Stalin's shitty espionage on Mao

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926


A former Soviet agent says he has found evidence that Joseph Stalin spied on Mao Zedong, among others, by analysing excrement to construct psychological portraits.
By the sound of things, it was a top secret and rather smelly experiment.
According to Russian newspaper reports, in the 1940s Stalin's secret police had set up a special department to get its hands on people's faeces.
The ambitious aim: to analyse samples of foreign leaders' stools.
In other words, espionage via excrement.
'Most extravagant'

It is former Soviet agent Igor Atamanenko who claims to have uncovered this unusual project, while doing research in the archives of the Russian secret services.
"In those days the Soviets didn't have the kind of listening devices which secret services do today," he told the paper.
"That's why our specialists came up with the most extravagant ways of extracting information about a person."
Mr Atamanenko says it was Stalin's henchman Lavrenti Beria who was put in charge of the secret laboratory.
When I contacted Mr Atamanenko, he told me what the Soviet scientists had been looking for in faeces.
"For example, if they detected high levels of amino acid Tryptophan," he explained, "they concluded that person was calm and approachable.
Special toilets were reportedly installed for Mao Zedong while he was in Russia so his faeces could be harvested and analysed (this photo is from 1961) "But a lack of potassium in poo was seen as a sign of a nervous disposition and someone with insomnia."
Mr Atamanenko claims that in December 1949, Soviet spies used this system to evaluate the Chinese leader Mao Zedong who was on a visit to Moscow. They had allegedly installed special toilets for Mao, which were connected not to sewers, but to secret boxes.
For 10 days Mao was plied with food and drink and his waste products whisked off for analysis. Once Mao's stools had been scrutinised and studied, Stalin reportedly poo poo-ed the idea of signing an agreement with him.
'I am here to do more'

Extract from The Coldest Winter (http://faroutliers.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/maos-humiliation-in-moscow-1949.html) by journalist and historian David Halberstam:
When Mao first arrived in Moscow, he announced that China looked forward to a partnership with Russia, but he emphasised as well that he wanted to be treated as an equal.
Instead he was being taught a lesson each day. He had become, in Ulam's words, ''as much captive as guest".
As such, he shouted at the walls, convinced that Stalin had bugged the house: "I am here to do more than eat and shit."
One of Russia's most popular daily newspapers, Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, scrapped the project and closed the laboratory.
I contacted Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, to ask if it could confirm Stalin's secret stool project. However, the FSB had considerably less to say on the matter than Mr Atamanenko:
"We cannot comment on this story," came the reply.
The main significance of this story other than the various fecal puns which can be made about it is that, if true, it shows some of the totally ridiculous rubrics the Stalinist regime used to determine who could be trusted or not.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

The Soviet Union really went down the toilet with Stalin in charge.

[Communist Mutant From Outer Space]

The Stalinist regime really shit the bed this time, eh?

[khad]

Intel SOP. Not sure why this comes as a surprise to anyone.
Then again, I've had leftists look at me like I grew a third eye when I mentioned ECHELON in college.
Maybe this is just another attempt to make leftists look silly on account of their total ignorance of how the world works.

http://www.rense.com/general72/fexc.htm


The White House flew in a special portable toilet to Vienna for Bush's personal use during his visit. The Bush White House is so concerned about Bush's security, the veil of secrecy extends over the president's bodily excretions. The special port-a-john captured Bush's feces and urine and flew the waste material back to the United States in the event some enterprising foreign intelligence agency conducted a sewage pipe operation designed to trap and examine Bush's waste material. One can only wonder why the White House is taking such extraordinary security measures for the presidential poop.

In the past, similar operations were conducted against foreign leaders to determine their medical condition. However, these intelligence operations were directed against dictators in countries where even the medical conditions of the top political leaders were considered "state secrets."

