Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Today is summer blockbuster Batphone day, err Red Phone, err Hotline Day.

June 20, 1963: the "memorandum of understanding" that established the "Hot Line" was signed by U.S. representative Charles C. Stelle (L) and his USSR counterpart M. Tsarapkin ® in Geneva. The Hotline quickly established a footprint in popular culture.



This Washington-Moscow Hotline became operational on August 30, 1963 and served as one of the most famous top level communications systems in modern history. In popular culture, the Washington-Moscow Hotline is often called the Red Phone, and therefore many people think it's a telephone line, with a red phone set on the president's desk. However, this is false: the Hotline was never a phone line, but instead set up as a teletype connection, which in 1988 was replaced by facsimile units. Since 2008 the Hotline is a highly 'secure' computer link over which messages are exchanged by e-mail.

On July 13, 1963, only a month after signing the agreement, the United States sent four sets of teleprinters with Latin alphabet to Moscow for their terminal. This was done via US ambassador Averell Harriman's plane (son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman). Another month later, on August 20, the Soviet equipment, four sets of teleprinters with Cyrillic alphabet, arrived in Washington. The cipher machines for encrypting the Hot Line messages came from Norway. According to the agreement, all these machines should be accompanied by a one years supply of spare parts and all the necessary special tools, test equipment, operating instructions and other technical literature.

News report of the Russian teleprinters being installed at the Pentagon:



On August 30, 1963, Skynet went active, err I mean the Hotline transmitted the first test messages. Washington sent Moscow the text The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890, which is a so called pangram of all letters and numbers of the Latin alphabet. The Soviets sent back a poetic description of Moscow's setting sun.

When the Hotline was established in 1963, it was a full-duplex teletype channel, which was routed through telephone cables from Washington, across the undersea Transatlantic Cable No. 1, to London, and from there to Copenhagen, over Stockholm and Helsinki to Moscow. In London, the Washington-Moscow Hotline cables were connected by a secure telephone exchange, situated in a huge underground tunnel complex, The Kingsway Tunnels, built during World War II.

In Moscow, the terminal of the Hotline was supposed to be in the Kremlin, somewhere next to the office of the prime minister. However, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev once told a group of Moscow-based American journalists, that their terminal was on the opposite side of Red Square, in the Communist Party headquarters. The Russian terminal was manned by civilians, the American one by the military.



On the American side, there are Hotline terminals at these four locations:

1. The National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the Pentagon
   
2. The Alternate National Military Command Center (ANMCC) in the Raven Rock Mountain
   
3. The military communications center in the White House
   
4. An unknown location in the State Department (probably on the 7th floor in Hillary's wunderland bathroom)
   

The primary US terminal is at the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in the basement of the Pentagon. There, the Direct Communications Link is a joint staff operation under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff J-3 Operations Directorate. The NMCC is responsible for routine testing of the Hotline and for the receipt, transmission and translation of the messages by highly qualified translators.

The terminal is manned by six teams of two man each rule, working in 8-hour shifts and led by a commissioned officer acting as Presidential Translator (PT). For the routine shift operations, the Hotline personnel falls under the command of the flag officer in charge of the NMCC. But when a real message from Moscow arrives, the doors of the terminal room are closed and locked and the personnel becomes subject directly to the president himself.

The nosy, Brits of course felt left out and wanted in on the Hotline:

The establishment of a direct link between Washington and Moscow caused some diplomatic upheaval in western nations, specifically the United Kingdom. Since the physical line between the two capitals ran through London, the British proposed that they be allowed access to any conversation taking place on it. They could then consult with Washington, instead of being informed of disagreements after they had been settled. While this would have gone a long way towards strengthening the special relationship that exists between London and Washington, the administration of President Kennedy believed that a three-way conversation in times of crisis might be counter-productive. It was also obvious that if London were given access to the hotline, other NATO member nations would want the same thing. The tension that arose was abated, however, when both the Soviets and the Americans made it clear that the line was only to be used in the event of an emergency where the failure to communicate directly might lead to an all-out war. It would not be used for situations that called for regular diplomatic channels.
Matt's Blog

1963: Establishment of a land line teletype link between the Kremlin and the Pentagon
1967: Ancillary terminal installed at the White House.
1978: The land line replaced by a satellite link.
1980: Old teletype and encryption machines replaced by newer ones.
1988: Teletype equipment replaced by facsimile units.
199?: Further modernizations
2008: E-mail capability established

The Washington-Moscow Hotline is often called the Red Phone, because many people think it's a phone line with a red handset on each side. This was never the case.

Also president Obama used the popular myth of the red phone, when at a joint press conference in June 2010, he joked about how social media might help to move past the traditional Cold War communications. Speaking of the Russian president Medvedev starting a Twitter account, Obama said: "I have one, as well, so we may be able to finally throw away those red phones that have been sitting around for so long".





The United States first official use of the "hotline" was on November 22, 1963, after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The Soviet Union’s first official message was sent on June 5, 1967, following the start of the Six-Day War between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Syria.

On October 31, 2016, President Obama used it to warn President Putin to stop interfering in the US presidential election: “International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace. We will hold Russia to those standards.” Seems Obama violated hotline protocol, but the night before they probably amended the Hotline usage protocol.

In 2021 Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs commemorated the anniversary with a tweet (although its graphic misstated the year the "hotline" was converted into an email platform). This year, so far, it has been silent...




Instead, they tweeted out a bio treat...




June 20, 1975: The film Jaws is released in the United States, becoming the highest-grossing film of that time and starting the trend of films known as "summer blockbusters".