Vic Socotra

18 June 2008

Time Ball

Comment le Pédé Va T’il?, Part One

Grounds of the US Naval Observatory, Washington, DC

Memorandum for the Director, Naval Intelligence, The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

"May I take this opportunity of commending your officer for his efforts in this matter; without the knowledge of the French language, he was able to make contact with one of the cleverest band of Corsican counterfeit passers operating in the Mediterranean Basin, a band which the Surete' Nationale had been trying to disperse for a number of years; he obtained the confidence of the members of this band who, heretofore, had boasted that no police officer would ever enter into their organization under the guise of a purchaser. He did this through his own resourcefulness, as no one was there to guide him while in contact with members of this band."

Very truly yours,
A.A. Christides
U.S. Treasury Representative, Paris, France
December 31, 1952

Good morning. The time-ball is still up, and I have time to start a story, though not complete it in this sitting. I got another long note from my associate who is retired now, and deep in the country. He is sculpting his memoirs, and I agreed to help get some of them ready for publication. This is his story, not mine, but bear with me, since he gave me the sea story, but not the context.

Put your feet up. There is time. It is late November, 1952. The Korean war is an unpopular and bloody stalemate, and peace talks have been postponed. The final peace treaty with Japan is just seven months old, and the former enemy has regained the appurtenances of self-government. That is one of the reasons my associate is just back from Japan, where he was the top cop in Yokosuka under military law.

People are still talking about the UFO scare, when unidentified objects buzzed the capital, taking evasive action after fighters were scrambled to investigate, and which returned after the jets departed.

In the same month, Dwight Eisenhower has been elected President, and America has detonated the first hydrogen bomb at Enewetok atoll. The US Navy has laid the keel for the first nuclear-powered submarine, named for the craft imagined first by the Frenchman Jules Verne, the USS Nautilus.

Regardless of how strange things are right now, the year of 1952 has all the strangeness anyone can rightly be expected to handle. My associate says it this way:

“I was assigned to the Naval District Intelligence Office, located on the grounds of the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest Washington. In those days, the District was responsible for most of the day-to-day activities of the Service.

The District managed the Shore Patrol, determined uniform policy, maintained security and ran Naval Intelligence in its area of responsibility. Just up the road was Ward Circle, where the Navy had run the big secret of WW II- the code-breaking activities that helped beat Japan. Goodness knows what they were doing in 1952. I knew later, but it was a place you did not talk about.

The observatory was home to the Chief of Naval Operations. That was before the stately home at Number 1 Observatory Circle was appropriated by the Vice President. It was home to one of the oldest scientific agencies in the country, having been established in 1830 to surpass Greenwich as the premier center of the navigational science.

The Depot of Charts and Instruments took care of the U.S. Navy's precision chronometers and maps. It had been downtown on the Potomac, at Navy Hill in Foggy Bottom until 1893, when light pollution rendered the telescopes inefficient.

The Admirals selected a perfect circle of property on the heights above the city at 3450 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest. The observatory and library were world class, since the compound was far away from the lights of the downtown area.

Since 1845, the Observatory had determined the time with the world's first vulcanized time ball, created to Superintendent Matthew Fontaine Maury’s specifications by Charles Goodyear. It was installed atop the dome of the 9.6-inch telescope. When the time-ball was dropped, a flag was mechanically raised, letting all ships and civilians know it was precisely noon.

By the time I was there the time ball was gone, and the Observatory determined time with a photographic zenith tube (PZT), an instrument that points straight up and photographs selected stars crossing the zenith. The Time Service transmitted via telegraph lines to the Navy Department, and also activated the Washington fire bells at 0700, 1200, and 1800.

When I got orders to the Observatory, the Director of Counterintelligence, Office of Naval Intelligence, had me take up residence on Wyoming Avenue. Today, the place I lived in is the first large building on the left of an old home at 2107 Wyoming Ave, and it has a sign on it, “The French School.”

Directly across from this is a white office building that was the office of the Director of SDEC- the Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-espionnage. His name was Philipe Thyraud de Vosjoli, and he was head of French Intelligence in the United States (and had a beautiful assistant by the name of Janine, but that's another story).

The French had a problem with currency, and they wanted some help. That is how I wound up in Europe, and assigned to liaison duties with the Surite Nationale.

I will have to get to that tomorrow, since I see the time ball coming down, and the flags for today are about to go up.

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