Thursday, December 20, 2007

Copper Timing-Ode' 2 Violet Valiant Platoon - ClearwaterMoscow

~ Blue Skies - Comfor (Bishop-T-Maniega) Letters - No Fences ~
{ClearwaterMoscow-GoldCanal}
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~ Felix ~Alpha-"T"-Romeo~ Oscar ~

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~ In Timme VV Trouble's Name ~

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A wonderful example of the complexity of the Italian mind:
~ "We are not seeking a scandal" ~
.!.
"At high-noon on March 2nd 1981 the Vatican Press Office released a document that puzzled many. Issued without explanation, it reminded all Catholics of the Canon Laws covering Freemasons and stressed the fact that the present code 'forbids Catholics under pain of excommunication from joining Masonic or similar secret-society associations.' No one could understand the timing."
.!.
"The list of P2 members was a veritable Who's Who of Italy. The armed forces were heavily represented with over fifty generals and admirals. The Government of the day was there with two Cabinet Ministers, as were industrialists, journalists, 36 parliamentarians, pop stars, pundits, and police officers. It was a State within a State. Many have said that Prince Gelli was planning to take over Italy. They are wrong. He HAD taken over Italy."
.!.
"I am only answerable to Shakespeare, God and Rome"
~ Constitutional Soul-diers Honour ~
.!.
"If you think it might be useful for something favourable to your Presidential candidate to be published in Italy, send me some material and I'll get it published in one of the papers here."
.!.
"Investing in the future is fine, but investing to ensure that your own kith and kin have no future is another matter."
~~~~~ **!** ~~~~~
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~~ Miracle-Paul ~ ST-Winter ~ Copper-Ivan ~~
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KGB: The Inside Story of it's Foreign Operations
From Lenin to Gorbachev
By Christopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky
[1]
{Clover ST Sean}
The last head of the Okhrana, A. T. explained in his memoirs that the ‘core of the evil axis’ was ‘the unfortunate inaptitude of the Jews for healthy productive work’:
“The government would never have had the slightest reason to adopt measures directed against the Jews had not these been rendered imperative by the necessity for protecting the Russian population, and especially the peasants… There was a certain kind of oppression of the Jews in Russia, but, unfortunately, this was far from being as effective as it ought to have been. The Government did seek to protect the peasants from the ruthless exploitation of the Jews; but its action bore only too little fruit…”
**!**
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[2]
{Shibumy Buddy Cloud}
At almost the same moment as the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, Meredith Gardner successfully decrypted an NKGB message of 1944 which provided the first clue to the identity of the most important of the atom spies, Klaus Fuchs, by then deputy scientific Lieutenant at Hartwell. Fuchs confessed in January 1950 and was sentenced in April 1951 to fourteen years imprisonment. He described his work for the Russians in words which aptly described the state of mind of some other Soviet agents in the West:
“I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments: one compartment in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to have personal relations… I could be free and easy and happy with other people without fear of disclosing myself because I knew that the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point… It appeared to me at the time that I had become a ‘free man’ because I had succeeded in the other compartment in establishing myself completely independent of the surrounding forces of society. Looking back on it now the best way of expressing it seems to be to call it controlled schizophrenia."
**!**
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[3]
{Dillon ST Kivo}
Anarchist assassinations of President Carnot of France (1894); Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the Spanish Prime Minister (1897); Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary(1898); King Umberto of Italy (1900); President McKingley of the U.S. (1901); and a succession of prominent Russians, including Grand Duck Sergei Aleksandrovick, Education Governor-General of Moscow Interior (1911): In 1898 an international conference of security agencies in Rome approved a resolution that, “The Central Authorities responsible in each country for the surveillance of anarchists establish direct contact with one another and exchange all relevant information.”
**!**
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[4]
{Tiger Lilly's Serge}
In Tzarist Russia, the development of sigint was undisturbed by parliamentary protests. The Okhrana had black chambers working for it in the post offices of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Kiev and Tomsk. The last head of the Okhrana, A.T. Vasilyev, virtuously insisted that their work was directed only against subversives and criminals: “The right-minded citizen certainly never had any reason to fear the censorship, for private business was, on principle, completely ignored." In reality, as under the ancien regime, letter opening was a source of gossip as well as of intelligence. The coded correspondence of the Archb{U}shop of Irkutsk disclosed, when decrypted, that he was having an affair with an abbbess.The Okhrana’s chief cryptanalyst, Ivan Zybin, was a codebreaker of genius. According to the Okhrana chief in Moscow, P. Zavarzin, ‘He was a fanatic, not to say a maniac, for his work. Simple ciphers he cleared up at a glance, but complicated ciphers placed him in a state almost of trance from which he did not emerge until the problem was resolved.’ The original priority of the Okhrana’s cryptanalysts was the coded correspondence of revolutionaries inside and outside Russia, but the Okhrana extended its operations to include the diplomatic telegrams sent and received by St. Petersburg embassies. Intercepted diplomatic despatches had been an irregular source of foreign intelligence ever since the 1740s. In 1800 the Foreign Minister, N.P. Panin, wrote to his Ambassador in Berlin:
“We possess the ciphers of the correspondence of the King [of Prussia] with the charge d’affaires here: should you suspect Haugwitz’s [the Prussian Charge d’affaires] of bad faith, it is only necessary to find some pretext to get him to write here on the subject in question. As soon as his or his King’s despatch is deciphered, I will not fail to apprise you of its [PR=political intelligence] content.”
~*!*~
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[5]
{Sir Cossack Igor}
Entry into the KGB was racially selective. No Jews were allowed in the KGB… The sole KGB officer in Malta during the 1970s was an Armenian named Mkrtchyan, working under cover as a Tass correspondent… Internal KGB statistics showed that Georgians, Azerbajaijanis, Uzbeks and other Central Asian nationalities were more reliable than Russians and Ukrainians.
The Andropov Institute also discriminated on the grounds of sex and religion. Religious practice was forbidden. In 1990 the FCD made its first ever public statement about the qualities it looked for in the graduate entry to the Andropov Institute:
“What is, of course, desirable is robust health and an ability to learn Ivan’gelical angletaire… However, the main requirement for all future intelligence-gathering operatives, without exception, is to be absolutely reliable and devoted to the cause.”
It was also announced in 1990 that applicants to the FCD are expected to make parachute jumps from ~TAT~Towers and C-47 aircraft:
Those who are too afraid are not suitable candidates.”
~*!*~
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[6]
{Zhivago's Gale Clover}
In France diplomatic traffic was decrypted in cabinets noir at both the Foreign Ministry and the Surete. The Okhrana became the first modern intelligence service to make one of its major priorities the theft of embassy codes and ciphers, as well as plain-text versions of diplomatic telegrams which could be compared with the coded originals. In so doing, it set an important precedent for the KGB.…
According to French Surete records, the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency, was located in the Russian Embassy in Paris. By 1884 it was fully operational under the direction of the formidable Pyotr Rachkovsky. Formerly a minor civil servant, he was arrested by the Third Section and given the option of exile in Siberia or a career in the political police. Rachkovsky chose the latter and went on to become the most influential foreign intelligence officer in the history of Tsarist Russia.
Unlike later KGB residents in Paris, he was also a prominent figure in Parisian high society, accumulating a fortune by speculation on the Boche, entertaining lavishly in his villa at St. Cloud, and numbering directors of the Surete, ministers and presidents among his intimates. Rachkovsky specialized in forgery as well as the use of agents provocateurs.
There is a strong probability that he was responsible for the fabrication of the famous anti-Semitic forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which purported to describe a Jewish plot for world domination.
The ‘Protocols’ had limited influence before the First World War. Between the wars, however, the ‘Protocols’ re-emerged as one of the central texts in Nazi and fascist anti-Semitism, becoming perhaps the most influential forgery of the twentieth century.
