James Jesus Angleton: "Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance"

We've mentioned Angleton a few times, usually in terms of the phrase 'Wilderness of mirrors', more after the jump.

From The Intercept, January 1, 2018:

Wilderness of Mirrors

Veteran CIA officer Cleveland Cram was nearing the end of his career in 1978, when his superiors in the agency’s directorate of operations handed him a sensitive assignment: Write a history of the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff. Cram, then 61, was well qualified for the task. He had a master’s and Ph.D. in European History from Harvard. He had served two decades in the clandestine service, including nine years as deputy chief of the CIA’s station in London. He knew the senior officialdom of MI-5 and MI-6, the British equivalents of the FBI and CIA, the agency’s closest partners in countering the KGB, the Soviet Union’s effective and ruthless intelligence service.

Cram was assigned to investigate a debacle. The Counterintelligence Staff, created in 1954, had been headed for 20 years by James Jesus Angleton, a legendary spy who deployed the techniques of literary criticism learned at Yale to find deep patterns and hidden meanings in the records of KGB operations against the West. But Angleton was also a dogmatic and conspiratorial operator whose idiosyncratic theories paralyzed the agency’s operations against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and whose domestic surveillance operations targeting American dissidents had discredited the CIA in the court of public opinion.

In December 1974, CIA Director William Colby fired Angleton after the New York Times revealed the then-unknown counterintelligence chief had overseen a massive program to spy on Americans involved in anti-war and black nationalist movements, a violation of the CIA’s charter. Coming four months after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Angleton’s fall was the denouement of the Watergate scandal, propelling Congress to probe the CIA for the first time. A Senate investigation, headed by Sen. Frank Church, exposed a series of other abuses: assassination conspiracies, unauthorized mail opening, collaboration with human rights abusers, infiltration of news organizations, and the MKULTRA mind-control experiments to develop drugs for use in espionage.

The exposure of Angleton’s operations set off a political avalanche that engulfed the agency in 1975 and after. The post-Watergate Congress established the House and Senate intelligence committees to oversee covert operations. The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required the CIA to obtain warrants to spy on Americans. And for the first time since 1947, the agency’s annual appropriation was slashed.

Cram’s mission — and he chose to accept it — was to soberly answer the questions that senior CIA officials were asking in their private moments: What in the name of God and national security had Jim Angleton been doing when he ran the Counterintelligence Staff from 1954 to 1974? Did his operations serve the agency’s mission? Did they serve the country?

With his porkpie hat and trenchcoat, the portly Cram bore a passing resemblance to George Smiley, the fictional British spymaster as played by Alec Guinness in the BBC’s production of John le Carré’s classic “Smiley’s People.” There was some professional similarity as well. In le Carré’s novels, Smiley is introduced as a veteran counterintelligence officer called on by his superiors to assess a covert operation gone disastrously wrong. He is drawn into a hunt for a mole in the British intelligence service.

Cram’s task in 1978 was to investigate a covert career that culminated in a disastrous mole hunt. Like Smiley, Cram was a connoisseur of files, their connections and implications, their deceptions and omissions. Like Smiley, he embarked on a Cold War espionage odyssey that would fill more than a few volumes.

When Cram took the assignment, he thought his history of the Counterintelligence Staff would take a year to write. It took six. By 1984, Cram had produced 12 legal-sized volumes about Angleton’s reign as a spymaster, each running 300 to 400 pages — a veritable encyclopedia of U.S. counterintelligence that has never before been made public. With professional thoroughness, Cram plumbed the depths of a deep state archive and returned with a story of madness that the CIA prefers to keep hidden, even 40 years later.

***

Last June, I received a phone call from a Los Angeles area code. Half expecting a robocall, I tapped the green icon.

“I’ve heard you are interested in a man named Cleve Cram,” the caller said in a British accent. “Is that so?”

Was I ever. I had just sent in final changes to the manuscript of “The Ghost,” my biography of Angleton. I thought of Cleve Cram the way a fisherman thinks of the Big One that got away. I had focused on Cram in 2015, as soon as I started to research “The Ghost.” He had written an article, published in an open-source CIA journal, about the literature of counterintelligence, which gave some insight into his classified conclusions about Angleton. To learn more, I sought out his personal papers, more than a dozen cartons of correspondence and other documents that his family had donated to Georgetown University Library after his death in 1999. The library’s finding aid indicated that the bequest contained a wealth of material on Angleton.

But I was too late. The CIA had quietly re-possessed Cram’s papers in 2014. I was told that representatives of the agency had informed the library that the CIA needed to review the material for classified information. All that had been publicly available vanished into the CIA’s archives. By withdrawing the Cram papers from view, the agency effectively shaped my narrative of Angleton’s career. Without Cram’s well-informed perspective, my account of Angleton would necessarily be less precise and probably less critical. I wrote about the experience for The Intercept in April 2016.

The caller said his name was William Tyrer. He had read my article. He told me he had visited the Georgetown library a few years earlier, while developing a screenplay about a mole in Britain’s MI-5. He had gone through the Cram papers, photographed several hundred pages of material, and become fascinated by the man. “He’s like an American George Smiley, no?” Tyrer said.

I agreed and said I would be most interested to see what he had found. He questioned me closely about my views on Angleton, Cram, and the CIA, and said he would be in touch. A quick web search revealed that Tyrer is a British-American movie producer, the man behind “Memento,” a brilliant and unforgettable backward-running thriller, the cult favorite “Donnie Darko,” and scores of other movies. He was a serious man and a credible source. A few days later, Tyrer started emailing me 50 pages of material about Angleton that he had found in Cram’s personal papers.

The Cleveland Cram File, portions of which are published here for the first time, contains a sample of the primary source materials that the veteran CIA official used to write his Angleton study. The documents were photographed in Georgetown University’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections. A Georgetown archivist did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment; the CIA also declined to comment.

The Cram file illuminates a pregnant moment in the history of America’s secret government, when the CIA began to reckon with the legacy of James Angleton, a founding father of the deep state, a master of mass surveillance, a conspiracy theorist with state power.

***

Perhaps the most complex and contested Angleton story that Cram had to untangle concerned two KGB officers who defected to the United States and offered their services to the CIA in the early 1960s. Angleton insisted the men’s conflicting stories had enormous implications for U.S. presidents and policymakers, and indeed for U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. For the CIA, the question was, which defector was the more reliable source?

