Knitting as Espionage, Part One: Secrets in the Stitch

Summary

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Ridiculous History – "Knitting as Espionage, Part One: Secrets in the Stitch" (March 17, 2026)

Hosts: Ben Bowlin & Noel Brown
Podcast: Ridiculous History by iHeartPodcasts

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Overview

In this engaging episode, Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown unravel the surprisingly rich history of knitting as a tool for espionage. Swinging from the American Revolution through World War II and on to Cold War intrigue, they reveal how knitting—a seemingly innocent domestic craft—became a cloak-and-dagger medium for secret communications and counterintelligence. With lively banter, signature tangents, and a few memorable quips, the hosts shine a light on three extraordinary women whose "secrets in the stitch" helped shape the past.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Knitting and Espionage: Thematic Introduction

• The hosts continue their exploration of how crafts, particularly knitting, have served clandestine purposes in history.
• “[Knitting] as tradecraft, of people conducting espionage and acts of spying through something as humble as knitting.” – Ben Bowlin (00:16)
• They promise a deep dive into real-world examples of wartime spies who leveraged knitting as their tool of trade.

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2. Molly "Old Mom" Rinker: The Revolutionary Spy

• [07:03]
• Molly Rinker, an innkeeper in Philadelphia during the American Revolutionary War, used her overlooked position as a woman to gather intel from British guests.
• She delivered secret messages to the Continental Army—mostly to George Washington—by hiding them in balls of yarn and then casually tossing them to Patriot couriers as they passed by.
• Memorable analogy: “It’s kind of like how you have a message in a fortune cookie. Or it’s kind of like how you have soup in a dumpling, right?” – Ben Bowlin (08:43)
• Her contributions were “absolutely ... mission critical during the 1777-1778 Philadelphia Campaign.” – Noel Brown (09:23)

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3. Phyllis “Pippa” Latour Doyle: WWII’s Knitting Code Hero

• [10:00]
• A 23-year-old South African-born British secret agent, Latour parachuted into Nazi-occupied Normandy in May 1944.
• Member of Churchill’s special army, the SOE (Special Operations Executive), she posed as a local woman with the codename Genevieve. Her assignment: gather intelligence for Allied bombing missions.
• She transmitted 135 Morse-coded messages but the twist? Her codes were disguised in the lace of her hair tie, which she wrapped around a knitting needle and concealed in a shoelace.
• Notable Quote:
  • “I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoelace that I used to tie up my hair.” – Phyllis Latour, as quoted by Ben Bowlin (11:22)
• Despite being detained and strip-searched, she was never caught due to the cleverness of her concealment—and the authorities’ tendency to underestimate women.
• She survived the war and remained quiet about her exploits, which only emerged publicly very late in her life; she died in 2023 at 102 years old.

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4. Elizabeth Bentley: The Red Spy Queen’s Yarn Bag Secrets

• [17:24]
• Elizabeth Bentley, “The Communist June Cleaver,” began as an American Communist spy, gathering intel in Washington D.C. for her Soviet handlers.
• Later became a double agent, voluntarily turning herself in to the FBI due to paranoia, fear for her life, and disillusionment with Communism.
• Her counterintelligence work led to convictions of 11 Communist Party leaders, but also fueled the Red Scare and the “witch hunt” atmosphere of McCarthyism.
• Bentley hid classified documents, microfilms, and even plans for the B-29 bomber in her knitting bag.
• Notable Moment:
  • “They really should have [searched her knitting bag], because that was definitely in there.” – Noel Brown (26:20)
• Her testimony was instrumental in high-profile anti-Communist investigations and contributed to widespread paranoia.
• Discussed Context:
  • The House Un-American Activities Committee’s role and its legacy until 1975.
  • Reflection on the dangers and moral ambiguity of spycraft.