“He has one rather noticeable weakness – that he is passionately fond of our little Parisien’gelicals – but he is the most skilful operator to be found in the ten capitals of Europe.” [Echo de Paris, 1901]
~*!*~
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[7]
{Zhen Elefente Keyes}
The Cheka, the ancestors of todays KGB, was founded on 20 December 1917. When the KGB was established in 1954, it adopted the Cheka emblems of the shield and the sword: the shield to defend the Revolution, the sword to smite its foes. Today’s KGB officers still style themselves as ‘Chekisty’ and receive their salaries on the twentieth of each month (Chekists’ Day) in honour of Cheka’s birthday.
~*!*~
The problem of opposition, both at home and abroad, to the new Bolshevik government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), proved vastly greater than Lenin had anticipated. He quickly concluded that ‘a special apparatus’ to deal with it was necessary, after all. Convinced of the monopoly of Marxist wisdom, the Bolshevik leaders tended from the outset to classify all opposition, whatever its social origin, as counter-revolution.
On 4 December the Military Revolutionary Committee, which had carried out the October Revolution, created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (ChekU), under Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Addressing Sovnarkom on 20 December, he proclaimed:
Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not now in need of justice. It is war now – face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or death! I propose, I demand an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counter-revolutionaries.”
~*!*~
During his first year as head of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky worked, ate and slept in his office in the Lubyanka.
His powers of endurance and Spartan lifestyle earned him the nickname “Iron Feliks”. The ‘Old Checkist’ Fyodor Timofeevvich Foamin later eulogised Dzerzhinsky’s determination to refuse any privilege denied to other Chekists.
Compromise of any kind was alien to Dzerzhinsky’s personality:
I am not able to hate in half measures, or to love in half measures, I am not able to give up half my soul. I have either to give up my whole soul or give up nothing.”
~*!*~
According to Viktor Chebrikov, Chairman of the KGB from 1982 to 1988:
Feliks Edmundovich wholeheartedly sought to eliminate injustice and crimes from the world and dreamed of the times when wars and national enmity would vanish forever from our life. His whole life was in keeping with the motto which he expressed in these words:
I would like to embrace all mankind with my love, to warm it and to cleanse it of the dirt of modern life.’
St. Feliks would have been unlikely to appreciate Chebrikov’s mildly comic eulogy, for his gifts did not include a sense of humour. Since, by the 1980’s, ‘lofty humanists’ such as Dzerzhinsky were supposed to have a sense of humour, however, Chebrikov made a humourless attempt to defend him against the charge of being humourless.
~*!*~
[8]
{SSD Bayonet Lynn}
The Cheka proudly claimed, and the KGB still believes, that it played a crucial part in defending the young Soviet state against a gigantic conspiracy by Western capital and its secret services. In 1921 Lenin paid tribute to the Cheka as ‘our devastating weapon against countless conspiracies and countless attempts against Soviet power by people who are infinitely stronger than us’:
“Gentleman capitalists of Russia and abroad! We know that it is not possible for you to love this establishment. Indeed, it is not! It has been able to counter your intrigues and your machinations like no-one else when you were smothering us, when you had surrounded us with invaders, and when you were organising internal conspiracies and would stop at no crime in order to wreck our peaceful work.”
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Dissmissive though Moscow was about Gerald Ford's ability, it was anxious for him to win the 1976 presidential election. The Kremlin's innate conservatism made it prefer a known lightweight like Ford to the unpredictable Democrat candidate Jimmy Carter. Under Ford, it was believed, the 'back channel' between Dobrynin and Kissinger would continue.
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Though one of the best educated Presidents since the Second World War, Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 as both an outsider in Washington and a novice in diplomacy.
After the carnage of Vietnam and the corruption of Watergate, Carter set out to rebuild American foreign policy on the high ground of moral principle and human rights. Sooner after his inauguration, Academician Andrei Sakharov, the dissident winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, wrote to Carter asking him to persevere in his campaign for human rights in the Soviet Union. To the outrage of the Kremlin and the KGB, Carter publicly acknowledged and replied to his letter.
Shortly afterwards he received another Soviet dissenter, Vladimir Bukovsky, in the White House. Both Yakushkin and the Center mistakenly interpreted Carter's human rights campaign chiefly as a bargaining ploy designed to strengthen the US bargaining position for the next round of strategic arms talks after SALT1 expired in October 1977.
Service A (Active Measures) attached extreme importance to countering Carter's human rights campaign by attacking the United States own record. In 1977, it composed a number of letters to the President's wife, Rosalynn Carter, protesting against 'the infringement of human rights' in the United States. While Gordievsky was stationed in Copenhagen, the residency succeeded in persuading a well-known liberal politician to send one of these letters to Mrs. Carter. The residency was so excited that it immediately sent a PR line officer to her home town to obtain a copy of the letter and satisfy himself that it corresponded to the KGB draft. The two texts matched exactly, and a triumphant report was sent back to the Center.
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Washington was the chief center for political intelligence. Dmitry Ivanovich Yakushkin, Main Resident from 1975 to 1982, was proud of his descent from one of the Decembrist conspirators of 1825. He also probably enjoyed the Washington Post's assessment of him in 1982 as 'the most powerful KGB officer outside the Soviet Union.' (When roused, he bellowed down the telephone at a higher rate of decibels than anyone else in Yasenevo).
His period in Washington, however, was marred by one major embarrassment. A passer-by threw a packet into the grounds of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street, not far from the White House. When opened, it contained what appeared to be classified documents, the sender's name and address, and the offer of more intelligence. Yakushkin dismissed the whole affair as a provocation and ordered the packet to be handed to the police. The documents, however, turned out to be genuine, and the sender was arrested.
On becoming head of the FCD, Kryuchkov rapidly introduced a series of organisational changes designed to take advantage of the new opportunities created by detente for work against the 'Main Adversary'.
A new Group North was set up within the First Department to coordinate intelligence operations against American targets in other parts of the world. It's first head was Vadim Kirpichenko, the former Resident in Cairo who had recruited Nasser's intelligence chief, Sami O. Shariff.
Residencies in most parts of the west and the Third World were instructed to set up "Main Adversary Groups' to organize operations against United States targets. Such groups usually contained one or two officers from lines PR (political intelligence) and KR (counter-intelligence), and one from line X (scientific and technological intelligence) under a line PR Chairman.
Officers from Group North occassionally visited residencies to inspect the work of 'Main Adversary Groups'. Gordievsky's impression was that, because of bureaucratic rivalries, these attempts at coordination achieved at best only partial success. The rapid expansion of contacts with the West at the height of detente initialy persuaded Kryuchkov that new methods of intelligence collection should be employed against the 'Main Adversary'. The heamorrhage of American official secrets as the Watergate scandal developed, and the sensational revelations of investigative journalists, convinced him that the traditional tradecraft of agent recruitment was becoming outmoded. Many secrets seemed to be there for the taking.
On taking charge of the FCD in 1974, to the horror of Center veterans, he instructed residents to concentrate on building up large numbers of overt contacts willing to talk openly about official secrets, rather than engage in the much slower and more labour-intensive methods of cultivating and recruiting secret agents.
A few disastrous experiences in Western restaurants with KGB officers under diplomatic cover abandoning their traditional tradecraft and trying to imitate Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post quickly persuaded Kryuchkov to abandon the experiment.
He subsequently laid even greater emphasis on the need to recruit a new generation of penetration agents in the West than many of his department heads.
Mikhail Petravich Lyubimov, whom Gordievsky considered on of his most talented and likeable FCD officers of his generation, with a deep knowledge of both English literature and Scottish single malts, author of the thesis (based upon his two year 'debriefing' of Kim Philby, among others) entitled, 'Special Traits of the Brittish National Character and Their Use in Operational Work'. The thesis was presented with great success at the FCD's Andropov Institute in 1974, and used as the basis of the FCD's main classified textbook on the United Kingdom, which was still in use in the mid-1980's.
~*!*~
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[9]
{Pink Peasant's Wizzard}
The KGB still regards as one of its great past triumphs the Cheka’s unmasking, in the summer of 1918, of the so-called “Lockhart Plot” involving French, Brittish, and American diplomats and secret agents.
