This page was last updated on: April 23, 2009
FSBVG News
2009 Campaign to Save Teufelsberg!
Starting the First of January, 2009, FSBVG initiated a campaign to save what is left on Teufelsberg and to have the remains restored from their destroyed condition to serve as a Cold War memorial and perhaps a museum. To that end, we have new pages regarding that campaign.
Visit our SAVE TEUFELSBERG! page, with its own News page, photo gallery, store for FSB and Save Teufelsberg gear, and much more.
It's a new book you can get from Amazon.com about ASA types, some DLI graduates, and others, who dug a tunnel from Rudow to tap into a East German military phone cable, known as the CIA tunnel, but I think it was more of an ASA tunnel. Then they listened to East German military phones. Lots of good fun, as we used to know it. Take the ASA/INSCOM Test to see if this book is for you. If you remember "Lightning Fast Chicken Pluckers," the EMHO report, getting off the trick bus after a swing (or a mid) for a curry wurst and beer, worshiping God ZULU, then you might pass the test. Stop by and see how you do with the rest of the questions. While the novel is ostensibly set in the mid-1950s, the author's pen name, T.H.E. Hill" shows that it's about Field Station Berlin as well.You can read a
summary of reviews on the Book's website. The reviews have been pretty positive.
summary of reviews on the Book's website. The reviews have been pretty positive.
Sunday Islands
John Hauer's book, Sunday Islands - New Zealand, Tahiti, Australia, is a great read.. Check out the review. John's pen name is Harold Truman. His previous work was a Vietnam memoir, A Country, Not a War. That tale of his travels in Indochina is now in the Vietnam archives collection at Texas Tech. It has a good review, too.
John tells us that, "Strangely enough, given my own high school career, A COUNTRY, NOT A WAR has been used as an official resource in more than one high school history class. GAMES, my first novel, will be out this Fall. I've been working on LATIN LUPUS, a novel about the international drug trade, since 1994, and have finished less than half of it. At that rate, it won't be done until 2007!"
John's photo, in an heroic pose as his alter ego, the "Hairy Ranger," is on our Photo Album's member mug shots.
NSA Crypto Museum
The National Cryptologic Museum of the NSA at Ft. Meade, Maryland, has no exhibits from any European SIGINT. The Army and NSA are not acknowledging the existence of our history through archives or exhibits at this museum or any other public museum. They don't acknowledge any SIGINT effort in Europe after World War II. If asked, they just say, "No comment."
Don't donate anything from your service memorabilila. They will sell your stuff to get rid of it. They will never exhibit it, and they say they have no room to store it. They will quickly auction your stuff off for funds for the museum.
The museum is soliciting donations to suppement future relocation expenses. $25 minimum gets you a membership card and special privileges as a junior NSA agent! You can visit the museum for free, so why donate when they'll not acknowledge our contribution to winning the Cold War ?
The museum is minutes from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, and is sited between them. It's located on Colony 7 Road, just off MD Route 32, adjacent to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Hours are Mon-Fri 9 a.m. - 3 p.m., Sat 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Closed Sundays and Federal holidays.
Berlin Traitors' Biographies
The story of US Army Warrant Officer James W. Hall, traitor to his country, INSCOM FSB vet; and the story of traitor US Air Force Airman Jeffrey M. Carney (6912th ESG ESC Marienfelde), in a five minute long audio interview by the British news Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell, was once available for us to hear from ZDNet at a streaming audio weblink, if you had a player program like RealPlayer on your PC. ZDNet has stopped carrying it. If anyone knows where it can be found, please let FSBVG know so we can repost it.
Cold War Certificates
may be obtained by anyone who was in federal military or civilian service from the end of WW2 to very recently. There will be many millions of these pieces of paper issued, and the present waiting time is four to six months. To apply for yours online.
German Shopping
Kaufhaus Des Westens, (called the Kah Day Vay, phonetically) for all your fine shopping and fine foods. Who could ever forget the treasures found on the 6th floor?
John's grocery, where one can order a case of the famous BERLINER WEISSE with raspberry syrup, and other fine German cuisine.
Usinger's fine sausages, for the very best in U.S. meats, especially, I'm told for making your own Currywurst!
Currywurst
Berlin vets seldom praise German food, but we enjoyed it, or if we didn't entirely, we'd be willing to give it another try, if only for nostalgia. If one didn't like German cuisine, then more experience is needed, because German food has variety, and anyone can find items to please the palate.. Good German restaurants are few and far between, but we could learn to cook some dishes ourselves.
Here is a note from an FSB vet, Bill Neubacher, Neubacher@aol.com, with an idea for replicating a couple of items which most of us have to admit we tried: beer and sausage! He says, "Currywurst is Dampfwurst covered with German Ketchup and curry powder. I can pretty well duplicate it by using a commercial Bratwurst. For example, get Johnsville's, Bob Evans', or Jimmy Dean's, and then just cover it with barbecue sauce and curry powder.
Berliner Weisse mit juice is Weisse beer, which is a mild wheat beer, served in a long-stemmed fish bowl glass poured over several ounces of raspberry juice. I was able to duplicate it with beer and juice from a local German delicatessen, but haven't been able to since the deli closed. There used to be a restaurant in D.C. that served Berliner Weisse but I don't know if it's still around."
More Notes on Currywurst
We can order good German cooking, including currywurst, to be shipped to us from specialty websites, such as from this German Delicatessen!
