Free State of Winston,” even by the county’s residents. The myth has spread so widely that multiple novels make reference to it, including Addie Pray (upon which the movie Paper Moon is based) and To Kill a Mockingbird. To mark the town’s uniquely divided culture during the war, the war memorial is a statue of a young soldier, clad half in Union grays and half in Confederate garb.
BONUS FACT
In 1937, an Alabama realty company sued the city of Birmingham, claiming that the city’s new parking meters—which were placed on parking spots next to the company’s property—were unconstitutional. The company argued that the parking meters (and, more to the point, the requirement that one pay to park) inhibited their right to access their property and therefore was akin to a seizure of that property without due process. The Alabama Supreme Court, amazingly, agreed.
WHERE THE BAGS GO
WHAT HAPPENS TO LOST LUGGAGE?
Air travel comes with a risk that, although mathematically rare, seems all too common: lost luggage. According to Conde Nast Traveler, U.S. carriers handle 400 million checked bags a year, and as many as 2 million bags are lost each year from domestic U.S. flights alone. That’s a small percentage—about half a percent—and most misplaced bags are reunited with their owners within forty-eight hours. Within five days, 95 percent of those 2 million bags will find themselves back home. But a small percentage—and we’re talking 50,000 to 100,000—sit idly, never to find their way back home.
What happens to these bags? They go to Alabama.
Scottsboro, Alabama, is a small city of just under 15,000 people, tucked away in the northeast corner of the state, thirty miles or so from the Georgia and Tennessee borders. Every year, about a million visitors come to this tiny city, the vast majority of whom come to visit the Unclaimed Baggage Center. This 50,000-square-foot store sells the things that flyers lost and were unable to recover.
When an airline loses your bags, federal law requires them to try to find them for you. Typically, the airlines are successful at doing so. But not always. After the lost bag has sat for ninety days unclaimed (or its owner has not been located), federal law imposes a different obligation on the airlines: They have to pay the flyer a settlement amount. In doing so, the airline effectively purchases the luggage, becoming the legal owner of everything inside the bags. But airlines aren’t in the business of selling random items like half-used bottles of sunscreen, underwear of every size, evening gowns, jewelry, and a cornucopia of other goods. Besides, it would be bad for business if the airlines—after scanning baggage and at times, manually inspecting the contents—started putting the high-priced items you formerly owned on some e-commerce site. (Imagine the conspiracy theories!) This leaves the airlines with a problem: Tens of thousands of bags become theirs each year, and they can’t sell the stuff inside.
The Unclaimed Baggage Center is the largest and most well known of a handful of intermediaries that help solve this problem. The UBC, as Scottsboro locals call it, buys unclaimed baggage by the pound, sight unseen, from the airlines. (This works well for the airlines because they’re better off having no knowledge of the contents of the unclaimed bags.) The UBC trucks the items from various airlines’ unclaimed baggage depots across the country to the Scottsboro HQ. Workers sort through the contents, and about a third of the items make it onto the shelves in the colossal store. Another third are donated to charity, and the final third is deemed unfit for sale. (The criteria for being unfit for sale is unknown, but shoppers have noted that partially consumed bottles of lotion are often on the store shelves whereas sex toys rarely, if ever, are.) Most items are for sale at a sizeable discount, and on occasion, a shopper may find a diamond in the rough—literally. The UBC has sold a handful of lost diamond jewelry in its forty-plus-year history.
BONUS FACT
Sometimes, albeit rarely, airlines are better off losing luggage. This was certainly the case regarding a regional flight servicing areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo on August 25, 2010. That day, the contents of one passenger’s carry-on bag resulted in tragedy. According to NBC News, a passenger had snuck a crocodile into a large duffle bag, hoping to sell it at his intended destination. The crocodile got loose, scared the you-know-what out of the flight crew and passengers, and caused the pilot to lose control of the plane. The plane crashed into a house (the residents were thankfully not at home), killing all but one of the twenty-one people onboard. The crocodile survived but was killed by a machete-wielding Congolese shortly thereafter.
FINDING THE TITANIC
HOW THE MILITARY HELPED FIND THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS SHIPWRECK
The RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton on its way to New York City on April 10, 1912. As we all know, it did not reach its destination. On April 14, the ship struck an iceberg and within hours snapped in two and sank to the Atlantic floor. The wreckage was lost at sea until September 1, 1985, when underwater archeologist Robert Ballard discovered the ship’s boiler and hull while aboard the Knorr, a research vessel owned by the U.S. Navy.
But the Knorr was not out there searching for the Titanic. It was on a secret Cold War mission at the behest of the Navy itself.
In the early 1980s, Dr. Ballard created Argo, an unmanned undersea video camera outfitted with various lighting designed to illuminate the ocean at depths approaching 20,000 feet. The site of the Titanic disaster, in the seabed roughly 370 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland, put the wreckage at about 12,500 feet, well within Argo’s range. But getting the camera—which out of the water weighed 4,000 pounds—to the site required a ship, crew, and a sizeable budget.