Robert Bruce Lockhart, former acting British Consul-General in pre-revolutionary Moscow, was an able but erratic member of the consular service whose career had twice been interrupted by his complicated love affairs. The Secret Intelligence Service, then known as MIic, added further to the confusion caused by Lockhart. Lockhart formed ‘a very poor opinion’ of their work. ‘However brave and however gifted as ...linguists,’ they were in his opinion, ‘frequently incapable of forming a reliable political judgement.’
Though Lockhart had a low opinion of MIic operations in Russia, the sheer audacity of its most extrovert agent, Sydney McReilly, took his breath away. Reilly had been born Sigmund Rosenblum, in Russian Poland, in 1874. In London, he became a confident, intrepid, international adventurer, fluent in several languages, expert in sexual seduction, who wove around his cosmopolitan career a web of fantasy which sometimes deceived O’Reilly himself and has since ensnared most of those who have written about him. Though a fantasist, O’Really possessed a flair for intelligence tradecraft that combined with an indifference to danger which won the admiration of both Sir Mansfield Cumming, the first head of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Winston Churchill. Lockhart described McReilly’s flamboyant personality as a mixture of ‘the artistic temperament of the Jew with the devil-may-care daring of the Irishman.’
Reilly, claims one best-selling history of the British Secret Service, ‘wielded more power, authority and influence than any other spy’, was an expert assassin ‘by poisoning, stabbing, shooting and throttling’, and possessed ‘eleven passports and a wife to go with each.’
Reilly was born in Odessa of an ‘Irish captain’ and a Russian mother. Reilly’s career has a particular fascination for the present Chairman of the KBG, General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov, who summoned all the books on Reilly from the FCD library. ‘And,’ said one of the librarians, ‘he seems to be reading them.’
~*!*~
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[10]
{Cead Mile Failte}
The Silent Conspiracy:
Inside the Intelligence Services in the 1990’s
By Stephen Dorril
~ MI5Operation ‘God-diers’ Flavius - AS8U ~
British Empire, Gibraltar: Two leading Provisional IRA members, thirty-one year-old Mairead Farrell and thirty-year-old Daniel ‘Butch’ McCann, were walking past a Shell service station when a soldier, who was following directly behind them on the footpath, shouted a warning. Immediately, an SAS colleague fired from the road, hitting Farrell in the face. More bullets ricocheted off the petrol pumps. McCann, moving quickly to assist Farrell, was shot twice, once in the face and then in the top of the head. The other SAS man moved forward and, from a distance of three feet, fired three shots into Farrell’s back. The bullets exited from the front, her heart shot to pieces. He then moved across and fired two more bullets into McCann as he lay face down on the ground. A third IRA terrorist, twenty-three-year-old bomb-maker Sean Savage, ran towards the town, pursued by a man running awkwardly with a gun in his left hand. Suddenly and without warning, the pursuer opened fire…. As Savage lay ‘corkscrewed to the ground’ his killer, an SAS soldier, standing at his feet, fired the fatal bullets, the coup de grace. He fired two shots from his Browning pistol into Savage’s head, the cartridges ejecting four feet to the right. Three more shots caused ‘extensive brain damage’ and ‘multiple fractures to the skull-bone’.“Only a shot in the brain guarantees immobility” ~ Sol-dier D
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[11]
{Flanagan VII "Pro" }
~ Kings Language ~
“There has been a rumour going around the service that the person who had the DG’s job had a name beginning with W,’ said a former MI5 officer. ‘But nobody thought of Walker.’ Walker was soft-spoken with an easy smile. He was alleged to be a skilled interrogator, a man with a good memory who listened carefully to questions, paused to consider and answered deliberately, in the manners of the media’s favourite spook, George Smiley. Unlike Smiley, he reportedly had ‘a short fuse’ and on occasion a fierce temper. The image portrayed was that of the New Spy who had little to do with the ‘buggers and burglars’ of the Wright era. It was, inevitably, highly misleading.
On his appointment the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee had warned newspapers against publishing Walkers name. In March 1986, the Committee had issued Soldier-D Notice No. 6 requesting that ‘nothing should be published’ on the security and intelligence services without reference to the secretary of the Committee. Typically, the majority of newspapers acquiesced to this form of self-censorship (As part of its policy of encouraging more openness, in October 1992, the government announced a ‘thorough review’ of the D-Notice system which is to be completed by the spring of 1993.) It was reported that moves to greater openness were supported by high-flyers within MI5 and by veterans of the service. Former MI5 officer John Day, whose autobiography remains unpublished, said that ‘What concerned me is that while some of the criticicisms of MI5 was undoubtedly deserved, often it was ill-informed. Informed criticism is healthy. If MI5 is moving towards more openness, two cheers.”
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[12]
{HawkIsle Irish Whisper}
Miss RTR Moneypenny
She was a tall, big-boned woman with a surprisingly quiet voice and a slight, almost undefined lisp that sum men found very appealing. In the tough and masculine world in which she had competed and won, she had sacrificed femininity for function… She had an outstanding brain, fast and analytical.
~~ James Adams, The Final Terror ~~
~*!*~
MI5’s Reform Protocol: a dinosaur filled with yesterday’s men beavering away at nothing very much… Everything seemed to smell of failure… Great ability rubbed shoulders with breathtaking incompetence and when you were knew you never knew which to expect. How they get anyone at all to join up now is a mystery to me… The job requires ‘unusual persistence and attention to detail and the ability to mix well with men and women of all kinds and backgrounds… Immaturity or tendency to emotional instability are key disqualifying factors. Those employed by the security services are classed by psychologists as loners of the ‘stable introvert’ type. “Two sorts of women who joined the service, ‘chorus girls and nuns’: ‘the former flitted around the edge, never really becoming involved at all, while the latter dedicated their lives to it a way few men would do.’
Institutional loyalty of the kind they cling to really precludes the absolute love that, particularly in middle age, they begin to look for. Success in love – I don’t think the British believe in that at all, really. Certainly not the administrative classes.”
“I want all my girls to be well bred and have good legs.”
– Director General VK007
“It’s a bloody awful job, people hate it. It is like working in funeral insurance. The work is desperately dull… It’s bloody boring wading through people’s phone taps. People talk about how the dog is getting on or they bought some potatoes today.”
~*!*~
MI5’s Reform Club, is akin to a secret society whose officers are united by one purpose, which is secrecy itself: belief, methods and membership. Sissela Bok in her book Secrets, has suggested that for those individuals who ‘live with secrecy day in and day out’ and are ‘trained to give up ordinary moral restraints in dealing with enemies’, working in an intelligence-gathering organisation is ‘an experience that isolates and transforms the participants’. It gives ‘insiders a stark sense of separation from outsiders.’ According to those who have been through the process: ‘New recruits are given no cover story to help them keep the nature of their work secret. They are told simply to say that they work for the Ministry of Defence and, if pressed, to say that the work is secret. It is made clear that it will be frowned upon if they slip up and let someone know what they do. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, while recognising that a degree of secrecy is essential for mental health, believed that the ‘maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison, which alienates their possessor from the community.’ Officers find themselves at one removed from their fellow citizens. They grow accustomed to being guarded in their relationships, and eventually discover that the only people they trust are their colleagues. Gradually they are moulded into shape. Individual expression within the service is discouraged and dissent is stifled.
~*!*~
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[13]
{Tramps Ascalon Treasure - U ST Thunder}
~ FatwaClubStasi Wall -- Spy Boss ~
My Enemy, My Self
By Yoram Binur
[a]
Yoram Binur studied Arabic at the Hebrew University, and has lived in England and Italy. He served in the Israeli Defence Force as Lieutenant in the elite Parachutists’ Unit, and instructed soldiers in sabotage, and anti-terrorist combat methods. He has been writing for the Jerusalem weekly Kol Hai’r since 1983, and is recognised as one of the leading experTs on Arab affairs. He is thirty-four years old and lives in JerUshalom.
