The Bishop's Weekly Column from the Parish Bulletin

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Listening Post(s)

October 6th, 2009

Hunting for a different quarry I'll be bound !

One of the reasons the Soviet Union "collapsed" was that they simply could not spend enough in the arms' race to keep up with the United States and N.A.T.O. forces in the west - or so it was said. On both sides of the Iron Curtain (as Churchill reputedly called it) listening posts were set up to monitor the radio, TV and military activities of the other side (or just about anything that transpired).

When the Cold War came to an "end", it was felt that there was no need for all the expenditure for all this technology. I can still remember the air raid siren on the roof of Hillside Station, Southport being periodically tested just in case of an attack. In actual fact the warning, in the event of a war, would have been useless since more than likely the war would have switched from conventional to nuclear real fast according to the war games' scenarios of the 1970s and 80s. In any case the air raid siren was removed from the station roof in the early 1990s - "peace" had been declared (and, once again... or so it seemed).

Now the Soviet empire is "no more", but the geographically reduced remnant of Russia, flush with a seemingly endless supply of bank notes because of their new-found oil revenues (rather than from their over-taxed people to whom the government kept making a pastoral appeal) has begun "beefing-up" its military all over again. Once more the Russian air force is sending its surveillance airplanes to test the defensive capabilities of the West. Britain seems to be a particularly favorite target as She was before.

The plucky British Royal Air Force are more than equal to their task, however, and although it is very expensive to scramble aircraft to deflect the surveillance planes from Russia, fortunately today counter-surveillance measures are not that expensive and are indeed within the reach of the man on the street via internet purchasing houses. Some kind soul anonymously contributed to my own "counter-surveillance" efforts by sending me a book on photography and a shutter for a camera lens. I thank him for that.

"Mischief" wrote one correspondent to me recently, "is everywhere these days". Indeed it is ! In an update to a previous column about the dirty-tricks at OLF I had been wondering how some of my conversations with people had been relayed to third, fourth, fifth and even sixth party sources. Availing myself of some internet research I discovered the answers. However, that was mere speculation on my part. Yesterday evening I saw what might have been a "Cold War" relic and it was just exactly what I surmised all along. Today I didn't see it any more and I don't think I'll ever see that ever again !

+TF