The Ultimate in Misdirection
October 2, 2014 11:02 AM   Subscribe

Why They Called It the Manhattan Project By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.
posted by Michele in California (46 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Fat Man and Little Boy is still eminently watchable. It's really less Paul Newman's movie than Dwight Schultz's (yes, Reg played Oppenheimer), and there are lots of appearances by various actors including an early role of Clark Gregg (with hair). There's a dramatization of the infamous Demon Core accident involving Louis Slotin (in an amalgam character played by John Cusack, and also chronologically moved forward to before the Trinity test). It explores how Oppenheimer's politics caused him (and Groves) grief, but not a lot about how he came to have those views, nor very much at all about his deeply contradictory feelings about his involvement (e.g. "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds"). There is a role called "N.Y. Times Reporter", by the way.
posted by dhartung at 11:14 AM on October 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.

I don't think either is the best example of that assertion. IIRC, truly random code names are fairly recent. (At leat in the west.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:22 AM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]


By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.

This is a pretty surprising article, for that "Manhattan really means Manhattan" bit alone. I'd always thought that label had been applied retroactively, not used as a codename at the time.

When you don't assign codenames randomly, things can frequently, if perhaps unsurprisingly, go really badly for you. From Wikipedia, on the Germans using the codename "Wotan":
"Knowing that the god Wotan had only one eye, R. V. Jones, a British scientist working for Air Intelligence of the British Air Ministry and SIS inferred that the device used a single beam and from that determined, correctly, how it must work. A counter-system was quickly created which made Wotan useless."
posted by mhoye at 11:23 AM on October 2, 2014 [18 favorites]


Previous discussion on why military projects are given such nonsensical names, by MetaFilter's own eriko. (This is my favorite anecdote to relate at parties. Which is probably why I don't get invited to many parties)
posted by Mayor West at 11:24 AM on October 2, 2014 [11 favorites]


IIRC, truly random code names are fairly recent. (At leat in the west.)

Not sure how "truly" random it is, but during WW2, the British took pains to make sure their operation names did not at all reflect the nature of the operation. (source).
posted by griphus at 11:25 AM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


The British Rainbow Codes were random, and quite retro-stylish. Randomly selected colour + randomly selected noun.

Blue Peacock, the nuclear landmine, deserves special mention.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:26 AM on October 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


mhoye already has it, but this comment by theodolite is too good not to repost:
During World War II, the Nazis were working on some kind of proto-radar navigation system that only used ONE radar beam instead of three or whatever, and they thought PROJECT WOTAN would be a totally badass name for a one-station radar thing, because the god Wotan (aka Odin) has one eye, get it? Except that the British kept decoding all these messages like RADAR PROJECT WOTAN IS ALMOST OPERATIONAL, MEIN FUHRER and correctly guessed the cute Norse mythology reference like a movie computer hacker figuring out that the password is the name of the CEO's daughter! And that's why code names are crazy made up bullshit.
posted by Iridic at 11:27 AM on October 2, 2014 [5 favorites]


Five of us seem to have told the same story about British espionage simultaneously. I vote we classify this aspect of the conversation under codename Blue...
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:33 AM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


but manhattan is not as magnificently inspiring as ENDURING FREEDOM or intimidating as DESERT STORM
posted by COBRA! at 11:33 AM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


I vote we classify this aspect of the conversation under codename Blue...

Operation Actually
posted by griphus at 11:40 AM on October 2, 2014 [6 favorites]


Commence OPERATION GRUMPY CAT!
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:42 AM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


Uh that "source" link was supposed to go to the book on Operation Mincemeat, not this thread.
posted by griphus at 11:45 AM on October 2, 2014


American Military Operation Name Generator

I'm pretty fond of Operation Screaming Sweet Baby Jesus.
posted by Foosnark at 11:46 AM on October 2, 2014 [6 favorites]


American Military Operation Name Generator

Operation You May Want to Stand Back From Our Imperialism!
posted by Iridic at 11:53 AM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


You May Want to Stand Back From Our Imperialism!


Military operation or ROU-class Culture ship? You decide!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:57 AM on October 2, 2014 [22 favorites]


R.V. Jones' success in guessing "Wotan" led him to buy a Norse mythology book and posit that the "Freya" Apparatus was a radar detection system with a range of a hundred miles based on his reading that Freya owned a necklace that was guarded by a watchman named Heimdall, who could see a hundred miles by day and night. Kind of a stretch there.
posted by Stig at 12:00 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


When you don't assign codenames randomly, things can frequently, if perhaps unsurprisingly, go really badly for you.