Anatoly Golitsyn, the chief of the KGB station in Finland, bolted to the West in December 1961. He was a heavyset man with hazel eyes and a methodical and manipulative mind. Yuri Nosenko, a career KGB officer embedded in the Soviet delegation to a U.N. disarmament conference in Geneva, started selling information to the Americans in June 1962 to pay back official funds blown in the company of dubious women. Eighteen months later, he approached the CIA and struck a deal to defect in return for a $50,000 cash payment. Among other things, Nosenko had firsthand knowledge that the KGB had not recruited accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962....MUCH MORE

Some background on Angleton's famous saying:
Nov. 25, 2017 
"Dollar threatened by six years of weakness - Morgan Stanley "

The story is from RT so it's probably just Russian dezinformatsiya , or maybe that's what they want us to think and it's actually true but in diving down that rabbit hole we may be approaching the 'wilderness of mirrors'* where we become contrarian to the contrarians.

And that way lies madness.
But it might be profitable.....

.... *Attributed to James Jesus Angleton when he was the Chief of U.S. counterintelligence at the CIA and attempting to discern which of two Soviet spies, Golitsyn or Nosenko was telling the truth.

Angleton ended up pretty much certifiable.

Plus, the term, meaning 'nothing is as it seems', was actually lifted from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:

...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations...

So that's that.
Or is it? 

And:

May 30, 2017
Spy Stuff and Media: Buzzfeed Gets Hit with a Second Christopher Steele "Dossier" Lawsuit
Here's the introduction to January's "The ultimate conspiracy: a conspiracy against Reddit’s conspiracy community?" concerning the CIA's chief of Counterintelligence 1954 to 1975:

Over the years I've mentioned the CIA's James Jesus Angleton a few times, here's a 2009 example:

As a practitioner of The Grassy Knoll Theory of Investing (there is a 'They' and 'They know') I am dubious of most EVERYTHING.

Of course this can lead you into the "Wilderness of Mirrors" which term the CIA's counter-intelligence czar James Jesus Angleton coined* and which trap he fell into:

...Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress and President Gerald Ford of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man," who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets. (Wikipedia)

Oh well, by the end of his time as a spy Angleton was pretty far gone, probably certifiable.

I put it there as more than just a cautionary tale, see after the jump, if interested.....

***

....I think Mr. Christopher Steele, the guy touted as the second coming of James Bond, got played by the Russians.
No?
Consider this, from William Smullen, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff and formerly an aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the cold war:

...“Typically, the Russian clandestine subversion specialists, being the best in the world in this demonical art form, operate in double, triple and sometimes multiple tactical plot lines,” said the former State Department official. “For example, in the media report … that the U.S. has intercepted a message from Kislyak to the Kremlin saying that Kushner had proposed a back-channel connection during the transition period, it has to be understood that Kislyak knows perfectly well that all his communications are being intercepted by the U.S.”

Indeed.
They don't say anything they don't want the British and Americans to know.
That is the very last paragraph in Politico's May 27 story "Kushner’s alleged Russia back-channel attempt would be serious break from protocol"

Or, as noted in the introduction to January's "Eugene Volokh on Libel Law: 'When ‘there is serious reason to doubt’ rumors and allegations, is it libelous to publish them?'": 

More Just as importantly, after reading the schlocky, amateur, borderline retarded "35 pages" thing, how could anyone ever again justify paying Orbis Business Intelligence actual money for anything they produce?

Played. Made to look the fool. By his own hand.
Back to James Jesus Angleton:

*In 2012 we noted Angleton only coined the use of the term in relation to intelligence...

Spy Stuff and Media: Buzzfeed Gets Hit with a Second Christopher Steele "Dossier" Lawsuit

Here's the introduction to January's "The ultimate conspiracy: a conspiracy against Reddit’s conspiracy community?" concerning the CIA's chief of Counterintelligence 1954 to 1975:

Over the years I've mentioned the CIA's James Jesus Angleton a few times, here's a 2009 example:

As a practitioner of The Grassy Knoll Theory of Investing (there is a 'They' and 'They know') I am dubious of most EVERYTHING.

Of course this can lead you into the "Wilderness of Mirrors" which term the CIA's counter-intelligence czar James Jesus Angleton coined* and which trap he fell into:

...Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress and President Gerald Ford of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man," who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets. (Wikipedia)

Oh well, by the end of his time as a spy Angleton was pretty far gone, probably certifiable....

I put it there as more than just a cautionary tale, see after the jump, if interested.

From Courthouse News Service: 
Owners of Russian Bank Sue Buzzfeed Over Trump Dossier

MANHATTAN (CN) – Unhappy with BuzzFeed over its reporting of the infamous “Pissgate” dossier, the owners of a Russian bank that is being investigated by the FBI for ties to President Donald Trump brought a defamation complaint Friday.

Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan, who together own Russia’s largest private bank Alfa, filed the 12-page complaint this afternoon in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The lawsuit comes over four months after BuzzFeed published a 35-page dossier linking the president and Russia. Former British spy Christopher Steele had originally prepared the dossier for a “Never Trump” firm that wanted opposition research to prevent Trump’s seizing of the Republican nomination in last year’s presidential election.

A Democratic research company picked up the tab for Steele to keep working during the general election, but its stream of cash was set to run dry before Election Day.

Though many in Washington knew about the dossier, it remained out of the public eye because many of its allegations cannot be independently verified. Shortly after CNN broke the news about the dossier, reporting on Jan. 10 that Trump and then-President Barack Obama had been briefed on its details, BuzzFeed published the full salacious document shortly after. 

The dossier disclosed in the article, “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia,” consists of 17 “Company Intelligence Reports 2016” prepared by Steele.

Alfa, which is Russia’s biggest private bank, is mentioned on page 25, buts its name is misspelled as “Alpha Bank.”...MUCH MORE

...Bloomberg reports that Fridman, 53, Khan, 55, and Aven, 62, are worth $12.7 billion, $8.8 billion, and $5.4 billion, respectively.

I think Mr. Christopher Steele, the guy touted as the second coming of James Bond, got played by the Russians.
No?
Consider this, from William Smullen, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff and formerly an aide to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the cold war:

...“Typically, the Russian clandestine subversion specialists, being the best in the world in this demonical art form, operate in double, triple and sometimes multiple tactical plot lines,” said the former State Department official. “For example, in the media report … that the U.S. has intercepted a message from Kislyak to the Kremlin saying that Kushner had proposed a back-channel connection during the transition period, it has to be understood that Kislyak knows perfectly well that all his communications are being intercepted by the U.S.”

Indeed.
They don't say anything they don't want the British and Americans to know.
That is the very last paragraph in Politico's May 27 story "Kushner’s alleged Russia back-channel attempt would be serious break from protocol"

Or, as noted in the introduction to January's "Eugene Volokh on Libel Law: 'When ‘there is serious reason to doubt’ rumors and allegations, is it libelous to publish them?'": 

More Just as importantly, after reading the schlocky, amateur, borderline retarded "35 pages" thing, how could anyone ever again justify paying Orbis Business Intelligence actual money for anything they produce?

