A COMPLIMENT FOR THE CIA: Eliot Higgins, the founder of the online investigation outfit “Bellingcat” has had a ton of successes – like uncovering the identities of Russian assassins who tried to poison Sergei Skripal or digging up details on Putin’s nearly successful attempt to kill opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Higgins has a book publishing soon called, We are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths and the Bold Future of News. The Cipher Brief hopes to get our hands on the book and review in the coming weeks. In an interview in The Guardian, Higgins reflected on one undesired result of his outfit’s big scoops: “People constantly accused me of being a liar or working for the CIA. It winds you up.”
NOW, HE TELLS US: Former CIA Director Ambassador R. James Woolsey hooked up with the former acting chief of Romania’s espionage service, Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, to produce a book called Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America. Their blockbuster conclusion is that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev personally instructed Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The book says the Soviets changed their minds, but Oswald ignored them, put his KGB training to use and went ahead anyway. The authors claim that all the information needed to prove their assertion is contained in the Warren Commission report. We wonder if all this evidence is out there – why it took a half century until someone dug up the answer to one of the biggest conspiracy theories of all time. If only Bellingcat was around in the 1960s. The New York Post says that Pacepa was the highest-ranking foreign intelligence officer ever to defect to the U.S. and that he died earlier this month. The cause was COVID. Or was it?
BUT HER EMAILS: Someone who knows a little about conspiracy theories – is Hillary Clinton. The former Secretary of State has joined forces with author Louise Penny and has landed a deal to produce a novel called State of Terror. The book will be about a novice Secretary of State who joins the administration of her former rival. The new president takes over after four years of American leadership that shrank from the world stage. (How do they come up with this stuff?) A series of terrorist attacks disrupt the world order, and the Secretary must assemble a team to unravel the deadly conspiracy, designed to take advantage of an American government dangerously out of touch in the places where it counts the most. The book is set to be published October 12.
STATUE OF LIMITATIONS: In the U.S., people are debating – and sometimes acting — to take down statues of folks who caused division in the country in years past. In Russia, things may be moving in the opposite direction. According to The Moscow Times, the Moscow Civic Chamber is holding a vote on whether to restore a statue of the Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Soviet Cheka secret police – thirty years after it was toppled. The monument stood for years in front of the KGB headquarters. Interestingly, Muscovites will be able to vote using blockchain e-voting in an election that will run through March 5. Hey, there is no chance those “Cozy Bear” hackers could steal the vote, is there?
IF IT AIN’T WOKE, MUST YOU FIX IT? Some folks argue that organizations can get a little carried away with political correctness and all this wokeness. Making that argument was an OPED on FoxNews.com by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. It seems the Navy set up a committee called “Task Force 1 Navy” with the laudable goal of eliminating discrimination in the service. As part of their recommendations, they propose that all sailors be asked to swear an oath that includes the words: "I pledge to advocate for and acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities of every sailor in the Navy.” Intersectional identities? That’s a new one for us.
BOURNE FREE: (Well, cheap perhaps). The website Looper.com has published a handy guide to the Jason Bourne movies, spinoffs and the Bourne-related TV series and lets you know where you can stream them. This may be handy knowledge if the pandemic drags on. The same article ranks the Bourne flicks from worst to best…at least in their minds.
POCKET LITTER: Bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
DAYDREAM BELIEVERS: TIK-TOK-ers went crazy last week when one of their number discovered a declassified 1983 CIA report which described a technique called “The Gateway Experience.” While that title sounds more like a bad 1970s band – instead, it is said to describe a study on how humans might “transcend space and time.” Tik Tok supports only short videos – so user Abigail Carey had to post a bunch of them to reveal the details of this mind-blowing report. The report was declassified by the Agency in 2003, but Carey says it is only getting attention now because it was “TLDR” (Too Long Didn’t Read.) Carey summarized the report saying it explains: “Where we go when we die, what ‘consciousness’ is, our universe is a hologram, time travel, and how to send telepathic messages.” More than you probably want to know about The Gateway Project is on Vice.com. Of course – we know that the CIA never mastered time travel – otherwise they would have gone back in time and undone mistakes of the past – for example, a couple coups – and logo designs.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE: The CIA and TikTok seem to be a match made in the heavens. Yet another TikTok report this week describes a declassified CIA document as an “astral projection” of someone whose mind took him or her to the planet Mars about 1 million years BC and said person apparently saw very large, tall, thin people there. This document has been floating around (declassified) since the year 2000, but with the pandemic, apparently TikTok folks have had time to catch up on their reading.
MAYBE THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED IN TEXAS: The People’s Daily, a Chinese-affiliated media site, published video of a man found “doing sit-ups on the overhead power line in SW China’s Chengdu.” The exercise routine led to a widespread power outage reportedly affecting tens of thousands of residents. The video is pretty grainy – so we can’t comment on his technique. Let’s hope the Chengdu workout doesn’t go viral.
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