My nuclear childhood: H-bombs, ICBMs, and cork-lined pop bottle caps as the surreal backdrop to 1961-62 tricycle adventures on a small planet

On Monday, Oct. 30, 1961, the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed was set off in an airburst test over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Russian Arctic Sea. The Soviet ‘Tsar Bomba’ had a yield of 50 megatons, or the power of around 3,800 Hiroshima bombs detonated simultaneously. The mushroom cloud from the Soviet detonation of “Tsar Bomba” was so large that the photographers had a hard time capturing its full dimensions.

A Tu-95V bomber was modified to carry the weapon, which was equipped with a special parachute that would slow its fall, allowing the plane to fly a safe distance from the blast. The aircraft, piloted by Andrey Durnovtsev, took off from the  Kola Peninsula on October 30, 1961. It was joined by an observer plane. At approximately 11:32 a.m. Moscow time, Tsar Bomba was dropped over the Mityushikha Bay test site on the deserted island of Novaya Zemlya. It exploded about 2.5 miles (4 km) above the ground, producing a mushroom cloud more than 37 miles high; the flash of the detonation was seen some 620 miles away. The resulting damage was equally massive. Severny, an uninhabited village 34 miles from ground zero, was leveled, and buildings more than 100 miles away were reportedly damaged. In addition, it was estimated that heat from the blast would have caused third-degree burns up to 62 miles distant.

I lived on Church Street in Oshawa, Ontario. I was 4½ years old and riding my tricycle illicitly up to St. Gregory’s church, rectory, and school parking lot with my friend Paul Drumm, who lived around the corner on Elgin Street. We were usually scouring the pavement, a block or two from our home bases and stay-at-home moms, for cork-lined pop bottle caps, which sometimes listed prizes under the crumbly cork – a variation somewhat of Tim Hortons’ Roll Up the Rim to Win® coffee contest, introduced 25 years later in 1986, and which has become one of the world’s largest customer rewards programs. In the early 1960s, pop bottle caps were still made of fluted metal with a natural cork liner that formed a seal on a glass bottle. Cork was phased out as a sealant in later in the decade.

Flash-forward to Oct. 27, 1962 – three days short of a year later. I was 5½ years old now in kindergarten and it would be more than a year still until JFK was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“There was a chill in the air in Washington, D.C., at least for the mid-fall season, on that autumn Saturday. The high only made it up to 12°C ( 54°F) instead of the normal 18°C (64°F ) and a record low of -1 °C (30 °F) that still stands for the date was set in 1962.

“It was also Day 12 of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Day on the Brink. The day that it almost all spun out of control…

“By Oct. 27, 1962, the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC), based at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, had increased its readiness level to defcon 2 – one step short of nuclear war – and nearly 3,000 American nuclear warheads were aimed at targets in the Soviet Union. United States Air Force Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr. was flying Mission 3127, his sixth foray over Cuba as part of Operation Brass Knob. Anderson was in his U-2 reconnaissance spy aircraft 14 miles sky-high at an altitude of about 72,000 feet. He had already made one pass over Cuba and was approaching the island shoreline when the Soviets, who had just selected American mainland targets and moved their nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to a firing position 15 miles from the U.S.-leased naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and fearful that Anderson’s mission would discover the fact, fired two SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) at his U-2. One exploded behind Anderson and sent shrapnel into the cockpit, puncturing his pressure suit, probably killing him instantly. His U-2 broke apart, plummeted at least 60,000 feet, and crashed in Cuba…

“We can thank Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov for our date with doomsday dispensation on Oct, 27, 1962. The launch of the B-59’s nuclear torpedo required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Arkhipov held the rank of captain and was aboard but not captaining B-59 that day. Savitsky was. But that still left Arkhipov as second-in-command. Rounding out the senior trio of executive officers was political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov. While Savitsky and Maslennikov gave their consent to the submarine-based nuclear torpedo launch targeting the USS Randolf, Arkhipov, who died in 1998, refused, citing lack of confirmation that a nuclear war had started. He wanted B-59 to surface, which it did, refusing assistance from U.S. destroyers, and making its way slowly home to the Soviet Union.”

