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It is suggested that the English used by the GOP is that of someone
trying to imitate the broken English of a state actor, therefore
must be a non-state actor. But they do not go down another notch to
suggest that it is a state actor emulating a non-state actor to
disguise the fact that it is a state actor.<br>
<br>
This "Islands in the Clickstream" essay was written in September
2003 about James Jesus Angleton who got himself lost in that
wilderness of mirrors and applies now more than ever -<br>
<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Why We Are All Getting a Little Crazy </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">James Jesus Angleton embodied the inevitable
trajectory of a
person committed to counterintelligence. Maybe he got a little
crazy at the end
but that might explain why we are all getting a little crazy too.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Angleton was director of counterintelligence
for the CIA
from 1954 until 1974. Fans of spy fiction might think of him as
John Le Carre’s
George Smiley, but that portrait puts a benign and smiling face on
the grimace
that counterintelligence practitioners can’t completely hide.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">For twenty years, Angleton’s job was to doubt
everything. This
enigmatic figure presented puzzles for people to solve in every
conversation, stitched
designer lies into every narrative, trusted no one.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">The task of counterintelligence is to figure
out what the
other side is doing, how they are deceiving us, what double agents
they have
planted in our midst. CI is predicated on double deceiving and
triple deceiving
the other side into believing fictions nested within fictions,
always leavened with
some facts, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>just enough
to seem real. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Counterintelligence is a dangerous game. You
have to be
willing to sacrifice pawns to save queens. Those pawns may be
loyal agents but
nothing you have told them, no promises or pledges, can stand in
the way of
letting them go when you have to, letting them be tortured or
killed or
imprisoned for life to protect a plan of action.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Angleton came to suspect everyone. Whenever a
mole was
uncovered in our ranks, he believed that he had been allowed to
discover that mole
to protect a bigger one, higher up.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">You see how the moebius strip twists back onto
itself. Every
successful operation is suspect. If you discover double agents in
your own
ranks, it is because the other side wanted you to find them. The
more important
the agent you uncover, that is how much more important must be the
one you have
not yet found.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Example. The Americans built a tunnel under the
Berlin wall
so they could tap Soviet military traffic. In fact, a mole working
for the Soviets
told them about the taps. But he told the KGB, not the military
whose traffic
was tapped. The KGB did not tell the military because then they
might alter the
traffic which would signal that the Soviets knew about the taps.
That in turn would
mean there was a mole. So to protect the mole, the traffic was
allowed to
continue unimpeded. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">The Americans, once they knew about the mole,
concluded that
the intercepted traffic had been bogus because the operation had
been compromised
from the beginning when in fact the Soviets had let the Americans
tap the
traffic, saving their mole for future operations. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">You get the idea. It’s not that we know that
they know that
we know but whether or not they know that we know that they know
that we know.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">It takes a particular kind of person to do this
sort of
work. Not everyone is cut out for distrusting everybody and
everything, for
thinking that whatever they accomplish, they were allowed to do it
to protect
something more important. Daily life for most people means
accepting the facts
of life at face value and trusting the transactions in which we
are engaged,
trusting the meaning of words, trusting that there is firm ground
under our
feet.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Otherwise we inevitably tend where Angleton
tended. Every
defector considered a plant, every double agent considered a
triple agent,
everyone in the American network considered compromised. Angleton
tore the
agency apart, looking for the mole he was sure the moles he found
were
protecting. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I am struck lately by how many plain people,
mainstream folks
uninvolved in intelligence work, volunteer that that they distrust
every word
uttered by the government or the media. How many treat all the
news as leaks or
designer lies that must be deconstructed to find a motive, plan or
hidden agenda.
Daily life has become an exercise in counterintelligence just to
figure out
what’s going on. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">It’s not a question of party politics. This is
deeper than
that. It’s about trying to find our balance as we teeter
precariously on the
moebius strip of cover and deception that cloaks our public life,
that governs the
selling of the latest war, that called the air in New York clean
instead of
lethal, that has darkened the life of a formerly free people who
enjoyed
constitutional rights as if there’s a mid-day eclipse. We see our
own civil
affairs through a glass darkly and nobody really knows what’s
what. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">As the envelope of secrecy within which our
government works
has become less and less transparent, the projection of wild
scenarios onto that
blank space where the truth was once written has become more
evident. But that only
makes sense. The inability to know what is true unless you are a
specialist in
investigative work makes our feelings of dissonance, our craziness
understandable. </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">We are all getting a little crazy about now. We
are becoming
the confused and confusing person of James Jesus Angleton in a
vast undifferentiated
mass, a citizenry treated as if we are the enemy of our own
government. We spend
too much time trying to find that coherent story that makes sense
of the contradictory
narratives fed to us day and night by an immense iron-dark machine
riding loud
in our lives.</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">It got to be too much and at last they let
Angleton go into
that good night in which he had long lived where nothing was what
it seemed and
everyone was suspect. So he retired and went fishing. But where
can we go? On
what serene lake should we go fish, listening to the cry of the
loons, trailing
our hands in the cold water because cold is at least a fact we can
feel, one of
the few in a world gone dark and very liquid?</p>
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