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5. Knitting, Coding & Fabric as Information Technology

• [28:06, 32:11, 39:13]
• The hosts share how governments recognized the intelligence risk of knitting: the US Office of Censorship restricted mailing knitting patterns internationally in 1942.
• Detailed exploration of the differences between knitting, crocheting, croquet (the lawn game), and croquettes (the food).
• Pop culture, etymology, and food tangents abound, with Max, the super producer, chipping in as resident "Crochet, Croquet, Croquette" expert.
• Educational Bit:
  • “Knitting uses two needles to create much more stretchy and draping fabrics ... crocheting uses a hook ... to produce a thicker, sturdier fabric.” – Noel Brown (32:11)

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6. Historical Parallels: Incan Khipu, Punchcards, and Geocities

• [35:32 – 42:33]
• The Incas’ khipu system: knots and strings used for encoding census data, taxes, and possibly stories or philosophies.
• The Jacquard loom is cited as a precursor to computing, using punch cards for automated machine knitting, which influenced the earliest computers.
• The hosts relate this to modern digital espionage, such as CIA messages hidden in goofy Star Wars fan sites; history repeats itself with new media.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Underestimating Women in Spycraft:
  • “Because again, not to sound too soapboxy, they did not take women seriously.” – Ben Bowlin (12:28)
• On Espionage Paranoia:
  • “Tradecraft is pretty brutal. And you ... are only worth the actions you can do ... As soon as your value is no longer relevant, they might kill you.” – Ben Bowlin (21:08)
• On the Red Scare:
  • “It was very much a witch hunt.” – Noel Brown (23:55)
• On the Cyclical Nature of Hidden Messages:
  • “Just because knitting is no longer a gold standard way of secretly communicating intelligence, that doesn’t mean ... other things like that don’t exist. Purposefully crappy websites ... I would propose a version of this same tactic.” – Ben Bowlin (37:15)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [07:03] – Molly “Old Mom” Rinker and the Revolutionary War
• [10:00] – Phyllis “Pippa” Latour Doyle and WWII code-hiding knitting
• [17:24] – Elizabeth Bentley (“Red Spy Queen”), WWII and Cold War double agent
• [32:11] – Difference between knitting, crocheting, croquet, and croquettes
• [35:32–36:21] – Modern equivalents: CIA and Star Wars fan sites
• [39:13–42:33] – Incan khipu knots, Jacquard loom, birth of computing
• [42:41] – Closing thanks and credits

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Memorable Tangents

• Recurring jokes about “crochet, croquet, and croquette” (33:09–34:15)
• Banter about Atlanta weather and neighborhood camaraderie (01:51–02:41)
• Food and etymology of croquettes, influences of colonialism on cuisine (34:15–35:32)
• Promise of a Dave & Buster’s trip for anyone who cracks the khipu code (41:32–41:40)
• References to pop culture (e.g., Billy Joel’s "Vienna," banh mi sandwiches)

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Tone and Style

• Conversational, humorous, and pop-culture savvy
• Educational yet irreverent
• Playful banter weaves together rigorous research and offbeat trivia

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Conclusion

This episode offers an entertaining yet deeply informative journey into the ways knitting and humble domestic crafts have hidden secrets in plain sight—helping turn the tides of war, fueling secret double lives, and even inspiring the earliest computers. With vivid tales, tangents, and a flair for connecting the dots across history, Ben and Noel make clear that sometimes the most unassuming objects—like a ball of yarn or an obscure website—carry the greatest secrets.

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Transcript

[Ben Bullen]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you as always, so much for tuning in. Previously on Ridiculous History. We examined the phenomenal story of people conducting tradecraft, of people conducting espionage and acts of spying through something as humble as knitting. Crafts. Crafts. Yeah, there we go. Perfect. And we want to give a shout out to our big homie, our super producer, Max Crochet. Croquet. Croquette.

[Noel Brown]

Wait a minute. Different things.

[Ben Bullen]

Williams, that is. We also have lightly pitched the idea of a falcon czar to ourselves. Off air, we took a. We took a quick break. But through the magic of editing, we are rejoining you today. Let's hear it for none other than the one and only Mr. Noel Brown. Tis I. Tis you, my friend. They call me Ben Bullen. And this neck in the global woods for tax purposes. You can obviously communicate my comings and goings through a V or a pearl in a scarf.

[Noel Brown]

I'm wearing a scarf right now because it's kind of got chilly today.

[Ben Bullen]

It's unpredictable. I walked out and I yelled at the sky. What?

[Noel Brown]

That is such an old man thing to do of you, Ben. And I'm here for it. I mean, did you shake your fist?

[Ben Bullen]

This is the thing, though, Noel. So we all reside in the Atlanta metro area, and everybody in Atlanta, if you've never had the privilege to visit, please let us know and we'll hang out. But everybody in Atlanta will tend to speak to you as though they know you and you're vaguely related. So this is a true story. This morning when I walked out and as you said, Noel, the weather totally did a 180 on us. I yelled, we. What? Because I was aggravated and it was very early in the morning, There was a guy walking through the parking lot who turned around and said, I know.

