can I offer you any more Kool-Aid? oh, I see you're already topped up

ECHO...
ECHO...
echo...
echo

you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself, i guess. the toll for reading this post is having to look at Madame Blavatsky here on the right.

i've been sitting on this one for a week now, because i couldn't be sure. but it finally came to me what the animation looked like. that seemed to be the key to me, stylistically. it didn't say "Russian" to me, and I threw out the live-action portions of the video as irrelevant to my point. whatever it was at the time. but i got it.

the animation is straight out of Fleischer Studios. you may remember them from the classic Superman cartoons.

that's what didn't sit right with me. it was supposed to be "Russian," but all the animated bits screamed "American." LS was the only one who got close to this, but i think you're basically all drinking the Kool-Aid. he said it was bullshit because it was bullshit the Russians wanted us to buy. he was nearly there. it's bullshit WE wanted US to buy.

stop and think about the provenance of this video for a second. EC says he got it at a garage sale in south Florida. if you look at that wikipedia link, you'll see that Fleischer Studios had their own animation outpost in Miami in the 1940s, at the same time this video was dated and that GFK confirmed in his post. now unless you're crazy enough to think that there was a secret Russian enclave working at Fleischer in Miami in the 1940s, this has definitely got to be ours.

the thing that makes me stop and doubt a little about WHO had this vid was EC saying that it had an old stamp on it that said "SA [something]." that could mean a lot of things. maybe it's "standard animatic" or something to do with animation. but it just as easily could mean School of the Americas.

the SOA (SA) was founded in 1946 in Georgia, so it would make sense that they'd use training or propaganda vids from a close source. Miami is a short train ride. plus, you've got all the Cuban population in Miami. we were training junior dictators and insurgents from south Florida before Castro. you better believe we were roping them in to work for SOA, just as training. after all, we liked Batista's thugs, and those thugs knew how to keep a population down.

so remember the spore thing I talked about? the quick explanation is that this is a biochem war training manual. we're showing the worst-case scenario to our latin Americans to show them how to get their gas masks on when we "cropdust" the commie latin Americans. why else all the fucking gas masks?

the other quick explanation is this was domestic propaganda and counter-information meant to scare the shit out of anti-war reps in congress. stop and think about the security the US felt in 1948 or whenever this video literally claims to be from. you've got the US riding high on being the only country with The Bomb. but at the same time, you have China falling apart to the communists. you've got people in State who don't like Chiang and think Mao is the answer. how do you take apart those people in State? HUAC and McCarthy are one answer. the other is, show them something that takes the a-bomb out of the question

you guys point to the Russian animation vids as propaganda from "them", and maybe they are. but saying this film is the same thing as that is just assuming too. what if we were inspired by their propaganda, like the reanimation of animals thing? "hey, that's scary. let's make it scarier. to LAUNCH the appropriations budget for the Military Industrial Complex into the STRATOSPHERE."

BOTH explanations come back to the same thing. maybe we were training SOA counterinsurgents with the vid. maybe we were scaring congressmen. both direct back at America to make us promote the M.I.C. we have to make it bigger. it needs to have its control.

LS talks about cloud seeding. who wanted to weaponize that? the M.I.C.! they took a thing that helps civilians and wanted to make floods and monsoons. THEY have been researching chemical seeding from the start. do you really think they stopped at RAIN? you really think it was just the Russians that tested shit in the sky, just because of a video? WE made that video. those jets are so fucking generic to begin with. it starts with cloud seeding, it ends with crowd control.

i love the Russian propaganda as much as you all, but you're so focused on seeing THEM behind the scariest options that you don't see US. behind the things we document. the things we proved we'd do. you don't assume that this video is just us making us bigger, for us, for no reason, again.

edit: if nobody's gonna comment, I'm just disabling it. also adding the "you guys are lazy shits" tag, because you guys are lazy shits.

The Devil's Advocate

No, for once I'm NOT talking about the FINEST movie Keanu Reeves ever made. I want to toy around a little bit with what you "gentlemen" have posted so far.

First up, thanks again for filming and uploading these, EC. Second, thanks again for writing up some smart speculation about what these films could mean, G.

Third, I think you're both wrong.

If there's any one thing we've FAILED to learn as a country from the Cold War, it's that an idea of a threat can be as powerful as the the threat itself.

