Free Republic

For 25 years, Soviet pilots flew impossible missions—chasing an American aircraft that flew higher, faster, and more untouchable than anything in their arsenal. The SR-71 Blackbird operated at 85,000 feet and Mach 3.3. Soviet MiG-25 interceptors? They could barely reach 80,000 feet at Mach 2.8—and only for minutes before their engines burned out. This is the story of over 800 failed intercept attempts. Of pilots who whispered the truth in ready rooms while filing false reports for Moscow. Of the psychological toll of chasing excellence you can see but never reach. March 6, 1982: Major Mikhail Myagkiy climbs toward 80,000...

On May 1, 1960, U.S. pilot* Francis Gary Powers was allegedly shot down while flying an Air Force Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance airplane, affectionately known as the “Dragon Lady.” He was 1,200 miles into Soviet Russia airspace, near Sverdlovsk, about 850 miles east of Moscow. A mystery persists about whether or not the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, or if it was forced down by mechanical problems. Other suppositions exist. The incident sparked a verbal battle between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., and led to the collapse of the Paris Summit at the height of the Cold...

In 1963, USS Thresher imploded at test depth killing all 129 aboard—the Navy blamed a "piping failure" and closed the case. But declassified documents from the 2000s revealed the submarine had over 800 documented defects before diving, whistleblower testimony proved inspectors were pressured to approve faulty welds, and acoustic analysis of the final moments shows the crew knew they were dying for nearly 5 minutes as water flooded in. The Navy knew Thresher wasn't safe, sent her down anyway, then spent 60 years hiding that 129 men died from institutional negligence, not accident. 26 Minute VIDEO AT LINK...............

Ukraine is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on Sunday amid lingering fears that Russia's 4-year-old war could spark a repeat of the world's worst nuclear disaster. "The Chernobyl disaster was the result of a reactor experiment ordered ⁠by Moscow, in violation of safety protocols, and followed by lies and cover-ups," Ukraine's foreign ministry said in a ⁠statement. "To this day, the world has to face consequences brought by a totalitarian system that subordinated truth and science to ideology and political power." Millions were exposed to radiation, hundreds ⁠of thousands forced to flee, and wide swaths of...

- What no one so far has talked about is that Chernobyl and that entire region - was once home to the important Chernobyl Hasidic community, and by 1897, its Jewish population reached 5,526 representing 59 per cent of the city...By 1939, 1,783 Jews lived in Chernobyl, one in every five residents of the town. The German army occupied the city on Aug. 25, 1941. On Nov. 7, 1941, almost half of Chernobyl’s Jews were shot. The rest were killed by the end of 1942. That history is practically absent from today’s memory... Today, the explosion of the nuclear plant...

The New York Times Sept. 4 feature on Tim Kaine1, shows that his year in Honduras introduced him not to Jesus Christ, but to Karl Marx. The story doesn't say that, exactly, but connect the dots with a little history, and an alarming picture emerges of Kaine's adventures with radicals and revolutionaries in 1980s Latin America. The Times notes that in Honduras: “Mr. Kaine embraced an interpretation of the gospel, known as liberation theology...” This wasn't mainstream “Catholic thought” at the time. It was a radical, Marxist-based ideology at odds with the Church, the pope, and the United States, but...

August 19, 1953: The Iranian military, with the support and financial assistance of the United States government, overthrows the government of Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstates the Shah of Iran. Iran remained a solid Cold War ally of the United States until a revolution ended the Shah’s rule in 1979. Mosaddeq came to prominence in Iran in 1951 when he was appointed premier. A fierce nationalist, Mosaddeq immediately began attacks on British oil companies operating in his country, calling for expropriation and nationalization of the oil fields. His actions brought him into conflict with the pro-Western elites of Iran and...

A newly surfaced CIA document suggests US intelligence once reviewed research that hinted at a possible cancer treatment more than 60 years ago. The document, produced in February 1951 and declassified in 2014, summarizes a Soviet scientific paper that examined striking similarities between parasitic worms and cancerous tumors. snip Although the document was declassified more than a decade ago, it has recently resurfaced online, fueling outrage among some Americans who say it raises troubling questions about why Cold War research hinting at possible cancer treatments sat in intelligence archives for decades.

A heroic battle, the longest dogfight in the history of US Naval aviation, was forgotten, buried among the closest held secrets of the cold war, for over sixty years.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, an imposing spy aircraft stands outside the main entrance — a relic from a pivotal era of Cold War intelligence gathering that, in its time, pushed aerospace technology to its limits. But its stationary, terrestrial home amid birds and bugs, instead of at Mach 3 speeds and altitudes of 80,000 feet, meant it risked falling apart. "The A-12 is prime real estate here at CIA headquarters," Robert Byer, CIA's museum director, told CBS News in an interview, noting employees pass by it daily. But, he added, "this plane was not built with the idea...

