ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER: Late last week, the United States announced that it would expel ten Russian “diplomats” as a result of the SolarWinds hack. As completely expected, Moscow responded by announcing they would match the ten diplomat expulsion and raise the US by banning eight prominent Americans from Russia. The gang of eight included some folks you might have guessed: Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, etc. But it also included some unexpected picks – like Susan Rice who used to have a foreign policy portfolio but is now White House domestic policy czar and R. James Woolsey who was Bill Clinton’s CIA Director in the early 1990s. The latter two are kind of head scratchers. Rice quickly tweeted that the ban meant she would be unable to take her family on Spring Break to their favorite AirBnB in Siberia. When he was at the Agency, Woolsey famously could not get an appointment to see Bill Clinton. Now, apparently, he won’t be able to get in to see Vladimir Putin either. Woolsey’s recent book claimed that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev personally ordered JFK’s murder – so maybe his addition to the Moscow persona non grata list is payback of sorts.
KASH AND CARRIED AWAY: Veteran Washington Post journalist David Ignatius had a very long story last weekend about “How Kash Patel rose from obscure Hill staffer to key operative in Trump’s battle with the intelligence community.” While Patel may be unknown to most Americans, he was a frequent subject of items in The Dead Drop, including when he left Congressman Devin Nunes’ staff to go to the NSC, and nearly was made acting number two at the CIA until Director Gina Haspel put the kibosh on the Patel putsch. Subsequent stories suggested that if Patel had become CIA Deputy, he would have quickly been elevated to Acting Director following a planned ousting of Haspel herself. The latest Ignatius opinion piece pulls the whole story together. But don’t tackle it until you have some time to spare – as we mentioned, it is a LONG story. Ignatius ends the cautionary tale by saying “As bad as this story was, in other words, it could have been much worse.”
APPARENTLY, YOU CAN MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Over the years, we have heard of individuals pretending to be members of the US military by donning medal-bedecked uniforms and playing soldier. But this is a new one even to us. Reuters reports that a Chinese man in the Los Angeles area, created an entire fake military unit. Yupeng Deng, 51, reportedly recruited more than 100 fellow US resident Chinese nationals and charged them $300 to $450 each to join what he called the “US Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit. Allegedly, he told them that if they joined the “MSFR” and did well – their path to US citizenship would be smoother. The recruits were given military-style uniforms and marched around LA. For additional contributions, recruits were promised higher ranks…although none quite as high as the rank Deng awarded himself: “Supreme Commander.” Deng even took his unit on a field trip to San Diego where they visited the decommissioned aircraft carrier, USS Midway, which is now a museum. No word whether they got a military discount to get onboard.
BYGONE TIMES: The online publication JSTOR Daily which claims it “contextualizes current events with scholarship” says that, as hard as it is to believe, Hollywood once kept mum about the CIA. It wasn’t until the Bay of Pigs disaster that the Agency started to make frequent appearances on the silver screen. They say the first “explicit reference” to the CIA in a major Hollywood production didn’t come until 1959 – a dozen years after the Agency was created. That year, in the Hitchcock movie North by Northwest a character says “FBI. CIA. ONI. We’re all in the same alphabet soup.” The JSTOR story is drawn from an academic article by Simon Willmetts that was published in the Journal of American Studies. Willmetts includes a line from the 1963 motion picture, Charade where a character played by Walter Matthau asks: “Do you know what CIA is Mrs. Lambert?” And a character played by Audrey Hepburn replies “I don’t suppose it’s an airline, is it?”
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
SPEAKING OF DAVID IGNATIUS: When Ignatius is not writing opinion pieces for WaPo, he is cranking out espionage thrillers. He has published 11 so far. Ignatius announced via Twitter this week that Mortal Kombat star Lewis Tan wants to star in a television version of his novel, The Quantum Spy. Ignatius says Dave Kalstein, co-executive producer of the Jason Bourne TV series “Treadstone” would be the showrunner. No word yet on where the series might air or when.
RIPPS, BELIEVE IT OR NOT: Among the inexplicable trends in 2021, is the emergence of “NFTs” (Non-fungible tokens) which (as we understand them – which is barely) are part of the Ethereum blockchain. Basically, some folks are paying enormous sums for digital things. It is a field ripe for con men, hoaxers and comedians. Witness someone who calls himself “Ryder Ripps” (which itself sounds bogus to us.) He previously (falsely) claimed to have been the person behind the redesign of the CIA’s logo. So, now Ripps jokes that, in appreciation of his hard work, the government gave him the entire CIA. But he is selling it as an NFT because he says he is too “lazy” to run it himself. Washingtonian magazine dives into the story in more depth than it deserves. At the time of their publication, the bid for the CIA NFT was just over $650 – which sounds like a Ripps-off to us.
FILM CAN SAILORS: The U.S. Naval Institute provided a “Fun Fact” on Facebook last Friday that provided an important life lesson: “don’t go by the label.” According to the Naval Institute – in 1954, a local TV station aired a film they got from the US Navy. The film cannister label said the flick was called “This is Your Navy.” Turns out instead, it contained an extremely graphic hygiene film called “USS VD: Ship of Shame.” One TV viewer said she was so revolted by the training film that she would never watch TV again.
USS DD: COLUMN OF NO SHAME: This is your Dead Drop. You want to help keep it underway? Those at the helm would appreciate it if you would steer us toward some news we could use. Drop us a line with your tips at TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com.
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