Whether it be due to embarrassment, espionage, or international diplomacy, there are lots
of true moments in history that are hidden from the general population.
But as time goes on, many of these secrets are uncovered, and the real stories and true
history of the world comes to light.
Number 5 In 1965, a team of mountaineers set off to
reach the summit of Nanda Devi, a mountain in the Himalayas and the tallest entirely
within the borders of India.
But the expedition was hit with poor weather conditions.
Heavy snowfall and a lack of oxygen meant they had to turn back.
The group planned to return the following year.
Before they left the mountain, they stashed the device they had been carrying with them,
believing they would be able to find it again the next year.
The device was a nuclear powered sensor, and the team of mountaineers came from the CIA
and Indian intelligence services.
Both countries were growing increasingly concerned by China’s developing nuclear arsenal.
China had nuclear weapons and it was testing missiles, but the location was too far for
US spies to get good information about.
Unless they tried to spy from the Himalayas.
After the success of the Everest summit a few years earlier, the CIA figured a tall
enough mountain inside a friendly nation like India would be perfect to spy from.
India agreed to go ahead with the plan.
The sensor was powered by plutonium.
Radioactive decay would cause waste heat, which would be used to power the sensor.
It’s the same method NASA uses to power some of the Mars rovers.
When the team was forced to turn back, they hid the device, including the stash of plutonium.
But when the team returned the following year, they could not find the device.
Multiple missions were sent up Nanda Devi to try to find the plutonium.
For several months, helicopters equipped with neutron detectors scanned the mountain, but
it turned up nothing.
The teams eventually concluded an avalanche swept the plutonium down the mountain, though
some suspected India may have sent a mission up to retrieve the device before the Americans
could get to it.
Most believe the plutonium is still on the mountain somewhere, though, and there has
been fear about what the nuclear material might have done and still be doing to the
natural environment.
Nanda Devi feeds the Ganges river, one of the most sacred rivers in SouthEast Asia.
Some reports have suggested traces of the plutonium made it into the water, though nothing
conclusive has been found.
Locals also blamed the heat from the plutonium as causing the devastating recent floods in
the area, though this has also been dismissed as unlikely.
The lost plutonium remained a secret until 1978 after it was revealed by a journalist
for the Outside magazine.
With the possibility of other secretive Cold War operations that may yet come to light,
it’s unknown how many similar incidents of true history we’re not supposed to know
about are out there.
Number 4
The Vietnam War became known as the television war, as many of the atrocities going on in
the South Eastern country were broadcast back home to American viewers.
But many of the battles never made it to the airwaves, and some were brushed aside to try
to keep anybody from looking into it too much.
Friendly fire was a real problem.
Soldiers on the ground would receive air support.
But as equipment being launched has no guidance system beyond physics, misses in the close
fought combat areas could cause devastation on those that the air teams were supposed
to help.
This happened in terrible fashion on Hill 875 in November 19th, 1967.
It was a battle that would later become known as the Battle of Dak Tu.
An American brigade was pinned down by enemy fire from tunnels nearby.
Napalm fires tore through the landscape.
The soldiers had made a makeshift command post beneath the lone tree on their perimeter.
Here, the officers and radio men had gathered, along with the wounded and medics.
Above them flew a number of friendly planes.
They were supposed to be targeting the North Vietnamese but, in the chaos of the fighting,
one of the weapons hit the tree where the command post had been set up.
The results were devastating.
The soldiers on the ground tried to make contact with those in the air, asking for them to
stop.
20 people lost their lives.
The remains of three would never be recovered.
For decades after the friendly fire incident, many believed it was the actions of a South
Vietnamese soldier that had accidentally hit his allies.
In reality, the official report of the incident discovered that it was a US soldier.
The soldier had been in Vietnam for about three months and had a good track record of
being on target.
But the short fall in this case had been terrible.
When researchers later scoured through the National Archives to create a book on the
Battle of Dak Tu, the report was nowhere to be found.
But eventually the true history came to light.
Number 3
The events leading up to June 8th, 1967 have been shrouded in secrecy and misinformation
for decades.
Between the efforts of US and Israeli governments to keep the attack out of the public eye and
conspiracy theories that have been allowed to spiral in the years since, getting to the
bottom of what really happened is near impossible today.
But, with the relatively recent Snowden leaks proving the government is still classifying
some aspects of that day as top secret, it’s safe to say this embarrassing moment in history
is not something we’re supposed to know about.
It was the fourth day of what would become known as the six day war in the Middle East.
The United States had opted to sit out of violence which was taking place between her
ally, Israel, and allies of the Soviet Union in the form of Egypt and Jordan.
But the Navy still had ships in the area, in particular the USS Liberty, which was in
the Eastern Mediterranean off the Gaza Strip.
The Liberty was an intelligence ship, and had all the latest communications listening
technology.
Sailors aboard the ship were used to Israeli jets flying overhead.
That morning, jets had flown overhead twice, reporting the Liberty’s location to command
in Tel Aviv.
Both times, it was noted to be a friendly ship, but in the late afternoon, the Liberty
was removed from the plot table, as the navy operators were no longer certain where the
ship was located.
At just before two in the afternoon, as sailors sunbathed on their lunch hour, jets flew over
the Liberty again, but these would not simply return back to base.