If we'd had an ounce of sense on September 12, we'd have said, "Ok, a bunch of useless whackjobs did this, and whoopie for them, they just killed off a third of their own manpower. They're a sad and lonely bunch of crazies who have to hide from society because of how much everyone else in the world thinks they're fucking dogshit. They punched us. It hurt. Who gives a fuck? We're bigger and badder than that, and we're going to rebuild, and they can go fuck themselves."

Instead, we fueled the idea. We made them supermen. We made them a thousand times more powerful in our nightmares than they ever could be in reality. A handful of totally twisted broken people with a severe inability to fucking DEAL WITH IT ("it" being the rest of the fucking world) became a monster in every shadow. We closed our eyes and saw them there too. When they probably weren't enough people to storm and wipe out half the fans of a southern high school football game.

The thing is, we ALWAYS do this, and we're ALWAYS wrong. Think back on Kim Philby and Team B and HUAC and McCarthy. We've got the worst track record on this shit. Every time we figure out that we were wrong, we say, "Well, we're never going to overreact like THAT again!" And then the next crisis comes along, and we go all, "WAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGH FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!" and freak the fuck out and act like a bunch of totally unforgivable pantswetting spazzes.

What's worse is, I think you guys are doing it again here. When, if anybody SHOULD know much better, it's you guys.


So what...?

Okay, first of all, let's accept that everything GFK said about the date of this video is true. Well, what's that tell you?

Look at the time period. The Soviets weren't stupid. They could see what was going on in America. Fuck, getting a subscription to the New York Times wasn't hard. They watched as we reported on our own paranoia. HUAC was a sitting committee starting in '45. Every time the communists made a gain in Europe, we flipped the fuck out. Meanwhile, look at it from their perspective:

1. They need nukes and don't have them.
2. They know even if they crack the nuclear code and start making nukes, we're way ahead of them.
3. But we'll believe anything we read, see, or hear, so...
4. What the fuck's it matter?

Instead of racing to close the distance between us on nukes, why not say, "Fuck it"?

I know what you're going to say: "Fuck it! Yes! That's your answer. That's your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead! Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! The bums lost!"

Seriously, though, follow me here. If we were so credulous we'd just buy ANYTHING, that meant they didn't have to sell anything real. Just invent something that would make us shit our pants. Sure, we had nukes, but all they had to do was claim they could seed the sky with something that would set the world on fire. Who needs nukes when they have that? BOOM, right there, it doesn't matter if there's a gap in nukes, because nukes are on equal footing with SKY FIRE.

It's not even that implausible when you consider 1946 is when cloud seeding was invented. We'd already just figured out that we could control the weather by dropping shit into clouds, so why couldn't the Soviets control the apocalypse by doing the same? Hell, WE tried to weaponize cloud seeding anyway, so we were already thinking perfectly along the lines they'd need to promote a propaganda weapon. WE started chemically altering the sky itself, so who could even say that they couldn't do it with the right compounds, ones we hadn't even found yet? Hell, just stop and think of the images in the film. Why are ALL their troops wearing gas masks? What is this stuff coming out of the plane? What could the Piemaker be making?




CHEMICALS. Or so we'd be totally willing to believe because we almost NEED to believe shit like this.

We set OURSELVES up. All they'd need was a punchline. One filmstrip leaked to the west later, and suddenly there's "proof" how they're going to fight American nuclear armament. A little push here with a cartoon and some Higgins motherfucker, and we'd shit our pants for them and create our own fears.

Stalemate.

Jigsaw Post #3

EC, God help me, what you posted was disturbing and, to steal from Scotty's word vault, awesome as hell. I don't know whether to feel elated or unsettled. I know what my stomach feels like: it feels like about half a bottle of the Jamey. And it feels like the other half should be coming soon. I wish you'd gotten that video out before I'd got tossed out of my head, but I can't stop watching it. I really doubt I'll be able to contribute all that much, but it's just amazing to me. Where did you say you got this again? Promise me you'll remember better and tell us more.

Okay, okay, we should look at some of the frames of this, because the individual pictures reveal probably more than the video as a whole, insofar as the choices the director made are animated ones (at least partially) where he could pick out the themes of violence he wanted to evoke, irespective of consequence.


This is an amazingly menacing image, because you've got the rat behind bars. I can't tell if this is immediately a capitalist metaphor, the predatory animal that eats and steals from others. It would seem to be the well that any good Soviet video would go to. This thing creates nothing and yet prospers due to exploitation and theft from the creative and generative class. Better that he be locked up. What happens to him is anyone's guess. I can't tell what's killing him, but his stabbing/strangulation seems almost lusciously vindictive and bloodthirsty.