[Noel Brown]

I said, seriously? I think I maybe did shake my fist a little bit. But, Ben, as promised, in our previous exploration of the nuts and bolts, the pearls and stitches, warp and weft. There you go. Of knitted coding, we are going to present you with a handful of real life examples of folks doing this very thing in the service of various war efforts. So what do you say we jump right into it? We got the spies who knit it. The big three.

[Ben Bullen]

The big three. Yes. And this comes to us again courtesy of our research associate, Maria.

[Noel Brown]

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[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

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[Ben Bullen]

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[Noel Brown]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Ben Bullen]

So let's start with Molly Rinker. Molly old mom Rinker. That's her street name. Okay, so this takes place way before World War I and World War II. This is what the US calls the revolutionary War. Rinker is an innkeeper in Philadelphia, and she's one of those, we're all big fans of RPGs and gaming and stuff. So she's to the powers of the beast. She's one of those NPCs at the local tavern.

[Noel Brown]

But they usually have some good intel for you, those bar maids and tavern keepers, right?

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, you gotta run out all the dialogue options. Quick pro tip from sorry innkeepers.

[Noel Brown]

You get what I'm talking about? Yeah, you gotta run out all of the. The dialogue tree options to get the goods.

[Ben Bullen]

So because people were often ignoring women at this time, Molly Rinker was able to be around people that didn't really treat her as a person. And she used that to her advantage. She would gather intel eavesdropping on her tavern guest, specifically her British tavern guest.

[Noel Brown]

And her methods weren't the most sophisticated in terms of the types of crafty trade craft that we're talking about here. But it did still involve knitting supplies. She didn't encode messages, however, inside of her knitting. What she did do was deliver messages to George Washington, the General, and the Continental army concealed inside balls of yarn.

[Ben Bullen]

Mm. Yeah. So she would sit outside Rinkerwood and she's knitting. And then when she saw Patriot couriers or Patriot troops pass by American forces, she would toss out small balls of yarn just casually like, oh, here you go. You guys need yarn, right? You need a lot of stuff in general, which was true. But she had stuffed these small balls of yarn with wartime secrets on small scraps of paper. So it's kind of like how you have a message in a fortune cookie. Or it's kind of like how you have soup in a dumpling, right?

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. Or you know, the nougat inside of the delicious sweet treat. Perfect, right? And her efforts were and are considered to have been absolutely, as you like to say, been mission critical during the 1777-1778 Philadelphia Campaign.

[Ben Bullen]

Beautiful. Thank you, Rinker. There are a lot of American heroes who don't get the credit they are due. So we want to shout you out and then we also want to travel again in time. Let's go to what do you say? May 1944.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, why the heck? Nah, we're talking about Phyllis Pippa Latour Doyle, a 23 year old South African born British secret agent who parachuted into Nazi occupied Normandy in May of 1944.

[Ben Bullen]

That's so hard, man.

[Noel Brown]

Unbelievable.

[Ben Bullen]

That's so cool. And she was not alone, right, Noel? She's One of the 39 female secret agents who served in one of the coolest secret armies of the entirety of World War II. Forget OSS folks, if you haven't heard about it before, we are so thrilled to introduce you to Winston Churchill's secret army. Something called the Special Operations Executive.

[Noel Brown]

The more innocuous the name, the more sinister the plot. In France, right, During World War II, she posed as a young woman with the COVID name of Genevieve and she was actually assigned to the SOE scientist circuit where she was able to gather intelligence to help the RAF bombing missions. That's the Royal Air Force. She transmitted 135 coded messages, Morse coded messages to be precise, to Allied forces with her handy dandy wireless radio. And of course, her hair tie. How's that work, Ben?

[Ben Bullen]

Right, yeah. Do you Morse code in the hair tie? She embeds these messages in the lace of her hair tie. And get this folks, she lives, Latour lives until 2023. And later she will talk about her war efforts. She was speaking to New Zealand Army News about how she concealed her codes. She said, quote, I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoelace that I used to tie up my hair.

[Noel Brown]

Tricky, tricky. Sending coded messages took her around 30 minutes from her wireless radio and it took the Germans 90 minutes to get a bead on where she actually was to trace the location of the signal that it was sent from. So the odds are certainly in her favor to make a clean getaway by the time the Germans knew what was up.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, at least for the first few iterations.