An appropriate currywurst note
from the bulletin board of the Berlin US Military Vets Association:
Posted By: Martina theslamb5@juno.com
Date: Thursday, 28 September 2000
In Response To: Re: Currywurst Stands (David C. Morrow Sr.)
"Hi, I'm a real Berliner that worked at the gates. So here is my help for you. Go buy Hillshire Farm Knockwust. Slash the skin and cook it on the grill or griddle until braun. Then you cut it in pieces and top it with paprika and curry powder and spicy ketchup (I add Tabasco to mine to make the ketchup spicy).
So try it and let me know if you liked it. -- Auf Wiedersehen! -- Martina"
Remembering Berlin's Bars
Here is a report on a subject we all remember, fondly or not.
If, heaven forbid, you don't remember fondly, or maybe not at all, read the "Berlin Bars" report anyway, before criticizing, please.
Texas FSB Vet Writes Teufelsberg Report
"C Trick: Sort of a Memoir"
This book is not a novel, but a recalling of the Berlin experience from the dimly recalled youth of Don Cooper. Don is a newspaper reporter these days. I'm glad I read the book, and I recommend it. It jogged my memory. I was in the actual C Trick, so I have an opinion about how it all really happened. I remember both the good and the bad, the pleasant and the uncomfortable, but I put aside the adolescent unhappiness I sometimes felt in that duty in Berlin. This book brings back remembrances of the moody attitudes I observed in my army colleagues then, and remember feeling in myself. Read more in the critical review.
DLI Alumni!
Rgister at the online DLI Alumni Association to make arrangments for reunions for your class.
Also, join the DLI Notes and News Yahoo Group for rapid communications and updates on all things for DLI grads.
NSA Eyeballing YOU now?
Would you be surprised to learn that the NSA has a backdoor key to your Windows? I wasn't. Can we lock NSA out of those windows? Click here to read about it!
Official Spook News
The politically correct, Clintonista party line version, the "Director of Central Intelligence Annual Report for the United States Intelligence Community," May 1999 edition.
German Zoos raided as German food scares grow
By Imre Karacs in Berlin
28 January 2001
What a sad place the little city zoo in Berlin's Kreuzberg district is. Children weep for their missing favourites; Gustav the gander, his wings drooping in sorrow, pines for his harem. All the other geese have vanished in recent days, along with four ducks and seven hens. The staff have eaten them.
Nothing seems sacred any more as Germans, confronted by empty shelves at the supermarkets, go foraging for food. With BSE beef already off the menu, followed by sausages and now pork, filling a German belly is becoming nearly impossible. As hunger grips, no one, not even the dedicated Kreuzberg zoo keepers, will object to a bit of free-range poultry.
Other options are fast running out. Even those still willing to risk steak are finding that restaurants are no longer serving it, while meat counters have at best only a token display of browning beef.
After the first scare in November, shoppers switched to game. Now the consumers are being informed that venison is also dodgy, because deer in German forests are apparently fed on the same kind of bone-mealfodder that has brought BSE to cattle.
Lamb is to be avoided, scientists warn, because of scrapie. Battery chickens come laced with salmonella and occasionally dioxin. Cats and dogs, in case anyone should fancy them, are out because of the low-grade
beef they consume.
Other pets, such as hamsters and guinea-pigs, are equally unwholesome because they, too, have been unwittingly munching on the remnants of animal carcasses for years.
That, more or less, leaves fish, largely unknown to German cuisine apart from the roll-mop variety. Fresh fish, in any case, is hard to find.
There was also pork, of course, prepared in hundreds of ingenious ways from the humble fried chop to Helmut Kohl's beloved Saumagen, or stuffed pig's stomach. No German would starve while there was pork around in abundance.
Unfortunately, officials discovered last week that millions of Bavarian pigs have for years been fattened up with the help of illegal drugs, including the sort of anabolic steroids that enabled East German female athletes to swim as fast as men, at the price of growing hair on their chests.
To someone who does not wish to repeat the feat, pork is looking rather unappetising. It is bad news for most Germans, who would rather die than become vegetarian. What are they supposed to eat?
That is the question preoccupying much of the nation's media, with television channels scheduling special
programmes every day in search of the elusive answer. But so far, consumers have only learnt from these what
they cannot eat, not what they can.
That leaves Alfred Biolek, Germany's best-known TV chef, with the task of educating the masses. Mr Biolek
is trying to wean people off their traditional greasy meat and stodgy veg. Viewers learnt the secrets of gnocchi with chanterelle mushrooms last week. They got the recipe for sauerkraut soup a week earlier.
What people can eat is also a political question in certain sensitive areas. For instance, the German parliament's canteen appears to have banned both beef and pork. Its latest offerings include cabbage stew,
elk ragout, and organic vegetarian cannelloni.
Beef has also been declared verboten in the armed forces, presumably on the grounds that you cannot have
mad soldiers. But too much muscle has never done the troops any harm, so pork is still allowed.
Everyone else must get used to elk, reindeer, ostrich, crocodile and other exotic meats which have recently
turned up at the shops, or go hunting. In this frenzy, the sheep in Kreuzberg are probably safe for the moment, but the rabbits had better watch out.
Old Gustav, by the way, survived the zoo keepers' feast because he was thought to be too chewy.
Another report here: Mad Cow affecting European Unemployment
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