Given how much the "Higgins" (cf. Scotty's post) character is lecturing or directly narrating at the camera, this substance seems to be a critical element (but is it an element?—the notation suggests it is not) in the dramaturgy. But not knowing what it is obviously means that we can't really say anything informed without venturing into putting on airs or, if you like, Asshole Territory.

If you remember, our earlier inclination was to say this was an anti-nuclear film — as if to say, "Here are your horrors. You would not want them yourself. But what could they do to us?" Perhaps it was the USSR drafting a westerner ("Higgins") to warn us about the dangers of our overreaching militarily and damaging the balance of power or the planet itself. But given how threatening or frightening the rest of this clip becomes, I don't feel comfortable anymore with this being cautionary. It could be an aggressive warning. I don't know what the substance is, but my first guess is that it's highly radioactive particulate matter. Something that shows the west that their weapons have direct harm.

Can you weaponize exposed soils? If teh Soviets had access to low-density soils exposed to an atomic blast, maybe they might offer them up as condemnation (in this video) of western action, or maybe they might offer them up as a threat. Remember that balloon from the earlier clip? Perhaps they could be saying, "If you poison our soils, we will drop your poison on you."


I could not get a clear screenshot of any of this, but there is a sustained sequence involving burning bodies and fires within a city. My guess is that it shows the horrors of a deliberate strike and the breakdown in social order. But I don't know if this is a passive or active statement. Food for thought.



This is another complete puzzle. This plane flies, and after it we see stalled boats and driftwood, which seems to signify the arresting of conflict. I don't know if this is a propagandizing gesture or a descriptive one. Is what's within this plane a metaphor? Is it an actual, named weapon? Is the word an acronym or a representation of something else?




This shot is a very poor one, but I'm having trouble getting my fingers to hit the keys at the same time I'd like. What I was trying to get is the people going by in gas masks. Again, I don't know what that signifies. My quick guess would be "Fallout Protection." Going off my earlier guesses, if this animation sequence is immediately post-war, that means that the Soviet Union did not then possess nuclear capabilities. They didn't get those until the Cambridge Five brought them the necessary scientific shortcuts in the later 1940s. If my dating suppositions are accurate, then it would make this video the product of an era of total and extreme paranaoia. It would make sense that they'd broadcast to the world both nuclear horrors and how those horrors could be turned back on the aggressor: how the seeds he'd planted with his bombs could taint the soil and grow into death and malignance for himself as well, how ripe the death could be for everyone who tilled that murderous field. How crappy poetry he could write if he were drunk. Sorry for writing all dramatic like this. Gross.


Here's where the warning stops being implicit and starts getting explicit. But I don't think this amounts to any such thing as a declaration of war. Although, I'm not naive. It just as well could be. However, as I've said, the dating of the video seems to be from a very praranoid time, so you can see this violence as retributive. If there is an atomic age that the USSR isn't part of, you can see them conceptualizing nuclear violence as something that beats back and bloodies its user just as hard and just as well. I don't know. I feel like I'm almost arguing against myself and better judgment at this point.



And here's where I'm starting to freak the fuck out looking at it. Because you can see the spread of this "CNOPbl" element cast across the North American continent and rise up into this Death's Head. Obviously, it's easy to incorporate this in my earlier thesis: this is the Soviet fright manifesting as a cautionary tale for the Americans. "Use this," it says, "and the death you bring is death across your own territory too. It doesn't get localized. Nuclear terror is global. Even for the user." On the other hand, there's something not at all "friendly warning" about skulls skipping across a continent and getting huge until they blot out the screen.

I feel like I started out wanting to believe one thing about this film and now almost want to believe the exact opposite. My problem is that I still think the dating of the film is on-target. If that's the case, it just makes it more confusing and difficult to deal with. If this is a pre-nuclear Soviet film, the threats it makes are all threats WE created. If it's post-nuclear (and I don't think it is), then the threats are clear. And it's an aggressive and confident document from early in their nuclear career. If it's not nuclear and not passive, it's just a bizarre anomaly that's hard to reconcile.

I have to quit now because I'm just drunk enough to be starting to write really crappy prose-poetry, tilling that field of sounding really sappy. And I need the rest of that Jamey.

Thanks again, EC.