[Noel Brown]

Right, right.

[Ben Bullen]

Because you have a window of time in which you need to move quickly. But the German intelligence community was, you know, they're not knuckleheads, they're not good people, but they're not knuckleheads. And they, they start to clock the unusual activities of this person. So they interrogate her, they detain her, and at least one time they strip search her. But she always was able to slip the noose. She continually avoided detection because they would have to have looked in depth at the lace of her hair tie to figure out any coded information. And they just didn't. Because again, not to sound too soapboxy, they did not take women seriously.

[Noel Brown]

Well, yeah. And it was just, it was literally a needle in a haystack. At least a needle in a hair tie kind of situation. And until they had gotten wind of this type of COVID activity, they wouldn't have even thought to have looked in something like that. But you're absolutely right, Ben. There was a lot of dismissal involved as well. She never talked about her work much, if at all. And her own family never knew until very late in her life. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 102 years old.

[Ben Bullen]

And kept it on the low, totally cool, until it became like a deathbed confession. You're a real one, Pippa.

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Ben Bullen]

We've got another person we want to introduce. We teased this a little bit in the first part of this series. Elizabeth Bentley.

[Noel Brown]

Elizabeth Bentley cooked up a plot to steal a lector cryptographic device from the Soviets and then sell it back to them. That's actually the plot from Russia with Love. Sorry I had to drop that one in there. Good one, Maria. But her actual story makes that kind of mix up. Make a whole lot of sense, mixing up her plot with the plot of a Russian spy thriller. Elizabeth Bentley was born in Connecticut. She went to Vassar and Columbia. No slouch, academically speaking. And she was, in fact, an American Communist.

[Ben Bullen]

Yep.

[Noel Brown]

I'm sensing a twist coming, Ben.

[Ben Bullen]

Card carrying. Yeah. She was known as the Red Spy Queen. And we're getting a lot of this from the official CIA website, CIA.gov, check out Red Spy, a biography of Elizabeth Bentley by Catherine S. Olmstead. Coming to us out of University of North Carolina. So she considered herself more of, and this is a quote, a Communist, June Cleaver. For seven years, she worked as what we call a contact woman, which meant she gathered Covid information Primarily in Washington, D.C. and then she would pass it along to her Soviet handler. That's correct, folks. This is an American, as you said, Noel, highly born in our socioeconomic pyramid. She was an American who spied for the other side. Kind of like the Cambridge Five.

[Noel Brown]

Say it ain't so, Lizzie. Say it ain't so.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. This is a thing that I think a lot of people miss when we're talking about the basics of tradecraft. It's not necessarily the shadowy guy in a nice suit that you have to be worried about in a foreign hotel. It's going to be the people who are admin, the people who are in housekeeping.

[Noel Brown]

The bartender. The bartender, concierge. They're hearing all the teeth.

[Ben Bullen]

I've met a few of them. Yeah. The people who surprisingly seem to know four languages. You know what I mean? I've met a few. They're cool people. Just stay on their good side and be honest with yourself about why they're talking to you. All right? Okay, so here's another twist, like you were kind of teasing there, Noel.

[Noel Brown]

A second twist.

[Ben Bullen]

A second twist. Almost as though we're making a knot in fabric. The Communist, June Cleaver. But as she styled herself, her activities, her early activities end in 1945. She goes to Uncle Sam and she outs herself to the FBI.

[Noel Brown]

Respect.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. And they do what any smart intel agency will do. They say, okay, well, just work for us. We're not Going to the double cross. Yeah, the double cross.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, heck, yeah. She turned double agent. And she said that she did this because she had become disillusioned by the party. As we know, we often talk about, especially on our sister show, stuff they don't want you to know. Communism seems great on paper, but the inherent corruptability of human beings tends to not make it work out so great in practice.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, the issue with communism as a theory is, like you said, communism in practice is something that maybe the human brain and society hasn't evolved for yet. But there's another factor here. Our character Bentley feels the walls closing in like she's Han Solo in Star Wars. She thinks the FBI is hot on her heels. She's just being paranoid. History will prove later she is not actually on the FBI's radar. She was incorrect in that assumption. But it's a very scary time and it's also very frightening and anxiety inducing to have to function as a spy. And then a third factor. Look, folks, not to soapbox here, but tradecraft is pretty brutal. And you are only. You as an individual are only worth the actions you can do in any kind of arrangement. As soon as you're done with those actions, as soon as your value is no longer relevant, they might kill you. She was worried that the Soviets would kill her because she had exhausted whatever her value was. And it turned out that bit of paranoia was true. So her going to the FBI may have been less of an altruistic crossroads moment for her. It may have been something much more like self preservation.