The final electronic link needed for pairs of land or sea-based missile operators to launch a nuclear strike is a row of randomly arranged numbers and letters for the Sealed Authenticator System code, one of the most closely-held secrets in the United States government, as the launch operators have to be confident that the emergency-action message actually comes from the President. The Air Force’s land-based Minuteman III missiles and the Navy’s submarine-based Trident II missiles require the eight-character Sealed Authenticator System code in order to be launched.

The National Security Agency produces the Sealed Authenticator System codes. Agency machines stamp the same computer-generated code of randomly arranged letters and numbers on two plastic cards. The machine then seals each card in a shiny metal foil. The code cards are nicknamed Sealed Authenticator System cookies because they look like wafer bars wrapped in tinfoil. The machine was specially built to do all the stamping and sealing itself, so no human eyes ever see the numbers and letters printed on the cards.

Some U.S. nuclear missiles are kept in a state of readiness that allows them to be launched within minutes after a decision to launch and are commonly said to be on “hair-trigger alert.” The military sometimes refers to this status as “high alert,” “ready alert,” “day-to-day alert,” “launch-on-warning status,” or “prompt-launch status.”

The exact number is classified, but experts estimate that the United States keeps a total of about 900 nuclear warheads on high alert. That estimate includes nearly all of the nation’s 450 long-range land-based missiles, each carrying one warhead, plus approximately 100 of its long-range submarine-based missiles, each carrying four or five warheads.

U.S. land-based missiles can be launched within five minutes of a presidential decision to do so, and submarine-based missiles within 15 minutes.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer after witnessing the world’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the barren plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range.

Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. During the Manhattan Project, he was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and responsible for the research and design of an atomic bomb. He is often known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Said Oppenheimer after the blast: “A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Canada’s ‘other’ national spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment, used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo for HTTP metadata monitoring and collection from ‘Free File Upload’ (FFU) file-sharing sites in a covert behaviour-based target discovery project codenamed LEVITATION

News today that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) used its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC) to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects, and has been monitoring and collecting HTTP metadata for 102 known “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files, is well … not so surprising. Canada is a  partner in the so-called “Five Eyes” electronics communications intelligence partnership, which also includes the United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

The three FFU file-sharing sites specifically named are RapidShare, SendSpace, and the defunct MegaUpload – based on a 21-slide CSE Microsoft PowerPoint tradecraft presentation in 2012 compiled by a three-member Canadian team and shared with its Five Eyes partners titled, “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis.” CSE said in the presentation three years ago they “only care about the 2,200 URLs [Uniform Resource Locators] that point to documents of interest,” citing the example of a SendSpace file titled, “How to make a gas bomb.” CSE said they were “finding about 350 interesting download events per month” back then. Levitation is the codename also for the larger Communications Security Establishment covert behaviour-based target discovery project, as well as the presentation.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” CSE presentation comes from the cache of Edward Snowden. The 31-year-old American computer specialist, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, who had lived in Kunia, Hawaii, went AWOL almost three years ago, eventually landing in Moscow, and since June 2013 has disclosed more than 200,000 classified documents to the press, a fraction of the cache of  about 1.7 million NSA intelligence files he downloaded, and the biggest theft of U.S. secrets in history, the Pentagon said in January 2014.

Branded as either a patriot or traitor, largely depending on the politics of whoever is doing the branding, Snowden faces criminal prosecution in the United States and was granted temporary asylum in August 2013 in Russia.

The “LEVITATION and the FFU Hypothesis” story was reported collaboratively today by reporter Ryan Gallagher and co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald of First Look Media’s The Intercept, an online publication created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar last February, and Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins of CBC News. The Intercept lists its short-term mission as providing “a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”

A series of exposés, based on Snowden’s  leaks, began being published in June 2013, revealing Internet surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora, as well as the interception of telephone metadata from U.S. allies, including Canada, around the world. The Canadian government was alleged to have engaged in economic espionage involving Brazil’s Ministério de Minas e Energia.

Snowden’s release of National Security Agency (NSA) material was called in 2013 the most significant leak in U.S. history by American defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who knows the territory well enough, one supposes, having himself leaked the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which were published by the paper beginning in June 1971.

Only a small percentage of the documents purloined by Snowden have been published to date. Since 2013, Snowden has been what Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks were to 2010. As is the case now with Snowden, at the same time stolen classified material was published by WikiLeaks, it was also being published collaboratively across various portals and platforms in three of the world’s most prestigious daily newspapers – the New York Times in the United States, the Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.