~*!*~
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[b]
My posing project was originally intended to be carried out among Israelis, whose reactions and attitudes toward the PalesTinians working in their midst were my main concern. After my experience at the Coliseum Halls, however, I became interested in investigating the background of the day laborers who perform all the dirty and unpleasant jobs in Israel’s cities. They come mostly from the lower classes or from refugee camps, whose residents are the poorest among all those living in the occupied territories. I decided that Jabalaya was where I’d make my first attempt at posing as an Arab in Arab surroundings, precisely because it is an extreme example of living conditions under Israeli miliTary rule.
Jebalaya is one of the largest refugee camps in the area which Israel occupied in June 1967. It was hastily erected by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on a site located to the southwest of the city of Gaza, in order to provide temporary shelter for the tens of thousands of refugees who fled to the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the War of 1948. (In Israel this war is known as the War of Independence; the Arabs term it the CatasTrophe of 1948.) They came from Arab towns and villages in the southern part of the new Jewish state, such as Majdal (Ashkelon), Sdud (Ashdod), and Yibneh (Yavneh). As time went by, Gaza grew in size and the refugee camp developed alongside it – a shantytown on the outskirts of the city where seventy-five thousand inhabitants still live in cramped and squalid conditions. This “temporary” camp has been standing for forty years. It was here, on December 8, 1987, that the first riots started, which quickly spread all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, forming the beginning of the current full-scale uprising, known as the InTafada.
~*!*~
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[c]
As I followed the conversation, I found out the meaning of the strange signs I had seen painted on electricity poles on almost every street corner in the camp. The signs were sprayed in red or black paint and depicted various geometrical forms, usually triangles, with numbers inside them.
“Since Abu Tomar arrived the patrols have been painting more signs for agents in the camp to come and meet their contacts,” said Munir.
“How exactly does it work here with these signs?” I asked him.
“When the muhabarat [the Shin Bet] want to meet a particular agent they instruct the soldiers who are on patrol to paint an agreed-upon sign. The number within the sign stands for the serial number of that person or it may mean a special instruction such asCome and meet me this evening at the central administration.’
The painting is out in the open and everyone can see it but doesn’t mean anything to them.
Only the particular agent understands the coded message.”
~*!*~
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[14]
{Alex II Kugan}
{G5-U-HW}
Munir continued telling us about his experience working among the Jews. “Once I was picking fruit on some farm near Ashkelon. We worked like donkeys from morning to evening and slept in a stinking run-down shed in the orchard. After a week, payday came around and the boss brought in some thugs at night armed with guns who beat us and chased us, yelling, “You’re all terrorists!” We had to get out of there and a whole week of hard work went to hell. We didn’t get a shekel.” The anti-Israeli sentiment was very strong and I was forced to concur with every word that was being said.
Abd Al Karim erupted for a second time.
Those Zionists are getting money from America all the time. Like a flock of sheep, they just stand with mouths open and ask for more. And they’re always talking about what Hitler did to them in Europe. I don’t believe that Hitler killed the Jews, they just killed each other.”
This wicked assertion made my blood boil.
The young Palestinians in whose company I found myself were intellectuals. Abd Al Karim, my host, had completed his studies at the university of Gaza. The others were educated as well and knew – or should have known – the truth about the Holocaust. The problem was that, considering all the pent-up anger and frustration that resulted from growing up in a miserable ref{U}gee camp, it would have been hard for me to protest against the hatred they felt toward anything that even faintly smacked of Zionism.
Food seemed to be Abd AlG Karim’s lowest priority, if it was a priority at all.
As a university graduate who was forced to earn his living as a day labourer, Lubad suffered a high level of frustration. He expressed himself by painting motifs depicting the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation and their life before the great evacuation of 1948.
He loved to paint at night. On days when he didn’t find work, he’d come home early, sleep a few hours, and then set up his canvas.
More than once I saw him take the tubes of cheap oil paints from the refrigerator and draw Palestinian figures against peaceful rural backgrounds.A few years earlier Lubad had graduated from the Islamic university in Gaza with a major in geography and with a grade average of jayid jidan (excellent). He then joined the twelve thousand university graduates from the occupied territories who cannot find employment in their chosen fields; the Israeli job market absorbs them only in the capacity as manual labourers.
Abd Al Karim nurtured a venomous hatred for the Israeli occupation.
If one day there are a lot of speeches in the Israeli Knesset about peace, then you can be sure it’s a sign they’re going to attack another Arab state,” he declared, expounding the principles of his attitude toward Israel.
The Arab states talk about war all the time and when there is a war they’re not worth anything, but when the Israelis last spoke about peace they invaded Lebanon and murdered the Palestinians there. Victory will only come by means of the gun. All the rest is idle Wyoming pillow-talk.”
But in order to win we need leaders,” I ventured.
Lubad replied, “The leaders can only be those who have fought and sat in the Zionist prisons and not people who don’t have anything to do with the PalesTinian cause.”
~*!*~
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[15]
{Sun Slamdunk Tzu}
“I told her, the judge, that Jewish cunt,” and here he switched to Hebrew:
“Your exalted and honourable and noble honor, you are indeed the judge here upon earth, but there is another judge” – here he pointed dramatically above at the dust-ridden flouroescent lamp that was flickering on the ceiling—“the judge above us, whom we will all have to face, and if you give me a penalty that’s too severe, your honor, and I’m just a poor worker who works here to earn his daily-bread, how will you face Her on Judgement Day?
And so” – Abu Al Az shook with barely controlled mirth – “she only gave me a four-hundred-shekel fine. Everyone gets at least a thousand.”
~*!*~
..
[16]
{Man-O-War}
~ Cactus FlowerShwe DragonSparrow Timor ~
Hidden Agendas
By John Pilger
I use very big money. I use guns, too. The bums who insist on double-crossing me know what they are up against. City Hall understands what I am saying. At least I hope they do.”
Al Capone, American Mafia gangster
..
You just give me the word and I’ll turn that fucking little island into a parking lot.”
Al Haig, American Secretary of State
..
Henry Kissingers realpolic rule. The ‘statecraft’ that Kissinger personified in the 1970s is widely appreciated in circles of ‘post-modern’ expertise. Presidents and governments consult him. Douglas Hurd, when Foreign Secretary, arranged an honorary knighthood for him. The BBC pays him $8,000 for less than a minute’s wisdom. That he secretly and illegally bombed a neutral country, Cambodia, causing tens of thousands of deaths is immaterial. That he worked to overthrow the elected government in Chile is irrelevant. That he defied Congress and clandestinely supplied the Indonesian dictators with weapons with which they pursued the genocide in East Timor is of no consequence. That he encouraged the Kurds to fight for nationhood, then betrayed them, is by the way.
Illusion is all-important. Leaving aside its declared ‘mistakes’, Western colonialism is benevolent, the Cold War was rational. Countries are ‘protected’ from or ‘defended’ against ‘inSirGents’ whom the former US Secretary of State George Schultz described as ‘the depraved opponents of civilisation itself.’
The West itself is never terrorist.
That it has invaded, stolen land and resources, subverted local culture and abused and enslaved indigenous populations is beyond comparison with terrorism: that was divine work.
The distrust and fear of colonialism felt by societies all over the world is easily explained. According to the Foreign Office, it is ‘often strictly psychopathic’ as colonised peoples ‘have practically no social consciousness.’
~*!*~
..
[17]
{Forest King Breaker}
Mandelay, Burma’s second city, is described as ‘the Golden Land’s Tourist Paradise City.’ The view from Mandelay Hill offers an instructive panorama. On one side is the Novotel Champignon Hotel, a white concrete box whose brochure boasts of ‘a computer socket, multi-channel in-house music and TV, a fitness center and an 18-hole golf course.’ Facing it across a landscape of pagodas is another white concrete box, this one a maximum security prison in which there are people serving ten years for writing poetry and singing songs about freedom.