[Noel Brown]

100%. It's a good point, Ben. I mean, it is. It's a good story to, you know, frame it in terms of she saw the light or what have you. But as we all know, in these types of situations, when you start thinking that maybe the walls are closing in, sometimes making a deal is the best move that you have.

[Ben Bullen]

And so it comes to pass in the United States that Bentley, the communist June Cleaver testifies in numerous very high profile investigations that Uncle Sam is conducting. This is also shadows of the Red Scare. Right. She's testified in communist influence investigations. She is a huge part in kicking off the second red scare. This is when, as we all recall, you could have your life and your career ruined because you went to the wrong meeting one time or Cartheism. Right. Or you knew the wrong person.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. You get pulled up in front of the House Un Americans Committee and then get blacklisted from Hollywood. A lot of writers got thrown under the bus for previous membership in the US Version of the Communist Party. It was not good. It was very much a witch hunt.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, very much so. And the House UN American Activities Moral Panic Committee. Yeah, the House UN American Activities Committee. I love that you're mentioning that. A lot of people don't know that they started in 1938, but they continued all the way up until 1975. Wow. I know.

[Noel Brown]

They kind of went a little more underground. Right. But they were. Weren't they keeping tabs on like, John Lennon and stuff as well?

[Ben Bullen]

Sure, everybody. Yeah. Arthur Miller, anybody they could touch. So in these.

[Noel Brown]

But they weren't hauling people publicly in front of their committee. They were just sort of operating a little more in the shadows after that period.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, they wouldn't really pull people out into the public eye unless they felt they had some kind of evidence. And Bentley's testimony often would consist of them saying, hey, do you know this person? In your work as a spy, did you ever contact this person? Did you ever hear this code name or whatever? And I'm sure it got ridiculous at some point and they said, you know, have you ever interacted with the insert famous Hollywood screenwriter here or something like that?

[Noel Brown]

And what was it? Dalton Trumbo was a big one that got railroaded. And lest we cast her in some kind of like, you know, again, we've already sort of couched it. This may well not have been some sort of moral about face. But lest we cast her as some sort of, you know, hero coming back and working for Uncle Sam, a lot of her testimony resulted in some people being very unfairly targeted and railroaded themselves as a direct result of her testimony.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, yeah, man, 100%. Her counter espionage was responsible for the conviction of party leaders. 11 real life proven Communist Party leaders. But to your point, her testimonies also lit a match under that growing America paranoia of the Cold War. You know, who isn't a Communist?

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. Name names, report on your neighbors. It's very much like a similar situation with what was going on during the Cold War in Berlin. You know, that was depicted in the film the Lives of Others, where kids were even like reporting on their parents and all kinds of stuff like that. Really, really dirty, unclean stuff, as you would say, Ben. We're talking classified documents that she got her hands on pieces of microfilm. She delivered information to the SO about Allied Force plans regarding the invasion of Normandy. And she kept a lot of this stuff hidden in her knitting bag, which no one ever thought to dig through for information about what the B29 bomber was going to be doing, but they really should have because that was definitely in there.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, she definitely got that part. Yeah, Specifically, she got the intel of the B29 and when she testified, she becomes a celebrity for a time. She's all over the headlines. She is a legit actual facts public figure, as our friend Lauren would say. But as the years went on and the news cycle and public attention shifts, her story falls into obscurity. Knitting espionage was so effective that multiple countries, including the United States Office of Censorship, restricted the international mailing of knitting patterns. They did this in 1942 because, let's say you have correspondence, right, with a friend in Vienna who doesn't have a friend in Vienna.

[Noel Brown]

And friend in Vienna is a friend

[Ben Bullen]

of mine, doesn't it? It sounds like a weird album name. What band would have an album called A Friend in Vienna? Would it be Mountain Goats? Billy Joel.

[Noel Brown]

Joel. He has a song called Vienna Early Billy Joel slaps, by the way. Oh yeah, he was much more of a Leonard Cohen type figure. Early days like really literate, poetic song story type stuff. And Vienna is one of my favorites.