On July 25, 2010, Assange’s WikiLeaks, a non-profit Swedish website started in December 2006, posted an unprecedented 91,731 mostly classified documents, the so-called “War Logs,” and most with a middling “secret” clearance level – from United States military databanks relating to the war in Afghanistan – on the Internet.

The documents made it possible to compare the mainly dismal frontline reality on the battlefield with the political propaganda coming from the higher-ups.

While some – including Assange – compared the War Logs to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the War Logs and Pentagon Papers were different in kind, as Ellsberg noted himself in interviews in July 2010.

“There is a very real drama because of the size of the release and it’s an important step, but these are low-level field reports while the Pentagon Papers were a high-level analysis about the origins of the war,” Ellsberg said. “Still, it’s a very important moment because this is a war that is taking place right now and what WikiLeaks has done could change how people think about it.”

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada’s national cryptologic agency with a National Defence Act mandate that includes foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) interception and analysis, including cryptanalysis or codebreaking, of communications and other electronic signals. CSE  is prohibited by law from targeting Canadians or anyone in Canada under the signals intelligence part of their mandate, but can, if requested, with proper warrants or other lawful authority held by the requesting agency, provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies in the performance of their lawful duties under what is known as CSE’s “assistance mandate.”

Its new $1.2 billion dollar headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, was dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents and is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.

The centrepiece of the new CSE complex on Ogilvie Road is equivalent to a 90-storey skyscraper turned on its side.

The old CSE headquarters was the five-storey Sir Leonard Tilley Building at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” and  located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa. The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems.

The Communications Security Establishment’s predecessor was the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), which began work in September 1946. The CBNRC was formed at the end of the Second World War by combining the two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit  was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

The rise and fall and rising again of Alexander Dubček and the blooming of Czechoslovakia’s ever-so-brief Prague Spring of 1968

It was 47 years ago yesterday that Alexander Dubček replaced Antonin Novotný as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee and the Prague Spring of 1968 began to unexpectedly bloom under the still Communist regime.

Dubček was born in 1921 in Uhrovek, Slovakia. He had joined the Communist Party  in Slovakia in 1939 and during the Second World War in 1944 joined the Slovak Resistance, serving with the Jan Zizka Brigade, which operated in the lower Tatra Mountains.

After the war ended n 1945, Dubček rose through the Communist ranks. From 1951 to 1955, he was a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé, the national assembly, and in 1953 he was sent to the Moscow Political College, where he graduated in 1958 with honours.

When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Dubček was appointed principal secretary of the Slovak Communist Party in Bratislava.Under Dubček’s leadership, Slovakia began to move toward political liberalization. Kultúrny život, the weekly newspaper of the Union of Slovak Writers, published frank discussions of liberalization, federalization and democratization, written by progressive and controversial writers – both Slovak and Czech – and became the first Slovak publication to gain a wide following among Czechs, as well as Slovaks.

In 1958, Dubček also joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which he served as secretary from 1960 to 1962, and the same year became a member of the Czechoslovak Party Presidium. A year later, he succeeded Karol Balicek as first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party. From 1960 to 1968 he was again a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé.

On Jan. 5, 1968, the party’s central committee nominated Dubček to succeed Novotný after the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee passed a vote of no-confidence in its then first secretary.
As first secretary, Dubček, although no democrat, began nourishing the first seeds of what became known as the Prague Spring, that proved to be a brief but exciting season of liberalization that wouldn’t bloom again for 21 years until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, when  Dubček returned from long political exile to be elected speaker of the  Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly.

In 1968, Dubček had moved toward what became known as “socialism with a human face,” saying he was determined to achieve the “widest possible democratization” of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of “a free, modern, and profoundly humane society.”

He allowed Communist Party members in Czechoslovakia to challenge party policy, as opposed to the traditional acceptance of all government policy. Party members were given the right to act “according to their conscience.” He also announced the end of censorship and the right of Czech citizens to criticize the government. The country’s newspapers produced scathing reports about government incompetence and corruption.

Dubček also announced that farmers would have the right to form independent co-operatives and that trade unions would have increased rights to bargain for their members.

At the same time, Dubček tried to reassure the country’s Soviet masters that Czechoslovakia had no intention of leaving the Warsaw Pact and Czechoslovakia’s 1968 reforms were an internal matter. The Soviet Union was not reassured.