The attack lasted about half an hour.
Planes launched torpedoes and napalm on the American ship, before torpedo boats attacked
from the sea.
The sailors aboard the Liberty raised the largest American flag it had, as the one that
had originally flown was damaged in the attack.
At 2:29pm, the attack ended.
34 Americans lost their lives in the attack, while another 171 were injured.
Many of the survivors would suffer mental and physical health problems for the rest
of their lives.
According to the official Israeli statements, the ship had been misidentified as an Egyptian
cavalry transport ship.
After an extremely short investigation by the US forces, this was accepted, and Israel
paid about $12.8 million to the US and the families of the sailors on the ship.
However, many doubt it was an accident, and many claim that at least during the attack
the Liberty was identified as an American vessel by the pilots, but they were ordered
to continue with the attack.
Number 2
Many of the people who make the biggest difference in the direction of history never intend to
make their identities known to the public.
Spies have made a major difference in countless wars going back to antiquity, and the American
War for Independence was no different.
The Culper Spy Ring played a crucial role in the war, and things may have gone a very
different way if the ring hadn’t been as successful as it was.
But given how much we’re still left questioning about their activities, it’s safe to say
this was a piece of history we were never supposed to know about.
The ring began in 1778, two years after the start of the war.
General George Washington had known from the beginning that having a good intelligence
network would be important, but his earlier attempts to get one off the ground hadn’t
really worked.
Being a spy during the revolutionary war was incredibly dangerous, and many spies on both
side lost their lives without trial, so only the bravest and most trustworthy could take
the role.
Eventually, Washington struck gold when he received a letter from Caleb Brewster offering
to gather intelligence on Long Island.
Along with a young army officer named Benjamin Tallmadge (tal muj), the pair formed the beginnings
of the Culper Spy Ring.
A few spies in the British strong hold of New York would transport information out via
trusted couriers to Setauket, where it could be given to the Continental Army.
The ring started out amateurish, but eventually became the most effective spy network on either
side of the war.
In time, they developed code-names.
Tallmadge was referred to as John Bolton.
The chief spy, Abraham Woodhall was known as Samuel Culper Snr.
There was a Samuel Culper Jnr, whose identity remained a mystery until well into the 1900s,
when it was discovered a merchant named Robert Townsend had taken the name when he as recruited
after Woodhall had gathered too much suspicion.
Brewster didn’t have a code name, but instead worked as a courier, transporting messages
to Long Island.
The Culper ring uncovered valuable information on British attacks, including a planned ambush
on the French army in 1780.
Putting down the ambush saved the Franco-American alliance and quite possibly saved the war
effort.
It’s from the Culper Ring that the legend of Agent 355 came about.
355 was supposedly a female agent that many say was crucial to winning the war.
While there were women involved in the spy ring, Agent 355 seems to be more of a legend
than a real person.
There has only been one reference to someone called 355 in all the letters discovered,
and it’s still debated who exactly the woman in question was.
Sources: https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/culper-spy-ring https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/06/george-washingtons-culper-spy-ring-separating-fact-from-fiction/
Number 1
Eleven years before Chernobyl, there was the Kyshtym (Kish teem) nuclear disaster.
It is now classed as the third biggest nuclear disaster the world has seen.
However, modern estimates believe the secrecy surrounding the 1957 event may have led us
to underestimate just how dangerous it was.
The event was the first major nuclear disaster, and it was a moment in history that both the
Soviet Union and the United States intelligence services didn’t want the world to know about.
The disaster took place at a facility known as Mayak near the town of Kyshtym in the East
Urals.
Mayak was the size of a small city, and was key to the Soviet’s nuclear program.
It’s believed to be here where the first Soviet nuclear weapon was developed.
We know today it was the plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and a nuclear fuel
reprocessing site.
Safety at the facility was unsurprisingly lacking, which resulted in radiation sickness
for thousands of workers and many living in the surrounding villages.
Waste would often be dumped in the nearby river, and those living downstream would suffer
the consequences of that.
Mayak itself was top secret, and even erased from Russian maps until relatively recently,
but those living near the facility knew something dangerous was going on there.
But when, on September 19th, 1957, bluish-violet lights appeared in the night sky, it was excused
as strangely southern polar lights.
Coincidentally, the government required those living in the area to terminate their livestock,
bury their crops, and plow their fields.
Large amounts of earth were dug up and piled away from the villages.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for locals to connect the two events.
It took much longer for evacuation orders to be given but, over the following years,
thousands of people were moved from the surrounding villages.
What had really happened was that a cooling system had failed without anybody noticing.
Unlike Chernobyl and Fukushima, there was no effort to try to stop the disaster from
occurring.
The failure caused nuclear waste to heat up to around 350 degrees celcius.
A chemical explosion occurred and the nuclear waste was catapulted hundreds of kilometers
across the surrounding area.
Unlike Chernobyl, the effects were relatively local, so it took a while for the Western
world to catch wind of what had happened.
By 1960, though, the CIA had satellite images and enough information to piece together what
had happened.
However, any reports were kept secret.
Even when a whistleblower from the Soviet Union tried to expose what had happened, he
was ridiculed by US government laboratories, who didn’t want the public to become scared
of nuclear power.
With the settling of the Cold War, though, the secret true history of Kyshtym was finally
acknowledged.