Also, Boston College sucks completely and couldn't even come close to the spread. Assholes.

(I'll add links in the morning.)

(Hell, who am I kidding? I'll add links in the afternoon.)

(Links added — 12/7 8:09 p.m.)

finally got more footage up

(not just talking about the footage in my pants)

okay guys, i have had a HELL of a saturday...all according to the gf's evil plans to steal all my weekends from me forever...and i am uploading this thing and sprinting for a bar

i wish this sucker answered more questions than it makes me ask...but it sucks that it doesnt. that film is really looking bad. there are bits that seem like theyre gonna break off at any second, so i tried to film a bit that looked like it was going to be pretty good...there were a lot of false starts in there. i figured you didnt want to hear me yelling at shit breaking or watch clips that were 11 seconds long. this is the best stretch

theres a lot of that Higgins guy again

we open with the spruce moose, then a lake i think...

about 25 secs in theres a FUCKING COOL scene with a rat

CNOPBLI! its what plants crave...a ton of people on fire...BAPNN -- you get it from planes

some dude gets OWNED with a flagpole in the FACE after getting seriously fucked up by someone

get this though...its a SOVIET flag...and the flag dude has a GAS MASK

after that the CNOPBLI spreads across america like death...VERY creepy

i hope this is enough for you guys to sink your teeth into because getting any kind of long clips off this reel is going to be hard...its just falling apart depending on where we are on it, and i cant sit and refeed it forever to try to get it going again. tell me you guys can get stuff out of this much because im not sure how much more i can get out of the reel without fucking up something really cool that we might not get to see again...also, i do you think im off base not taking this in somewhere? do you have a guess if its valuable??

Russia & Georgia (Will They Ever Hook Up?)

You asked, I felt like I should answer about Russia.

Also I'm going to preemptively head off any complaints about being eggheaded by saying you asked for this.

There are only two problems facing Russia, and they're Putin and indifference.

Let me tell you about the indifference. Right now, Russia is going through one of its biggest economic expansions ever. If not the biggest. (You don't even have to include the boost organized crime contributes to the economy, especially the pirating of western media.) And God help you if you don't report that condition favorably.

Since Putin took power, about 20 journalists have been killed in Russia. While that's not quite Columbia-level numbers, that's astronomical for a western European country. There's just no excuse for it. But a common thread running through the deaths and the spontaneous raids of radio and TV stations is that these people were following the money. The Putin regime has never really seemed to care if you report on their human rights abuses or their lack of transparency or the really boundless executive power. Once you get into the kleptocracy stuff — once you ask, "How many billions does Putin have in Swiss bank accounts due to just seizing energy companies?" — that's when you're going to get disappeared.

Because ultimately I don't think a lot of Russian citizens care too terribly much about a lack of transparency at the top. When America was doing all right economically, you probably couldn't find even 5 people in 10 who really gave much of a damn about unchecked executive power. Iraq or Katrina or tax cuts for the wealthy... sure, they might have cared about that. But the principle of balanced power and oversight of the executive is too abstract to care about.

Putin's a smart guy. It's the economy, stupid. He's kept people better off than they were under communism and under the panics of early democracy, and for that they repay him by not caring enough to ask the hard questions. "Who cares if he's a strongman? We have iPods."

It's also partially what happens, I think, when a people have almost zero experience with democracy and whose moments of freedom almost always couple with economic panics or social dislocation. Russian democracy was a messy business, and it hurt an awful lot of people because there were no built-in safety nets anymore. In the rush to tear down communism, they tore down the stuff that bailed out people in tough times, and the only people who knew how to build those safety nets only knew how to do it with a communist instruction manual.

So because freedom was so scary and uncertain, a lot of people treated it as "the time you steal everything not nailed down because you never knew when the next crisis would come and it would all disappear." But since that kind of cowboy capitalism creates crises and destabilizes the economy and social order, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You want to get out of a crummy system, so you choose freedom; but freedom creates chaos and another kind of crummy system. So at some point you throw up your hands and say, "WE NEED ONE MAN TO SOLVE THIS, BECAUSE DEMOCRACY DOESN'T WORK!"

I think that's sort of what's happened in Russia. Historically they've always kind of see-sawed between flirting with more liberalism and then trusting in an iron-fisted figure to solve the problems facing them. To a certain extent, I think they looked at Putin and said, "You. Fix this." He did, and in response they turn a blind eye to many things.