On the pretext they had evidence that West Germany was planning to invade the Sudetenland, comprising the Czechoslovakian border districts of Bohemia, Moravia and parts of Silesia. Moscow said it  would provide Czechoslovakia with the troops needed to protect the country from invasion by the NATO power. Dubček refused the offer but the Soviets insisted.

On the night of Aug. 20-21, 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces from Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia. The occupying armies quickly seized control of Prague.

The beginning of the end of the Prague Spring came on that night of Aug. 20-21, 1968. Dubček was arrested, spirited away to Moscow with other reform leaders, and detained for a week before he was returned to Prague and released, and then continued on as first secretary until April 17, 1969, when he was appointed speaker of the new Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly, and soon after went on to serve as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to Turkey for just over six months from Dec. 15, 1969 to June 24, 1970. Three days later, on June 27, 1970, Dubček was expelled from the Communist Party and banished to Bratislava where he worked in a timber yard, spending the next 19 years in a low-profile but not entirely uncomfortable position, although he had little contact with the outside world for almost two decades and was under surveillance by the Státní bezpečnosti (StB), the Czech secret police.

Dubček  spent the last three years of his life back in the political limelight after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989. He died at the age of 70 on Nov. 7, 1992 at Homolse Hospital in Prague. A little more than two months earlier on Sept. 1, Dubček had been seriously injured in an automobile accident that occurred when a car driven by his  chauffeur left the highway in a rainstorm and plunged down a ravine. Dubček suffered serious spine and chest injuries and underwent surgery.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Will we see the return of Inco Ltd. to TSX next summer as Vale re-thinks base metals?

Iron ore accounts for three-fourths of Brazilian mining giant Vale’s revenue.  With economic growth in China slowing and iron-ore production from Vale’s rivals in Australia speeding up, the benchmark price for the steel-making material has fallen to around $70-$75 per metric ton recently, little more than one-third of the 2011 peak of around $190 per metric ton. Mining analysts estimate that it costs Vale $67 to produce a metric ton of iron ore and ship it to China, making for a very tight profit margin at current commodity prices. Vale’s shares as of last week had fallen 42 per cent year-to-date. What to do?

Vale CEO Murilo Ferreira, in an annual presentation to investors Dec. 2, said the company is considering selling shares of between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of its base-metals division. The division is made up primarily of copper and nickel mines in Brazil, in Indonesia’s island province of Sulawesi, an hour’s flight north of Bali, on the southern tip of Grand Terre, the main island in New Caledonia, an overseas territory of France, east of Australia, and Canada, including nickel mining, milling, smelting and refining in Thompson, Manitoba, where copper and cobalt, along with associated gold, silver, platinum, sulphur, selenium and palladium deposits, are also mined.

The Initial Public Offering (IPO) would be intended, Ferreira said, to “unlock” value in the base metals division, although specifics haven’t been worked out nor has the sale been proposed to Vale’s board of directors. The Thompson smelter and refinery, which opened March 25, 1961, was the free world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and built at a cost of $185 million. Mining analysts believe Vale’s base metals division may be worth $30-billion to $35-billion, including the assumption of debt.

Rio de Janeiro-based Vale has mining operations on five continents in 38 countries. Its base metals business is headquartered in Toronto. Vale is the second largest mining company in the world by market capitalization, surpassed only by Melbourne, Australia-based BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP), and the second-largest nickel producer after Moscow-based OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel. About 75 percent of Vale’s nickel production comes from Canada. Vale is the world’s largest iron-ore producer.

Ferreira said an IPO would hinge on a “fair price” for the base metals shares. Thompson Reuters data suggests such an IPO could  raise $5-billion to $8-billion, making it the biggest in Canadian history, eclipsing Manulife Financial Corp.’s record $2.12-billion IPO in 1999.

Vale would use the money realized from an IPO pay for key projects in the midst of sliding iron ore prices. While the base metals business is highly profitable for Vale, analysts see it as a lost division with the larger company focus on iron ore.

Nickel prices peaked at $25.51 per pound on the London Metal Exchange (LME) in May 2007 just months after Vale bought Inco Ltd. in a $19.9-billion all-cash tender takeover offer deal in October 2006.  In December 2008, nickel briefly dipped below $4 per pound and was $4.31 per pound on March 9, 2009 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a 12-year low of 6,547.05 – its lowest close since April 1997, losing 20 per cent of its value in only six weeks.