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[Noel Brown]

Ben, I think we're about to reach the tangents and trivia part of our story, wherein we can set the record straight. First and foremost, I think we owe this to the ridiculous historians out there to describe the difference between crocheting and Knitting. They are not the same. They are not the same. And I know people were yelling at their podcast devices, but they are, in fact, distinctly different crafts. Knitting uses two needles to create much more stretchy and draping fabrics that might be better used for garments, while crocheting uses a hook. And in order to produce a thicker and sturdier, a little rougher hewn fabric that might be better for blankets and the aforementioned little characters, little toys that your girlfriend and my kiddo like to craft. Knitting focuses much more on what's called live stitches, whereas crochet completes each stitch individually.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah. And let's go over to Max as well, because, Max, you wanted to clear the record on not just crochet, but also croquet croquette. Yeah.

[Max Crochet]

I've always had an issue with this one, where I'm like, what's the difference between croquet, crochet, croquette, what is all these things? So, obviously, crochet is what we're talking about today, which is knit, which is not to be confused with the sport croquet, which is an outdoor game played on grass where players use mallets to hit balls through a series of hoops. But also not to be confused with the croquette, which is a small breaded fried food roll. And delicious.

[Noel Brown]

Which is. What is it? Isn't it Cuban in origin?

[Max Crochet]

It is delicious.

[Noel Brown]

South American.

[Max Crochet]

Let's see.

[Noel Brown]

It's a little pastry. It's a little savory pastry.

[Ben Bullen]

I think it's everywhere.

[Noel Brown]

It is. I guess where I typically see it is in.

[Ben Bullen]

It's French.

[Max Crochet]

The etymology.

[Ben Bullen]

The etymology is French, but the process of frying food is pretty common, especially with some breadcrumbs.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, no, it's a really good point. It also is another product of colonialism, where you will see potato croquettes and other types of croquettes very popular in some South American cuisine. I want to say, what is poppy? That's Cuban, isn't it?

[Ben Bullen]

Poppy's the restaurant. Yeah. Yes, yes.

[Noel Brown]

That's a place here in Atlanta.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Max Crochet]

And I find all this so interesting and so insightful, and I will forget it within an hour.

[Ben Bullen]

That's okay, man. We'll have this episode out. As long as society doesn't collapse and maybe even a little bit after.

[Noel Brown]

And forgive me, the Caribbean and South American version of that food would typically be pronounced croquetas, but it very much comes from the same background and from that French culinary tradition. Where you're gonna see in Brazil, for example, yucca and mandioca. Croquettes, various fillings depending on the region that you're getting them from, and also differences in preparation. But just like we see the incredibly fantastic banh mi sandwich in Vietnamese cuisine, you're gonna see that French bread influence from the old colonial days of French influence over that region. Region.

[Ben Bullen]

And we have a proposition for you folks. I have something we have to mention. Just because knitting is no longer considered a very successful form of tradecraft, like enemy forces know what to look for, it doesn't mean that other innocuous things are not being used to communicate secret messages. One of the most interesting recent examples comes from our sister show stuff they don't want you to know. Where yours truly Nolan, our pal Matt Frederick learned that the CIA was communicating secret messages through. You'll love this, Max. Through purposefully dumb looking Star wars fan sites.

[Noel Brown]

Oh my God, I love it. It's another perfect example of this kind of stuff. Things that are dismissed and hidden in plain sight. Like whoever. No one ever expects the Geoci wars fan sites of old, but that is exactly what the COVID agencies of the United States government were depending on when they used them as ways to communicate with their assets in the field.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, did you ever hear about that one, Max?

[Max Crochet]

No, but I don't spend much time on Star wars fan sites because I spend all my time on Star Wars.

[Ben Bullen]

No one does. That's the thing.

[Noel Brown]

I'm kidding. That's not true. I'm gonna get canceled. Like Timothee Chalamet being dismissive of opera and ballet.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, that was weird.