The Israeli Mossad conducted one such operation against Syrian President Hafez Assad when he visited Amman, Jordan in Feb. 1999 for the funeral of King Hussein. The Mossad and its Jordanian counterpart installed a special toilet in Assad's hotel room that led not to a pipe but to a specimen canister. Assad suffered from diabetes and cancer and the operation was designed to discover the actual medical condition of the ailing leader.

During Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Washington in 1987, the CIA reportedly placed a special trap under a sewage tank to collect the Soviet leader's bodily waste for analysis.

More recently, the CIA was reported to have collected waste samples from Ugandan President-dictator Yoweri Museveni's toilet when he visited Washington. Hey, here's a question - do you know where James Bond hid his lockpicks (http://www.spymuseum.org/exhibition-experiences/about-the-collection/collection-highlights/rectal-tool-kit/)?

[The Intransigent Faction]

Mr Atamanenko says it was Stalin's henchman Lavrenti Beria who was put in charge of the secret laboratory. Well, that explains everything.

It's interesting that Khrushchev cancelled it. If he was trying to show that he was less paranoid/suspicious, though maybe not more willing to view Mao and the Chinese as equal partners, that obviously didn't succeed at repairing Sino-Soviet relations.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Intel SOP. Not sure why this comes as a surprise to anyone.
Then again, I've had leftists look at me like I grew a third eye when I mentioned ECHELON in college.
Maybe this is just another attempt to make leftists look silly on account of their total ignorance of how the world works.


Khad - good point, although what's interesting about this case vs the cases you listed was that they were looking to build a psychological profile of Mao using this information, instead of determining whether he had diabetes or some other physical condition. Discovering that an autocrat has a disease like diabetes using fecal samples is serious intel, while I'm not sure if one can actually determine whether a person is "approachable" or not using a stool sample.

[khad]

Khad - good point, although what's interesting about this case vs the cases you listed was that they were looking to build a psychological profile of Mao using this information, instead of determining whether he had diabetes or some other physical condition. Discovering that an autocrat has a disease like diabetes using fecal samples is serious intel, while I'm not sure if one can actually determine whether a person is "approachable" or not using a stool sample.
You should know to cut and run when a position is untenable.

What you specifically quoted:


"For example, if they detected high levels of amino acid Tryptophan," he explained, "they concluded that person was calm and approachable.

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1983-32882013000300018


Psychol. Neurosci. vol.6 no.3 Rio de Janeiro July/Dec. 2013

Tryptophan diet reduces aggressive behavior in male mice

Julio Cesar WalzI, II;Laura StertzI; Adam FijtmanI; Bárbara T. M. Q. dos SantosI; Rosa Maria M. de AlmeidaI

IUniversidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
IICentro Universitário Unilasalle, Canoas, RS, Brazil

A tryptophan diet reduces aggressive behavior in different species, although some controversial findings have been reported. We studied 65 male mice divided into four groups according to increasing dosages of tryptophan (10, 20, 30, and 100 mg/kg) and a control group (vehicle). The first four groups ingested 10, 20, 30, and 100 mg/kg tryptophan together with cellulose vehicle and water by gavage before the behavioral tests that sought to record aggressive behavior. The control group received only the vehicle at the same time that the other groups received the tryptophan solutions. The results showed that low concentrations (10 and 20 mg/kg) of tryptophan decreased (p < .04) the frequency of attack bites and lateral threats (i.e., aggressive components; p < .02) after an encounter with a male intruder without altering locomotor activity. In conclusion, the low concentrations of tryptophan diminished aggressive behavior against a male intruder.