Scotiabank said in mid-April it now expects nickel to average $7.66 (U.S.) per pound this year. At the beginning of 2014, nickel was about US$6.50 per pound, compared to just under US$8 per pound a year earlier. The LME price today is $7.43 (U.S.) per pound, with the price being supported less by demand than supply restrictions because Indonesia, the world’s largest nickel producer, last January 2014 banned all exports of unprocessed nickel ore. Indonesia’s Constitutional Court recently upheld the legality of the ban. Nickel has risen 19 percent this year, the most among six main metals traded on the LME and has made the third-biggest gain in the Bloomberg Commodity Index of 22 raw materials.

The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Kiernan reported Dec. 2 Vale “failed to round up buyers for some nickel operations in Canada, according to two people familiar with the matter. Last year, Vale tried to get a partner to buy into the sprawling operation at Thompson, Manitoba, which includes two mills and a refinery, and this turned into an attempt to sell assets, one of the people said.” Vale’s Chief Financial Officer Luciano Siani is reported in the same story to have said the “Thompson complex isn’t for sale.”

Jennifer Maki, a chartered accountant who joined Vale in Canada almost 12 years ago in January 2003, was named Nov. 14  as Vale’s executive director of base metals as Peter Poppinga replaced long-serving José Carlos Martins as executive director for ferrous minerals.

Poppinga, who had replaced Tito Martins as chief executive officer of Vale Canada and executive director of base metals and information technology in November 2011, led 16 operating sites around the world and in Vale’s quest for asset base optimization over the last three years.

Maki, who has an undergraduate degree in commerce from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has served as executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Vale Canada since September 2007. Before joining Vale as an assistant controller for financial planning in 2003, she had worked as a chartered accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers for almost 10 years.

In a March 2013 interview with Upfront, the in-house magazine of PricewaterhouseCoopers, her former employer, Maki observed, among other things, that Vale’s “workforce in Brazil, for example, is much more mobile and they’re much more willing to pursue opportunities outside of their home cities and towns than people are in Canada.” Maki, commenting on how Inco’s culture changed after its 2007 merger with Vale, said, ” We’ve probably become more performance driven by key performance indicators and metrics. You see it right through Vale from their compensation packages to how people are rewarded. I think part of that is coming from a country like Brazil, where there’s a very hungry group of people who have grown up in a developing country. I think they’ve instilled that here and made some major changes across our Canadian operations.”

Since last January, Maki has been the chief financial and administrative officer for base metals, as well as participating in the management of base metals businesses outside Canada. She has been a member of the Board of Commissioners of PT Vale Indonesia Tbk (PTVI) since 2007 and recently became its president commissioner.

Poppinga was born in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He holds a master’s degree in business administration from Fundacao Dom Cabral in Brazil. He received a degree in geology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1980 and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany and a post-graduate degree in geology and mine engineering from Clausthal University of Technology in Clausthal-Zellerfeld Germany in 1984, with specialist diplomas in geo-statistics from the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and strategic mega trends from Asia Focus, Kellogg Singapore.

He speaks four languages including Portuguese, English, German and French. He worked for S.A. Mineracao da Trindade (SAMITRI) from 1984 until it was acquired by Vale in 1999, when he joined Vale as commercial director and general manager of the iron ore business in New York for Vale subsidiary Rio Doce America before moving to Rio Doce International, Belgium where he led Vale’s market and sales activities in Europe from 2000 to 2004. Between 2005 and 2007, he was president of Vale International S.A. in Switzerland, and from 2008 until the end of 2009 he was executive vice-president human resources at Vale (then Vale Inco) in Toronto.

In January 2010, Poppinga moved to Australia when he was named vice-president for base metals operations for the Asia and Pacific region where he was responsible for operations in Indonesia, New Caledonia, China and Japan.

Ferreira is a former CEO of Vale Canada, serving almost two years as the top Vale official in Canada, starting when the Brazilian mining giant finalized its purchase of Inco in January 2007. He had originally joined Vale in 1977. In 1998 he was appointed executive officer of commerce and finance at Vale do Rio Doce Alumínio S.A.-ALUVALE, a holding company of Vale that was merged into Vale in December 2003. Much of his experience is in aluminum and ferroalloys.