Using random codenames for everything and dealing with 20+ meaningless codenames every day can be pretty annoying though. You have people asking you if Jamaica will be ready for Project Lemon Drop before Helium is released and after a while you have a hard time remembering what the hell anyone is talking about.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:01 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


infamous Demon Core accident involving Louis Slotin

He was from Winnipeg! /Obligatory
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:05 PM on October 2, 2014


I like to think that when it came time to select cores for the atomic bomb tests, the scientists consulted all pointed to the Demon Core and insisted that the relevant authorities remove it from existence.
posted by Slackermagee at 12:25 PM on October 2, 2014


manhattan is not as magnificently inspiring as ENDURING FREEDOM
...or nearly as misleading...
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:38 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]


they called it the manhattan project because none of the other four boroughs would have conveyed sufficient historical gravitas.
posted by bruce at 12:38 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


So what would have The Staten Island Project been, then? I mean, besides a great band name.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 12:42 PM on October 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

Incidentally I think a lot of people don't know the context for that quote - which I'm pretty sure Oppenheimer got because he explained it himself. It's not so much about death and destruction as tragedy on a human scale so much as awe at divine revelation. And specifically Krishna reveals himself (as an avatar of Vishnu) in order to convince the warrior prince Arjuna that he must go kill a bunch of people because that's his role in the cosmic plan, more or less. Which he does, that's the whole point. So certainly JRO was overwhelmed by the existence of this force and grappling with his duty in the wake of that revelation. Which perhaps isn't an entirely different shade of meaning from a more direct interpretation but it's not at all about a personal realization of power (rather the opposite I'd say) and I think still quite undecided about whether it was the right thing to do.
posted by atoxyl at 12:43 PM on October 2, 2014 [5 favorites]


Why isn't this show on FanFare yet ugh
posted by Apocryphon at 12:44 PM on October 2, 2014


So what would have The Staten Island Project been, then?


That was the plan to have Cpl. Tim O'Brien, Pfc. James McDonough, and Pfc. Francis Polidano phone in to Tokyo Rose's morning show and call General Tojo a fairy.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:49 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]


Operation Paperclip.
The JIOA also expunged from the public record the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and régime affiliations. Once "bleached" of their Nazism, the scientists were granted security clearances by the U.S. government to work in the United States. Paperclip, the project's operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists' new political personae to their "US Government Scientist" JIOA personnel files.
posted by Kabanos at 1:09 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


Operation "Chastise", better known as the DamBusters raid.
posted by Gungho at 1:46 PM on October 2, 2014


In Churchill's history of WWII he included a memo he wrote to the people who were responsible for coming up with names like this, and one of the things he mentions is that the names shouldn't be totally frivolous. The bad example he cites is "Bunnyhug".

He says that he doesn't want to tell a grieving mother that her son was killed in Operation Bunnyhug.

The names should conceal, but they should also have a degree of dignity, because they represent actions in which thousands or even millions of men are risking their lives.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:46 PM on October 2, 2014 [9 favorites]


There are entire departments at the CIA that generate cryptonyms, ensuring that they're generated (semi-) randomly, and NOT generated by anyone that will actually use the project (so they don't influence the name design). Moreover, they have to ensure that nobody else is using a variant of the name, or that the name isn't accidentally describing something close to the real project, and that people with access to one set of named projects are excluded from another set of named projects.

I imagine it's like playing a giant game of word-based Tetris.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:46 PM on October 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


Oh, and they also have to ensure that public-facing names aren't problematic, like the flap over Operation Infinite Justice, which raised criticism from Muslim communities.

The operation was originally called "Operation Infinite Justice" (often misquoted as "Operation Ultimate Justice"),[3] but as similar phrases have been used by adherents of several religions as an exclusive description of God, it is believed to have been changed to avoid offense to Muslims, who are the majority religion in Afghanistan.[4] U.S. President George W. Bush's remark that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while", which prompted widespread criticism from the Islamic world, may also have contributed to the renaming of the operation.[4]
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:49 PM on October 2, 2014


Commence OPERATION GRUMPY CAT!

I'd skip that one. Everything grumpy cat is involved with ends with "it was awful"
posted by Hoopo at 1:50 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


The Art of Naming Operations, Gregory C. Sieminski, Parameters, Autumn, 1995
posted by ob1quixote at 2:34 PM on October 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


He says that he doesn't want to tell a grieving mother that her son was killed in Operation Bunnyhug.

Either wear a cup or secure those hind legs soldier.
posted by srboisvert at 2:37 PM on October 2, 2014


Oh, and they also have to ensure that public-facing names aren't problematic

The original name for the 2003 Iraq War was Operation Iraqi Liberation, which produced a problematic acronym.
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 2:53 PM on October 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


Five of us seem to have told the same story about British espionage simultaneously. I vote we classify this aspect of the conversation under codename Blue...