Played. Made to look the fool. By his own hand.
Back to James Jesus Angleton:

*In 2012 we noted Angleton only coined the use of the term in relation to intelligence:

The term was developed into a theory by the CIA's James Jesus Angleton to describe a situation where nothing is as it seems. He lifted it from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:

...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations,

Typical spy. Stole his best line, without attribution.

"The ultimate conspiracy: a conspiracy against Reddit’s conspiracy community?"

Over the years I've mentioned the CIA's James Jesus Angleton a few times, here's a 2009 example:

As a practitioner of The Grassy Knoll Theory of Investing (there is a 'They' and 'They know') I am dubious of most EVERYTHING.

Of course this can lead you into the "Wilderness of Mirrors" which term the CIA's counter-intelligence czar James Jesus Angleton coined* and which trap he fell into:

...Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress and President Gerald Ford of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man," who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets. (Wikipedia)

Oh well, by the end of his time as a spy Angleton was pretty far gone, probably certifiable.

From The Verge:

The Trump dossier has r/conspiracy spinning out 

The r/conspiracy subreddit is the birthing ground of such feats of imagination as “Hillary Clinton has financial ties to ISIS” and “the Ft. Lauderdale shooting was a failed MKUltra experiment,” as well as the adopted home of Pizzagate theorists after Reddit shut down r/pizzagate. There are friendly weirdos who just want to talk about Stanley Kubrick, but there are also more sinister paranoids who feel the need to investigate the “influence” Jewish people have on various world powers.

But today, the subreddit is hooked on a new masterpiece of a conspiracy theory: a conspiracy against conspiracy theorists. The users are worried there’s a conspiracy to shut down r/conspiracy.

The presumed actor in this conspiracy is of course the broad “them,” and the alleged motives are no more specific:

“Theory: those in power have noticed they can’t destroy ‘conspiracy theories’ and that many people trust more ‘conspiracy theories’ than their scripted narratives. Thus, they are now trying to take control of the most active conspiracy forums like this one. What you can’t destroy, control.”

Why today of all days, for “them” to put an end to the conspiracy community?

Alongside the notoriously fetid troll swamp r/The_Donald, r/conspiracy is where you can find claims that BuzzFeed’s choice to publish a scandalous but unverifiable dossier of information about President-elect Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian government last night was actually orchestrated by someone on 4chan in a bizarre attempt to bolster Trump, torpedo BuzzFeed (presumably with far-fetched lawsuits), and destroy the country’s faith in the media. This theory is based on a screenshot of a 4chan user mentioning a “sex tape orgy” after another user claimed to have fed false information about Trump to vehemently anti-Trump GOP political consultant Rick Wilson. Theorists on 4chan and Reddit are praising this user for duping Wilson into passing the information off to either to the CIA, or to independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, who then gave it to Senator John McCain. Wilson has spent the better part of the day fending off trolls convinced of his involvement, writing on Medium that the claims are “false and risible,” and the 4chan poster appears to have been banned from Twitter.

This fear seems to stem from what users are calling an unprecedented amount of activity in the subreddit over the last 20 hours or so — or ever since BuzzFeed dumped the Trump dossier and encouraged the public, basically, to play the part of journalists: “BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” ...MORE

*In 2012 we noted Angleton only coined the use of the term in relation to intelligence:

The term was developed into a theory by the CIA's James Jesus Angleton to describe a situation where nothing is as it seems. He lifted it from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:

...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations,

Seymour Hersh: "The Fall Of James Jesus Angleton"

I can't tell if Mr. Hersh is burnishing his spook/counter-spook cred or just wanted to tell the story. Maybe a bit of both.

From Seymour Hersh's substack, May 10: 

My part in the sacking of the notorious counterintelligence chief

Last week I wrote a column about my unforgettable afternoon visit more than a decade ago in London with the late Pervez Musharraf, the exiled Pakistani president who bragged to me about his country’s ability to hide its nuclear arsenal deep underground. Two days later, my colleague Jeff Stein, whose SpyTalk newsletter covers American intelligence, turned over his column to Jefferson Morley, an author who has spent decades tracking the CIA and other state secrets stemming from Jack Kennedy’s assassination onward.

Morley focused on the Biden administration, battered anew last weekend in the wake of negative polling, and its willingness to continue pretending that Israel, long known to have an undeclared but significant nuclear arsenal, has no such arsenal. His main target was the administration’s refusal to declassify 48-year old Senate testimony by James Angleton, the notorious onetime head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton turned up recently as a character in A Spy Among Friends, a television series about the murderous transgressions of Kim Philby, the brilliant British intelligence officer who spied for the Soviet Union and conned Angleton, among others, in a long career of betrayal. 

After serving in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, Angleton was assigned as station chief for the newly organized CIA in Rome, where he had two main responsibilities: he was liaison to the Israeli nuclear program and was the main architect of the CIA’s postwar mission to prevent Italian politics from turning to the left after years of fascist suppression under Benito Mussolini. Instead, the CIA supported the two most prominent anti-communist groups in Italy: the Mafia and the Christian Democratic party. Political corruption was a staple of life in Italy for the subsequent decades.

I have a few things to add to Morley’s account....

....MUCH MORE

If interested see:
James Jesus Angleton: "Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance"

If you wish to jump right into The Wilderness of Mirrors, with special fun-house mirror effects and phantasmagorical loops and vortices, here's the CIA's official historian reviewing a biography of Angleton:
Book Review: "The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton"

Book Review: "The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton"

From the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency:
Reviewed by David S. Robarge
[Dr. Robarge is the chief historian of the CIA and an adjunct at Georgetown]

Readers who pick up The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley hoping finally to have a comprehensive and objective treatment of the Agency’s shadowy and controversial chief of counterintelligence will be sorely disappointed.

What they will find instead is an erratically organized account of most of the key events in Angleton’s life along with an agglomeration of often badly sourced suppositions, inferences, allegations, and innuendos frequently cast in hyperbolic or categorical language. The Ghost displays the most prominent shortcomings of journalistic history: reportage substitutes for cohesive narrative, with vignettes and atmospherics stitched together with insufficient discernment among sources. One of Morley’s more dubious ones—an anonymous blog post with no citations, from which he pulls an outlandish quote—has inadvertently provided an insight into what his ulterior motive in writing The Ghost appears to be: “This is not about who James Angleton was so much as what he had to be ” [emphasis added].

In pursuit of a story he seems to have already written in his mind, Morley manipulates historical facts, engages in long leaps of logic, and avoids inconvenient contradictory evidence and interpretations to produce yet another superficial caricature of a deeply complicated personality.

