Who Else Gets Paid for What They Don’t Know?

by Gordon Duff,  Senior Editor

“Spies” are the most ignorant people on earth.  The TV show “Burn Notice,” watched by all real spies the way cops used to watch “Hill Street Blues” tells it like it really is. 

So does John LeCarre, or at least how it was once, long ago, that and maybe some Graham Greene and some of Ian Fleming.

Many, maybe most of my friends are some kind of intelligence or “counter-intelligence” officer, active or retired.   I am “dad” to most with a few noted exceptions.

There is no real gossip anymore, not like during the Cold War, secrets about terrorist rings, things like that are childish drivel compared to the Soviet era stuff.

Spies have changed, they are “compartmentalized,” too many organizations, too much dependence on what they call “signals intelligence” and too much “tasking.” 

Tasking is when you are told to find something out whether it is true or not.

This is how we got into Iraq, how we blamed bin Laden for 9/11 and just about everything else the president and congress are told.

Tapping my phone must be a joy.  “Gordon, I am stuck in (place unnamed) with (people unnamed.)  What the hell is going on here anyway?”

There are rules.  I can tell you who will lie to you, who will kill you and who you can trust.  I can, often as not, tell you what is going on.

Generally, a “tasked” individual isn’t supposed to know that.  If the truth ended up in a report of some kind, it would be a disaster.

As I now consider myself a writer, more a failed humorist, unable to turn away from disaster, I have the need to amuse and be accepted.

Hell, yesterday the news was filled with the death of Christopher Hitchens.

I not only write a bit but manage a rather large stable of writers and a publication many times the size of most journals and I had never heard of the guy.  He was compared to Orwell and nearly everyone else.

Problem is, he wrote on issues spies are supposed to know about, and got so much of it utterly wrong, like he was paid to get it wrong.

I know a dozen writers who are better, certainly funnier whose death is, not just likely to go unnoticed, but, like it or not, will be less than “accidental.”

Maybe Hitchens was a real spy.  Maybe that’s why I never heard of him or is it that I hang out with all the wrong crowd.

There is a simple question out there, how to tell the real from the “tasked.”  We call it “Building 7.”  You don’t know “Building 7,” then you belong to “the club.” If you get a check, you are a professional, if you aren’t paid to be stupid, consider yourself a “talented amateur.”

Spying is based on a number of things.  Being intelligent helps, not just smart but one of those crazy puzzle solving folks.

This means, of course, there has to be more than a few crossed wires in the brain, which comes with a life of baggage, usually including inability to live like a normal person.

The tradition is for those who have access to secrets to be overly chatty or to foster delusions of anger and persecution.

Thus, spies are often traitors, not at the level of politicians, but spying allows a moral flexibility and the intellect to rationalize anything from murder, even mass murder to what others term as betrayal.

A recommended film is “Gross Point Blank,” a comedy about a professional assassin.  If you haven’t seen it, do so while not watching Burn Notice.

Others are waiting for the new Gary Oldman version of Tinker Tailor, the remake of the 1979 BBC mini series starring Sir Alec Guinness.

Order a copy, no matter what it costs, of the 1979 version.  Be careful that you don’t get a PAL version or that you have something that can play it.

It may be one of the best things ever done for television.  A sequel, Smiley’s People, came out a few years later, also with Sir Alec.  It is also worth purchasing, especially if you consider yourself a spy.

If you are getting a check, it would be nice to learn what it is that you were supposed to actually do for a living, just so you know the difference.  Ah, fiction.

Years ago, we used to worry about Central America.  I became an “expert” on that.  Was I an expert?  Not hardly but I could certainly sound amusing and make things up on command.

I actually spent some time in Southeast Asia.  My expertise there is infallible.

I read all the right books, shot some people, some of them supposedly the enemy, and developed a reputation as a pliable moron.

Here, I stop on this subject because a number of old friends are now cringing, knowing where this goes.

Careers developed out of the total idiocy of Vietnam, for some leading to successful retirement after lives spent doing things that, for the lucky or not so lucky, depending on how you look at it, at least allowed “a place at the table” and a paycheck.

Here I add my own assessment.  Over 90% of what passed for intelligence was invented to justify funding or to support suppositions that allowed the support of commercial interests even if it involved making the world a much worse place than it already was.

Some people obfuscated, the clever ones quietly laughing to themselves.

The morons in Washington had to know it was lies because they had requested the lies, funded them, and often simply requested what they wanted intelligence reports to say, what they wanted found, whether there was a lick of truth to any of it or not.

This is what we are doing with Iran but it isn’t just Iran.  This is what we are doing everywhere, spending billions, funding a moronic army,  tens of thousands, all being “tasked.”

Do you wonder why the world is as it is?  This is but one of the reasons. Tasked.

Who are the most lied to people on earth?

