A Wilderness Of Mirrors
This weeks events in Israel are … perhaps a spectacular intelligence failure. Like the Yom Kippur war of fifty years ago, or the 911 attack, or Pearl Harbor. I am pointedly NOT going off mission and running to look at the shiny, but I will pause to observe a couple things around here.
I guess stumbling across this video of the CIA’s first and foremost chief of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, is what set me in motion. The twilight of his career parallels the downfall of Control in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and his secret return post dismissal is precisely George Smiley’s role. I enjoy the spy movie genre in general, but the two I come back to are TTSS and Body of Lies.
Since I never served in the military, nor in any intel agency, and I spend my time talking to others like me, I seek out these cultural artifacts that can convey a sense of what they might experience. The patient detective work, the little clues, the pacing. That is how things usually are, at least in my experience.
I’ve enjoyed the Bourne series of movies, most recently The Bourne Legacy last night. I’ve owned a rifle with a scope and I’ve been in crashes of both two and four wheeled vehicles over the years. Movies like that are fun to watch, but nobody attaches a scope to a receiver and immediately makes a 300 meter shot on a moving target, nor do they get slammed to the pavement, then dash off looking barely mussed.
So this will be about reality, or more correctly … what we have left of reality.
Attention Conservative Notice: Navel gazing from a beat up old man on what resources we have available to us and the monumental task ahead.
Demographics:
Among the 54 subscribers to this site I can easily identify a third of you that I’ve spoken to by phone. I made an association matrix. I took the time to make some rough categories for myself, using words like academic, activist, intel, journalist, marketing, military, and a final very mixed bag I labeled “private” - those in commercial efforts that overlap with one or more of the others.
The number one commonality here? A baker’s dozen of you are hardcore Agents for the Republic of Change, denoted by a blue bar next to the label. No matter where you started, you arrived at a place where something HAD to be done, and no one else was doing it. One has to make a living, but you’re all doing so while keeping your eye on the long game.
Developments:
Just a month and a week into this I am pleased to report several positive happenings.
I’ve had not just one but TWO conversation about cell phone plans after covering those issues in Tool Time. Some of you, advised by my meandering thoughts in that area, ARE emboldened to go out and DO some things. I couldn’t be more pleased.
Today featured two conversations, one with a professional in the sense-making field, the other with one of those change agents, another self educated and directed player similar to me in some ways. Those of us who are in contact share a common trait - we can make each other stop and think. Individuals have opinions, intelligence is a group activity.
I finished David Ucko’s The Insurgent’s Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail. This book immediately earned a place on the must read shelf with Reinventing Collapse, How Civil Wars Start, and Brave New War. If your business is trying to see what’s next, or guiding groups through it, you might want to take a look at these maps of the terrain before setting foot in it. There is a lot of conventional wisdom at this time, in this country, that’s just plain wrong.
There is a folder on my desktop that’s an after action review. The group is new to me, I was asked to look it over by a third party, I’m amazed at what they took on, and how far they’ve come. This might even progress to interviewing the source, and if that does come to pass I imagine they’ll have some questions for me in return …
Directions:
We’re supposed to be looking at those first two phases in The Online Operations Kill Chain - Acquiring(1) and Disguising(2) assets. Thus far all I’ve covered is the tradecraft required to get your own observation posts working without having your actually life dragged into the fray. I’m a little unsure of what to do next. The paper itself is about service provider level access going after nation state grade operations.
Here are some things we could do:
Examine how you grow a planted account.
Rounding up some studies on prior operations to see how they got caught.
Check out marketplaces for bulk social media accounts.
Picking out a current macro event and trying to trace its assets.
I’m a bit leery of the last one. We start looking at a live target, someone clones my signature, tears into it, and then I’m handed the bag for whatever dumb shit they do. We might need to stick to historical material, which is hard to do when the world is on fire as hot as it is this weekend.
Conclusion:
Did you watch the entire twelve minutes of the Angleton clip? That aired when I was in the 4th grade, and it seems well nigh prophetic to me now. He understood what the Soviets would do and the hazards the west faced. The timing of his removal as the CIA’s chief of counter-intelligence division, his clandestine return to provide an orderly transition, the overall context of it … I feel like I’m about to make room for another intelligence history book on my shelf.
But not until I finish Mark Galeotti’s The Weaponisation of Everything. I suspect this one is also going to get promoted to the must read shelf, but I’m only a third of the way through it.
Despite rumors to the contrary, I don’t actually bite all that often. So maybe share with me what good reading you’ve found? We need every advantage we can get for what lies ahead.