Simon Forbes

Investigative Journalist & Historian (PhD from SOAS). Interests i/c terrorist & other serious crime, religion, film, music, art (pic from Latheronwheel)

[🌸🎵 Beautiful Melody 🎶💖 @Ducnghia16]

The stuff that legends are made of. Remember hearing this the first time and then over and over and over. Merry Clayton: amazing.

Is ���Gimme Shelter” the Rolling Stones' greatest song?

[Schnitzel @Schnitzel63]

The Stranglers - Hanging Around

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

He had been living quietly for fifteen years...

Under the name Ricardo Klement, Adolf Eichmann had built an ordinary life in a forgotten corner of Buenos Aires. A factory job. A wife. Children. Quiet evenings in a modest house on Garibaldi Street. No guards. No fear. Fifteen years of life that he had not earned and that six million people had been denied.

He had been one of the principal architects of the Holocaust's logistics, the man who organized the deportation of Jewish men, women, and children to the death camps with the methodical efficiency of someone who had reduced mass murder to a bureaucratic process. When the war ended, he disappeared. Some believed he was dead. Intelligence agencies followed rumors across continents for years and found nothing. It was as if the man had dissolved.

The break came not from any intelligence service. It came from a father listening to a teenager talk too much.

A Jewish girl in Buenos Aires had begun dating a young man named Nick. Nick liked to brag about his father's wartime past. The girl's father was Lothar Hermann, a Holocaust survivor whose eyesight had been damaged by Nazi torture during the war. He listened carefully to what Nick said and something settled in him with the specific weight of recognition.

He sent a warning to Israel.

Mossad was skeptical at first. Why would one of the most wanted criminals in the world be living in poverty in Buenos Aires without protection or resources? But doubt is costly in intelligence work. They sent agents quietly. For weeks they watched the man who called himself Ricardo Klement.

The confirmation came through his own habits. On his wedding anniversary, the man came home carrying flowers. A camera caught the side of his face. The shape of his ears, an anatomical feature that cannot be surgically altered in ways that defeat careful comparison, matched Adolf Eichmann's wartime photographs exactly.

Now came the harder question. Argentina had become a refuge for former Nazis. Alerting Argentine police risked Eichmann disappearing again, permanently, with the resources and warning he would need to construct a new identity in a new country. Mossad decided to take him themselves.
May 11, 1960. Seven-thirty in the evening. Garibaldi Street.
Mist hung low. The streetlights barely worked. A car sat broken at the roadside with its hood open, agents pretending to work on it. They knew which bus Eichmann took home every night.

The first bus came. He was not on it. The second bus came. Nothing. The operation was close to being aborted when a third bus arrived and a man stepped down slowly, carrying a lunch box, walking toward his house.

Agent Peter Malkin stepped forward. Un momentito, señor. Just a moment, sir.

When Eichmann turned, it was over in twenty seconds. He was grabbed, brought to the ground, silenced, and put in a waiting car.
Inside the car the questions came in German.

Who are you?
Ricardo.
What is your SS number?
Silence.
Then, in a broken voice, the name he had spent fifteen years not using.
Ich bin Adolf Eichmann. I am Adolf Eichmann.

For nine days Mossad kept him in a safe house while Argentine police searched the city and his sons looked for him and checkpoints appeared across Buenos Aires. The goal was not revenge. It was to bring him to trial, to make him stand in a courtroom where survivors could testify and the world could watch.

They smuggled him onto an El Al aircraft dressed as a flight crew member, drugged, carrying false documents. Airport officials waved them through without knowing what they were allowing to pass.
When the pilot announced they had reached international airspace, agents who had spent careers maintaining professional discipline wept openly. Not from triumph. From the weight of what they had been carrying and where they were finally bringing it.

© Untold History Writer

#archaeohistories

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

In 192 AD, a massive fire swept through central Rome and consumed the Temple of Peace — which had been used as a library and storage facility for some of the most important documents in the Roman world.

