In 1962, Egypt's Missile Program Lost Its Key Scientist Without a Trace | Hacker News Reader

In 1962, Egypt's Missile Program Lost Its Key Scientist Without a Trace

popularmechanics.com

133 pointsbookofjoe103 comments

Lots of shady missile deals went down in West Asia/North Africa in the 60/70s. Somewhat related: Israel was collaborating with Iran on missile projects but allegedly planned to deceive them by providing outdated missiles while using Iranian funds to develop superior versions for themselves [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_Flower

Where's the part about deceiving in the link? Aren't you conflating Iran-Contra that happened after the revolution?

It's in the last paragraph.

>While Pahlavi's authorities were happy with this project and its advancement away from the eyes of the US in their view, Israel had carefully duped Pahlavi to secure its interests. According to Israel's plan, during this project, contrary to what Iran's top officials think, Iran would only achieve obsolete technology.

and in the original source [0]:

>A very senior source in the Israeli Ministry of Defense reveals that the weapons deal with Iran was fraudulent. With each of the six joint proj-ects, the Israelis planned to deceive the Iranians by providing them only an outdated version of the weapon in question, while using Iranian money to build a new generation for Israel's exclusive use.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=NkxZcHL1xdYC&pg=PA6&redir_...

When I buy a laptop from Apple, they used my money to build the next generation of laptops… which inevitably come out within a year. I wouldn’t necessarily believe Iran was deceived without more.

This comment is clearly not in good faith but one can clearly understand that the current generation is out outdated.

Not sure what's the historical validity for that one source saying it was fraudulent, but this sure reads like anachronism. As someone that tries to defend him being part of selling ballistic missiles to Iran a very short time before it turning into a theocracy.

I am not completely inclined to believe Bergman because of me personally knowing one case where he published something completely wrong, and also this doesn't align with the cooperation Israel had with pre-revolution Iran.

In any case, it's theoretically possible, I guess

... and when you ship in laptop for repair, you'll get a worse torn out one back. /s

I read from somewhere that Italy, Libya and some South America country were developing missile programs together, too. Probably from a book about Fiat I think.

The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya was part of a century long power struggle between France and Italy over influence of Libya. Italy had a good relationship with Gaddafi, to the detriment of French influence. Europeans and the US understood the motivation behind France's push to intervene and were reticent to get involved (because of the internecine spat, not out of concern for Libya), but France got the UK on their side by appealing to anger over the Lockerbie bombing. Combined with France making it explicitly clear they were demanding it be a NATO operation (France had only just recently joined NATO and were expecting a quid pro quo), the rest of NATO acquiesced, under protest by Italy, of course.

I've always found it so interesting that the history of France's colonial imperialism in Africa and Asia seems so underappreciated in comparison to how absolutely detrimental it has been to the world.

Yeah. I first learned about France's ongoing imperialist ambitions in Africa reading the famous book on the Rwandan genocide, and ever since then French military involvement in seemingly random places in Africa stands out. I don't think any European country (except maybe Russia), or even the US, has maintained such a broad, cohesive, continuous imperial policy. Maybe it's well known to French people, and Europeans who follow politics, but I think for the rest of the world it's completely hidden.

France's actions in Africa were horrendous, but let's also not forget Asia. The Vietnam War was born out of the French Indochina War and France used anticommunist rhetoric to gain US support for its war against the Viet Minh.

While it would be unfair to say that America's actions in Vietnam were the fault of the French, there was certainly French encouragement if not outright manipulation.

Somebody here on HN told me once that France is the stupidest colonial power, because even though they had the most powerful army and one of the most powerful navies in Europe for a long time, they haven't been able to utilize them optimally, and have only lost more than they gained in their colonial ventures.

I tend to agree. Even now the French can't maintain a cohesive relationship with their client states, which is why they've lost influence severely in the Sahel. They just didn't know when to be cohesive and how to be extractive.

Colonial powers are almost always purely extractive and in the case of the European colonial powers, especially the French, they had an inherent belief in their cultural superiority, which was justification for their brutality.

Eh, it depends. Portugal and Spain were more integrating than the rest (Portugal literally shifted the government to Brazil during Pedro I, while the Spanish were intermarrying and handing out Spanish dukedoms to Native American monarchs).

France was dumb because they barely did any extraction while they exploited the natives.

> Portugal and Spain were more integrating than the rest...

I'm sorry but your characterization is very strange given the history. Portugal and Spain were just as brutal as the French.

Yeah, I realized that when going down the rabbit hole. In a certain respect, the French were the least asshole-ish of the lot, simply because they didn't know how to colonize and extract properly.

They were all despicably brutal beyond redemption. Some things simply can't be rationalized, justified or compared.

>but France got the UK on their side by appealing to anger over the Lockerbie bombing.