Questionable Logic
Perhaps the most problematic feature of The Ghost is Morley’s penchant for reaching grandiose conclusions based on sketchy or no evidence, contorted reasoning, or unfamiliarity with intelligence processes and the history of the events in which he places Angleton. Among numerous instances, Morley overstates Angleton’s part in the Italian election operation—he hardly was its “miracle worker”...MUCH MORE

C'mon now Professor, don't sugar-coat it.
The review is six pages long and just brutal. I don't think he grades on a curve.

Where In The World Is Izabella Kaminska?

She's been sending short messages and the signal seems strong, 5x5.

Central banks are stuck in a ‘hall of mirrors’ via @FT
https://t.co/hIsuWYZi50

— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) November 22, 2021

SCOOP #ChineseHypersonicWeapon that flew around the earth on July 27 fired a missile mid-flight over the South China Sea, revealing a spectacular technological advance that stunned the Pentagon & US intelligence.https://t.co/7TypmPhEMT

— Demetri Sevastopulo (@Dimi) November 21, 2021

If you want to know what’s really going on in the current Belarus/Poland standoff and hybrid war — follow the gas (rather than the money) hints Poland’s PM. https://t.co/S3PbmpOiUQ

— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) November 21, 2021

And she appears to still be an avid reader of the Financial Times.

Ms Kaminska's Twitter home.

As a side note, I was always partial to "Wilderness of Mirrors" from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:

...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations...

 

Which term the CIA's counter-intelligence czar, 1954 to 1974., James Jesus Angleton purloined and which trap he fell into:

...Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress and President Gerald Ford of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man," who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets. (Wikipedia)

Oh well, by the end of his time as a spy Angleton was pretty far gone, probably certifiable.

Maybe we'll stick with Hall of Mirrors.

"TOTAL INTRA-DAY REVERSAL"

As a practitioner of The Grassy Knoll Theory of Investing (there is a 'They' and 'They know") I am dubious of most EVERYTHING.
Of course this can lead you into the "Wilderness of Mirrors" which term the CIA's counter-intelligence czar James Jesus Angleton coined and which trap he fell into:

...Angleton came to suspect Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who commented wryly that even the most brilliant and loyal officers should not spend their entire career in such pressurized and paranoid fields. Angleton also privately accused numerous members of Congress and President Gerald Ford of treason. Angleton's notorious pursuit of the "5th Man," who he believed had penetrated a secret agency in Washington, was solved, he believed, when DCI William Colby fired him. No one was above suspicion, and even Angleton himself was accused by others of working for the Soviets. (Wikipedia)

Oh well.
From The Pragmatic Capitalist:

S&P futures have reversed this morning’s gains for a full 2% decline. High beta is leading the charge down on heavy volume. Not exactly the kind of action you see at a bullish reversal point in a rally. Of course, we’re not day traders here at TPC nor do I emphasize such trading, but this it notable action on a day when the data appeared quite positive.

"The CIA and the New Dialect of Power"

From American Affairs Journal:

In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, the Central Intelligence Agency announced a “digital facelift.” The agency’s goal was to attract millennial and Gen Z applicants who might be skeptical of the organization’s mission and to “increase racial, cultural, disability, sexual orientation, and gender diversity so that its workforce is ‘reflective of America.’”¹ The rebrand involved a new minimalist logo, reminiscent of the type of design typically used to promote electronic music (as some online were quick to point out). The models used on its website were conventionally attractive and ethnically ambiguous twenty-somethings, the faces you might see on a college brochure.

The agency’s twin adoption of liberal talking points and Bay-Area-inspired professional class aesthetics suggested that the two might be linked, and—as we shall see—they are. It was not until May, however, when a series of recruitment ads titled “Humans of the CIA” appeared, that the political undertones of the CIA’s rebranding would be made explicit and all hell would break loose. The most notorious of these ads included a Latina woman who begins her monologue, “When I was seventeen, I quoted Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me.’” The video continues,

I am a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment is not and was not a fluke or a slip through the cracks. I used to suffer from imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I am supposed to apologize for the space that I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my brilliance. I am proud of me, full stop. My parents left everything they knew to expose me to opportunities they never had. Because of them, I stand here today a proud first-generation Latina and officer at the CIA. I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are. Know your worth. Command your space. Mija, you’re worth it.²

The advertisement was almost universally panned. As one Forbes headline put it, “The Internet Comes Together to Mock the CIA’s New ‘Woke’ Ad.”³ The pushback was so intense that the CIA felt the need to respond, with a spokesman telling Fox News that “2020 was a standout recruitment year for the CIA despite the pandemic. . . . Our 2021 incoming class is the third-largest in a decade.”⁴ Apparently the rebrand was working for its target audience. The broader public may have been repulsed by the unfamiliar, academic language, but it was not directed at the public. This is the language of the professional class, the liberal elite—in short, a new dialect of power.

Dialects of Power, Then and Now

Previous generations of CIA officers spoke an older dialect of power—the genteel, patrician, transatlantic accent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jackie Onassis, Gore Vidal, and Katherine Hepburn. Like the new dialect of power, the transatlantic accent was used to distinguish the speaker from the masses. It was taught in boarding schools modeled on the British system, as the accent itself was modeled after the English. Many of the CIA’s initial recruits were brought up in such boarding schools, where, as Vicent Bevins points out, they inherited the upper-class imperial values of the British.⁵

The way the old elite spoke about the underclass would seem outrageous to our new elite. In Conversations with a Masked Man, John Hadden recounts with horror his CIA agent father’s description of watching a street brawl between union workers and scabs from a limousine window, referring to the brawlers as “these people.” Hadden writes, “The small phrase gives me a chill. The way he says it leaks contempt for the rabble or those brainless clods; he is above the fray, dissociated and indifferent.”⁶ Of course, not all the early CIA officers came from Mayflower-descended, British-boarding-school stock. James Jesus Angleton, a former OSS member and one of the CIA’s earliest recruits, who became its chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, had a Mexican American mother. Yet it is difficult to imagine Angleton uttering “Mijo, you’re worth it.”

He was, however, uniquely transfixed by language and literature—he was a onetime companion of the poet and Mussolini-sympathizer Ezra Pound—particularly the New Criticism. As his biographer Jefferson Morley put it, “He would come to value coded language, textual analysis, ambiguity, and close control as the means to illuminate the amoral arts of spying that became his job. Literary criticism led him to the profession of secret intelligence. Poetry gave birth to a spy.”⁷

Today’s new dialect of power, which has supplanted the old, is radical New Left politics internalized, individualized, and regurgitated by the professional class. It is imparted by the universities just as the previous elite idiom was imbued at British-style boarding schools. This dialect, like the transatlantic accent before it, is a class signifier. But today this class contains both CIA agents and left-wing journalists, to the embarrassment of the latter. This language was not “co-opted” by the professional class, as Natasha Lennard insisted in The Intercept.⁸ Quite the contrary, the CIA has as much claim to the new dialect of power as anyone else in the professional class, having had some hand in creating the New Left intelligentsia from which it sprang.