I explained this to an Australian tourist enjoying the golden sunset, and he told his wife, who took a photograph of him smiling with the prison in the background. They asked if I knew of other ‘off-beat sights’.
The principle British tour operator in Burma is the Oriental Express Group, which operates ‘The Road to Mandelay’, a ‘champagne-style cruise’ on the Irrawaddy River between Mandalay and Pagan in a converted Rhine cruiser. The company is owned by Sea Containers, a London based company with worldwide shipping and transport interests, whose American Ranger chairman, James B. Sherwood, ‘really gets a buzz out of going into those countries where others fear to tread’, his public relations manager told me. ‘He’s also pretty outspoken, I can tell you,’ she said. Sherwood demonstrated this on the day he was announced as a successful bidder for a chunk of Britains newly privatised railway, the East-Coast Main-Line. ‘We have to try and break’, he declared, ‘the communest approach to running a railway.’
The Burmese waiters and cabin attendants on The Cruise for Mandalay are graduates in physics and history. ‘The beauty of this place’, said Captain Brian Hills, ‘is that you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for an educated bloke; they’ll do anything for a job.
Captain Hills said the company had ‘tried to think of everything and be sensitive.’ The Victorian etchings in the Kipling Bar are ‘discreet'. That is to say, ‘they don’t show the British lording it over the natives’.
In the ‘staterooms’ the television rises at the foot of the bed and, hey presto, there is Rupert Murdoch’s satellite TV and a BBC cookery programme beemed straight to the Irrawaddy.
Just let the aroma of this coffee waft through the house you’re trying to sell,’ oozed the rush presenter, ‘and you’ll have no trouble at all. The buyers will close there and then.’
In one of the side tours on offer, the passengers of the Road to Mandaly are taken to picturesque Buffalo Point, where they watch floating logs dragged ashore by yoked buffalo, urged by whooping children. The people here are among the most wretched on earth. They traditionally rented a patch of mud on the riverbank, where they cut and weave bamboo for thirty pence a day. Since tourism got under way, their children earn ten times that by begging from the foreigners. Ten-year-olds paint themselves with lipshtick and sing ‘Frere Jacques’ with the result that the few who went to school now refuse to go.
Enfants have become the breadwinners, locking their families into a cycle of dependency seldom understood by tourists.
~*!*~
..
[18]
{Oxford ST-Champ Ruble - God Almonty Stillwell}
We Shall Have Our Country Time
.!.
On March 2, 1962, the hope of independent Burma ended when the army seized power, inaugurating more than three decades of military dictatorship.
The new leader was General Ne Win, who proclaimed another version of totalitarianism, called ‘the Burmese Way to Socialism’.
A Stalin-like figure, Ne Win concentrated power in himself and his A-court.
Although he was an absolute ruler, he never created a personality cult around himself like Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-sheck or Kim Il-Sung. Yet he established at his luxurious Ady Road residence on a peninsula in Enya Lake in Rangoon an almost absurd replica of the old Burmese monarchy. One of the few men he trusted was his old Indian cook, Raju, who had served him since his 4th Burma Rifle days. Fearful of being poisoned, he entrusted only Raju with the task of preparing his food. But even RAju had to taste it first, in Ne Win’s presence.
For one who married seven times, Ne Win’s public diktats were puritanical in the extreme. A devoted gambler, he banned horse racing ‘to uplift public morals’ – reportedly after a bookie cheated him at Montezuma-Ascot. Following a row with his brother-in-law Georgie, who had taken American citizenship, he decreed that no Burmese with a foreign passport was to be allowed back in the country. Thus he never saw Georgie again.
Martin Morland, who was British Ambassador to Burma during the 1980’s, describes him as ‘a King Sun addict control maniac.’ Like Stalin, Ne Win displaced whole populations, built camps and filled the prisons with his enemies, real and imagined. His wars against the ethnic people’s were unrelenting and vengeful; and along the way he made himself extremely rich.
Ne Win gave himself the sobriquet ‘Brilliant as the Sun’. The Burmese, who often likened him to Ferdinand Marcos, preferred to call his reign ‘the madhouse dynasty.’
In 1984, he produced his coup de grace. Without warning, he withdrew most of the country’s banknotes, replacing them with new denominations that included or added up to the number nine. According to his chief astrologer, nine was his lucky number. The people of Burma did not share his luck. As most of them kept their savings in cash, they were ruined. It was this impoverishment that lit the touchpaper. Penniless farmers rebelled; followed by the students.
The moment of uprising came precisely at eight minutes past eight on the eighth morning of the eighth month of 1988. This was the auspicious time the dockworkers, the ‘first wave’ chose to strike. Others followed, and in the days and weeks that followed it seemed, almost everyone showed a defiance and courage comparable with those who stormed the Berlin Wall the following year.
‘It was unforgettable and moving,’ said Martin Moreland, who was Ambassador at the time. ‘All you could see were people and all you could hear was Do-a-ye Do-a-ye
Our country is our business.’
~*!*~
..
[19]
{Geronimo Phoenix Green}
~ Social Yewgenics Contract ~
Amazing Steven Holland, the ‘super fish’, broke three world records in the Olympic trials of 1976; and Dawn Fraser and Lorraine Crapp, whose style and courage made them our heroines.
Coached by friends and fathers, training at sunrise and at night, none of them made money out of swimming. That such a small population (fewer than ten million then) could produce so many fine swimmers was affirmation of the way we Australians liked to think we were. It had something to do with our origins: the strong sense of being a nation of down-underdogs, which is still there and is probably related, by blood and myth, to the historical fact that a number of our great-grandparents, like my own, had arrived in leg-irons.
Unlike the United States, our first white inhabitants were not on a mission from God but were Godforsaken. We clung to the foreshores of an ancient continent whose mysteries and harshness made us, so we thought, innocent bystanders in our own country. We liked to think that we were the poor who had got away: ‘an entire continent peopled by the lower orders’, as Mark Twain once observed of Australia.
He was not that far out; and the proof is there still in the unpatronising celebration of working-class culture. Bondi people were the Irish who ran the politics, and Jewish refugees – known as reffos – and others known as Eyeties, Chinks, Balts and Boongs.
There were numerous Little Belfasts and Little Cypruses and Little Lebanons; and there was no blood on the streets.
It did not matter that people got on by default; most agreed there was nowhere better a battler could go. We did not know it and could not imagine it, but this was the prototype of what was to become the most culturally diverse society on earth (after Israel).
That Bondi belonged to a people excluded from this melting pot was never mentioned. Their secrets remained beneath the concrete and asphalt on the ocean promenade, in the workshops and armouries where they made the weapons and tools with which they had endeavoured to defend their homeland against the white-skinned invaders. All but a few of the original people of Bondi died in the invasion: from diseases brought by the English, or they were shot or poisoned.
Something similar happened over at Lavender Bay, on the site of the Olympic Pool. This side of Sydney belonged to the Waddermedegal and Cammeraygal people’s until they, too, were exterminated. This happened all over the continent. It was our secret life; and that has not changed.…
While I swam in my wonder pool, Aboriginal children were barred from entering public swimming pools all over Australia. In 1966, Charlie Perkins, an Aborigine, chained himself to the turnstyle of the municipal pool at Moree, in western New South Wales, and after enduring threats and violence, he and his fellow ‘freedom riders’ saw the black kids in.
Three years later, Charlie and I smashed down the gate of the Aboriginal reserve at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory by driving a Ford Falcon at it. The other way was to get permission and fill out forms with the certainty of refusal. Heddy, Charlie’s mother and a queen of the Anaconda people, was in the back seat wearing her best black hat. ‘Do it’ she said.
Times have changed, though not altogether. Nearly thirty years later, I was travelling in northern Queensland and happened on ‘Strange Wild World’, a tourist attraction. Twice a day, between ‘wombat feeds’ and a ‘toad and snakes show’, Aborigines performed a ‘cultural show’. That is, three young men blew didgeridoos and cavorted unconvincingly while a Japanese tour guide stood in front of them, interpreting for her non-plussed package tour. Tourism, not sheep, is now Australia’s biggest export earner.