One of those things is the sudden aggression toward neighbors. Georgia today. Ukraine and Belarus recently. To a certain extent, there are probably a lot of Russian citizens who enjoy this. After being down and out for the late 1980s and 1990s, it feels good to kick ass and be the big kid on the block again. (You know America loved Gulf War I for the same reasons: Vietnam was such a bummer. But now — we rule again!) But for the most part, this seems like Putin's thing.

You can take the KGB away from a man, but put him in charge of the country, and he'll just recreate it with a new name. Which he has. Putin's an unregenerate Chekist, and he's rebuilt the same spooky secret state apparatus he used to be a part of. And with that comes the aggression, because otherwise what's the point?

As to what that aggression means, I don't think it's part of a plan for global domination. As my namesake George Kennan pointed out in his famous Long Telegram, Soviet expansion post-WWII was really just a realization of all the 19th century land grabs the Russian Tsars pursued. It was this paranoid reach for security in the guise of a century-long national dream.

I don't think this aggression is as grand, but I think it indicates Putin and his band of Chekists are going back to the recent past. They want those satellite states that the USSR had. They want their old Socialist Republics back — Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus. They want to have the glory of the old Soviet dream back. Just without the communism and with the billions and billions of nakedly stolen petrochemical dollars and hijacking of private industries.

It's funny that we picked the name that we did for this place, because at the time, it couldn't have been more of a winking joke. The world wasn't really like that anymore. Now it seems prescient. The movement toward opacity, mendacity, ornate deceptions, arms increases, elective wars and wars-by-proxy — the sort of stuff we lived through in the Cold War — were all sort of coming back after 2001. But to take it seriously enough to call looking at it "Kremlinology" would have sounded like pretentious self-indulgence. Yet in just the last year, all those tendencies have ramped up to an absurd degree. It's not funny anymore. It's not even remotely funny.

And, at least in Russia's case, it looks like Putin and his joke of a picked successor will get away with it. In part because most of the people are too indifferent to really ask what's going on and challenge the responses they get. And in part because when people do do that, more of their bodies are dropping on St. Petersburg streets than Marlo Stanfield dropped on West Baltimore.

Team B

I needed something to take my mind off of the absolute gut-punching feeling I still have from the Patriots' Super Bowl loss, so I decided to write something. Anything. I get the feeling that hollow pit in my stomach isn't going away anytime before the start of the next NFL postseason, so the best I can do in the meantime is try to chase away the pain with good old-fashioned anger. LS's Philby post reminded me of this, which is one of the worst excesses in the history of American intelligence: Team B.

In 1974, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (sound familiar? Same guy. Don's pretty unique in American history in that he held the same job two decades apart and managed to be completely fucking wrong about the most important parts of his job both times) claimed that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Soviet Union was building up massive armies, missiles and atomic stores in preparation for an apocalyptic war with the United States, advocated by borderline-mad hardline party members and generals. Meanwhile, peaceniks and nearsighted analysts in the U.S. couldn't even see that this was happening!

Another person, professor Albert Wohlstetter said the same thing. Some people consider Wohlstetter one of the founding members of the neocon movement, since he taught at the University of Chicago at the same time that a lot of members of the movement were also teaching or attending school. It's also important to remember that this guy (along with Kissinger) was partly the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove. In political terms, that's like saying, "This guy was the inspiration for Dr. Lecter."

Anyway, like a lot of neoconservatives in 2002 and 2003, they managed to scare the everloving fuck out of enough Americans that Team B was created by then Director of the CIA George H. W. Bush. The point behind it was to establish a different evaluation of Russia's military actions, to test if what Rumsfeld and company said was true.

Their conclusions were an entire fabrication, counter to every CIA estimate that preceded them and every conclusion wrought by the end of the Cold War. Declassified documents prove that their assurances were panics and terrors aimed at the American people. I hate to quote Wikipedia, but it simplifies things:

The CIA and other agencies who watched the Soviet Union strongly disagreed with Rumsfeld, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and claiming that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed its own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's exactly what happened. If it sounds unfamiliar, it's because you're someone who grew up biting hard on the line that the people in Team B, Ronald Reagan and neoconservatives have been feeding you: that Ronnie won the Cold War. Why, without massive tax cuts to the rich and a pointless and wasteful mass increase in defense spending and a concomitant MASS increase in the national debt, the Russians might have conquered us instead! We had to outspend them! Nevermind the fact that most of the generals on the Russian equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to say about the last two decades of the Soviet Union: that they were always terrified, because they were always one large riot or two days of panic or mass desertion away from total collapse.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. What about Team B and what does this have to do with Philby?

