elfismiles wrote:No shame necessary. I just figured if there were some dirt there you (or somebody out there) would find it by now.
That NYTimes article certainly doesn't dig deep enough to uncover anything like that.
Ha. The only reason they'd ever even think about looking at that material would be if some nice obliging oppo-researcher from someone else's campaign dropped it in their laps.
I'm sure that's exactly what led to the
WaPo finally doing the
Of-course-he-knew-what-was-in-those-newsletters story. The only enterprise reporting any of those places ever do is always either done by one of their couple/few prestigious-award-winning investigative stars, or by a staff-newsroom team that was obviously explicitly assigned to do a series that could be submitted for a public-service Pulitzer.
Mostly. On which basis one might infer that the
WaPo story is probably a sign of how well he was doing, as a matter of fact. (IE -- Well enough that an oppo guy working for Gingrich or Santorum or whomever dropped those sources on the media.)
Yes, that's just my little fantasy. What of it?
Why "wouldn't [you] have found anything out anyway"?
What someone did during his service just isn't the kind of thing you can figure out with open-source research on the internet. (Especially if it
was covert in some way, obviously.)
But you know what?
You might be able to find out the basics. Because his personnel file is probably in the Texas State Archives. You could submit a FOIA for them. Then the Archives would forward to the TXANG. Then the TXANG would say you couldn't have them for some reason. Then you could resubmit the request with a line added saying something like, "Oh, ffs, just REDACT the addresses and SS#'s, I didn't want those ANYWAY," in order to allay their concerns.
And then they'd say "No" again!
Actually, it might not be that big of a deal. There's no way of knowing unless you try.
I say go for it.
Searcher08 wrote:I had a look on Wiki and it seemed that there was a long term upgrading of the Ethiopian Air Force continuing during the early 60s that had been going on for several years and that there was a similar situation with the Iranian Air Force. The center of operations seemed to be Incirlik
Air Base in Turkey, which had been established in the 1940s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/39th_Air_Base_Wing
Yes, we were all over Turkey doing cold-war stuff during that era. And we were also backing Ethiopia against Eritrea (and assorted other cold-war shenanigans) at the same time. And I had
thought that apart from some guys on a map-making mission, we didn't have troops stationed there.
But I was WRONG. It was very small, but evidently there was some US military presence there:
On May 22, 1953, the United States and Ethiopia concluded an agreement that gave the United States a twenty-five-year lease on the Kagnew communications station in Asmera. At the time, Kagnew was one of the largest radio relay and communications monitoring stations in the world. The United States later developed its facilities, which were manned by 4,000 American military personnel, to monitor Soviet radio communications throughout the region. The two countries also signed a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement, whereby the United States pledged to provide US$5 million to equip and train three 6,000-member Ethiopian divisions. A United States Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was sent to Ethiopia to administer this program. By March 31, 1954, the United States had delivered US$3.8 million worth of small arms, vehicles, and artillery to Ethiopia. In October 1954, Washington granted another US$5 million in aid to Ethiopia; and in November 1955, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed that Addis Ababa needed a minimum of US$5 million a year in military assistance supplemented by the direct sale of air force and naval equipment. Despite these increases, the Ethiopian government complained that this military aid was insufficient to satisfy its defense needs. In early 1956, Addis Ababa therefore appealed to Washington for "a combination of grants and long-term military credits to support the country's defense needs," which included the suppression of Eritrean dissenters. In October 1956, the United States National Security Council responded to this request by issuing a report that included a recommendation that United States assistance to Ethiopia be increased.
After 1960--a year in which Washington promised to provide support for a 40,000-member Ethiopian army--United States military aid to Ethiopia gradually increased. In the 1960s, at the peak of United States involvement, more than 300 American personnel were serving in the MAAG. In addition, nearly 23,000 Ethiopian service personnel, including at least twenty who subsequently became members of the Derg, received advanced training directly from United States personnel. About 4,000 of these troops were trained at facilities in the United States, Mengistu Haile Mariam among them. By 1974 Ethiopia's armed forces had become totally dependent on the United States for military hardware and spare parts.
So there you have it.
Yeah. It depends. But it's still kind of weird that he wasn't just stationed in one place with one unit for such a short stint, especially during that era. After all, there was a hot war going on at the time. And tons of bases all over the U.S. and the world with fighters and bombers on stand-by all the time. They all would have needed flight surgeons. Why wasn't he at one of them, instead of rushing around on some kind of Early 1960s Hot-Spots of the Cold-War Grand Rounds????
I WANT TO KNOW. Because I'm a busybody.