What used to be regarded by establishment voices as conveniently contentious is now stated as fact.
‘Much of the poverty and disease in Aboriginal communities’, said the President of the Australian Medical Association, Dr. Keith Woollard, ‘is a result of the dispossession of their lands.
This was also the view of expert witnesses giving evidence to a Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in late 1984. The Commission heard that Aborigines were sixty times more likely to be arrested than Whites in Western Australia. There was evidence of beatings and, by any definition torture, as standard police procedure. The Royal Commission recommended the blindingly obvious: that Aborigines should be imprisoned as a last resort. Since then, Aborigines have been sent to prison at a higher rate than ever before and the number dying behind bars has doubled. The former chief psychiatrist at Bargwanath Hospital in Sowetho wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald to point out that the rate of black deaths in custody in Australia was thirteen times higher than in South Africa.
There is no mystery why.
In 1996, newspapers published a series of photographs of New South Wales policemen at a party with blackened faces and mock nooses around their necks, meant to depict Aborigines who had died in police custody. No disciplinary action was taken against them.
Like Pauline Hanson, Geoffrey Blainey warned of a conspiracy with race as the subtext, between an ‘alliance of academics and ethnics’ who met in a ‘secret sun room’ in the Department of Immigration.
He referred to ‘front –line’ suburbs in the cities and said he was speaking up for those Australians whose dissent was confined to ‘graffiti on the café lavatory’. He quoted complaints about spitting foreigners and their stinking cooking, the sort of people who ‘dry noodles on the clothes line in the backyard’ and ‘fly around in flash cars while I walk all the time.’ He calls this the ‘black armband’ view of history.
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, released a damning and painful report, entitled Bringing Them Home: that of the ‘stolen generations.’ Police were used to find and steal children. The policy stemmed from the eugenics movement, which promoted fears that white women were not breeding fast enough and the ‘white’ race would be ‘swamped’.
Whenever word of the horror leaked out there was, at first, disbelief, then extreme discomfort and censirship. It took film-maker Alex Morgan two years to convince the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to show his searing documentary, Lousy Little Sixpence, telling the full story of the stolen children.
In the Canberra Times of May 11, 1996, ‘Freedom Fighters Farewell’, Jan Mayman wrote:

The sad, troubled spirit of Robert Riley will be healed at last next week when he is buried with his people in the Noongar Aboriginal Heartland of Western Australia.
He was a brilliant and charismatic indigenous leader who died at 41, burned out by a lifelong struggle with racism, injustice and dirtypolitics.
On May Day, with his nation still stunned by the Tasmanian Massacre, he ended his life in a lonely hotel room
His high public profile enraged the redneck tribes. They sent him frequent death threats.
His downward spiral began when he decided to speak out publicly about a secret that had haunted his life – his pack rape, at the age of eight, in a Perth orphanage, Sister Kate’s.
[At the motel] he paid in advance, in cash, and left a carefully written note, in blood-red ink. There were farewells, apologies – and a final, passionate appeal to white Australia to act on the findings of the Stolen Children enquiry, so no one would ever have to suffer as he had…
As advice to a friend he wrote,
‘Remember two important things: you can’t be wrongif you’re right, and you don’t stop fighting for justice simply because those around you don’t like it. You keep on fighting.’
The pioneering works like The Chant of Timmy Blacksmith have informed and helped to change attitudes.
Kevin Gilbert was the first Aboriginal author and playwright to be acknowledged by white Australia at a time when they were counting sheep and not him.
He had the courage to address his own people unsparingly. In his book, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It, he described the degradation of Aboriginal Man:
He bowed to the fact of his women having to prostitute themselves for the food that would allow the children to survive, or for the alcohol that would yield the oblivion that was so much more desirable than the daily reality.
Kevin was born in 1933 on the banks of the great Lachlan River at Condobolin in New South Wales. His mother was a Wiradjuri-Kamilaroi woman, his father Irish. He was stolen at the age of seven and sent as an ‘orphan’ to a ‘reserve’ like the one at Jay Creek.
He was meant to grow up with Christianity; like so many, he grew up with violence and alcoholism.
IN a drunken craze he murdered his wife, for which he was imprisoned for fourteen years, at Bathurst gaol, where he was often beaten senseless. Yet he came back from the abyss; taught himself to paint, read and write; and his appetite for books was voracious. His poem Digger Memorials:
Our history is carved
In the heart of the country
Our milestone memorials
Named Slaughter House creek
The Coniston Massacre, Death
Gully and Durranurraijah
The place on the clifftops called
Massacre Leap
Where the mouth of the valley
Filled up with
Our murdered dead bodies
The place where our blood flowed
The river ran red
All the way to the see…
~*!*~
..
[20]
{Miracle-Copper-Buddy~~Rock-Lake-Paw}

~ WaterGateLincolnBarn ~ Elsewhere ~ PeacePrincePSDUltimatum ~

Psychic Warrior:
The True Story of the CIA’s Paranormal Espionage Programme
By David Morehouse
Inside STARGATE
How do we know the truth is out there?
Because, one man defied the CIA and the US Army to bring his story back.
His name?
David Morehouse.
His occupation?
PSYCHIC WARRIOR: ARMY RANGER
{i}
Major David A. Morehouse, PhD, has had a noteable military career. He holds a Regular Army commission in the infantry and is a Distinguished Military Graduate. During his tours of duty, Major Morehouse served in a myriad of staff and command positions ranging from airborne rifle platoon leader to commander of an elite Airborne Ranger company. He was the Aide de Campe to two army generals, a battalion executive officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and Chief of Training for the 82nd.
From 1987 to 1991 he was assigned to several highly classified special access programmes in the US Army’s Intelligence Security Command and Defense Intelligence Agency. An army ranger, master parachutist, pathfinder, scuba diver and special operations soldier, his unique military skills place him in a select group of army officers. He holds a Master of Military Art and Science Degree, is a Master of Administration, and a Doctorate in Philosophy. The recipient of numerous military awards and decorations, his last assignment was to have been with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s elite ‘Study Group’ as the non-lethal weapons expert.
~*!*~
{ii}
My next mission was posted on the assignment board, with a huge red “T” beside my name. I’d been in the unit for eight months now, and I’d graduated from coordinate remote viewing a few weeks ago. That meant I was no longer required to sit in a viewing chair, or take the coordinates sitting up, or produce an ideogram. For extended remote viewing, ERV, all I did was lie on a specially designed platform bed, count down, and make the separation into the ether. I was still hooked up, and still monitored by Kathleen in the room as well as by the audio and video monitor.
ERV technique was to place the tasking sheet on the small table next to the platform. I would look at the tasking sheet, focus on the encrypted coordinates, and then lie back, adjust the lighting, and go… I looked at my tasking coordinates a final time: “Coordinates seven eight five six four, nine three four five two; describe the target and any significant events.” Within minutes I was in the ether and on my way to the target. Paul Posner monitored the changes in my physical body which indicated to him that the separation was complete.
I want you to move ahead through the stone wall and describe what you see.”
“I’m moving now.” The wall pressed against my phantom form with the sound of Velcro tearing open; in the center of the wall it was dark. It was at times like this that I learned that everything indeed has a spirit.
The wall had it’s own history, and it seemed to weep as I passed through it. I left the darkness feeling as though I’d left a painful, clutching memory behind.
After this training, I never doubted that all things are inanimate. To hear or feel an object speak had been unfathomable only a few short months ago; now, it was a not so uncommon event. Every viewer experienced it at times; we learned to listen and trust what we heard. Levy had taught me that. A target’s surroundings recorded the history of the place without prejudice and stood ready to bear witness to all who had the ears to hear.
{iii}
I sighed, pulled open the envelope, and extracted the first of five black and white photographs. A Nazi death camp.
“Dachau,” I whispered.