The most deluded, the most “fooled” folks are our intelligence “industry.”  I call it that because much of it is now “privatized.”

They know nothing of the “prime movers” of the world, the actual motives.  Imagine watching a “cop show” on TV where nobody ever asked why anyone killed someone else.  This would be how spying works.

Spies can’t know about how things really work.  They are told such things are “conspiracy theory.” They are told about extremism, how to find it, more often how to create it,  and pointed at the poor and ignorant as targets.

All of it, of course, is delusion.  The truth has always been simple, class warfare, gone up a level or two, those who used to be rich who lived off the poor have now let the curtain be pulled back even more.

Even the “rich and powerful” are slaves in today’s world, likely to be standing in line at the slaughterhouse with the rest of us.

“Rich”, isn’t what it used to be.

Now it is clear, as stated so eloquently by actor John Cusack in “Gross Point Blank,” that there are no nations anymore.  There is no “United States,” not even an Israel though they are the “flavor of the month” for blaming the world’s troubles on.

There isn’t even a “Wall Street” although there is a vast criminal element located in such a place that an even larger criminal element employs.

Were one to face the truth, most world governments are criminal elements, employed by a global conspiracy that does things like invent wars, not just the Cold War or the War on Terror but even orchestrated the two great world wars during the last century.

They were totally phony too, with the massive armies and Navies, the huge battles, the mythology about good versus evil, Fascism and Democracy.

Did you know Stalin murdered 65 million people as our ally? Did you know that 8.5 million Germans were killed, not part of the war.

Did you know that Hitler offered peace terms in 1940 that, were they taught in our history books, would turn the world upside down. 

The case would be made that Winston Churchill was more Hitler than Hitler and that much of what did happen or we are told happened never happened.

The two world wars were not one iota different than the Bush invasion of Iraq or blaming 9/11 on Osama bin Laden.  Remember “Building 7?”

Two minutes of “hard facts” about Building 7 utterly proves 9/11 to have been a fabrication.  The hundreds of tons of vaporized steel were real, even most of the dead were real.

Did you note I said “most?”

Supposedly there was a feud between Christopher Hitchens, who I had never heard of, and Gore Vidal, an interesting and outspoken guy, that “intelligence officers” are told to pretend doesn’t exist, something over 9/11.

I would say something like, “Hitchens, what planet are you from,” perhaps changing the “are” to “were” if talking to the dead did any good.  Talking to the living certainly is a waste of time, many of them at least.

It is always better to talk about “intelligence” or “journalism” rather than to “do” intelligence or journalism.  In general, both are terms for lying to people. 

My advice?  Remember the “Matrix” films?

You know, the ones with Keanu Reeves that tell us reality is a dream and we are all in storage somewhere being used as chemical batteries with wires and tubes coming out of us, those movies.

What I am saying is assume they are real.

Then, when and if you finally discover the truth, whatever it is, and I have an idea or two on that, you will be “less upset.”

Much less?  No, I don’t think you will be “much less” upset.  In fact, you will be absorbed in irony.

I have always been told a little gossip helps the poison go down.  Let’s put some here.

We have one really funny one, let’s see if I have the discipline to stick to one only.

Yesterday, former Russian or Soviet or whatever, “the big boss,” Vladamir Putin, said Senator John McCain was crazy.

First of all, many will note that Putin isn’t breaking into any new territory with this claim.  But this isn’t the point.

Putin officially joined the KGB after law school in 1975.  His connections go back further, years further.

In some ways, I am a big fan of Putin.  Thus, hearing him talk about John McCain as he did was strange.

Putin was a spy but he was also is a Russian spy. They tend to be less deluded than their American counterparts.

Thus I assume Putin to be both dissembling and “playful” when attacking McCain or is it something else.

[youtube Al_m15uyMMc]

Putin was a Russian spy master, brought up by Oleg Kalugin, now his arch nemesis who defected to the US years ago.  Thus, “we” have information.

Here is what is wrong with what Putin said, although his statements were theoretically to support his criticism of US criticism of the recent Russian election, a “tit for tat” as it were.

McCain, while a POW in Vietnam was, according to so many sources I tire of quoting them, US, Russian, French, Spanish, Cuban, “turned” and became a Soviet agent.

McCain, in intelligence circles is called either “the Hanoi songbird” or “the Manchurian Candidate.”

The reports, all quite classified as is McCain’s presidential pardon which prevented him from being court martialed, say McCain lived a very very different life as a POW than he tells of.

The NSA has transcripts of 32 radio broadcasts made by McCain, defectors from Russia brought us tons of debriefing documents and records of things McCain had done while there.

It wasn’t just Colonel Earl Hopper or Colonel Ted Guy that asked to have McCain jailed.