So you five are all awesome for just knowing that already (plus eriko), but are there any very very good books on this type of subject that the rest of us might read?
posted by stoneandstar at 3:08 PM on October 2, 2014




As a boy I read a book of practical jokes, and it kept coming back to an inveterate prankster and British engineer, Jones, the same one mentioned above in re: Wotan.

In one of German's beam-based targeting efforts, called Knickebein (bent-leg -- possibly a reference to the English channel shape), narrow directional beams were projected from France over England. Because the French coast towards England is so long, they set up multiple transmitters at different angles which intersected at critical targets. The pilot flies along the beam (per the radio strength-o-meter on his plane) and when he intersects the second beam (and hears a new tone in his earphones), he pickles his stick of bombs.

The beams were deduced because of a needlessly-sensitive radio receiver found in a shot-down German bomber. Jones knew he could've jammed them, but giving up the game like that was not his style. He built his own transmitters, and aimed his "J-beams" to intersect the german beams in places where the pilots would drop entire sticks of bombs into empty fields.

Knickebein was followed by X-Gerat (Wotan) and Y-Gerat (Wotan II -- this one was foiled by a disused BBC transmitter which happened to share the frequency with the new beams), which were variations on the beam-targeting systems, all foiled by Jones.

The Brits weren't short of pranksters in WWII, which is why they had things like inflatable tanks and Operation Mincemeat, in which a corpse with a Royal Navy uniform and a briefcase full of false secrets was planted on the coast of Spain, which revealed British invasion plans for Greece and Sardinia (when in fact the plan was to hit Italy).
posted by Sunburnt at 10:15 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


> I always thought The Laundry code names were a little too descriptive.

DEEP SIX and BLUE HADES were my favorites, and I agree they are a bit on the nose. And of course GORGON STARE, which uses the UK's ubiquitous CCTV cameras to turn targets into stone, just as it sounds like, and something different in real life.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:21 PM on October 2, 2014


but manhattan is not as magnificently inspiring

Don't tell Allen Moore.


I like to think that when it came time to select cores for the atomic bomb tests, the scientists consulted all pointed to the Demon Core and insisted that the relevant authorities remove it from existence.

Considering it was used for the first of the Operation Crossroads tests, that's probably exactly what happened. That test wasn't as effective as they would have liked, however, as somehow the bomb missed its target, a battleship painted red-orange, by over 700 yards, despite there being no fault in the plane's bombsight and later test drops from that plane using simulated bombs of the same weight and aerodynamics hitting their marks dead on. My guess is that it was knocked off course by the demon's attempts to get out of the bomb before it blew.
posted by radwolf76 at 11:29 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


FLUFFY KITTENS or CUPCAKE FROSTING would be more of a code name.

FLUFFY KITTENS and CUPCAKE FROSTING were already allocated, and by sheerest coincidence describe kitten-related and confectionery-related apocalypses respectively.
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:13 AM on October 3, 2014


Moreover, they have to ensure that […] the name isn't accidentally describing something close to the real project

If you ask me, that’s a fault. Now everyone knows that “Operation Bunnyhug” cannot involve, say, weaponised myxomatosis. That has to be under some other code name.

If you stick to random naming, it shouldn’t matter if there’s a coincidental similarity between the name and the subject, because no one without security clearance knows the coincidence exists.
posted by Fongotskilernie at 1:52 AM on October 3, 2014 [1 favorite]




If you stick to random naming, it shouldn’t matter if there’s a coincidental similarity between the name and the subject, because no one without security clearance knows the coincidence exists.

But that only works if your attackers assume everyone is using random generation. I use KeePass to make all my passwords, but if it generated the random password "Password1234", I'd make it give me another one, even though that is as likely as any other alphanumeric 12 character password.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 4:04 AM on October 3, 2014 [1 favorite]


The Art of Naming Operations, Gregory C. Sieminski, Parameters, Autumn, 1995

Reading about Operation "Just Cause" made me think about how it often it seems operations are "Just Cuz".
posted by Kabanos at 7:54 AM on October 3, 2014


The Pentagon has finally given its operation against ISIS a name: Inherent Resolve. But only after previously rejecting the name. "It's kind of bleh" says one military officer.
posted by Kabanos at 11:28 AM on October 15, 2014


Twitter is awash with anagrams:
Revelers None Hit.
Reenthrone Evils.
Relieve Hen Snort.
Overseer Then Nil.
posted by Kabanos at 11:32 AM on October 15, 2014


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