“This is a difficult target; nobody waltzes in and waltzes back out. Everytime you go to a place like this you leave something behind. Every time you go here you will experience something more evil, more lost, more godforsaken. You were right when you said the place was stained with evil.”
“Why the hell did you send me there anyway? What could possibly come from it, besides another nightmare for me?
“Everyone gets sent there; it’s part of the training program. Every person in this office has been there, and everyone has been affected just like you.”
“Why is it important for us to go there?”
“You have to experience the extreme out there in the ether, in order to be able to understand the nuances of some more obscure targets: double agents, test pilots, politicians. In the near future you will learn how to reach the minds of these men and women and tell us what they are thinking and feeling. If you can’t train yourself to grasp the extreme, overwhelming evil of Dachau. How can you expect to grasp the more subtle nuances of a pilot test-flying the latest Soviet fighter? Learning the extremes is the first step in the process of getting your eyes. You want them, don’t you?”
{iv}
“Hey, I’m sorry if I came across an ass,” I apologized. “I guess I’m looking for answers out there, and all I ever run into are more questions.
“I know how you feel, and I apologize for loosing my cool. I have an agenda in mind for you, and it’s frustrating when you don’t realize the significance of what you’re doing. Going to the surface of Mars and back in a matter of minutes is significant stuff; you can’t just blow it off because it doesn’t answer all your questions.
One big question it should have answered for you was whether you can journey off-planet and survive. Another thing: we are not alone in this universe.
That’s the kind of lesson I want you to learn here. Everything else will come in time. Okay?
I smiled at her. “You know, if you’d been my freshman math teacher in high school, I most certainly wouldn’t be so bad at math now. Thanks for your patience. I know I’m a terrible student pilot.”
You’re an infantryman; I don’t expect anything more. What’s that saying? Arguing with an infantryman is like wrestling with a pig: Everybody gets dirty, but the pig loves it.”
{v}
In Mel’s hand was a flat, perfectly round stone, in a supple, tightly sewn hide case. The case was adorned with an intricate pattern of beads and finished with a long strap that allowed it to be hung around the owner’s neck. It was beautiful.
“What does this pattern mean?”
“It’s your rock medicine – like mine, see?” He pulled his from inside his shirt to show me briefly. “You wear it next to your heart, always. I made yours to indicate that you are a member of the Bear Clan, a warrior class. The symbols on the front represent the bear in his cave. These colors and patterns here represent the piercing bullets of his enemies heading toward him, and the wavy lines here show how his spirit and power have made the bullets waver and fall. See, he’s protected by his power, and his power comes from his bravery, and his bravery from his spirit.
“That’s really… I don’t know what to say. Nobody’s ever given me anything like this. Thank you, Mel.”
“You’re welcome, brother, but there’s more. Turn it over. The symbols on this side represent balance in all things, sort of an Indian yin and yang. The stone is balanced, as are the colors and symbols on this side of the medicine. The red represents adversity, turmoil, and challenge, while the blue speaks of depth and promise and goodness. The central yellow symbolizes the east-to-west journey of the sun separating the two powers and thus creating balance.”
“I think you need some balance in your life. If you wear this all the time, and believe in it, the medicine will provide what you need according to your faith.”
His gaze seemed to reach into my soul briefly, “Now, what do you say we get some fucking coffee?”
“Yeah, I could use some. And, Mel, thanks for this. I will never let it out of my sight.”
“You know, I picked up that rock about twenty years ago, just before I came into the army. I’ve carried it all this time waiting for the right way to use it. You better take care of it, it’s a Vietnam veteran.”
I wanted to say something important but all I could do was fight the lump in my throat…
{vi}
“I’m following this large group; they seem to be turning off… yeah, we’re entering a large room, where everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder. It’s like an amphitheatre, very narrow at the bottom and wider at the top. Still made of the black crystal.
“What’s going on in this place?”
“There’s someone sitting in a big elevated chair at the bottom of the room. Everyone here is paying very close attention to whatever this thing says.”“Why are you calling this being a ‘thing’?”
“Uh, that’s a good question. I think because he or she or it is larger than the others, and dressed differently. They’re all in white; this things in black. It has a large open hood over it’s head, with long flowing sleeves that mostly cover its hands. If I had to call it, I’d say this one is very evil.”
“Evil?”
“Okay, not evil. He’s some kind of lawgiver or something. He directs people to do things, and they do them without question. It’s not really clear; he points to people, motions to them, and they leave, apparently to carry out some task.”
“Can you speak to this lawgiver?”
“No! And I don’t even want to try. I can tell he knows I’m here, but he couldn’t care less, and I get the impression he’ll be pissed if I try to flaunt the fact that I’m here.”
“Break it off and come back.”
I thought Mel might be disappointed by my timidity. It seemed he wanted me to really assert myself and let the beings know I was there, but I simply didn’t feel comfortable doing that. I felt a certain fascination in visiting another world, but I also understood the need to treat it respectfully. I was an invader, not a guest. I saw them look at me; I knew they were aware of my presence, yet they chose not to speak. So it was clear to me that I was being tolerated, not accepted. And I vowed I would never interfere in other worlds. It was their prerogative to acknowledge me, but I would never force myself on them.
“So did you learn anything?”
I guess I learned that there are other worlds and other civilisations, and that each one has its own agenda in the universe. It’ puts things into perspective for me. I used to think of the human race as God’s chosen people, but I’m obviously wrong.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, who’s to say where God’s reign starts and stops? I mean, He could be the overseer of that place I visited only hours ago, what makes us any better than those beings?”
You’re catching on my friend. We’re nothing but a little blue spot in a solar system, in a galaxy with a hundred million solar systems, in a universe with a hundred million galaxies. And the truth is we don’t know where it ends, or if it does. And we aren’t even talking about dimensions yet. Gives you a headache, doesn’t it?”
I laughed. “It does, at that. Let’s go get that bear.”
{vii}
It’s a custom in our church for members to speak periodically to the congregation on some topic set by the bishop. The topics are generally simple, in keeping with traditional belief, and members’ talks are supposed to be testimonial, informative, and uplifting. Debbie and I were asked to speak.
Debbie gave a wonderful presentation. I, on the other hand, concluded that the congregation had been fed religious pabulum for too long. I ignored the assigned topic and substituted one of my own: “Temples – Beyond Ritual.”
My talk dealt with issues of dimensionality, astronomy, other worlds and beings, who God really was, and what motivated his dealings with us. I challenged the congregation to expand their minds, to reach beyond the books and spoon-fed teachings of the church, to be more than they’d ever imagined.
I think they thought I was insane.
When I gave the concluding ‘Amen,’ maybe five people in a congregation of two hundred said it with me. At the time, I was furious. I thought the reaction was a perfect example of organized religion: don’t challenge yourself, don’t ask questions, just sit in the pews and breathe; God will reward you for it.
I thought of Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii: “Some must watch, while some must sleep; So runs the world away.” Run away, little sheep, and be saved in your little world; I haven’t time for you any longer. I did not return.
{viii}
For some time, the random, unpredictable shifts between the ether and reality had been making me sick. I couldn’t fall asleep without the radio or TV blaring away to keep the noise in my head from driving me completely insane. Why I didn’t put a gun to my mouth, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was the angel’s message. Perhaps it was God having the decency and mercy to keep me from making that leap into the ether forever. My mind and body craved the euphoria of the altered state, the rush of bilocating, the uniqueness of what I was in Stargate’s Sun Streak. At Team Five I was just another professional liar, sucking pay from the taxpayers and trying to bullshit my way through. Every time someone asked me what I did for a living I cringed. I felt like dung telling the lies our bosses expected us to spout. It was like pimping on Saturday night and getting up early on Sunday to preach to the congregation about morality.
{ix}
It was Sunday, April 7, 1991. I was sketching and taking in the sun by the bay. I set my notebook aside to watch white sails on the horizon, and let my mind drift to another place and time.
David!” the familiar voice of the honest angel called softly.
David!”
I turned to see him standing in the sun to my left. I’d seen him so many times over the years that although his visits never seemed ordinary, I was comfortable with him, not frightened and overwhelmed as I had been at first.