My point? I “believe” that Putin knows McCain had been and may well be a Soviet and now Russian “asset.” Putin talks about Gaddafi almost tearfully, knowing quite well he was always a CIA asset, almost his entire life.

Why the McCain issue is timely is due to the current Defense Authorization Act.  For those unaware, there are provisions in our yearly military “money bill” that virtually ends the United States, gutting our constitution, eliminating our courts, erasing the bill of rights, even more.

This is a wildly crazy bill.  I write about it here but there are now hundreds of articles that say same thing.  Usually most things you will read from so many sources are “tasked” and, in being so, utterly false.

Pretty much everyone has this one right, this is “end of the world as we know it” legislation with a twist, both “liberals” and “conservatives” are backing it with “Hanoi songbird,” John McCain, subject of the odd attacks by Putin, taking the lead.

Two questions cross my mind from this one.  Putin is obviously, to me anyway, running John McCain.  But who is running Putin?

The other gossip involves the US being thrown out of Iraq.  We are told we were thrown out because we failed to investigate the Haditha war crimes.

The New York Times found piles of secret documents in a city dump outside Baghdad this week, “slam dunk” proof America is bad.

Should I have said it some other way, perhaps been more clever?  Isn’t this why we have a New York Times in the first place?

What aren’t we being told? 

Israel is moving military forces into Iraq as we go.  They have always been in and around Mosul, an area Israel has coveted as part of their imaginary vast kingdom from some period of their mythological history, something they spend hours a week selling to anyone gullible enough to listen. 

Some background on this is available here.  What you will pick up, whatever your own beliefs or ethnicity, is that 99% of Jewish history is invented.

No, there was never a “David” or “Solomon” or even “Moses,” things that are just as likely to upset Muslims as well and even some Christians.  In fact, the evidence of the existence of Odin has more documentation than that of Noah or Abraham.

Deal with it and move on with life and, in the process, learn more respect for the Danes, Norwegians and Icelanders.  Maybe they are the real “chosen people.”

The next “gossip,” which I will keep short, is about Africa.  What is being timed is a “Pan-Sahel” civil war, starting in Northern Nigeria and going as far as Sudan and even Somalia, which is intended to be timed to coincide with the US “withdrawal,” read “collapse” in Afghanistan.

We are going to leave there also, “battle flags held high.”

Behind all of this, there are nastier rumors.  Back in the 1980s, WMD’s, biotoxins, diseases, were being developed to target specific ethnic or genetic groups.

This was not only done but they were used in Angola and elsewhere.  The purpose?

A “group,” be it nations, some mysterious “skull and bones” type conspiracy or whatever, has decided to target those of African and we are also told “Chinese” genetic background for removal from the planet even if it involves the deaths of billions.

Problem is, there is real evidence of the research, real weapons were developed and things like the nasty reality that much of the world is mixed race, which means that any of us could have any genetic group in our background and not know it.

This points at a plot that everyone, certainly everyone in the “intelligence” business is stumbling over.  There seems to be a plan to depopulate the planet in order to make it more “controllable” and more profitable.

I know this is hard to believe, that human beings, especially those who live under the total isolation that extreme power bestows, are capable of such “inhumanity.”

Those making the decisions will number less than 10.

It is so easy.  You can go to nearly any scientist and offer a funding grant to make a disease that only kills parakeets and, let’s say, Australians.  This isn’t a war crime, its “pure science.”

Then you ask someone to build it.  We call that a “defense project.”

If a reporter reports such a thing, they are a “conspiracy theorist” or “whistleblower.”  Conspiracy theorists are ignored, whistleblowers are jailed or killed.

Do not doubt that for a second.  The most dangerous thing anyone can have happen to them is to be taken seriously as a threat, a threat to things that are “outlandish” and “could never exist.”

It is a death sentence.

Who is safe from such a fate?  One group, for sure, is spies.  They are the “Sergeant Schultz’s ” of the world, that or worse.  From the TV series, Hogan’s Heroes:

[youtube 34ag4nkSh7Q]

Because of Sgt Schultz and the tens of thousand like him that the US government funds with over $40 billion per year, I don’t have to explain why enough steel to build 3 Nimitz class aircraft carriers was vaporized on 9/11 with less heat than required to melt the aluminum foil used to wrap a Christmas turkey.

Choices are easy.  You can get a paycheck, a pension or you can be jailed or killed.  Even that doesn’t matter anymore, votes can be erased, armies of internet goons stand ready to infect any idea, poison any fact or guide dissent into the “dark closet of obscurity.”

Try explaining why Newt Gingrich would be ahead of Ron Paul in the polls?

Want me to keep going?  I can do this forever, even longer but then, at some point, all the fun goes away.

Editing:  Jim W. Dean                                                                         Gbay Graphics by Steve Scroggins

Gordon Duff

Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.

Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

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