Fidelis Cloer
In a career spanning two decades, Fidelis Cloer has supplied presidents and dictators with the finest luxury armored vehicles money can buy.
Diego Garcia
Diego Garcia is a tropical, footprint-shaped coral atoll located south of the equator in the central Indian Ocean. Several groups claim that the military base on Diego Garcia has been used by the U.S. government for transport of prisoners involved in the controversial extraordinary rendition program.
The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception
In 1953, the fledgling CIA hired professional magician John Mulholland to adapt his techniques of stealth and misdirection to the craft of espionage. Mulholland produced two illustrated manuals featuring a range of tricks from placing pills into drinks to stealing documents and avoiding detection. The classified manuals were believed to have been destroyed in 1973, but the authors discovered a copy in 2007 among recently declassified CIA archives.
Dueling scar
At the turn of the 20th century, the dueling scar was popularized by upper-class Austrians and Germans who saw it as a mark of their class and of their honor, due to the social importance of dueling societies at Austrian universities at the time. If you were a doctor, lawyer, or professor, the dueling scar was a tattoo that signified your inclusion in an elite social rank, and visitors to university cafes would expect to see young men with bandaged faces.
Semipalatinsk Test Site
Between 1949 and 1989, the Semipalatinsk Test Site was one of the primary locations for Soviet above and below ground nuclear testing.
Project Iceworm
Project Iceworm was a top-secret US military project from the cold war. Powered, remarkably, by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator and known as “the city under the ice”, the camp’s three-kilometre network of tunnels, eight metres beneath the ice, housed laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel and accommodation for as many as 200 soldiers. Its personnel were officially stationed there to test Arctic construction methods and carry out research. Scientists based at the camp did, indeed, drill the first ice core samples ever used to study the earth’s climate, obtaining data still cited today. In reality, the camp served as cover for something altogether different. Project Iceworm, presented to the US chiefs of staff in 1960, aimed to use Camp Century’s frozen tunnels to test the feasibility of a huge launch site under the ice, close enough to fire nuclear missiles directly at the Soviet Union.
Antonov A-40
The Antonov A-40 was a Soviet attempt to allow a tank to glide into a battlefield after being towed aloft by an airplane, to support airborne forces or partisans.
Guy Debord’s Kriegspiel
In January 1977, the French Situationist Guy Debord founded the company Strategic and Historical Games. This company had an immediate goal: to produce a game of war that Debord had already designed in his head years before. Inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of Napoleon, Debord's game is a chess-variant played by two opposing players on a game board of 500 squares arranged in rows of 20 by 25 squares.
Voisin III
The Voisin III was a French two-seat bomber and ground attack aircraft of World War I, among the earliest of its kind. It is also notable for being the first aircraft in the war to win an aerial fight and shoot down an enemy aircraft.
John Rigby & Co.
Founded in Dublin, Ireland, in 1735, John Rigby & Co. has forged an enduring history of manufacturing excellence and design innovation that is unequalled in the annals of rifle and shotgun manufacturing.