The CIA and the New Left

The CIA was heavily invested in mid-twentieth-century art and cultural production through the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), and was involved in the noncommunist Left more broadly, much to the chagrin of conservatives at the time.⁹ The CCF’s tendrils were seemingly endless, even reaching the preeminent postcolonial writer Derek Walcott.¹⁰ The CIA was consistent in its anti-communism, but it was never conservative. The feminist Gloria Steinem went so far as to characterize the CIA as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”¹¹ Steinem would know—she freely admitted to working with the CIA through a front organization called the Independent Research Service.¹² The CIA’s Harry Lun encouraged her to become the face of the organization, sending her to lead a group which would disrupt proceedings at the Marxist Vienna Youth Festival in 1959, and later to Helsinki in 1962.¹³ These affiliations were hardly a problem for Steinem on the left; she long served as an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America until such positions were abolished in 2017.¹⁴ The DSA officially condemned Steinem a year later in 2018 in its magazine—not for being a CIA agent, but rather for her insinuation that young women supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton because “the boys are with Bernie.”¹⁵

Of course, the CIA’s flirtation with the New Left soon became untenable, as leftist groups like the Weather Underground began picking up arms and setting bombs. The most radical elements of the New Left would be arrested or killed. Some, like the former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, would later help launch the political career of one Barack Hussein Obama.¹⁶ Many others retreated to academia, the site of professional class reproduction, and there cultivated a form of radical liberalism from which the new dialect of power arose. In addition to education and law, many new academics, who placed a premium on diversity, would find work in various “area studies”—which, as Bruce Cumings points out, were a pet project of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s immediate predecessor.¹⁷

The CIA: Vanguard of Liberalism

Another Humans of the CIA advertisement features a gay CIA librarian who expresses his “shock” at seeing a rainbow flag on former CIA director John Brennan’s lanyard upon swearing-in. He later learned that it had been designed by angle, the CIA’s LGBT resource group.¹⁸ The septum-ring-wearing protagonist of this video would be delighted to know that the CIA’s position on homosexuality has always been liberal for its time—even amid the Lavender Scare, when homosexuals were seen as potential blackmail targets or communist sympathizers, Soviet spies in waiting. Much to the annoyance of Joseph McCarthy and other conservatives, Angleton employed openly gay men in the CIA, including hiring Carmel Offie shortly after he had been fired from the State Department for propositioning an Army officer.¹⁹ Angleton also befriended an openly and flamboyantly gay British diplomat named Guy Burgess, a friend (and possible lover) of Angleton’s close confidant, a British spy named Kim Philby. Unfortunately for Angleton, both men in fact turned out to be Soviet spies.²⁰

In 1985, at the height of the Moral Majority’s power, and decades before a thirty-something CIA agent would call herself a “cisgender millennial” in a recruitment video, an internal CIA report expressed great hope in France’s “New Philosophers.” Their ideas, particularly Michel Foucault’s, would help form the basis of an emerging academic field called queer theory, which pioneered concepts and terms like “cisgender.”²¹

On April 24, 2006, Judith Butler, who became the most famous living queer theorist by taking Foucault’s idea of sexuality as a social construct and applying it to gender, spoke at a “teach-in” at UC Santa Cruz against the Iraq War.²² Calling it a “teach-in” was a deliberate choice, an homage to the New Left radicalism of the Vietnam protests. But something had changed. During the Vietnam War, it had been the students who led the teach-ins; now, it was the professionals, professors like Butler, as well as politicians, lawyers, and in this case, a former diplomat named Joseph Wilson. Wilson had worked in the Iraqi embassy before it closed during the first Gulf War and was the last diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. The CIA had previously sent him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to investigate whether Saddam had purchased yellow-cake uranium from that country. The dictator of Iraq had not, and Wilson wrote as much in the New York Times.

But Wilson was not there because of an op-ed in the Times nor because he was a former diplomat; he was there because the Bush administration had outed his wife as an undercover CIA operative. It is difficult to imagine the student radicals of the Vietnam War era inviting a man who had openly worked for the CIA to speak at one of their teach-ins. Gloria Steinem had at least bothered to keep her affiliation with the agency a secret. But the world had changed, and so had the former college radicals at UC Santa Cruz. Wilson was one of them: a professional concerned with the particulars of his work, in his case, intelligence, in the wake of 9/11, and an expert ignored by conservative politicians and the impulsive, vengeful rubes they represented. The Bush administration’s retaliation against Wilson and his wife turned them into the ultimate professional-class martyrs. Her name, Valerie Plame, was all over the news, and the liberal intelligentsia would never forget it.

Thirteen years later, Valerie Plame drove a speeding Chevrolet Camaro through the New Mexican desert, recounting the story of her betrayal. Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, had been convicted of leaking her identity and Trump had just granted him a full pardon. “You might have heard my name,” she said, as valerie plame appeared in bold letters on the screen, each word accompanied by a metallic clicking sound. Then, stepping out of the Camaro, Plame took off her sunglasses, “And Mr. President, I have some scores to settle.”²³

This campaign advertisement garnered almost two million views, and small-dollar donations began flooding into New Mexico’s Third Congressional District. “She hid where 90% of her campaign contributions came from by not listing them,” one rival campaign manager said, implying that most of her donors were from out of state. The Plame campaign responded only that “the number of campaign contributors is evidence of broad political support from everyday people.”²⁴....

....MUCH MORE

"Dollar threatened by six years of weakness - Morgan Stanley "

The story is from RT so it's probably just Russian dezinformatsiya , or maybe that's what they want us to think and it's actually true but in diving down that rabbit hole we may be approaching the 'wilderness of mirrors'* where we become contrarian to the contrarians.

And that way lies madness.
But it might be profitable.

From Russia Today, Nov. 18:

One of the world’s leading financial services companies Morgan Stanley has predicted six years of weakness for the US dollar amid strong global growth, which may eclipse any positive influence from interest rate rises by the Federal Reserve.

“The dollar has topped out in January this year, and we are very likely to look into a dollar weakening trend for the next six years to come. The key driver for the US dollar is not rate expectations, but how the global economy is performing and what is the global demand for funding,”
Morgan Stanley’s chief global currency strategist Hans Redeker told Bloomberg.

The analyst recommends investors to short the dollar against the euro and currencies of emerging markets as growth gathers momentum. The dollar’s rally against the yen will halt at 117 in the first quarter before it drops below 108 by the end of next year, said Redeker.