[khad]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-4159.2011.07369.x/full


Neurochem. (2011) 118, 796–805

High tryptophan diet reduces extracellular dopamine release via kynurenic acid production in rat striatum

Alato Okuno, Tsutomu Fukuwatari and Katsumi Shibata

At endogenous brain concentrations, the neuroinhibitory tryptophan metabolite kynurenic acid (KYNA) is a preferential antagonist of the a7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (a7nAChR). In the present study, male Wistar rats were fed a high tryptophan diet (adding 0.1–1.5% tryptophan) for 24 h to examine (i) the effect of increased tryptophan on extracellular dopamine (DA) and KYNA levels and (ii) to determine any possible interactions between DA and KYNA. Brain KYNA levels were dose-dependently increased by tryptophan intake, and these increase were consistent with kynurenine (KYN), the precursor to KYNA, levels in the brain, plasma and liver. Administration of the 1.5% tryptophan added diet reduced the extracellular DA level to 60%, and increased the extracellular KYNA to 320% in the striatum. The DA reduction was attenuated through inhibiting KYNA synthesis with 2-aminoadipic acid. These results indicate that a high tryptophan diet can induce KYNA production and suppress DA release. One possible mechanism is that as more KYN is metabolized from the high doses of tryptophan in the liver and released into the blood stream, KYNA production in astrocytes is enhanced and the increased extracellular KYNA inhibits DA release by blocking a7nAChRs. Dietary manipulation of KYNA formation in astrocytes may offer a unique strategy to modulate DA.

[John Nada]

Mao's arrival in Moscow on December 16 was an edgy one. He was treated not as the leader of a great revolution bringing into the Communist orbit one of the world's great nations but rather, as the historian Adam Ulam has written, ''as if he were, say, the head of the Bulgarian party."Linked to in the BBC article: http://faroutliers.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/maos-humiliation-in-moscow-1949.html That's a bad example to use if it meant Mao wasn't given respect. Head of the BCP until he died of a heart attack 6 months before Mao's visit was Georgi Dimitrov (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Dimitrov), last General Secretariat of the Comintern and chief theorist on fascism and the anti-fascist people's fronts. Famous for making the Nazis and prosecutors at the Reichstag Fire Trial look like jackasses, accusing the Nazis of starting the fire and being found not guilty.
Intel SOP. Not sure why this comes as a surprise to anyone.
Then again, I've had leftists look at me like I grew a third eye when I mentioned ECHELON in college.
Maybe this is just another attempt to make leftists look silly on account of their total ignorance of how the world workTo be far, leftists do a pretty good job making themselves look silly without help from shitty BBC articles. And after Snowden, in the land of the blind, the three eyed man is king.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

What you specifically quoted:

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1983-32882013000300018

There's a difference between a diet impacting people's psyche, and their stool reflecting their psyche. For one thing, any samples collected from Mao while visiting Russia would only tell them about the contents of the food that they themselves were feeding him. If they fed him a lot of food with a high Tryptophan content like Turkey, then their samples would reflect that. If they didn't, then his diet would reflect a low content. Thus, even if one could build a psychological profile off of this kind of data, you would need long, consistent testing. Otherwise, you're getting a window into just a brief period of someone's life.

Low potassium is associated with insomnia, but again, if you're taking a few days of samples, you're not finding a consistent pattern about someone's psyche, but the contents of their diet during a short period. Perhaps this kind of data might be useful, but again it's a very limited window. You might find that they haven't been sleeping well for the days he's visiting Russia, but it doesn't say anything about how he eats and sleeps most of the time at home in Beijing.

I don't care about posturing on positions about this, but I am curious - is there any evidence that this particular method is efficacious, as opposed to an analysis of dietary impacts on psychology, in the scientific literature.

[khad]

I don't care about posturing on positions about this, but I am curious - is there any evidence that this particular method is efficacious, as opposed to an analysis of dietary impacts on psychology, in the scientific literature.
There's nothing in your position but posturing.

The question is not whether or not a particular method is established as effective on the basis of rigorous historical evidence. These are agencies are exploring any advantage they can get based on the prevailing medical and scientific knowledge of the day. Efficacy is a question that is easy to answer with 60 years of hindsight, but it says nothing about the imperatives dictating the operation of intelligence orgs in their time.