I don't believe anyone still gave a shit at that point or expected ghadaffi to redo after he paid for it. I think it might be better to look at the deals of BP and such in the area.

What, you mean the thing Microsoft did to IBM with DOS? Say it isn't so!

... DOS or OS/2? lol

I do suppose there are some analogies to be had if we talk about OS/2...

i.e. that was supposed to be more of a partnership versus a normal vendor agreement...

However my understanding is that there was a lot more org cultural friction; A big one being IBM's insistence on early versions of OS/2 supporting the 286 (as well as similar rigid bureaucratic support requirements) on top of the way IBM did 'Process Management' on developers as far as using LOC to measure productivity.

While I am a huge proponent of .NET, I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft...

But I've also worked at orgs that have run the gamut between 'too conservative' and 'a little bold/reckless' in engineering practices. Microsoft was able to iterate way faster and decided to tackle backward compatibility in different ways. They got tired of the bureaucracy of IBM, and I'll use Raymond Chen's story of a coffee maker to example the type of bureaucracy and how ironically simple it was to avoid; https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10...

The wonderful book "Rise and Kill First" is a history of Israeli assassinations, with their policy of going after the "head of the snake". There are some interesting sections on how Israel used assassination to inhibit missile programs in the Middle East, including Egypt. Its a pretty easy read despite being long.

Not much of an achievement when you can't hit back without the Western world responding.

Not many people know this but it was not Cuba, Korea, Vietnam or Berlin that got NATO closest to WW3. It was Israel. For the USSR the Jews in the desert were just another proxy war sideshow for Europe it was non negotiable.

The historical record shows that Arab war planners consistently depended on the West stepping in to restrain Israel. This was something that Nasser and the other Arab states in the 67 and 73 war explicitly talked about. This remains a core consideration of Arab actors in the region in their prosecutions of various hostilities against Israel.

And here comes trump, getting duped by israel over and over again. Very fitting explanation of the middle east.

On the other hand, the USSR was literally deployed on the ground during the war of attrition and shot at Israelis. So you can also blame Egypt/the USSR

More wonderful yet is Seymour Hersh's Samson Option, outlining how Israeli spies hijacked America's intelligence agencies to support this double-standard. Those agents provided the necessary diplomatic cover for Israel to make their initial incursions into satellite intelligence and nuclear weaponry, which started the strategic imbalance that would endanger civilians in the Levant for decades to come. You can see shadows of the same US/Israel relationship in the China/Iran axis, wherein China's intelligence agencies successfully launder support for humanitarian crises like Gaza, while strategically bolstering Iran with air defenses and satellite intelligence.

Hersh's best work since unveiling Abu Ghraib. Highly recommend it over the super-spy biographies, especially since Hersh didn't have to go through Israel's Military Censor like Bergman did.

If you want an interesting related story that's so incredible people wouldn't believe if it was a film plot, look up Otrag. Not the Wikipedia page, that only tells a fraction of the full story. There's a documentary floating around somewhere about their work in Zaire under Mobutu before they started building ballistic missiles for Gaddafi.

Both cases remind me of Project Harp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP). After the project was shut down by the US and Canada, the engineer behind it (Gerald Bull) decided to work for Saddam Hussein to build a "Babylon Cannon" which then caused Mossad to 'intervene' in 1990:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull

I wonder how many similar but unknown cases there are involving former Soviet scientists and engineers trying their luck with 3rd world despots after the Soviet Union collapsed.

PS: just remembered that Willy Messerschmitt also ended up building a jet fighter for Egypt after the project was abandondend by Spain. Egypt then also eventually cancelled the project in 1969 though and instead decided to become close buddies with the Soviet Union - I wonder if that decision saved Messerschmitt from the same fate as Krug and Bull:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helwan_HA-300

"caused"

it's all human decisions. especially at institutional level, there's no causing others to act

> it's all human decisions. especially at institutional level, there's no causing others to act

And what is the difference? It seems the same ("A got dangerous, causing B to act" vs "A got dangerous, having B decide to act").

Jews caused Nazies to kill them. See it?

And Kurt Tank, father of the FW190 among other things, built the Pulqui for Argentina until it was nixed by a combination of the fall of Perón and heavy US pressure to make sure Argentina never developed a domestic fighter industry, after which he went to India and create the Marut. He could have been building them for the UK but they turned down one of the world's foremost aircraft designers because they couldn't see a need for him.

the fact you all dropping one operation after another, and the top HN story now about Ai just being better at remembering... kinda explains why Tata, and it's reboot, grok, went Mecha Hitler.

This is also why the USA was funding biolabs in Ukraine. After the Soviet breakup they didn't want people with suddenly no income and dangerous skills offering them to despotic governments, or the labs deteriorating and legitimate knowledge lost. Around 2022 it was briefly trotted out as an excuse for the Russian invasion.

