A note about The Gad About Town web site: A very sad thing happened in my girlfriend’s family this week, and while she has been attending to matters related to this, I have been striving to attend to her. My intent with the “This Day in History” feature is for it to be just that, a feature, but I have not had the time to finish my backlog of posts. Thank you all for your notes of encouragement about this feature. And, look, here it is now:

Operation Detachment, more famously known as the Battle of Iwo Jima, began 71 years ago today. The battle for control of the island, whose value as either a resource or a staging area for future operations was questioned by civilian and military authorities alike even as the invasion commenced, raged for five weeks.
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Toni Morrison is 85 today. Her most recent novel, “God Help the Child,” was published last year.

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“What took you so long?”—Robert Hanssen

When he was arrested by FBI agents 15 years ago today, Robert Hanssen asked them, “What took you so long?” An FBI agent himself, Hanssen had been a volunteer mole selling secrets to the Soviet Union and then to Russia since 1979. By February 2001, he had grown suspicious that he was being monitored, finally, and had started to look for a new job, had complained that he suspected his car was bugged, and wrote to whomever might help him on the other side that he thought “something has aroused the sleeping tiger.” His 22 years of intelligence damage earned him $1.4 million and 15 consecutive life sentences. His arrest was announced two days later, on February 20, 2001.

He is held in the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day.
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