At least something like mineral and amino acid levels have in vivo medical evidence supporting their impact on psychological health. How much evidence do you suppose was available when the CIA explored the possibility of hallucinogenics for use as truth serums? How much evidence of efficacy was available when the NSA launched the largest bulk data collection program in human history? Or Project Stargate psychics?

On a 1 to 10 scale of outlandish things intelligence agencies pull, this is maybe a 2 out of 10. In fact, I would actually say that building psychological profiles out of stool samples is an even more valid method today, given the proliferation of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications. Back then, people often had to rely on more natural means of mood modulation, which meant more speculative inference based on nutritional markers.

Let's face it - the only reason why you posted this thread is because it mentions fecal matter, in order to get a cheap laugh out of the corpse of the Soviet Union.

When the FBI picks through the moldy banana peels in a suspect's garbage, will you make a thread on that too?

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Why do you assume that I find the CIA or FBI to be any less ridiculous?


At least something like mineral and amino acid levels have in vivo medical evidence supporting their impact on psychological health.Nobody disputes that diet effects mood, but again, you're not going to get an accurate profile of someone's actual psyche based on the stool of someone eating the food that you yourself are providing them.

I think what would be more revealing is a knowledge of their general dietary habits, but you won't get that from a couple stool samples.


. In fact, I would actually say that building psychological profiles out of stool samples is an even more valid method today, given the proliferation of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications.That's true, but in that case you'd be finding specific medications they'd be taking. Those medications are associated with specific psychological conditions. I think finding out that Putin takes antidepressants would be infinitely more relevant than finding out Mao ate turkey the night before.


Let's face it - the only reason why you posted this thread is because it mentions fecal matter, in order to get a cheap laugh out of the corpse of the Soviet Union.I was pretty explicit in the OP that the opportunity for scatalogical humor was one reason I posted it. I do find the notion of building a psychological profile on that data to be dubious, though (once again, not to say it's necessarily more absurd than secretly giving a bunch of soldiers LSD as you mention, but why post that when it's a well known fact that the US tested those drugs on unwitting subjects?)

Anyways, if anyone or any thing is the target here, it's not the USSR, it's one particularly peculiar methodology employed by the intelligence services under Stalin towards another major figure in Leftist history. Nobody, be they a Leftist, a moderate, a liberal, a soc dem or a conservative doubts the historical capacity of the Soviet intelligence services.


When the FBI picks through the moldy banana peels in a suspect's garbage, will you make a thread on that too? If that suspect is a major world leader and potential US ally maybe ... I'll post it when I see that story.

[John Nada]

Simply because the article omitted other details doesn't mean that nothing else was checked for(this is probably one of those mandatory anti-communist, anti-Russia/anti-China articles from the BBC, probably just anti-communist in the Russian papers). It's likely they weren't just checking for potassium or tryptophan(meat in general, dairy and eggs has just as much if not more tryptophan than turkey). It's likely they did check for drugs, alcohol, diseases, trace elements and isotopes, and a whole bunch of stuff. This info would be combined with other intel(HUMINT, SIGINT) for a complete profile. In fact, Mao may have been more of a test on someone familiar and friendly before applying it to enemies.

If Khrushchev dropped it, that's just more of his buffoonery at work. If they were among the first, the Soviets were clearly ahead of the game. It's very much a smart, sane thing to check in combinations with other sources. Like urine, fingerprints, blood or garbage its leaves a lot of personal details(now more shit I got to be paranoid about:unsure: ). I'm certain with DNA and improvements in chemical analysis, it's even more important, and still widely done by many intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Simply because the article omitted other details doesn't mean that nothing else was checked for(this is probably one of those mandatory anti-communist, anti-Russia/anti-China articles from the BBC, probably just anti-communist in the Russian papers). It's likely they weren't just checking for potassium or tryptophan(meat in general, dairy and eggs has just as much if not more tryptophan than turkey). It's likely they did check for drugs, alcohol, diseases, trace elements and isotopes, and a whole bunch of stuff. This info would be combined with other intel(HUMINT, SIGINT) for a complete profile.