He was chief executive officer of Vale Inco, currently known as Vale Canada, in Toronto and executive director of nickel and base metals sales of Vale when he left the company for personal reasons at the end of 2008 and was replaced by Tito Martins. Ferreira rejoined Vale and replaced Roger Agnelli as CEO on May 22, 2011.

Vale is controlled by Valepar SA, which is owned by Previ, the employee pension fund of state-controlled Banco do Brasil SA; Bradespar SA, an industrial holding company; Mitsui & Co, Japan’s second-largest trading company; BNDES Participações SA, or BNDESpar, and Elétron – and the Brazilian government owns 12 so-called “golden shares” in Vale that gives it veto power over corporate decisions. Created on June 1, 1942 by the Brazilian government, Vale was privatized on May 7, 1997.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Paul Henderson: Shooting right, playing left wing

This is the column I owe Paul Henderson. Not necessarily because he scored the most iconic goal in Canadian hockey history for Team Canada almost 42 years ago on Sept. 28, 1972, with 34 seconds remaining in the third period in Moscow’s Luzhniki Ice Palace, to win the game 6-5 over the Soviet Union and clinch the eight-game Summit Series 4-3-1; no, far better sportswriters have applied their best prose recently in that direction.

No, I owe Henderson a column, if for no other reason, than waxing nostalgically almost four years ago in a column on Dec. 1, 2010 about a part-time job I held at Oshawa’s Civic Auditorium selling refreshments to hockey fans at Oshawa Generals games, caught up in the happy reflective moment I briefly took leave of my senses (and broader memory, apparently) to write this ending paragraph to the column: “One of the great perks is that we put the hotdogs and Coke cart away at the end of the second period intermission and were free to watch the usually decisive third period. Was there ever a better right-handed shot playing left wing than Bill Lochead, who scored 57 goals with 64 assists for 121 points in 62 games for the Generals in the 1973-74 season before being selected in the first round, 9th overall, by the Detroit Red Wings? I think not.”

What I thought, probably even before the column on it electronically reached the printer were two two-word phrases, which apply just as aptly used in either order: “You idiot” and “Paul Henderson” or “Paul Henderson” and “You idiot,” or simply as the single phrase, “Paul Henderson, you idiot.”

I was 15 when Henderson scored his “goal of the century.” I grew up in Oshawa, Ont., 30 miles east of Toronto. The Toronto Maple Leafs, including Number 19, were hockey for us.

Lochead, 59, has lived in Germany for most of the last 30 years, playing and coaching hockey.  He is now a successful hockey player agent living in Frankfurt Germany. During his rookie season with the Red Wings in 1974-75 he scored 16 goals and hit the 20-goal mark in 1977-78 when the club reached the playoffs for the first time in eight years. Halfway through the 1978-79 season, Lochead was claimed by the Colorado Rockies after Detroit placed him on waivers. In the off-season he was traded to the New York Rangers but dressed for only seven games in 1979-80. He spent most of the year with the AHL’s New Haven Nighthawks where he scored 46 goals and was named to the league’s first all-star team. After the season, Lochead retired from North American pro hockey and moved to Germany where has gone onto a successful career at first coaching in Switzerland and Germany and now working as hockey player agent in Germany.

As well as both shooting right and playing left wing, Lochead and Henderson have a couple of other coincidentals in common: They are both from southwestern Ontario; Lochead from Forest, and Henderson, from near Kincardine. They also both spent part of their NHL careers playing with the Detroit Red Wings. And in the spring of 1986, Lochead was chosen to play for the Dave King-coached Team Canada in the Pravda Cup tournament in Leningrad.

Henderson, 71, is being treated for chronic lymphoid leukemia and responded  well to experimental treatment as part of a clinical trial he participated in last year. For several reasons, including salary disagreements with then Leafs’ owner Harold Ballard, Henderson slid into angst, anger and alcohol, with a full measure of bitterness, shortly after his 1972 golden goal. But in the 1973 off-season, Pastor Mel Stevens, knocked on Henderson’s door. The founder of Teen Ranch, a Christian sports camp in Caledon, Ont., Stevens wanted Henderson as an instructor for free. “I thought, ‘Do you not know who you’re talking to?’” Henderson has said many times since.

Henderson would spend the next two years studying 20 books – along with the Bible – under Stevens’ tutelage before becoming a Christian in March 1975.