The Consulting Political Detective

Before I tell you the story, I have to tell you this other story.  And by "tell you" I mean copy/paste part of a Wikipedia entry about a famous bit of science fiction lore from the 1940s:

[By March 8, 1944, Cleve Cartmill's story 'Deadline'] had come to the attention of the Counterintelligence Corps, who saw many similarities between the technical details in the story and the research currently being undertaken in great secrecy at Los Alamos. Gregory Benford describes the incident as told him by Edward Teller in his autobiographical essay, "Old Legends"

Coming three years later in the same magazine, Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline” provoked astonishment in the lunch table discussions at Los Alamos. It really did describe isotope separation and the bomb itself in detail, and raised as its principal plot pivot the issue the physicists were then debating among themselves: should the Allies use it? To the physicists from many countries clustered in the high mountain strangeness of New Mexico, cut off from their familiar sources of humanist learning, it must have seemed particularly striking that Cartmill described an allied effort, a joint responsibility laid upon many nations.

Discussion of Cartmill’s “Deadline” was significant. The story’s detail was remarkable, its sentiments even more so. Did this rather obscure story hint at what the American public really thought about such a superweapon, or would think if they only knew?

Talk attracts attention, Teller recalled a security officer who took a decided interest, making notes, saying little. In retrospect, it was easy to see what a wartime intelligence monitor would make of the physicists’ conversations. Who was this guy Cartmill, anyway? Where did he get these details? Who tipped him to the isotope separation problem? “and that is why Mr. Campbell received his visitors.”

Fearing a security breach, the FBI began an investigation into Cartmill, Campbell, and some of their acquaintances (including Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein).^[3] It appears that the authorities eventually accepted the explanation that the story's material had been gleaned from unclassified sources, but as a precautionary measure they requested that Campbell should not publish any further stories about nuclear technology for the remainder of the war.

Campbell, in the meantime, had guessed from the number of Astounding subscribers who had suddenly moved to the Los Alamos area, that the US government probably had some sort of technical or scientific project ongoing there. He declined to volunteer this information to the FBI.

Moral of the story: A reasonably bright person with a decent imagination who pays close attention to the available literature can suss out a remarkable level of detail about almost any topic, even when that topic is a tightly guarded secret.  Because facts and logic are what they are, and if one is careful to construct a series of simple inferences each based on the previous one, it is amazing what a humble citizen of the realm with no special access to secret information can figure out.

Still, even when a world-famous consulting political detective such as myself has woven together a coherent and tightly logical series of deductions about exactly why our political media is so (as Holmes put it so eloquently in the Case of The Giant Sumatran Rat Fucker) fucked-in-the-head, it is very gratifying to have someone from inside the game poke their head outside and say, yep, that is indeed exactly how this shit goes down.

Thanks to Alert Reader "MD" for pointing this out to me: the Keepin' it 1600 podcast (which is interesting in and of itself) does a long form interview with former CNN Chief White House Correspondent for CNN, Jessica Yellin.

The fun begin at around the 39:22 minute mark...