[Noel Brown]

No, no, no. Much love to the Star wars fan community out there. I guess the point though, Ben, is just a lot of them because it is so popular and the ones we're talking about were like the bad ones, the low quality ones.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, that's how they slid it in. So that is the thing. History repeats itself quite often. So just because knitting is no longer a gold standard way of secretly communicating intelligence, that doesn't mean that other things like that don't exist purposefully crappy websites are. I would propose a version of this same tactic. And what got me here. Maybe we can start to end on this. Guys, what got me here is we're talking a little bit off air. And when our research associate Maria first pitched this idea, it reminded me of another way of encoding messages through fabric. This is a true story, folks. The Incan Empire, the Khipu. Yeah, the Incan Empire had a coding system that we still don't understand that was entirely based upon knots and shout

[Noel Brown]

out to Our colleagues over at Stuff to Blow youw Mind, Robert and Joe, who have done an extensive deep dive into the Khipu on their podcast Stuff to Blow youw Mind. So do check them out as well. That's right, Ben. Pictograms that they encoded using knotted string devices.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. So they were able to communicate, similar to what you were saying in part one of this series, they were able to communicate pretty complex mathematical information that we can prove through these knots. They just used fleece and cotton. And a lot of what modern society has figured out about the Khipu is that it was administrative stuff, census figures, tax allocation. You twist the strings, you make the knot, you show the information.

[Noel Brown]

You're building a precursor to spreadsheets.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, exactly. You're making a fabric spreadsheet just so. And this is bizarre because I don't know about you guys, but fellas, to me it makes sense that you could do that with knots, that you could do numerical information with knots, because it's no different from a spreadsheet or an abacus.

[Noel Brown]

Well, and maybe our boy Alan Turing, if he'd tried his hand at cracking the quipus, he maybe would have had some success because as we know, he famously cracked one of the most impenetrable codes in history, the Enigma, and also won the war, eff, more or less, for the Allies. But to this day we know some of what was encoded into these khipus, but we have not been able to fully crack that code. And there are samples remaining today. A third of these devices, the so called narrative Khipus, appear to contain encoded non numerical narrative information, including names, stories and even ancient philosophies. So if you're into puzzles and word games and things like that, the narrative Khip are something that you might dig.

[Ben Bullen]

Absolutely. Yeah. We wanted to mention this because it's still a real rampy cabeza. It's still a real head scratcher for people who, as you said, love puzzles. How do you use a series of knots to convey philosophy, to convey cultural myths or legendary traditions? We know you could spell a name. Right. Knitting figured that out for us later. But this happened before what we call Morse code. This happened before what we understand as binary reasoning. So if you can check this out, if you can help us solve the mystery of the over 1000 khipu that remain unexplained in the modern day, then just like we said with the rational numbers, we will take you on an all expense paid trip to the Dave of Buster's of your choice. Asterisk, please keep it in the Atlanta metro area.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. There's maybe three to choose from. And they are not all. Not all. Dave and Busters are created equally, I might argue. And we've been talking a lot about the kind of interchangeability of this type of coding with the foundations of modern computing. Unless you think it's just kind of parallel thinking. Not entirely the case, Ben, it would appear. And if you want to read a little further about this, we're going to hip you to an article that the Jacquard loom, which is a form of industrialized machine knitting, is actually considered a predecessor to modern computing. The punch card system. Yeah, that big old room filling machines of the early days of computers. And you can check out programming the story of the Jacquard loom over atScience Industry Museum.org UK and it makes sense, right?

[Ben Bullen]

Because it is a form of automation. It's a surprising story and perhaps a story for another day.

[Noel Brown]

I think it is.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. Folks, thank you so much for tuning in, fellow ridiculous historians. We hope this exploration finds you well. And amid grand adventure, we also want to thank our super producer, Max Croquet. Croquet, Croquette, Crochet, Williams.

[Noel Brown]

All different things. I do love a good game of croquet. Also patonk. You ever played Patonk?

[Ben Bullen]

I have not played.

[Noel Brown]

It's very similar to bocce ball, I think. French equivalent of bocce ball. Very similar.

[Max Crochet]

I thought of a lot of patons.

[Noel Brown]

I don't understand.

[Max Crochet]

Oh, come on. You're the clear obscure guy as well.

[Noel Brown]

I thought that. That's right. There was a clearance. I was, I was getting a clear obscure reference in there. I need to jump, jump back into that game. What a, what a delight on the canvas.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh boy. And thanks as well to Alex Williams, Max's biological brother, who composed this slap and bop. Big thanks to Rachel, Dr. Big Spinach Lance, as well as AJ Bahamas Jacobs,

[Noel Brown]

the puzzler and the rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. If you dig our show, you're gonna dig theirs for sure. And thanks again to our research associate, brand new research associate, Maria, who absolutely knocked out of the park with this one. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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[Jacob Goldstein]

This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at o d o o dot com. That's o d o o dot com.

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