The most important thing here is a concept called "Confirmation Bias." It's a psychological term that you probably suffer from. Hell, I know I do. You think, "Geez, that guy's kind of a dick." So every time you hang out with him and he does something dickish, you say, "Yep, total dick." Then, when he does something nice, you don't notice. Why? Because you're too busy looking for when he's next going to be a dick. Or you rationalize it. You say, "That guy's only being nice now because he knows we think he's a dick, so he's buttering us up for the moment he can act like a dick again." In simple terms: that guy's acting nice because he's a dick.

Think of it another way. You want to find out what the best burger restaurant in town is. You, almost everyone you know, the two food reviewers for the town newspapers, the food reviewer from the local rag that prints News of the Weird, and a bunch of online reviews say that Sal's Burgers is the best burger joint. But you know ten people who think that Mort's Burger Shack is better. You give those ten people $10 each to buy a burger at both places and tell you which one's better. They all tell you it's Mort's Burger Shack. Big motherfucking surprise right there.

Here's the rub: this is exactly what happened with Team B. The people appointed to Team B were all people who already believed what Team B was supposed to investigate. We needed to know, "Is the Soviet Union secretly MUCH more powerful than we think and planning to attack us?" and to prove that we asked a bunch of people who already had that opinion whether it was true. That's like asking OJ if he thinks someone else murdered Nicole and then handing him the keys to the LAPD crime lab to figure it out.

You can Wikipedia Team B and find out a bunch of this stuff pretty quickly. It's absolutely nuts. The best example probably comes from Star Wars/SDI. The CIA and other analysts said that the USSR had too many economic problems and was too disorganized to be able to produce an effective missile defense system like Star Wars/SDI. Team B said, "HAHAHAHAHA! THAT'S WHAT THEY WANTED YOU TO THINK! THEY ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!"

Sound familiar? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In fact, it's proof of the opposite. If you want to go back to the OJ example, it'd be like saying, "Of course he killed Nicole! Because there's not a shred of evidence proving he did. Look how crafty he is. The best proof he did it is how perfectly he removed all proof he did it." Or pick any other example. If you read this post and disagree with it, that's just proof of how well you're hiding how true you think it is. The best proof that you're gay as hell is that you're married. The best proof you love Lifetime Original Movies is how you never seem to watch them. You must hate America because you go around not protesting it. What the fuck are you trying to hide???

This goes back to the Philby thing. Once he was outed as a double agent, people wanted (that's probably not the right word, but in some way they sort of needed) to believe there were tons of other double agents out there. The proof they were there was, in fact, all the proof that wasn't there. All the people who were squeaky clean — they must be the guilty ones. There's an old joke in intelligence history: "How can you tell someone's crooked? They've never done anything wrong." We tore our own intelligence networks apart and discredited dozens of loyal operatives because we wanted to find wrongdoing and were willing to believe the absence of it proved its existence. The absence of evidence is not....

Here's the rub again: we can do this with anything. Spies, Iraq, terrorists, Putin. Think about all those liberals you hear about who want to destroy and weaken America. What's the proof of that? That they devote their lives to being public servants by running for elected office in America. Ohmigod, that's so fucking spooky. They're like Manchurian candidates. Maybe you are.

And you.

And you.

And you.

Kim Philby

Cindy is really into British TV. I think I've seen more Britcoms in the last two years than American sitcoms. Come to think of it, maybe that's not so bad. Every time I see a new American sitcom these days, it either came from a Britcom or sucks. Except 30 Rock. That's amazing. Someone squeezed the finest juices out of their mind grapes to make that show.

The bad part is that she's started branching out into British drama series, usually movie miniseries, with names like, "Love in a Cold Climate" and "Acting Cross with Tea," and "Looking Like Wet Gray Asshole." B/C I'd never heard of John le Carre, I groaned when I opened up the Netflix and found out she'd gotten, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

I admit it. I'm an idiot.

If you guys haven't seen it, rent it. It's amazing. Alec Guinness stars as George Smiley. He's the anti-Bond and 10x more authentic. He's this rumpled older spy who's trying to figure out who the mole is in British Intelligence. His boss, Control, has died or left the service (you REALLY have to pay attention in this series, b/c important info can come quietly and out of nowhere, and they really don't repeat it. It's also about 6 hours long and builds slowly, but believe me it's worth it), but Control knew there was a mole. Now a key defector and an agent have been shot.