This one?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EA0XfkboFIY

Funny enough the uploader has made that video unavailable in Germany (OTRAG was a German company, the first private/commercial aerospace company about 3 decades before SpaceX).

Scott Manley has a video about them, and that's also available in Germany ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed4w4Cz5ccU

PS: GP probably meant this one (this is just the trailer of a German documentary from 2018):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXDdKuRANbc

Kind of sad that they didn’t work out. I really wish German industry had a little more willpower to get things done instead of giving up so easily. That’s one strength of the US. They just keep marching forward and have enough investors that are willing to take the risk.

The US didn't have a (successful) private aerospace company in the 1970s either (AFAIK). The whole thing was simply too early to be a realistic business.

It's not that the private sector gave up entirely though (e.g. see https://isaraerospace.com/), but of course it's incredibly hard to enter a market that's dominated by a handful heavily subsidized and state/military-sponsored companies (and that includes SpaceX).

But I have a feeling that at least the braindrain from Europe towards the US will not be quite as extreme in the future as it was in the last 90 years.

Also:

> I really wish German industry had a little more willpower

I think it's less about company willpower but about (investment) money, and of course every idea must make business sense. That whole balancing act between 'must quickly become a viable business' versus 'how much investment money is available to burn on failed experiments' happens on a much smaller scale in Europe compared to the US (and a lot of European investment money is being burned in the US instead of Europe, and this clearly would need to change first).

That's the one, there seem to be multiple copies around, e.g. this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfBcCLSQP-c

I remain astounded that (a) all this footage actually exists and (b) someone made an entire documentary about it. I'd never heard of this stuff until I talked to someone who claimed to have helped finance the project at the time.

Related? the Helwan HA-300. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helwan_HA-300

Summary: Egypt was going to develop an indigenous fighter in the 1960's based off of a mostly finished Spanish design by a post WWII otherwise unemployed Willy Messerschmitt.

I First heard of the project via a pretty good youtube documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqIpJuqvsWQ Messerschmitt's Remarkably Good Supersonic Fighter (Not A Pound For Air To Ground)

https://archive.ph/d7dLv

It's easy to throw stones, but who among us hasn't lost a key missile scientist at some point or another?

Or key industrialists.

A concerning number of stateside scientists working on hypersonics have died or vanished under questionable circumstances in a rather short timeframe recently.

It's probably nothing, I wouldn't look into it

You're referring to this conspiracy theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_scientists_conspiracy_...

It just may be that they've been pulled from duty.

I haven't looked into those scientists in particular, but a few years ago I did some OSINT on others that had funerals. I was surprised to find a couple of them living in other countries with different identities.

The social media posts on their funerals were rich sources of data. So, I think some don't have funerals anymore because of the PII leakage.

If any of you were in gifted programs during the 70s and 80s, you may have experienced being scouted by intelligence agencies or at least witnessing others being scouted. I suspect the gifted program was largely created for that purpose. So, at least some exceptional scientists who grew up in that era have connections with intel.

Use Google Translate or llm to translate the content in this url

https://www.intelligence.org.il/?module=articles&item_id=16&...

I've been enjoying the Firefox translate, but for some reason sometimes it doesn't show the option to engage it, and I have to fall back to running things through duck.ai

Too shy to file a formal bug or let the cloud know what I'm OSINTing :-)

>for some reason sometimes it doesn't show the option to engage it

The language detection definitely isn't 100%.

On desktop there's always "Translate page" in the hamburger menu. On Android it's in the 3 dot menu, hidden behind "More".

>On desktop there's always "Translate page" in the hamburger menu.

Thanks, maybe I didn't look hard enough last time.

Interesting Heinz Krugs last traces are a car in Solln, which is very close to Pullach, the headquarter of former Gehlen Organisation now home of the German secret service. If there is a good place to vanish, then it's probably there.

It is almost as if there's a country that since its foundation always find perfectly reasonable to kidnap or murder potential enemies in other jurisdictions, ignoring blatantly the sovereignty even of allied or friendly countries, without any restrictions, or respect for international law.

What is the value in reminding the readers? Is there anybody who does not know at that level?

Avoidable also in view of the following: have you noticed in the past years a surge of indoctrinated that, at every misdeed from some part P immediately note how some other part S championed it? Judge: "Have you committed rape?" Defendant: "What about all the other rapists?". It's not even a bad argument, it's gut diversion - it's for the distraction of animals.

I was talking about exactly the same country referenced in the TFA.

Reminded me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Alexandrov#Disappeara...

I recall reading the Arab world was a major refuge for escaping Nazis. Egypt had WW2 Nazi aces flying against Israel unless I'm mistaken?

I wonder if the Arabs got nearly as much milage out of Nazi scientists as the Americans or Soviets got.

If your program has a key scientist it is a pretty bad program.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com