The firm is making its forecast as investors’ attention to the dollar reflation trade is growing while US tax reforms have achieved some progress and the Fed has determined to gradually raise rates. A potential hike in December along with three more in 2018 would have only “tactical impact” on the US currency, according to the analyst.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index has climbed 3.8 percent since dropping to a more-than-two-year low in September. It is still down by more than seven percent this year....MORE

*Attributed to James Jesus Angleton when he was the Chief of U.S. counterintelligence at the CIA and attempting to discern which of two Soviet spies, Golitsyn or Nosenko was telling the truth.
Angleton ended up pretty much certifiable.

Plus, the term, meaning 'nothing is as it seems', was actually lifted from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:

...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations...

So that's that.
Or is it?

EU Promises €2 Billion Of Ammunition For Ukraine

The BBC headline says "EU gives Ukraine €2bn of ammunition after shell plea" but nothing has been delivered, and won't be for some time. Among the artillery shell manufacturers the go-to is BAE Systems. That's all I know about one of the more inflationary expenditures a country can make: we build 'em, we blow 'em up, then we build more. Sort of like the falling-down Chinese bridges of a few years ago: great for nominal GDP, a bit of a drag on real national wealth.

From the BBC, March 20:

More than a dozen European Union member states have agreed to supply Ukraine with at least one million artillery shells over the next year.

The plan, worth €2bn in total, was agreed in Brussels on Monday.

Ukraine had told the EU it needed 350,000 shells a month to hold back advancing Russian troops and launch a counter-offensive this year.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba hailed the "game-changing decision" from the EU.

"Exactly what is needed," he wrote on Twitter. "Urgent delivery and sustainable joint procurement."

The deal comes as Russia grows concerned at a Ukrainian counter-offensive near Bakhmut or in southern Ukraine, according to a report from think tank Institute for the Study of War.

Meanwhile, Russia's own new year offensive "may be nearing culmination", the ISW added.

• Up to 30,000 Russian casualties claimed in Bakhmut

Defence and foreign ministers from 17 EU countries and Norway signed the ammunition agreement.

The first part of the plan commits €1bn ($1.06bn; £863m) of shared funding for EU states to draw upon their existing stockpiles, with the hope of sending this to Ukraine by the end of May.

The second part of the deal would see a further €1bn used to jointly order 155mm shells for Ukraine - the most sought-after artillery rounds.... 

....MUCH MORE

As mentioned in the outro from March 13's "Ukraine War: A Major Change In Messaging From U.S. Media": 

....Relaying the WaPo story, Business Insider: 

All 500 original members of a Ukrainian battalion were killed or wounded in fighting with Russia, commander says  

The fact they both published the story means someone in the upper reaches of the U.S. establishment wanted this story out. It's either indicative of a change in strategy for the west or it's an attempted fake-out of the Russians.

Where is James Jesus Angleton when you need him?

"2012 – A Bad Year for Pundits…."

Truth.
The trick this year was to abandon any pretense of fundamental analysis and trade the 2nd derivative of Fed announcements.
You couldn't use your interpretation of what the Fed was saying or even the market's understanding but rather had to ascertain the market's reaction to said announcements.

Getting damn close to James Jesus Angleton's Wilderness of Mirrors.

From Pragmatic Capitalism:

2012 was another bad year for Wall Street’s pundits.  This piece in yesterday’s WSJ highlighted some of the pitfalls involved in making broad market prognostications and not having to back those comments up with, well, anything at all:

Neither Mr. Rogers nor Mr. Cramer should feel singled out. The business of market punditry is fraught with potholes.

Of the 65 market “gurus” tracked during the last few years by CXO Advisory Group, the median accuracy for market calls is 47%. If that sounds low, or you wonder about the quality of the pundit, consider that the list includes such well-known names as Bill Fleckenstein (37%), Jeremy Grantham (48%), Bill Gross (46%) and Louis Navellier (60%).”...MORE, including comments.

I've never thought Cramer was anything more than entertainment and possibly a (witting? unwitting?) Paulson/Blankfein disinformatzia agent.

"CIA Director Tells Saudis the US Was Blindsided By Iran Normalization"

 "You had one job..."

From AntiWar.com:

Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to reopen their embassies on Thursday after their foreign ministers met in China

CIA Director William Burns visited Saudi Arabia earlier this week to express frustration over Riyadh’s surprise normalization deal with Tehran that was brokered by Beijing, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

According to the Journal, Burns told Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that the US “has felt blindsided” by Riyadh’s rapprochement with Iran as well as Syria, two nations under crippling US economic sanctions.

Following the deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia is poised to normalize with Syria. Riyadh is expected to invite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to an Arab League summit it’s hosting in May. The Biden administration is against regional countries upgrading ties with Syria as it prefers to keep the country isolated as US policy is to prevent reconstruction....

....MORE

HT: ZH

The CIA being blindsided by Riyadh-Tehran rapprochment is a pretty major indictment of the State Security Apparatus.

Right up there with the failure to spot the crop failures in Russia and Ukraine which led to the Soviets getting huge advantage in 1974's "Great Grain Robbery".

And the failure to foresee the rapidity of the collapse of the communist governments in Eastern Europe.

And the round-up, torture, and murder of virtually all the human assets the CIA was running in China.

And the Chinese hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management starting in 2013, exposing the personal information of 20 million current and former employees, including those with highest level security clearances. That was actually a joint CIA/FBI failure. As was the Soviet development of the H-bomb.

And....well, it is a very long list.

On the other hand, perhaps the CIA director is lying and they weren't blindsided—spies lie for a living—and this is exactly the result that those in the corridors of power desired. Reduce the standing of the U.S. in the Middle East and in the eyes of the rest of the world, enhance the power of the petroleum power players, maybe make some bucks for themselves with a few well placed hydrocarbon bets informed by, as the securities lawyers say, material non-public information.

Who knows? And is it any wonder that James Jesus Angleton went nuts? 

Ukraine War: A Major Change In Messaging From U.S. Media

Two stories that dropped out of the feedreaders within a few minutes of each other that would not have been published three months ago. Something's up.

From The Washington Post, March 13:

Ukraine short of skilled troops and munitions as losses, pessimism grow

DNIPROPETROVSK REGION, Ukraine — The quality of Ukraine’s military force, once considered a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties that have taken many of the most experienced fighters off the battlefield, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv’s readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive.

U.S. and European officials have estimated that as many as 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the start of Russia’s invasion early last year, compared with about 200,000 on the Russian side, which has a much larger military and roughly triple the population from which to draw conscripts. Ukraine keeps its running casualty numbers secret, even from its staunchest Western supporters.

Statistics aside, an influx of inexperienced draftees, brought in to plug the losses, has changed the profile of the Ukrainian force, which is also suffering from basic shortages of ammunition, including artillery shells and mortar bombs, according to military personnel in the field.