Smiley has to piece it together. No guns (except a little at the end), no car chases. Just walking, talking, reading, listening. It's the classic chess game.

What's amazing is, it's real. Most of the story of TTSP comes from the story of Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five.

Now I don't know if any brits will wind up reading this, so sorry if you're reading it and saying, "WELL, DUH," but it's not like they teach British Intelligence History in high school over here. If they find intelligence in high school, someone drives it out with great force. Using them brain bits is, like the british would say, just not done. Same goes for gum chewing.

From 1941 to 1963, Kim Philby was probably the most important counter-espionage agent in Britain's MI6. He was a big swinging dick in a field where they say, "Your dick, do not let it swing. It draws attention. Put that away for crissakes. I said- oh, god. CHECK, please. I don't even care if that's your big beef and you're makin the cheddar- you, sir, have disgraced Arby's for the last time."

He not only handled their double agents within Russia and tried to find Russian double agents within Britain and other NATO nations, he also trained most of the counter-espionage personnel in Britain. He even trained James Jesus Angleton (should have changed his name officially to "James - JESUS! - Angleton"), who went on to become the CIA's chief counter-espionage agent for something like three decades. Angleton wrote the book on CIA counterintelligence and is probably the most legendary CIA agent ever.

The trouble is, Kim Philby had been a Russian agent since 1933, a member of a group of 5 Cambridge students recruited by the Russians in the 1920s and 30s.

So stop and think about this for a second. The guy in charge of rooting out Russian spies in Britain was a Russian spy himself. Instead of working to root them out, he worked to cover them up. He also worked to cover them up within the United States. It was probably Philby who worked with his pals Burgess and Maclean to pass American nuclear secrets to Moscow. And not only that, but he was in charge of turning Russian agents into double-agents for the West. Only he probably pretended to do this, creating fake agents and then passing on useless information while sending USEFUL information about the west to Moscow. On top of ALL this, he trained America's best counterintelligence agent.

When he defected in 1963, it's putting it mildly to say the shit hit the fan. It's like someone took all the manure runoff from every Tyson chicken farm in Arkansas and dumped it onto the spinning blade of 20 Apache helicopters while someone inside them played the old Circle Jerks song and screamed, "I love the smell of WAAAUUUUUUGHGHHHHHHH."

Angleton basically turned into a paranoid nutball. His mentor betrayed him, America and Britain. Angleton saw spies everywhere, double agents in the shadows and meaning where there wasn't any. The Americans became convinced that everything in MI6 was rotten. Angleton acted like he was trying to cut a tumor out of himself. He hacked the careers of other CIA agents to bits and basically destroyed british intelligence for about a decade by making their bosses throw out agents AND intel. He destroyed people. Philby proved he didn't have ANY perspective on counterespionage, and it's like he went so far in the opposite direction that he lost all perspective that way too.

I can guess what you're gooing to say. "Where are you going with this?" Well, think about it. Philby told one lie, but one lie was enough for the CIA and MI6 to almost destroy themselves, with their own hands.

What's amazing about Philby is that he could have done almost nothing for Russia. He could have just BEEN there and talked to other people, and he still would have torn the CIA/MI6 apart. He could have been rating playmate of the month. B/C if you have a bunch of people who believe themselves and their own judgment, then make them totally question everything about it, they'll implode.

They'll tear themselves apart just out of fear and anger at being wrong even once. If they find other double agents, that just proves they were right to start worrying, and they keep looking. If they don't find any other double agents, they must not be looking hard enough. They're still out there. They could be everywhere. As a matter of fact, the guy in charge of finding double agents hasn't found any. Maybe he's just like Philby. Maybe he doesn't find any b/c he doesn't WANT to find any. Maybe it's HIM. Let's get him.

What's totally amazing about Philby is that it's like playing the Kevin Bacon game. He's connected to everything, b/c intelligence is connected to everything. Our countries make decisions based on it every day. They trust the intelligence they get, and they talk to the people in intelligence. So once you start doubting one part of it, the doubt never stops. It spreads to everything.

I don't want to seem insensitive or anything, but when you look at Philby and then look at Angleton's paranoia about it after the fact, the really mindblowing thing is that the paranoia ever stopped. There's no reason to stop questioning, except at some point you have to.