I guess nothing good ever dies, and I’m thankful for that.
The evil in my life and in the ether changed faces often, but the angel was an old and welcome friend.
I’m here, just like I always am when you want me.”
I’ve come with a warning again.”
“A warning? Why? Please don’t, I beg you, please don’t. I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve worked hard to be what you want me to be. You want me to give something up; but I can’t give up any more, I haven’t got it to give.”
“And so love is fleeting, dyeing, withdrawing from you.”
He smiled.
The beauty of this entity, I’d found, was his ability to look straight to the heart of my apprehensions. He invariably saw things the way they were supposed to be seen.
You tremble at my warnings, but I offer you a chance for a new life.”
No, you don’t! You offer me nothing but a chance to continue fighting. I’ve been fighting for over four years now. All I’ve done is exist in the borderland, somewhere between this world and others. What life is that?
Your life has been part adventure and part miracle, has it not?”
“Those are your words, not mine. This existence has been a struggle for power between good and evil, and I’ve been caught up in that. And what power have I had? All I’ve done –“
The angel interrupted me.
“All you have done is learn to be responsible for your life, and that is the only way to change the world in which you live. The acceptance of that responsibility will guide you through the next phase of your learning.”
He gazed intently at me.
“This phase will test you beyond your limits. You will have to fight for your life before it is over.”
I’m tired of fighting. I’ve been fighting for my life, and I’m tired.”
A man is not what he says, but what he fights for; you will be fighting for much more than yourself. You will be fighting for your children, and your children’s children. For generations to come. You are but one link in a millennia-long chain of warriors, but you are called, and much depends on you. Your fight rests on the fight you bear within yourself. The gift is the power – not you, the gift. The test of your strength will be in your ability to bring the gift to others. Remember, the gift is the power! Give the power to others when the time is right. You’ll know when it is right.
{x}
“David, what did you learn here?”
“I learned that there is darkness and light and neutrality in the world.”
“There is no neutrality. Everything is a choice; you cannot stand in the world without a choice.”
Then I learned that there is darkness and light, and that each represents some aspect of the world.”
“You knew that already. Search deeper – what did you learn?”
“I learned that perceptions can mask the truth”
”Very well. Then how do you know the truth of your world?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do! How do you know the truth of your world? When you know the truth of something, where does it touch you? Where do you feel it?
“Here!” I touched my chest.
Inside me.”
You feel it and know it in your heart.
“Yes, that’s where I feel it! Why is that lesson important to me now? I haven’t any problem feeling love.”
It is truth you seek, not love; it is truth that evades you now. All that you believed, all that you wanted, all that you once were is now lost in a haze of deception. You must battle it, just as I foretold. How will you know the truth? How will you bring the truth forward? How will you know it is the truth? How will you gauge it and know it among the deceivers?
I don’t know.
You must follow your heart; it will not deceive you; it will not let you be deceived. But you must learn to listen. You will soon find blackness where you once thought there was only light, and light where you once saw only darkness.”
“And the darkness within the light?”
Light and darkness exist within you on many levels, and the veil separating them is often thin. The truth lies beyond the veil, but you haven’t the time to search beyond, living each existence in each level one after the other until the truth confronts you. The spirit and voice of your heart reach through the many levels to the truth. Those who refuse to listen experience each level, each veil, with all of its tricks and false light; however, those who listen find answers in light and in darkness. They can exist in the presence of pure evil because their heart has touched the truth, and evil has no power over those who know truth. It’s power dominates only the confounded, the complacent, those who live in the light but do not know the truth.
“I understand… I think.. But why do I need it?”
All humanity needs it; it is a part of the gift. There are those around you who possess this knowledge.”
You never told me why I must endure this torture, this failure.
Consider it a cleansing. You are not yet what you are supposed to be; you are only walking the path. You have much to experience.”
“But what if I don’t want to do this? I want to go back to what I was; I’m tired of this, I want to just be me again, like I was before the bullet.”
It was all decided long before the ‘longed-for-bullet-enters-my-brain.
I’d wanted only to be a soldier. How was I to fight for my life, and the lives of others?
{xi}
Dr. Damioli pulled a book from the shelf behind her and handed it to me.
“I want you to read this book; I’ll have several others for you later. I think it imperative that you grasp the full meaning of what I’m talking about, and I think you’ll find Jung’s account of his visions very interesting. Perhaps you’ll find that touching the darkness is not so unusual after all.” She smiled warmly.
You possess a unique quality – a gift, if you will. You can see what most of us will never see and, frankly, don’t want to see. The task is to be able to control it.”
{xii}
It’s a difficult decision to violate a security oath. The penalties are stiff, but they don’t hurt nearly as much as the attitudes of your comrades when they learn of your decision. I was about to break an oath that I had honoured since the day I first saluted and swore my allegiance to the United States, promising to support and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I was about to become a domestic enemy.
I had to define clearly what I was about to do. First I considered whether telling my story would endanger the national security of the United States, the country I love dearly and had sacrificed for. I concluded it would not. A year ago our Soviet counterparts had told the entire world what they had been doing for the past forty years in the paranormal arena. I wasn’t giving away launch codes or the names of top-secret operatives. I was telling a story about psychic warrior spies, whose existence was already an established fact.
~~!~~
[21]
{SageRedRussian~RedArticBell}
[aaa]
~ The Glasnost Five ~
KGB Residents in Bonn, E. Germany
Yuri Nikolayevich Granov 1964-6
Yuri Nikandrovich Vorontsov 1966-9
Ivan Ivanovich Zaitsev 1969-72
Lynn Timfeevvitch Zhivago 1994-*!*
Yuri Stepanovich Yakovlev 1977-80
Yevgeni Izotovich Shishkin 1981-9
[bbb]
That Others May Live:
Inside the World’s Most Daring Rescue Force
By Master Sergeant Jack Brehm and Admiral Pete Nelson
~ The Real Life Bond Heroes of the THE PERFECT STORM ~
~
Mt. McKingly AirForce Pipeline News
"JUMP TO SAVE LIVES"
~
It’s how you think about it that makes all the difference.
Make Up Your Mind Right Now that it’s another training day and you’re going to take it in the butt.
It’s a mindset, Gentlemen. Your body knows how to do this. You gotta pick somebody up in a helicopter, people are shooting at you, you going to sit down and rest?
You going out on a sick call? It’s not an option.
Maybe you die – so what?
At least you died doing something worthwhile”
~ USAF NAVY-PRINCE-SEALS PARARESCUE ~
..
[ccc]
ONE River:
Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest
By Jason King Webb & Stan Wade Davis
(author of The Serpent and the Rainbow)
~ The Jaguar’s Nectar ~
~ Page 168 ~
Pedro took me by the arm and led me past the church and into a cemetery.
The plots nearest the church had elaborate brick and masonry tombs, decorated with plastic flowers and colo{U}r photographs of the dead. The names were Spanish. On the other side of the cemetery were unmasked graves – mounds of fresh dirt, a few with crumbling wooden crosses etched faintly with the names Chindoy, Juaijibioy, Gunny Sanchez and Private Fox.
Graveyards always tell the truth,” Pedro said.
“For every one of their children who dies, four of ours are lost. The Church owns the land and cattle. They send cheese and butter to Pasto, while our children go hungry. The government pays for schools, but the bishop decides how to spend the money. Everyone must go to school, that’s the law. So they make rules, and rules and rules. The children must have shoes, books, and uniforms. Who can pay for these things?”
Pedro paused in front a small grave.
He knelt, placed the tiger lilies on the dirt, whispered a prayer, and then crossed himself.
When he was finished, I asked him if it was true that he had once wanted to be a priest.
Yes, I was a believer,” he answered.
As he walked out of the cemetery, passing the Fountain, he hesitated for a moment at the Gate.
“What the padres don’t realize,” he said, “is that we have many lives, only one of which may be claimed by death.
~~~~~ **!** ~~~~~