“The most valuable thing in war is combat experience,” said a battalion commander in the 46th Air Assault Brigade, who is being identified only by his call sign, Kupol, in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol. “A soldier who has survived six months of combat and a soldier who came from a firing range are two different soldiers. It’s heaven and earth.”

“And there are only a few soldiers with combat experience,” Kupol added. “Unfortunately, they are all already dead or wounded.”

Such grim assessments have spread a palpable, if mostly unspoken, pessimism from the front lines to the corridors of power in Kyiv, the capital. An inability by Ukraine to execute a much-hyped counteroffensive would fuel new criticism that the United States and its European allies waited too long, until the force had already deteriorated, to deepen training programs and provide armored fighting vehicles, including Bradleys and Leopard battle tanks....

....MUCH MORE

Relaying the WaPo story, Business Insider: 

All 500 original members of a Ukrainian battalion were killed or wounded in fighting with Russia, commander says  

The fact they both published the story means someone in the upper reaches of the U.S. establishment wanted this story out. It's either indicative of a change in strategy for the west or it's an attempted fake-out of the Russians.

Where is James Jesus Angleton when you need him?

I. Kaminska "How fake new spreads: a real-time dissection"

That's an I followed by a period, not a comma as in I, Claudius.

Before we go to Izabella's pieces, there was a tweet at the fake Jeffrey Gundlach Twitter account:

All you would have to do is have the video ready to go and when you switch camera shots before his speech you just roll the video and TV stations would have no idea.

— Fake 𝕵𝖊𝖋𝖋 GUNdlach® (@JeffGundIach) August 21, 2020

Which, if you think about it, parody account questioning reality of political speech, gets us to somewhere between James Jesus Angleton's usage of T.S. Elliot's "Wilderness of Mirrors" line and Cardiff Garcia's "self-referential vortex of psychologically important thresholds".

Media Matters for America said Rush Limbaugh also questioned the first rate delivery of the speech: "Rush Limbaugh questions whether Biden's “flawless” speech was live, or “a series of edited-together segments made to look live”" but I prefer my commentary from parody accounts and get a kick out of the Twitter query.
And I think I have the answer to what's going on. More after the jump.

First up, Izzy writing at the paper:

We cannot rely on a digital A-Team to fight deepfakes

Governments must introduce measures to better protect vulnerable citizens online

A new generation of highly persuasive deepfakes designed to manipulate and confuse the public is worming its way through the internet. We may think we are invulnerable, but the sophistication of this new breed is likely to catch even the savviest of us out — in fact, it has probably already done so. Today’s deepfakes are more than just Twitter accounts controlled by robots or manipulated videos of real people in the public eye. They are being designed to pass as unremarkable ordinary people, or journalists. Take the case of Oliver Taylor, a coffee-loving politics junkie who writes freelance editorials for the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel. Or so the world thought until a Reuters article in July noted that, despite his ample online footprint and convincing profile picture, “Taylor” does not exist.

 It is not clear who was behind the fake persona, masquerading as a real person. The technology to generate deepfakes is now so accessible and cheap he could as easily have been generated by a hostile nation state or a teenage prankster in a basement. His mission was seemingly to dupe editors into printing stories that promoted his agenda and built credibility for his profile. He was only exposed after an academic he had accused of being a terrorist sympathiser followed up on a hunch that something didn’t feel right about his bio and picture and began to make inquiries. But for that, “Taylor” could still be going about his business unmasked. Despite an ample online footprint and convincing profile picture, freelance writer Oliver Taylor turned out to be a deepfake 

© Cyabra/Reuters 

His exposure is probably only the tip of the iceberg....

....MUCH MORE

I remembered seeing that picture but didn't know the story behind it.

And from FT Alphaville, August 17:

How fake new spreads: a real-time dissection

Melania, the US First Lady, was trending on Twitter on Monday thanks to a clip of her supposedly refusing to take President Donald Trump’s hand as she stepped out of Air Force One.

Scores of media outfits quickly repackaged the content, echoing the sentiment that it showed the First Lady rebuffing her husband’s attempts to take her hand in their headlines....

....MUCH MORE

Back to the Vice-president.
Going into his speech there was speculation, on both sides of the aisle, whether it would be live or taped, and if taped whether it would be shot in one take or a series of snippets, edited together.

I think the campaign used a stunt double.

The thing is, in these big budget productions, and the Biden production is one of the biggest, estimated at $2 billion when all is said and done, in these big budget productions the insurance companies who write the completion guarantees for the investors will refuse to allow anything that could terminate production.

When Tom Cruise jumped off the world's tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, in Mission Impossible 4, the insurer refused to allow it. So Cruise and the other producers fired the insurance company and found cover that would include that one scene. It couldn't have been cheap.

I imagine the new underwriters insisted on some language in the policy that the director would shoot all the other scenes first and should Cruise fall to his death the shot would be included in the unfortunately shortened franchise so as to at least guarantee a boffo opening and reduce the insurers potential exposure.
Or something.

Here Vice-president Biden's speech. Is it live or taped?

Okay Kids: Here's One Of The Reasons We Had That Whole Ukraine Maidan 2014 Revolution Thingy

Back in October I asked what I thought was a simple question, "Who Owns Ukraine's Farmland?" A big part of the reason the U.S. helped overthrow the Ukrainian government was to get access to some of the best farmland in the world. Well that and the natural gas goings-on. And the billions in aid that was looted and paid as commissions and protection money and some very interesting laundry tips.

Did you know that because money and political power are fungible you can launder your ill-gotten gains into political contributions and end up with squeaky clean political influence with no one the wiser? And then use that influence to earn 'clean' money? Well now you know.

Onward. The introduction to that 'Who Owns Ukraine Farmland' post:

As mentioned yesterday, that was the simple question yours truly asked before stumbling into the rabbit hole of "Why Was The American Government Training Neo-Nazis In Ukraine?".

The reason for the original query was the mandate from the IMF that in return for one of the tranches of  multi-billion dollar loans related to the whole PrivatBank theft, money laundering, Maidan, Victoria Nuland web of lies and corruption that Ukraine allow foreigners to buy farmland.

Some really good farmland, by all accounts.

Farmlandgrab keeps track of this stuff all over the world and a couple of their posts give a quick overview of what's what.

Here is one part of the puzzle, not the stuff that attracts the foreign money:

April 29, 2020

Zelensky enacts law on farmland sale in Ukraine from July 2021....

And circling back to Farmlandgrab, a January 20 report from the Ukrainian Independent Information Agency of News:

World Bank, EU ready to provide technical support for Ukraine to launch farmland reform 

A roadmap for further joint work within the Land Reform Steering Committee is expected to be finalized in early February.

 

The World Bank and the European Union stand ready to provide technical support and other resources for Ukraine to successfully implement farmland reform.

 

This was stated by Klaus Deininger, Lead Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, according to Ukraine's Ministry for Development of Economy, Trade and Agriculture.

 

In his words, Ukraine has all the prerequisites for the introduction of a transparent farmland market, which will increase the efficiency of the use of land resources, provide a basis for the development of agriculture, rural areas and the local population.

 

Ukraine's Deputy Minister for Development of Economy, Trade and Agriculture Taras Vysotskyi, in turn, said that the introduction of the farmland market and the provision of all the necessary tools for its successful operation remains a priority for the government of Ukraine for 2021....

....MUCH MORE

 

And speaking of the Nazis the U.S. was training and paying and supplying in 2014 -2016,  here's one visiting the U.S. Capitol building in January: 

Rosyjski separatysta Siergiej Dubinin, były operator telewizyjny ukraińskiego kanału Inter, zwerbowany przez rosyjskie służby specjalne i Człowiek-Bizon https://t.co/u9r1g21pgU pic.twitter.com/imGQIEkHYY

— Obcy8pasazer (@Obcy8pasazer) January 9, 2021

He says he's Pravy Sektor. Some say he's Russian. Hard to tell whose side who is on after a while which is probably why James Jesus Angleton lifted that whole 'Wilderness of Mirrors' thing from T.S. Eliot before J.J. went insane.

 

What I do know is that there is going to be something on the order of $100 billion worth of Ukrainian farmland changing hands over the next decade which is getting to be serious money.

Except maybe for Musk and Bezos. And the CIA. And the State Department. and...

"Jobs growth didn't slow down in March"

A rather provocative headline for a straightforward analysis from Calafia Beach Pundit:

Did private non farm employment grow in March by only 121K (per the establishment survey), or by a very impressive 318K (per the household survey)? Take your pick: no one really knows which one is right, even though they paint dramatically different pictures of how strong the economy currently is.

In the 30+ years during which I have been following these two monthly surveys, there have been many times when they have diverged. Over time they tell the same story, but over shorter periods of a few months or even a few years, they can tell different stories. One shorthand way of resolving the problem of a divergence is to simply split the difference, since the truth is likely to be somewhere in the middle. Doing that for March gives you a private sector payroll gain of 225K, which is right around where expectations were, and which is also consistent with what we've seen in the past few months. I don't see any reason to think that the unexpected slowdown in jobs growth that surfaced in the establishment number reflects any actual slowdown in the economy; the economy never turns on a dime without there being a number of indicators suggesting that something big is going on....MORE

I'm getting a "Wilderness of mirrors" feeling about the market.
The term was developed into a theory by the CIA's James Jesus Angleton to describe a situation where nothing is as it seems. He lifted it from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:

...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,	65
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,	70
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.	75

"How the UK government is seeking to retake control of Londongrad"

Anyone on the outside who purports to know what is going on with the spy guys and spy gals, whether in the U.S., Britain, Russia or wherev, is at minimum a liar, knave, fool or varlet, and probably some combination thereof.

The writer of this piece, Con Coughlin is the defense and foreign affairs editor at the Telegraph who was part of a team that did a piece on  Oleg Deripaska last week which caused a bit of hubbub in some quarters, link after the jump.

This OpEd is from The National (UAE) Feb. 8:

MI6 regards Russia as posing a grave threat to British security, writes Con Coughlin

There was a time when London was known as Londonistan, owing to the preponderance of radical Islamist activists – many with close ties to extremist groups like Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood – who had taken refuge in the British capital, using it as a base from which to propagate their pernicious creed.
 
But now London is attracting a new, equally unflattering sobriquet, namely that of Londongrad, which is due to the large number of Russian oligarchs who have taken up residence in the city.

For the past few weeks, the dull winter nights in Britain have been enlivened by the BBC television drama McMafia, an unlikely tale about a British-educated member of a prominent family of oligarchs who becomes caught up in a bizarre world of Russian hitmen, Indian drug dealers and Israeli money-launderers. Entertaining, maybe, but most viewers see it more as a diverting thriller that bears little resemblance to reality.

And yet, to judge by some of the more controversial recent developments concerning Russian activity in London, the plot line might not be that far-fetched after all.

The latest scandal to emerge relates to the recent float of the Russian-owned energy and aluminium company EN+ on the London Stock Exchange at the end of last year.

EN+ is owned by Oleg Deripaska, one of Russia’s wealthiest men and a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Mr Deripaska is something of a controversial figure in British political circles owing to his relationship with some of Britain’s most prominent political figures.

In 2008, former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne found himself in hot water after he went on a sailing holiday with Mr Deripaska and former Labour minister Lord Mandelson, during which Mr Osborne was accused of soliciting illegal donations to the Tory party. Mr Osborne – who now edits the Russian-owned Evening Standard – furiously denied claims of any wrongdoing, thereby bringing the controversy to an end.

Now Mr Deripaska finds himself embroiled in a fresh controversy in Britain after the Daily Telegraph this week reported that senior officers at MI6, the intelligence service, were furious over the stock exchange decision to allow EN+ to float in London.

MI6 regards Russia as posing a grave threat to British security. Intelligence officers estimate there are now more Russian spies operating in the UK than there were at the height of the Cold War.

Their concerns over the flotation relate to Rusal, an aluminium company that is also owned by Mr Deripaska and is suspected of having links to the Russian military. EN+ owns half of Rusal, which until recently said on its website that a fine metal powder it produced was used “in the production of military equipment”.

British intelligence experts believe the same type of powder was used in a Russian-built Buk missile that Dutch investigators said shot down Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board.

Because of these suspicions, MI6 officers believe they should have been consulted prior to the flotation being allowed to proceed, on the grounds that it could have a direct bearing on Britain’s national security interests.

One senior intelligence officer familiar with the case described the flotation as a “scandal”....

...MUCH MORE

TASS reported on Feb. 7 in response to the original Telegraph article:

Russian company En+ refutes Telegraph claims on violations during floating IPO 
The corporation is taking counsel with lawyers on the possible further actions...MORE

And from the Telegraph, February 6:
MI6 raises concerns after energy oligarch linked to Vladimir Putin makes £1bn on London Stock Exchange

Related:
Feb. 5
Russian Oligarchs In Britain Will Be Asked To Explain Wealth
Jan. 16
Money Laundering "The Russian Laundromat and Blackpool Football Club"

There appears to be quite a bit more going on here than just security concerns and big money.
 I'm talking the really important stuff—in some quarters—CYA as an art form.
As practiced in three world capitals.

More to come.

In the meantime, we didn't post Jan. 7's  James Jesus Angleton: "Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance' simply for the grins and giggles therein.