Korean War hero Royce Williams is being awarded the Medal of Honor, and his actions are something not even Hollywood could have dreamed up. Congressman Darrell Issa announced on Wednesday that President Donald Trump officially informed Williams of his MoH. The Medal of Honor is the nation's highest military award. It is only awarded for actions so heroic that oftentimes, the person earning it is killed. Williams is still with us in 2026, and his once-secret actions are now out in the public. Buckle up for one of the most insane war stories you'll ever hear.

Denmark’s foreign minister had the top U.S. diplomat in the country summoned for talks after the main national broadcaster reported Wednesday that at least three people with connections to President Donald Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland. Trump has repeatedly said he seeks U.S. jurisdiction over Greenland, a vast, semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. He has not ruled out military force to take control of the mineral-rich, strategically located Arctic island. Denmark, a NATO ally of the U.S., and Greenland have said the island is not for sale and condemned reports of the U.S. gathering intelligence there.

On this date in 1987, a once-promising American intelligence asset was executed with a single gunshot to the head in Moscow — his treachery exposed by two of the most infamous Soviet moles in U.S. intelligence history. A Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB posted to the Soviets’ official Washington, D.C. offices in 1980, Martynov had turned in 1982 and begun funneling intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the cryptonym “Gentile”. Truth be told, he was a mediocre source, but he was a younger officer with the chance to grow into a more important asset in the years ahead. Fate...

The Italian Renaissance gave birth to ballet, but Russians dominated the art to such a degree no one questioned their supremacy. The Bolshoi, the world’s reigning company, pirouetted onto U.S. stages in 1959 and 1962. The State Department-sponsored American Ballet Theatre (ABT) went east in 1960 followed two years later by the New York City Ballet (NYCB), led by its Russian émigré choreographer George Balanchine. Adding a thermonuclear layer of stress, the Cuban Missile Crisis ignited in October 1962 when the Bolshoi and the NYCB were in each other’s countries. Upstart Americans left home unproven underdogs…The New York Times feared...

The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror   By David Meir-LeviFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, December 14, 2007 The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi's new book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The Terrorism Awareness Project previous printed his history of the "right-wing" influence on Islamic extremism, "The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad." Taken together (with his entire book), these chapters show that Islamofascism is a political, not merely a religious force; and the potent and deadly offspring of the totalitarian ideologies of the past. -- The Editors. Although many Nazis...

First Strike - Overview of 1980s Nuclear Retaliatory Response Scenario (Full Version) . Association of Air Force Missileers (AAFM. 1,132 Comments. 327,371 views Jan 5, 2022 Show less Video includes Minuteman ICBM operations, Airborne Launch Control System (Looking Glass) and other Strategic Air Command and U.S. Navy resources that would have been brought to the fight if America was attacked. This is the full version of the video .. Presented from the archives of the Association of Air Force Missileers (AAFM) www.afmissileers.org tonight you will be the victim of a nuclear attack by the russians. we might pay particular notes...

Francis Gary Powers was on a CIA spying mission over Soviet Russia when his U-2 plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile. "I looked up, looked out, and just everything was orange, everywhere," Powers recalled. "I don't know whether it was the reflection in the canopy itself or just the whole sky. And I can remember saying to myself, 'By God, I've had it now.'" In fact, Powers managed to parachute to safety, but his troubles were far from over. Having been arrested and interrogated by the KGB, he was put on trial in Moscow, where his family could only...

Beale Air Force Base, Calif. – On the evening of July 31st, a TU-2S Dragon Lady from the 9th Reconnaissance Wing took off from Beale Air Force Base (AFB) to begin a flight unlike any the U-2 airframe had done before. Seventy years after the very first Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady’s accidental maiden flight in 1955 by Tony LeVier over Groom Lake, Nevada, the U-2 would finish the longest single flight this platform had ever attempted, flying across all 48 contiguous states of the United States. An icon of the Cold War, the U-2 continues to provide high altitude intelligence,...

There was a small renaissance in science fiction movies in the early '50s, aside from the space operas and creature features there were politically resonant, to include big budget titles like Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. How and why science fiction films took themselves seriously isn't hard to understand if you just look at the headlines from the moment the film began production to after it hit theatres. Screenwriter Edmund North was working on the script for the film in the first two months of 1951, at the beginning of the first full year of the Korean...

Suzanne Massie first met President Reagan in January 1984, when US-Soviet relations were at their iciest: the previous year Reagan had labelled the Soviet Union the “evil empire”. Massie was not an academic, but she had written a book about Russian culture called Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia that had caught Reagan’s eye, and she was summoned to the Oval Office for a five-minute chat that lasted 25. She proceeded to tell him what his hardline, all-male, fervently anti-communist advisers had not: that there was a huge gulf between the Russian people and their Soviet rulers,...