In 1982, Ballard asked the Navy to request funding for his search for the Titanic, but the Navy wasn’t interested. It was, however, interested in Argo more generally. In the 1960s, a pair of nuclear submarines—the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion—sank. The Navy didn’t know what caused the disasters, and was particularly concerned about the Scorpion’s fate—it may have been sunk by the Soviets. Further, the military wanted to know what happened to the nuclear reactors on those ships and the impact they had on the ocean environment. So the Navy struck a deal with Ballard: help answer these questions and, if time and budget permit, you can search for the Titanic while you’re out there, too.
Ballard managed to find both the Thresher and Scorpion with time to spare. (The Thresher sank due to a piping error, he concluded, according to National Geographic; he couldn’t determine if the Scorpion fell prey to an attack. Neither nuclear reactor had an adverse effect on the ecology of the ocean.) With the Navy’s blessing, he went toward where he believed the Titanic came to rest, and, correctly speculating that the ship had broken into two parts, was able to discover its location. Fanfare and major press attention ensued.
The Navy, for its part, began to worry. With the public eye now focused on Ballard’s expedition, the Navy feared that his initial reason for being at sea would come to light. But apparently, no one thought to ask. Ballard’s secret mission did not become public until after the fall of the Soviet Union.
BONUS FACT
The Titanic had two sister ships—ships of virtually the same design—called the HMHS Britannic and the RMS Olympic. Both had disasters of their own. In 1911, while under the command of Captain Edward Smith (the captain of the Titanic when it sunk), the Olympic crashed into a British warship and nearly capsized. No one died, as the ship successfully returned to shore despite two chambers taking on water. In 1916, the Britannic met a fate similar to the Titanic’s four years prior, sinking in the Mediterranean Sea. But unlike in the Titanic’s accident, the vast majority—1,036 of the 1,066 people on board—survived. One of the survivors was a nurse named Violet Jessop, who also was on the Titanic when it sank. She is the only person to have survived both, and was also on the Olympic during its aforementioned collision.
THE TWO SOVIETS WHO
SAVED THE WORLD
MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION, TWICE AVOIDED
In 1961, the United States undertook a series of unsuccessful campaigns in Cuba, attempting to overthrow Fidel Castro and his regime. These campaigns—including the Bay of Pigs invasion—ultimately failed. The Soviet Union, Cuba’s staunch ally at the time, reacted by working with Castro to build a secret nuclear weapons site on the island. Cuba is a stone’s throw away from the continental United States, and had the weapons base been completed, any nuclear missiles there would have been able to hit American soil.
On October 12, 1962, a U.S. recon plane captured images of the base being built, sending the White House (and the American people) into panic. The United States imposed a military quarantine on Cuba, denying the Soviets the ability to bring in any weapons, and insisted that the base be dismantled. The Soviets publicly balked, and anyone alive at the time (and old enough to remember) needs no refresher: The world was on the brink of nuclear war. Roughly two weeks later, on October 28, 1962, the two nations came to an agreement, staving off what could have been a tragic result.
However, if it weren’t for a Soviet naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov, there is a good chance none of us would be here today. The day before the Americans and Soviets found a middle ground, Arkhipov was aboard a submarine patrolling the waters near Cuba. American naval forces surrounded the submarine and began dropping depth charges—a tactic the U.S. Navy used to get submarines to surface, not one intended to destroy the (assumed to be) enemy submarine.
Unfortunately, the submarine’s captain either forgot about this tactic or was unaware of it, and—underwater, unable to contract Moscow—believed war had broken out. Soviet protocol at the time allowed for the use of nuclear torpedoes if the three highest-ranking sailors on the ship believed it proper. The captain and a third officer concluded it was. Arkhipov, the second in command, objected—and, thankfully, prevailed. The ship surfaced without starting World War III.
More than twenty years later, nuclear war was barely averted once again. By the early 1980s, the Soviets had developed an early warning system that aimed to detect an incoming nuclear missile attack. The system allowed the Soviets to, if need be, respond with a retaliatory missile attack. Without such a system, the incoming missiles would likely destroy or disable the Soviet arsenal before it could be deployed. The protocol was simple: If the monitoring station discovered missiles headed for the Soviet Union, the leadership there was to notify its superiors. The powers that be would then decide whether the U.S.S.R. should launch its own strike, and, given the tensions at the time, it is likely they would have.
On September 26, 1983, the monitoring station detected an incoming missile. Then, it detected four more. Stanislav Petrov, the lieutenant colonel and ranking officer on site, did something incredible: He unilaterally decided that the monitoring equipment had erred, and he declined to report the “attack” to the Kremlin. Petrov based this belief on a few key factors. First, the equipment was very new and believed to be a bit buggy (although not to this degree); and second, Petrov believed that a U.S. strike would involve hundreds of warheads, not five.