Galen lost most of his life's work in that fire. He had spent decades writing — medical treatises, philosophical texts, commentaries on Hippocrates, anatomical studies, pharmacological guides, and works on logic and philosophy ranging across nearly every field of human knowledge. He had stored copies of many of these works in the Temple of Peace's library. The fire destroyed most of them.

Galen was in his early 60s. He spent the remaining years of his life rewriting from memory what he could, producing new works, and documenting what had been lost. The works that survive — approximately 300 texts out of more than 500 he is known to have written — represent only a fraction of what he produced. And yet those surviving works dominated Western medicine for fourteen centuries.

Medieval Islamic scholars translated his texts into Arabic and built entire medical traditions on his foundations. European medical schools in the 12th through 16th centuries taught Galen as the final authority on anatomy, physiology, and treatment. His concept of the four humors — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile — shaped medical thinking from Rome through the Renaissance. It was not until Andreas Vesalius began systematically correcting Galen's anatomical errors through direct human dissection in 1543 that medicine began to move past him — and even then, the process took another century.

#archaeohistories

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

🇰🇼 An Arab man making a phone call in front of a public phone booth in Kuwait, 1960s

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

🇮🇷🇦🇷 Iran's squad playing in '78 World Cup match against Scotland in Cordoba, Estadio Cordoba, Argentina, 1978

[كـــ @kamlfurqan]

@menavisualss

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

Portrait of lawyer Habib Bourguiba (1927)

🇹🇳 The leader of Tunisia’s struggle for independence and the first president of the modern Republic of Tunisia. He organized his country’s resistance against French colonialism and led it to victory; through reforms in education, women’s rights, and modernization, he transformed the country’s destiny.

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

😻🇮🇷 The Persian Cat Museum in Tehran, Iran

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

Dagger with horse head pommel, detail. India, Mughal dynasty, 17th century. Blade: Damascus steel inlaid with gold; hilt: jade with carved decoration, inlaid with gold and semi-precious stones.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Gregory Hemingway, son of Ernest Hemingway, publishes a memoir about his father titled “Papa: A Personal Memoir.”

Norman Mailer writes in the preface: “For once, you can read a book about Ernest Hemingway and not have to decide whether you like him or not.”

Hemingway paints a tender picture of his father, who struggled with but was tolerant of Gregory’s lifelong cross-dressing habit.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Between 3,000 and 20,000 black students in Soweto, South Africa walk out of classes to protest the requirement to learn Afrikaans in school.

However, police barricade the roads and set dogs on the protestors.

After the protestors kill one dog, police open fire on the unarmed children.

Emergency clinics are flooded with wounded and dead; more than 100 children may have been killed.

Two whites have also been killed, including Melville Edelstein, a social worker.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Shalva Maglakelidze, leader of Georgian soldiers in the German Army during WWII, dies at home in Tblisi. He was 82.

After the war, Maglakelidze lived in West Germany, but in 1954 he was kidnapped by the KGB and smuggled back to the USSR.

Nevertheless, he did not go to prison and he spent the rest of his life working as a lawyer.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Francis E. Meloy, Jr., the incoming U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, is kidnapped by fighters from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as they drive through Beirut.

The militants execute Meloy and two others and dump their bodies on the beach.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Commuters cycle to work in Shanghai. The bicycle is the most popular form of transportation in China.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

The above photo was taken three weeks ago, when the Pakistani Prime Minister met with Mao. It was a PR debacle.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

The government of the People’s Republic of China announces that Chairman Mao will no longer receive visitors, fueling speculation that he is terminally-ill.  

Here is Mao’s most-recent photo:

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Production has been a mess:

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

With production five weeks behind schedule, Fox gives “The Star Wars” crew four more weeks to complete the film before they pull the plug.

Producer George Lucas hastily hires three more camera crews.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Many teenagers are disappearing around Chicago. The most recent one was hardly a week ago: