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Dead Drop: August 26

Dead Drop: August 26

FACEBOOK “FOUNDER” FLEES FEDS:  Bloomberg news had a story last week you might have missed about Paul Ceglia, a guy who says he helped invent Facebook and who claims Mark Zuckerberg owes him half the company’s worth.  But the government charged Ceglia with falsifying some documents to support his case against Zuckerberg.  So he was sporting an electronic ankle bracelet until about a year ago when he reportedly cut it off and went on the lam with his wife, two pre-teenage sons, and dog.  Ceglia, 43, told Bloomberg in recent emails that he fled due to a “very credible” threat that he would be “arrested on new charges, jailed and killed before trial.”  Why, you might reasonably ask?  He says he was targeted for death because the CIA didn’t want him to reveal that the Agency’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel, played a role in setting up Facebook. Here at The Dead Drop, we have (not yet) been targeted for assassination by the CIA – but if we were – we’d probably avoid sending emails from our hideout to media outfits.  And as Jason Bourne could tell you – it is hard enough to avoid being tracked down by the CIA. Imagine how hard it would be if you were running with your wife, two kids, and the dog?

RAPP ATTENTION: Several months ago The Dead Drop told you that actor Dylan O’Brien was in talks to play CIA operative “Mitch Rapp” in a forthcoming movie called American Assassin. The flick is based on the popular novel of the same name by the late Vince Flynn.  Now we hear that Michael Keaton and Taylor Kitsch have also signed on.  According to one account:  the film American Assassin will follow the rise of Mitch Rapp (O’Brien), a “CIA black ops recruit” under the instruction of Cold War veteran Stan Hurley (Keaton). They are asked to investigate a wave of attacks on both military and civilian targets. Together they discover a pattern in the violence, leading them to a joint mission with a lethal Turkish agent to stop a mysterious operative (Kitsch) intent on starting a World War in the Middle East. Note, in the original novel, Vince Flynn credited former CIA officer (and current Cipher Brief network member) Rob Richer with helping give him the flavor of Beirut in the early 1990s.

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