Petrov turned out to be correct. The satellites were not functioning properly and the “missiles” were phantoms. Ground-based systems, a few minutes after the satellites erred, saw nothing, corroborating Petrov’s belief. But Petrov did not view himself a hero. Later in life, he said that he was just doing his job and, in fact (quite literally), he did nothing at all.
BONUS FACT
During a sound check prior to giving a radio address in 1984, then-President Ronald Reagan jokingly said into the microphone, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Contrary to popular belief, that audio was not actually broadcast over the airways. It was, however, recorded and later leaked to the press.
BLAME CUBA
HOW AMERICA’S NEIGHBOR TO THE SOUTH ALMOST BECAME A MAJOR SCAPEGOAT
In April 1961, roughly 1,500 American-trained Cuban exiles invaded their homeland in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government. That assault, now referred to as the Bay of Pigs invasion, ended in failure. The Cuban militia overwhelmed the attackers, capturing 80 percent of them and killing most of the other 20 percent. The political fallout in the United States was massive, and the desire of Americans to further engage Cuba in battle was understandably low. Further, other nations questioned America’s attack on a neighboring sovereign, especially one that had shown little in the way of aggression toward the United States and was already the subject of American economic sanctions.
But the Cold War was in full force. The United States saw Cuba as a surrogate for the Soviet Union and having a Soviet stronghold just ninety miles off Florida troubled the leadership of the American military. The Department of Defense (DOD) and the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) felt the need to revive civilian interest in overthrowing Castro and liberating Cuba. Absent a Cuban strike on Americans, though, this seemed unlikely, and no such Cuban strike appeared imminent.
So the DOD and JCS proposed to create such an attack themselves. A fake one, aimed at turning public opinion against Castro and in favor of continued military action against Cuba.
The plan, devised in 1962 and code named Operation Northwoods, had a simple yet striking goal: “to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” The details, outlined in an appendix to an originally classified document titled “Pretexts to Justify U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba,” included:
Using friendly Cubans, pretending to be enemy fighters, to stage a fake (as in, there’d be no actual firearms discharge) attack on the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complete with mock funerals after. This plan may have included blowing up grounded planes and/or igniting ammunition stores on base to suggest sabotage—and of course, the fake saboteurs would be “captured.”
Blowing up a U.S. ship (again, unoccupied) somewhere near or within Cuban waters, and blaming the assault on Cuba’s air force or naval batteries.
Creating a group of fake Cuban terrorist cells, targeting Cuban refugees in the United States. The plan allowed for some bodily harm to come to the targets—“to the extent of wounding”—and also called for “sink[ing] a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated).”
Painting U.S. fighter jets to look like Soviet MIGs and then harassing civilian flights with these planes—potentially looping in the commercial pilots to help convince passengers of the ruse.
Potentially shooting down an aircraft traveling from the United States to Central America, purportedly transporting college students (but actually empty), as it passed over Cuban air space.
In almost all cases, the plan was designed to avoid killing American civilians, although the same could not be said for “boatload[s] of Cubans” destined for Miami. Regardless, the total death toll from Operation Northwoods was zero. Then-President John F. Kennedy rejected the idea and removed its lead proponent, General Lyman Lemnitzer, from his position as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
BONUS FACT
The U.S. embargo of Cuba dates back to 1960 and its reach has been adjusted a few times since. (In general, the restrictions have been tightened, but on July 16, 2012, a U.S.-sanctioned ship carrying humanitarian goods from Cubans in Miami to their families sailed into Havana, showing a recent loosening of the rules.) The ban on importing Cuban cigars was not among the original restrictions—that was added in an executive order signed by President Kennedy in 1962. But JFK was, apparently, fond of the cigars. According to Pierre Salinger, then the President’s press secretary, one evening that year JFK asked him to pick up about 1,000 cigars by “tomorrow morning.” Salinger over-delivered, obtaining 1,200, and presented them to the President the next morning. As Salinger r
ecounts: “Kennedy smiled, and opened up his desk. He took out a long paper, which he immediately signed. It was the decree banning all Cuban products from the United States. Cuban cigars were now illegal in our country.”
INVADING CANADA
THE U.S. PLAN TO INVADE ITS NORTHERN NEIGHBOR
The United States and Canada, by and large, have been peaceful neighbors—especially since Canada became a de facto independent nation under the British North America Act in 1867. But although the two nations are friendly and, typically, allies, things can change. And in 1927, the United States planned for just a scenario.
At the time, Canada was still mostly under British control, and even though the United States and the United Kingdom were friendly—they fought on the same side in the Great War—things could change quickly. The United States was concerned that the UK’s imperial desires, albeit unlikely, could extend back to the United States and America was not going to be caught unprepared. The U.S. Army, therefore, developed “War Plan Red,” a comprehensive strategy to foil any British expansion into its former colony.
War Plan Red assumed that in the case of war, Britain had two significant advantages. First, the British navy was a formidable force, able to control the seaways and therefore the U.S. export economy. Second, the UK controlled Canada and could use it as a staging ground for an invasion of the United States. The American plan was to strike Canada first.