The drugs/diseases issue makes more sense than trying to determine whether he has insomnia or something. It would not be surprising if researchers, journalists or former Russian agents are omitting parts of the story to make it more absurd.

[Invader Zim]

You should know to cut and run when a position is untenable.


From the guy who linked to and quoted a notorious conspiracy theory and Holocaust denial website.

[Mialectical Daterialism]

This story seems to confirm that the combination of turds and Stalin still rakes in the page clicks for the capitalist media.

Also that examining faeces is an excellent if obviously quite basic way of studying a living organism, humans included. If thought is a product of matter then there is nothing wrong with thinking that you may be able to scientifically discover something about it from whatever waste products are excreted. And as Khad has shown, you actually can, even if it is crude, but then what do you expect.

[Tim Redd]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926

A former Soviet agent says he has found evidence that Joseph Stalin spied on Mao Zedong, among others, by analysing excrement to construct psychological portraits.
By the sound of things, it was a top secret and rather smelly experiment.
According to Russian newspaper reports, in the 1940s Stalin's secret police had set up a special department to get its hands on people's faeces.
The ambitious aim: to analyse samples of foreign leaders' stools.
In other words, espionage via

The main significance of this story other than the various fecal puns which can be made about it is that, if true, it shows some of the totally ridiculous rubrics the Stalinist regime used to determine who could be trusted or not.

This is the kind of thing Revolutionary Communist Party chairman (an RCP chauvinist term) Bob Avakian does against people he perceives as rivals or enemies. He wants to know the most intimate and personal actions and behaviors of such individuals in order to use even those kinds of things against those persons. Avakian repeats and plagiarizes exactly what such persons say so that he can undermine and have a leg up on them. If for example one of the persons he targets states that marble curbs were created by the working class in an insurrection, he will be sure to mention it without acknowledging that he learned about it from those persons. And if Avakian left it at trivial examples like that it wouldn't be such a big deal, but Avakian also does this kind of thing on key points in significant areas of study, research and discussion. He is a real low life plagiarizer and meglomaniac. That is why I call Avakian a "would be Stalin". Stalin had some good points but he was also a real stinker. Avakian has done some good things for the movement but it doesn't entitle him to claim the contributions of others. He is a master of taking credit for other people's ideas including my own and is a real stinker.

Avakian claims that he has always spoke about the concept of difference with the same core, however he never mentioned this until well after I delineated the same concept in a chapter on the concept of Polymorphism in my paper "Forward with Revolutionary Dialectics", released on May 1st, 2006.

See the second section of the paper "Forward with Revolutionary Dialectics" at www.risparty.org (http://www.risparty.org) for details about what I just have delineated.

Addendum: There are 2-3 people who know about the above situation and support Avakian nevertheless. These people claim to be communist revolutionaries who think that society achieve the communist goal of the abolition of classes and the elimination of exploitation and oppression by any means necessary. However because their names are publicized by the RCP, they meet famous people they would not ordinarily meet and they play key roles in various RCP related or initiated events, these people throw their lot in with the RCP and the RCP orientation that Bob Avakian is the be all and end all who should be mentioned or referred to at all times. The fact that Avakian has plagiarized my ideas and even specific terminology means nothing to them weighed against the other things I just listed as bennies for supporting the RCP and Avakian. This goes to show their ultimately bourgeois ideology and how they behave in ways that support the existence of capitalism rather than its thorough going elimination and annilhilation.

[John Nada]

A former Soviet agent says he has found evidence that Joseph Stalin spied on Mao Zedong, among others, by analysing excrement to construct psychological portraits...This is the kind of thing Revolutionary Communist Party chairman (an RCP chauvinist term) Bob Avakian does against people he perceives as rivals or enemies. He wants to know the most intimate and personal actions and behaviors of such individuals in order to use even those kinds of things against those persons..."From the asses, to the asses". He's just applying the "ass line".:lol: