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The Panopticon
#14 A Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew (Part I)
An exploration of Christopher Andrew´s book "The Secret World: A History of Intelligence."
Twitter is @ThePanopticon84
Welcome to the Plenopsis kind. It is October 24, 2023, year of our Lord, your Lord. Lord and their Lord, I am ancient zero here with la manche. Did I pronounce that correctly? Nope, then say it. I want to sit there. Leave me hanging and pronounce it right, knucklehead.
Speaker 2:La malinche. That's exactly what I said, la malinche.
Speaker 1:What is that Spanish?
Speaker 2:You got to add the A at the end. Yeah, la malinche.
Speaker 1:And what's that mean?
Speaker 2:We'll get into that when we get to the, because there's a section in here when he talks about the Aztecs, ah, which I think you'll find quite interesting the great, but then I don't.
Speaker 1:did you spell it right? No, yeah, you did, All right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you don't need to doubt. You know, let it go, let it go Let it go, let it go.
Speaker 1:So what are we talking about today? La malinche.
Speaker 2:Well, agent zero and la malinche, we'll be talking about Christopher Andrews. He's a great tome on the history of intelligence called the secret world, in which he provides this grand survey of the you know, intelligence as it. He takes us through biblical starting with biblical times, on through modern use of intelligence and the craft of intelligence he shows. The one we'll cover today is kind of the early stages, the rudimentary stages, from biblical Greek, roman Islam, venetian, you know, early Renaissance as techs are in there Spanish, and then the Elizabethan times.
Speaker 2:Those are the main kind of even gets into the Russian Ivan the terrible in his use or misuse of intelligence. So he kind of, he kind of each chapter, he kind of takes a culture or a period of time, mainly Western. He also, though, does talk about the art of war and this other book that was used in India back in the days, and then Islam too. So it's not just Western periods or cultures, it's also some Eastern or Middle Eastern cultures in which that used intelligence, or had their own version of it, or added certain innovations, and in the intelligence, and who's this man?
Speaker 1:Christopher Andrew.
Speaker 2:Christopher Andrews. I don't have the cover of my book, but let's see if it says it in here. He is, it's.
Speaker 1:Christopher Andrew, no S, not Andrews.
Speaker 2:Oh, is it? Yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right, you're so right. Oftentimes you're wrong, but in this case you're very right. So from what I understand, he's more of a regimeist right. So he's worked, I think, either for or educated at certain different intelligence agencies Cambridge, I believe.
Speaker 2:This is published by Yale, this book but he's had stints at the CIA, I want to say MI6. So he's kind of, and in this book you'll see him make certain connections between how the old tyrants handled certain things in terms of intelligence and the punishment of treasonous behavior by counter-AT agents or double agents, the use of misinformation, propaganda, erasure of history and so forth. He'll draw those comparisons to modern day one state governments he calls them which we're supposed to take to be like, you know, russia, stalin's, soviet Union, hitler, mao and the like. Rarely does he bring up the Western's kind of equivalent, like the MI6 or the CIA and so forth. So that that'll be. We can discuss later as we read the book, the entire book, because maybe he does offer sort of certain comparisons. So that says to me that he's there's also some bias here or there's some hit, there's a agenda, right it's, it's. This itself is propaganda in some ways.
Speaker 2:We can get into that as we complete it, christopher.
Speaker 1:Maurice Andrew. He is a secret intelligence historian. He was a former chair of the history faculty at Cambridge University. Official historian of the security service. M M one five. Is M one or MI five? What is M 15? What the hell is that?
Speaker 2:Honorary.
Speaker 1:MI, mi five, honorary air comm, commodore of intelligence squadron, royal Auxiliary Air Force, visiting Professor Harvard, toronto and Canberra. So he's just wrapped up in the. Many of his students are staff many universities throughout the world on intelligence history, yeah so so.
Speaker 2:So he is, you know, embedded in Cambridge, and Cambridge, for what I'm gathering is he even states it in this book when he talks about Elizabethan security service. The head of it was Walsingham. He would oftentimes recruit members from Cambridge, so Cambridge has had a apparently a long history of recruitment for intelligence officers and known history for for sure and like World War II, right. Hot oh, is that where the whole code breakers were?
Speaker 1:No, I there. That's a whole different rabbit hole. Cambridge's alliance, with all kinds of intelligence agencies I'm sorry you know spies and so forth. Some or a lot, affiliated I shouldn't say affiliated Worked in the Soviet Union, recruited for the Soviet Union and things like that.
Speaker 2:And the US has an equivalent, I believe Johns Hopkins, a big one. They oftentimes from what I've heard, I don't know for sure but recruit a lot of folks from there. And I mean, if you want to talk about the elite, you know Princeton Yale. Those two places are big, big time as well In terms of recruit, not only recruitment of elite, you know kind of members, but, I'm sure, intelligence agents as well. So let's start, shall we? Let's do it. So we'll start with the. In the beginning he calls it as chapter one.
Speaker 2:In this chapter he talks about the biblical evidence that intelligence or intelligence type activity was began there, or at least that's the evidence we have when In the Bible. In the Bible, okay, he gives us various stories in the Bible. In that reveal, you know certain characteristics of intelligence types operations, the big one being that there was a heavy kind of use of spies in certain stories. He talks about not only that, but it sets up the whole trope that you know is in modern times too, is the use of outsiders within a culture that you're going after right, or you're trying to infiltrate or trying to find out about. You go to the outsiders of that culture to help you.
Speaker 2:And now that I don't know what the reason is for that. Maybe they're the ones who have less to lose, or something. Also, the use of outsiders in the sense of a prostitute or a whore yeah To kind of, or or arenas of sin for lack of a better word brothels and stuff, in order to kind of use the whore or the madam of the brothel as a way to give you intelligence or to let you hide out there in the brothel. What would the reason of that do, you think is?
Speaker 1:The reason for what Recruiting these kind of or formatting these outsiders is kind of the spies.
Speaker 2:Well, look, here's a quote, page 16. The biblical account of their mission. This is a mission of a group of spies that are sent out to investigate the land of Canaan, I think it's called, or the city of Jericho. They want to infiltrate it because they want to attack it, right. So that's kind of what the story revolves around. The biblical account of their mission provides the first record of a joint operation involving both of repeatedly, the world's two oldest professions said to be prostitutes and spies.
Speaker 2:Once in Jericho, joshua's spies found accommodation with. This is the name of the lady, rahab the harlot. She was a prostitute. Now, one reason that's beneficial to hide out in that brothel is travelers to Jericho often visited the prostitutes. Supposedly they get loose lips in the bed. Yeah, these travelers, they start spilling information to the prostitutes. It's a good source of information about the surrounding area that you can get through them. Some modern intelligence agencies have made similar use of brothel's intelligence potential. I mean that could be one reason why it's always been so beneficial. Another one is I was thinking, well, you could blackmail these so-called travelers or spies, or what have you at these places, if it's a place that's immoral, looked at, culturally immoral, or you say certain bad things that can be used against you, right, yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an opportunity to set up these highbrow individuals that they're converting with lower status and immoral women and people but I tend to lean towards. Women are generally a men's weakness and men like to talk about their exploits at the same time as letting their guard down in front of these women. And I think women are perfect tool, weapon, whatever you want to call it to get information from these people, because men are going to keep their guard up with other men, certainly in formal situations, but you get them relaxed, you have sex with them. Their guard is down. They want to get their exploits out there in some ways, for whatever reason, and the honey trap is the perfect way of doing it, or at least I think, one of the most optimal ways.
Speaker 2:Now, this chapter also sets up certain other motifs or elements, aspects of intelligence that will play on throughout history, one being kind of needing a survey of the land that you're you got your eyes set on. You know the time maps were not used very much, I mean not until late Renaissance or what have you. You know that sort of intelligence that's what the spies were kind of used for in some ways is like okay, get someone in Jericho this prostitute Rahab, she knows the land right, she was born there. She knows different areas in Jericho that she can tell you that are weak spots or that are where the military hangs out. You know what I mean. Nowadays it's you kind of got more technological kinds of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they in the military and others. They call that human intelligence, human intelligence versus other types of intelligence. Like you alluded to technology and you've heard arguments in the past that America and other modern countries rely too much on the technical intelligence like satellites and such America loves its satellite imagery because human intelligence is very, very difficult, very hard to establish and maintain but it's. It's, I think, the best type of intelligence satellite.
Speaker 2:Which one human? Human for sure. Yeah, yeah because you get all that stuff, that the that the satellites don't capture.
Speaker 1:You know satellites can be very deceptive, but so can human intelligence.
Speaker 2:So you kind of use both to come up with a synthesis. Yeah, use human. And what do you call the other one, various?
Speaker 1:technological intelligence. I mean it's depending on what type of technology you're using. So I mean, would you rather have a colonel in the Iranian army who stationed on X base and Iran, or a satellite image of that base? I mean you can get so much information, you don't know when certain individuals arrive. The satellite imagery can't tell you when certain individuals arrive on base or leave base. They can't tell you who likes who and who hates who. They can't give you those interpersonal dynamics, they can't tell you where exactly the weapons store is and things of that nature. So ideally you have a combination of both.
Speaker 2:but ideally you have a network.
Speaker 1:Ideally you have four or five spies, if you will, within that same base that don't know that each other are spies, and then you can confirm or deny what each are doing. You know or saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, another trope set up in this first chapter is this concept of deception as being integral to intelligence gathering and to kind of what would you call kind of misinformation, trying to confuse the enemy by having your double agent or whatever give them wrong information, that sort of deception, but also deception like wearing a disguise and things like that. Now he says the modern intelligence services concerned to draw lessons from the espionage mission mission excuse me, missions set by Moses and Joshua in the promised land have predictably been those of the state of Israel since its foundation in 1948. Massad, the foreign intelligence agency, and Shin Bet, the domestic security service. Both Shin Bet and Massad have taken their mottos from the Hebrew Bible. Shin Bet's comes from Psalm 121. He who watches over Israel shall never slumber nor sleep.
Speaker 2:The current Mossad motto is where no council is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety. This one was replaced earlier. Oh, this replaced an earlier, more contentious motto based on Proverbs 24, six, which is by way of deception, thou shall conduct war. Now, that's the one that, even kind of, they want to use, but it's, it's more like the one that's official. Now is euphemism the old one that by the way of deception thou shall conduct. War is more the real the reality of it.
Speaker 1:You know.
Speaker 2:It's more of a realistic, I think, and it even says that motto is still sometimes cited by certain Israeli prime ministers, benjamin Netanyahu, for example, who, when celebrating the Hanukkah Festival with President Shimon Perez and Massad's chiefs, tamir Pardo, said On Hanukkah, we traditionally say who will sing the praises of Israel's strength, and I add to that who will carry out Israel's covert operations? As it is written, by way of deception, thou shall conduct war. Massad's use of deceptions thus claims biblical origins. Any thoughts on that? So Massad is the foreign intelligence for the Israelis, I mean, if that's their motto, right, that could explain a lot of kind of things that have been brought to attention, like Epstein, for example if Massad is behind Epstein, is honey potting a use of deception?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Because you pretend, like Epstein's, this philanthropist right Bringing these leaders to his island for vacationing, or what have you Get them involved in, these underage girls that they might not be aware they're underage?
Speaker 1:They might be yeah.
Speaker 2:But they might not be Right. If they're not, that's deception. And at the same time you're videoing them and also wiretapping them or whatever the rooms that, whatever sex takes place, that's an active deception, right.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But that's not something just massage does, that's now probably all of them do that. Yeah, that's just that's what I mean. Like this guy's linking it to massage, right, why not link it to what my six is also also done back of course, he's talking about the biblical origins.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's tying in the Bible with using missiles an example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I would say like massage, and Israel is a very religious Country. Do you know what I mean? I mean, I don't know for sure, but it's not like the US doesn't have a huge kind of Christian overall driving factor to its operations, or to its country, I guess, identity, identity of its nation.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, I I mean you could argue, well, it is Israel religious country. I would say no, I think it's more of a country with a very Homogeneous society, culture, and they use religion but, our binding Is a binding mechanism to rally, to self-identify and then rally against the others.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So like, do Israelis identify, use their religious Identity? Is that? Does that play a bigger percentage in their self conception, each individual's self conception? More so than we do in the United States, because we're made up more of a heterogeneous population. Now, back in the day, like you're right, we were more, you could say, christian, protestant, maybe Catholic too. In fact, cia's, a lot of people say it stands for, kind of Secretively for Catholic intelligence agency.
Speaker 1:Oh, really I thought was a Mormons.
Speaker 2:I Haven't heard that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've heard that CIA is full of Mormons.
Speaker 2:Because the no, the big. I mean that would make sense.
Speaker 1:Because they're not, they might not have a any sort of yeah, they're easier to get in, and then as Catholics.
Speaker 2:We know how dirty they are. So if you're, if you have, if you're free of dirt, then you're less likely to be exploited by foreign Black males. Right, that's, yeah, that's the theory.
Speaker 1:But then if you get enough of one type of people, whether it's based on religion, race, culture or all the above, eventually that that group can organize and start to gain power, larger and larger swaths of power, within that organization that they're working in.
Speaker 2:So they, they recruit or trust their own kind, so to speak. Yeah, it starts to go that way for sure, furthering on in this chapter there's a.
Speaker 2:He talks about the Amarna letters. The Amarna letters, basically, are these Clay tablets that they found, and on these clay tablets they were written in some old school language that revealed like evidence of this secret communication that was being sent from one party to the other, and so it sets up this trope. Also that's key to intelligence is information Communication interception, I guess you would say. You know. Secrecy of it would later come into play with letters and letter routes. Yeah, which was one way in terms of, like the Elizabethan times, that the Amarna letters were sent from one party to the other, in terms of, like the Elizabethan times, that their intelligence agency was so strong was because they had such a master or a control over the trade routes In western europe. They could intercept these letters, do whatever they wanted with them, either skew them or or just burn them, or, you know, at least read them and send them on their way to their intended, to their intended receptor, you know yeah.
Speaker 1:So deception and information are kind of two central principles of intelligence works deception, information, communication, not a little much later.
Speaker 2:Coercion, yeah, blackmail, interrogation, misinformation, disinformation, and then you know the different types of information like you were talking about. Well, in venice, when they get onto that, which was a huge trade route, so you've had not only do you have all these foreigners coming in so you can get information from them about the land they come from and the culture and what's going on there, but you're also getting the it's trade routes right, so you're getting the communication, letters and so forth coming through. So venice became big. One reason there's that he's arguing Because of that reason in terms of political intrigue and political powers, because they had all this access to not only commercial information.
Speaker 2:So you know, venice made a lot of their, their money because of that. They had a like a stranglehold over communication, sorry, over trade, and so If they got certain information about another City that was big on trade right, or, let's say, another textile company from down the way, they could use that information and either to sabotage that other area or that company or, you know, you gave them a bigger, more power, basically over other businesses that we're dealing in, the same types of businesses they were dealing in, if does that make sense. So there's commercial and commercial intelligence. There's political intelligence, which is more of what kind of what we're talking about, like Military strategies that the leader of constantanople, for example, is, is thinking about, or, or that type you know, what's going on in the political spheres of the countries outside of your country.
Speaker 2:Oh, what other types of? Yeah, those are the. Those are the two main ones early on commercial intelligence and political intelligence. Yeah, so continuing on Talks about Egypt, just very little bit. Um, what he talks about with the Egypt is the story about tootin common right King Tut.
Speaker 2:So it appears a lot of the people in the egyptian times with the pharaohs. The pharaohs didn't really have a lot of power. It was the viziers they call these sort of clerics on the outside, who were kind of manipulating everything. They had access to a lot of the knowledge that they were the intermediaries between the pharaoh and what else was going, the information basically of what was going on around them, which is kind of what you, I was, kind of what we think now, right, the president, for example, is he really the one with the power? Or Elizabeth the first? Was she really the one with the power?
Speaker 2:Or is it the guys in the background, the administration, the select members of the cabinet or the court in elizabethan's case, elizabeth's case? Who who have the access to the information? They can decide what to tell the so-called leader figurehead? Do you know what I mean, yeah, it sets that whole like okay, who's really the intrigue of it? To me, in trip with intelligence is like who has access to the accurate information and what they do with it? Are the ones who have the power, or at least they have a lot of power.
Speaker 2:Like I would be very scared to be the leader that figurehead of a of a country or of a nation, because you better trust those people who your cabinet Do. You know what I mean. You better have intense scrutiny over them and what they're doing, I like where and what then? Where does that end too? You got to monitor them. Well, you got to monitor the people monitoring them. You know what I mean. Ultimately you. There has to be some, I guess, trust.
Speaker 1:Trusting the right people at the right time. I'm at the right place. I think is is key and it takes a certain personality, as we've discussed in the past to master that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, um, continuing on with this communication interception. So these amarna letters, right, uh, and things like that in the in the Egyptian times. Well, if you could intercept these messages, then that gave you a certain amount of power. And there's this one story he talks about. Let me hold on. So toot and comments half sister queen, ock and sonamen whoever that is Is probably his half sister. She, um, she was set to marry this one guy. She didn't want to marry him, so she, she wanted to, uh, marry this other dude, so she sent him secret letters, right, well, the guy who wanted to marry her basically was one of these viziers.
Speaker 2:They call them these, these, uh, the royal court guy and in, or if he married her, he would get to be king. Essentially, he intercepted those letters and he skewed it to where it made her look like she was deceptive and, uh, basically going against the the kingdom, right? Well, he assassinated the man that she wanted to marry, which was this other king and another part of the the kingdom, so he got him assassinated and then he married the lady he wanted to marry. So he got to the position of power he needed and then she died mysteriously not short thereafter. So it shows you kind of Kind of the power of being able to intercept this secret communication. Yeah, if you have access to that secret communication of what people are scheming, that and and that scheming is interrupting or interfering with your assent to power, if you have access to that, that's very important, that's very powerful and I'm sure that happens. It's happened throughout history on up to now. I mean this whole Emails, getting access to those emails Stealing documents from the nsa With, uh, what's his name.
Speaker 1:Snowden long guy in russia.
Speaker 2:Snowden. That sense of Secrecy and being able to maintain it is crucial if you are in one of these power positions. Not only that, but getting access to that secret information.
Speaker 2:Yeah combing through people's cell phones, making it legal to do it on a governmental level, you know, being able to spy on your citizens. To get any little inkling, I would, I would. I would suggest it's probably me. What they're really looking for are the people. They're their competitors within the realm they operate, trying to get secret information on them so that you can devise your schemes, you know, rather than just the general old public who has no power.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Any thoughts?
Speaker 1:No thoughts.
Speaker 2:So what if you're thinking about the bible, right, the new testament? Who's one of the biggest deceivers that you would say spy?
Speaker 1:well, you could say judas.
Speaker 2:The great Uh deceiver judas is great betrayer he's the and then, so this sets up the. Because judas was coerced, persuaded by the almighty ducket, the dollar, the money, the cash, they, he, they named his price, or he named his price, they gave it to him. And so he did what he did, which was reveal kind of the location of the last supper and kind of when jesus was going to go to bed or whatever. And then, once that was set, he revealed To the people waiting where he was. They came in, they got his ass.
Speaker 2:So they talk. In this episode christopher andrew talks about kind of the various methods in which to coerce or to persuade someone to betray or to be a spy on their own people. Um and fbi has an acronym mice. Each one, each letter, stands for a certain method of of that. What would try to come up with that? What does the m stand for?
Speaker 1:I have no idea.
Speaker 2:One thing you could use to try to persuade someone else to do what you want. I don't know. Give it a shot, just guess.
Speaker 1:I have no idea.
Speaker 2:Okay, money. Okay, I is ideology. C is compromise. That one, I'm not sure, was that mean you have something against them, maybe To compromise them, and and e is appeal to their ego. Not sure how that would work nowadays. Um, maybe you could promise them some sort of Fame or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you figure out. You figure out what this person Um craves the most, what that person wants the most, and then you give it to him, or you promise to give it to him, or um, or you know. Again, like I was saying, with the prostitutes, people like to talk, they like to reveal their exploits. So maybe you use a honey trap to get him to talk, because he's an egotistical person. Um, that's one way of doing what about ideology? Ideology, that's religion, that's uh.
Speaker 2:Ethics. You can appeal to their sense of you know human rights, shit like that.
Speaker 1:Woke, woke ism you know. Find out what that person what that person's yeah, but what he, he or she values, what the purpose of their life and other, what they view the purpose of life, as you know, and then use that.
Speaker 2:And then he. So that's chapter one, chapter two and three. He talks about the greek and then the roman, uh republic not the empire, the republic. So in the greeks, the gist of it is one reason why their Intelligence was so bad. They're use of it, or even their their recognition that it was something that would be important in order to Maintain power is that they have divinity, seers, magic, you know, that sort of Non-rational type of of of religion, uh-huh, they relied heavily on that.
Speaker 2:For example, they had these people who would, before a battle Ritual was to inspect the guts of a dead animal that they slaughtered and to kind of use mysticism to interpret, how, fortell, how the battle was going to go or what, maybe, what way to take. That's highly Ineffective, right? Yeah, I mean this is fucking bullshit. Now, the one thing that, like with the greeks, the oracle at delphi, which was those, uh, those uh prophets that they would go to to seek kind of foretell their fortune or what was going to happen, foretell the future, one thing that they this guy argues, maybe these oracles, because, again, they dealt with so many people from all across the west or europe, let's say even the east. So they heard, they constantly heard people talking to them, right, all these foreigners.
Speaker 2:So just that fact alone, they would gather up this intelligence from From all these countries and over time, it would give them kind of, uh, the ability to manipulate, manipulate Such and such greek person that was going to come to them, ask for something, right? Or I did give them certain intelligence that Could, let's say, a turkish or persian guy came them, said something, and then later the greek guy came to them saying something Basically about persia. They could, kind of it, give them an opportunity to manipulate the situation and maybe give that greek person a certain amount of intelligence, that that mattered, which I found interesting. I never thought of that, because all you hear really about the oracles at Delphi is that when they were fucked up on some sort of nitrous oxide, or something.
Speaker 2:But maybe there was some sort of fucking gypsy type manipulation that they had going on, based on real intelligence they got from all these foreigners. That was cool to learn. That's the general gist about the Greeks that they've constantly fucked up because they were relying on these types of folks for strategies. To come up with strategies during warfare. Oftentimes it would lead them into perilous missions and failure. Same for the Roman Republic Now. Where the Roman Republic differed was because he brings up Julius Caesar right before the empire, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah before he declared himself empire, he actually was one of the first to use what you would say modern day types of intelligence in order to be successful in his campaigns, One of those being like very much an interrogation of the enemy. You would use interrogate this Gaul, right, Then you would get a layout of that. Gaul would tell you everything about the camps, what they were doing. I think they also talk about how he would send out little agents to kind of or reconnaissance type people more heavily used reconnaissance. At the same time, though, he would also use these divinatory practices, non-rational practices. Hold on just a second, let me get to it. He was also one of the first to use what's called substitution ciphers. Do you know what those are? Nope, so ciphers are the early which were used to. If you were gonna write something down, you would write in code to deceive or the enemy.
Speaker 2:If the enemy got intercepted that information, it would look like a bunch of gobbledygook right. That would come into play later. I mean actually from many different eras and time. They use these different codes, but not only codes but code breakers, which were just as important because it would give you ability to decipher whatever code message that you got your hands on, I mean in World.
Speaker 1:War.
Speaker 2:II. This was huge when the British broke the German code finally, and that supposedly helped them immensely in helping to end the war, because the Germans weren't aware of it either. Anyway, so Caesar set up this one I guess he used it, caesar's substitution cipher, this is which he replaced each letter with a letter three places further down the alphabet, for example. Caesar thus became FDHVDU, so early rudimentary stages of codes in intelligence. He used rudimentary ways to understand the enemy. So again, these enteros. They're not the same as the other letters, but they're the same as the other letters.
Speaker 2:So again, these interrogated people. He would try to learn more than people before him about what the culture was like, the weaknesses. These two guys don't get along in the gals. There's some schism there, and so maybe he could take advantage of that. But the author does say most of it was about where are they? Tell us where these people are, because how are their camps divided? More militaristic, I guess in bent is like where can I learn about the positions of the different groups of these gals or what have you so I can exploit it, you know, yeah, and have a. Come up with a strategy about how to attack them. Then, lastly, in this episode. He talks about how Caesar did not take seriously that famous fortune telling sentence that was uttered to him. Do you know that one right oh yeah, when he was back in Rome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the Ides of March.
Speaker 2:Beware the Ides of March. Yeah, supposedly Caesar was like ah, fuck that On the day, and then later he gets fucking axed. One guy, basically. What's his?
Speaker 1:I don't know his name, anyways, he told him Caesar Spirina is his name.
Speaker 2:He's, this guy named Spirina examined the entrails of an animal a little earlier than the one that said don't go there.
Speaker 1:Bit where they are. Make sure you're highly secure.
Speaker 2:Beware the Ides of March, it's something bad's gonna happen. Caesar said no, thank you, I'm good. Nothing happened right During most of the day, and he goes. He told Spirina where are your prophecies now? The Ides of March have come. Do you not see that day which you feared to come and I am still alive? Spirina says yes, it has come, but it has not yet passed. Spirina then split open a bird, slit its throat while it was held by his assistants, examines its entrails. Pointing to the bird's curiously-saped liver, he declared this is a portent of death. Caesar laughed off the warning by declaring the same thing happened to me in Spain when I was fighting Pompeii. Caesar's assassination later that day, however, was made possible not by his disrespect for divination, but by his failure to heed intelligence on the threat to him from within the Senate. The value of even the best intelligence is only as great as the use made of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is another thing that Christopher Andrews sets up is that it's not only that you have the intelligence, it's that you use it properly right. Which is something that is the fundamental to intelligence. Even now, like with 9-11, apparently the excuse me, the intelligence agencies had all these warnings and whatnot, they didn't heed it, right Right, supposedly they didn't take it seriously. Well, maybe they had that in a thousand other warnings that like which one do you take seriously Exactly?
Speaker 2:Now chapter four. I want you to maybe comment some more on this is he talks about the art of war, which is by Sun Tzu. Sun, yeah, asian right See Sun Tzu. Then he talks about the Arthasastra, which is from India. These two books actually were far more, I guess you would say, advanced than the Western cultures at the time in terms of intelligence. They had a much more developed sort of type of intelligence. What do you know about the art of war?
Speaker 1:The art of war is supposedly written by a Chinese general strategist. Some claim that Sun Tzu never wrote the art of war, but that's beyond the scope of this conversation. But it's a one of the master writings that if you're a strategist, whether it be a military or political or corporate strategist, it's a must read. But deception is a central tenant, if not the primary tenant, of Sun Tzu. To quote, all warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable. When using our forces, we must appear inactive. When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away. When we are far away, we must make him believe we are near. But he also talks about the importance of spies, using spies to find out the quality and quantity of formations and troops of your enemy, and so that was important too is spying that he talks about in his work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he actually sets up different categories of spies too. He calls native spies or native agents recruited from enemy countryside, inside agents which are within enemy officialdom. I guess those are more higher up people closer to power Double agents whom the enemy wrongly regards as its own loyal agents, expendable agents. These are used to feed disinformation to enemy. So again that disinformation factor comes into play. Living agents who bring intelligence from within the enemy camp when the yeah. Another thing is Sonsu explicitly says do not rely on divinatory guidance. So, as opposed to the Greeks and Romans, sonsu sets up from the very get go that that's not gonna help you at all. That's in fact gonna. It's a fault. If you use that, you have to use some sort of rational sort of knowledge, practical knowledge. Oh yeah, you read that All warfare is based on deception.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Good intelligence diminishes likelihood of enemy surprise attacks but does not guarantee victory over them. The Yard of War damaged its credibility by promising too much. This is the author breaking in. Know the enemy and know yourself remains nonetheless, possibly the best single sentence advice ever given to military commanders Know the enemy and know yourself. I wonder if that quote keep your friends close and your enemies closer If that comes from that book.
Speaker 1:I think it does. Let me see.
Speaker 2:So it's about intense scrutiny of the enemy in all its aspects Knowledge, information it puts that at the forefront. Practical knowledge, not divine knowledge or anything like that, or intuitive knowledge even yeah, End deception, like you said I don't think that specific term comes from Sun Tzu. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean it's in the Godfather. The reason huh In the Godfather.
Speaker 2:Godfather.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the movie.
Speaker 2:Is it in that Yep? I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:Keep your friends close and your enemies close.
Speaker 2:So there were a couple like emperors, like Khao Khao, who used Sun Tzu's tenets, but that it slowly became out of fashion or disused because in China and therefore in the West or any elsewhere in the world. Because, according to Henry Kissinger, under successive dynasties, china was never obliged to deal with other countries or civilizations that were comparable to it in scale and civilization. It did not feel sufficiently threatened by barbarian states to wish to be well informed about them. So this aspect about knowing your enemy well, I guess they didn't have that many enemies.
Speaker 1:So not external, and I mean I mean they fought with each other all the time and one would assume that deception would remain at the forefront Intelligence would mean at the forefront of all their strategy, whether it's military, economic, political et cetera. And you're always going to have opponents and enemies, whether they're domestic or foreign, and no matter what the scale, if it's just a group a gang, small gangs versus small gangs or larger organizations versus larger organizations versus nation states and nation states.
Speaker 1:What's interesting and I don't know if he gets into his corporate espionage on each other. You're trying to find out? Yeah, he doesn't mention that he doesn't Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, because it seems to me more about nations or big cultures or civilizations. But again, we haven't gotten into the modern kind of the modern chapters.
Speaker 2:later in the book he mentions in Asian literature, asian culture, assassination played much more of a role or a theme as a mechanism to kind of I guess what shift power or what have you Also talks about bribery, seduction, disinformation. Now there's this other book, artisastra, whatever. This is another sort of kind of art of war type book that laid out a plan for military strategies, which the art of war is. More of a military strategy kind of handbook is what this guy's trying to say. But you know, like you said, corporate strategies, people, leaders in corporate world, in other realms use it metaphorically, I guess, to apply it to a different type of practice, right? Not just military.
Speaker 1:No, I mean like the art of war in our thastra. These are books on, like I was saying, not only military strategy but on statecraft, political science, economics strategy. I mean these are all intertwined and interconnected with one another.
Speaker 1:And aren't separated. These are just various means of as we talked about a struggle for power. These are how do I gain power? We can do it politically, you can do it economically, you can do it militarily, you can do it all the above. Again, these are just means to gain power or maintain power or expand power.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this book called the Art Thasastra. It says that it was less concerned with warfare, which the art of war was primarily about. It brought center to stage espionage, intelligence operations. So it has a huge section on spies. Even in their religion, the god Varuna used the stars as his spies to keep all human activity under constant surveillance. In the book it says the leader should employ as spies men looking like idiots or like those who are deaf and blind. His spies should be employed, so employed that they may not know one another. So again there's that issue of how do you use the outsiders, or people who you would never suspect, people who are the powerless? How can you use them to your advantage? Because I guess the idea goes, you don't want anyone to know. Your spy is a spy, right? So who is not looked at in your culture? Who does people disregard or don't regard at all?
Speaker 2:I mean that is saying well, people like that are the best to use because they're the least conspicuous, exactly, and that's called.
Speaker 1:That's part of the deception. That's deception and using human psychology to deceive your enemy. Because we have, I guess, archetype in our minds of what a threat is and it goes back to the honeypot and what is not a threat. We know who our enemies are clearly, or what potential enemies might look like Big, strong, very gregarious, loud type of people.
Speaker 1:Oh, I need to keep an eye on that person, not the weak little slave who's sweeping your floors, or your cook, or the timid, the weak at least, who look weak, and this is again is great psychological, using psychology to deceive people. Those are the ones again who you lay or let your guard down in front of generally and ideally you get someone who is closest to that person, whether it be the slave.
Speaker 1:you know, back in the day aristocrats had their own personal slaves, or their barber or a cook, or someone who is intimate with your target and who your target trusts but at the same time, your target doesn't see as a threat.
Speaker 2:And in fact this book called the Watchers, which, about Elizabethan espionage, keeps reiterating over and over, the best spies basically were house servants Because, like you said, they're close to the person. They are overlooked by that person. They, like this Catholic right Schemer who's trying to kill the queen, has a servant. Well, he'll tell, he'll talk, he'll throw a little gathering with other Catholics and they have this huge conversation about what you know their plans are. Meanwhile, the servants just they're milling about getting drinks or whatever, recording everything. Basically. So they have access to the, to the community, they have access to the information without and no scrutiny is on them by those people.
Speaker 2:This book also, it really gets detailed in the types of spies. It lists 29 types of spies. So it's very like an anatomy, basically, of spies, a catalog of different types of spies. The Greeks and Romans had nothing on that, you know. It shows a sophistication of the east. I think at the time the reason being he talks about in the Indian kingdoms and stuff there was an intense paranoia within their leaderships, I guess, because there was constant overtaking and constant threats. But the danger was that they were too paranoid, they were unable to keep their keep a restraint on that. But, at the same time, their paranoia allowed them to come up with all these different types of strategies that were practical and realistic in terms of spy, in terms of spies. This book also denounced divination or any sort of witchcraft as a way to get intelligence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, more of the kind of scientific method, if you will.
Speaker 2:Now this. It goes on to kind of show how both the art of war and this other book started to become influential in the 20th century intelligence circles. So one of the huge proponents of it, who brought it to light, was Mao.
Speaker 2:No one was really focusing on it, mao for some reason I guess he saw the advantage of it, really started studying it, making it kind of one of his touchstones in his the way he ruled. And then, though Alan Dulles of the CIA leadership during the early Cold War. He was well acquainted with the art of war. People like him do not seem to have read the Arha Thastra In Richard Bissell, the CIA's director of plans, head of operations, began to draw up plans for the assassination of Fidel Castro in 1960. He paid no heed to the Arha Thastra's exhortation on the careful selection process required during the recruitment of assassinations. So this book, the Arha Thastra, was also big on assassinations and how to do them.
Speaker 2:Since the CIA, unlike the KGB, had no trained assassins, bissell proposed the subcontract to the Mafia, which had a reputation in the United States as the most professional killers. The Mafia had reasons for its own for wanting dispose of Castro, who had wrecked its lucrative gambling and prostitution operations in Havana. But Bissell seems to have been poorly informed about its assassination skills. I found this really interesting because it basically states that the CIA were in cahoots with the Mafia using them. We kind of knew that, I guess, but if this guy's a regimeist, andrew, he's basically admitting it Right Now. That might be because from the Freedom of Information Act it came out that that was true, so he asked to kind of admit it or whatever, but then you can draw a kind of draw it on down further.
Speaker 2:So in 1963, were the Mafia used to assassinate political leaders, not only JFK, but RFK, malcolm X, all these folks. What do you feel about that?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think it's almost common knowledge. Now it's like none of these.
Speaker 1:None of this is a surprise. From a common folk perspective, and from a from a latest perspective, that's what should have been doing. I mean, that's what your hope, your, your weapons, your instruments of power are doing and controlling, controlling power Now, as a this is where the paranoia as a leader comes in is well, once any or all these instruments of power become bigger than the government itself, well then they become their own entities, and then they take that power with them and either subsume the government itself or become separate from it. That's when, as as an elitist or as an emperor, president or what have you, you should be very concerned.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, because the CIA's intention, like I guess one of their parameters, was that you could do these operations overseas. You could employ the mafia with your help to try to kill Castro, right, because it benefited both the mafia and the CIA or the American government in terms of rooting out communism in Cuba and at the same time, you could give mafia their commerce back with the, with the drugs and the, the casinos in Cuba, which Castro put a clamp down. But once you start doing that on your own soil, that's, quote unquote, illegal, right? The CIA is not supposed to do that.
Speaker 1:No, that's like a violation of and this is what we'll get into this later on down the road, with checks and balances, and you know, our forefathers, if you will, of the United States established a form of government that was supposed to check itself through the executive, legislative and judicial. You know the head. Whoever is elected by the people, in this case the president, would select his cabinet to include. Now, there wasn't formal intelligence agencies at the time, but now that president nominates a CIA chair who is supposed to be the guardian of what the people want, not what the CIA wants, but once that all gets corrupted, which it always does- all that goes out the out the window or once.
Speaker 1:A organization like the CIA has more power than the elected government and the people have already given up its sovereignty, if you will. So no, let's do it but you know it's illegal for CIA, but who's going to charge them? Is it going to be all the politicians that were on Epstein's fucking plane? Or you know other ways of you know that CIA has other information on you. Are you going to do that? No, you're not, because you're going to be next in line, my friend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you look at in the 1963, the power elite had such a stranglehold over public opinion at the time that no one knew any different that it was a lone nut. You know that was the story they were given by their voice of the truth, walter Cronkite. Well, they're not going to, they're not going to even think of that. The CIA had something to do with it, or the American government at all. And the FBI? You got the FBI supposedly helping with the cover up. You know, because Hoover was there. He was tied with Samaphia. He would always be going down to Del Mar, supposedly, which is a lot of where the race horses were, and the. You know he was gay, so I'm sure they had that on him. He had everything on everybody else.
Speaker 2:The JFK, he had dirt on them. So it was this whole corrupt system from the get go anyways, or at least from the 40s. You know, 40s, 50s, 60s. So if you, yeah, so you're not going to be able to. I mean now, later, 40 years later, yeah, a lot of people know probably there was some, a lot of corruption going on and JFK died because of agents within our own country. But it doesn't matter really. Now it's too, too way too late for anybody to be for the right to be, for the wrong to be right, if you know what I mean. To be righted.
Speaker 2:But I just found it interesting too, because if you think about JFK is like, okay, the mafia and the CIA had interest in Cuba. It was different, each one wanted something different, but they, they both wanted Castro out. Then later, when JFK didn't, he pulled back the forces from Cuba. Right, he didn't help defend it or whatever defend the rebels that were in there trying to get Castro out because of fear of a nuclear war in the bad pigs. He realized, supposedly, that the CIA lied to him, so he fired dullest, thistle, all these guys that were part of it, part of trying to get Castro out, and at the same time his brother, robert Kennedy was was he the attorney general or something like that.
Speaker 2:He was going hardcore after the mob, when in fact the mob was the one who helped rig the election to get JFK in. So then, not only did the CIA have an intention or a reason I guess you would say a motive to get rid of JFK, but so did the mob. So what I'm thinking and what I've learned throughout my whatever 30 years of thinking about, is that at some point and this seems to be the early stages of it the CIA, the intelligence community and the mafia worked together for so long they eventually, I think in the 70s, the 80s, became one and this is just a theory, whatever. But because in the 1970s the mafia started getting killed off, like all these leaders, the five families all. Now they say it's a lot of it's internal war, internal warfare.
Speaker 2:But also what it was is, I think I don't know if the CIA or the intelligence agency started killing off the members of the mafia. That, yeah, I haven't. I don't know, I haven't thought about that enough to make sense of it, but it just seems like there was this melding of the two. And then, because, if you look at the way the government and the foreign policy have operated since Vietnam until now. It's very mafia type. It's mafia like, if you know what I mean. How do you, what do you think about that?
Speaker 1:I mean I don't know if they merged or if the FBI, cia just eliminated the mafia or perhaps not eliminated them, but destroyed them enough where they weren't a threat to the government. Now you could argue that they destroyed them enough that they weren't a threat and then took over their businesses. But drugs, drugs, prostitution, shit like that, yeah, you could argue. I think that's something you could talk about, think about, yeah, I mean because it's like maybe they destroy a country, you can't destroy their entire infrastructure and the people that run the infrastructure.
Speaker 1:We learned that in Iraq. So if you treat the mafia the same way, you have to keep them around because they're the ones who've been. I mean, they established this infrastructure. You know drug, drug rings, prostitution rings, et cetera. So you still want them basically to run the show. So, middle management to lower management, you kill off or throw in prison the higher, higher folks and then you become the new dawn as a, as a large government, and you keep in the middle middle managers who actually run the show in the first place.
Speaker 1:You could argue. You could argue that I think Mm hmm.
Speaker 2:So you basically usurp the power you take over their operations.
Speaker 2:Eliminate the leaders, why not? At the same time, if you have this sort of hidden relationship with these leaders, they have something on you, like, for example, kissen Hoover. Hoover's got a lot of information on you and they have a lot of information on him. So you've got to eliminate those, those potentials for that information to get out or for that relationship to get out. So you got to get rid of them, you know, beat them to the punch, so to speak. Right, I mean, that's one reason, if you, if you remember good fellows they did.
Speaker 2:The, which is by Martin Scorsese, 1990, talks about this period in the 60s and 70s, when the mafia were doing all this shit, stealing these huge heists. What happened was one of the mobsters started killing off all the other mobsters that had something to do with it because the he didn't want that, that information to get out there. Right, I guess he was trying to and, on the one hand, eliminate competition but on the other hand, trying to eliminate the information sources that could put his ass in jail. And that's why I think, if you also look at the 1970s, when this renewed scrutiny into the JFK assassination was going on, with the Senate committee of on the assassination, suddenly all these witnesses and people who possibly had something to do with it started dying, you know, in a matter of a year and they were a lot of them were about to be interviewed by this commission. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:A lot of them were mobsters too, yeah, so you got to get rid of those those all your former friends, or at least your alliances, if you believe the JFK assassination was kind of a mafia CIA hit job. I mean, these are these are types of kind of mafia tactics, If you want to look at that way it's like all right, you, you both do a hit together. The pressure's on now. You got to get rid of your witnesses and the witnesses are your partners.
Speaker 1:And so you, you start taking out your partners, and that's if that's true, if it's true that you know this alliance, that's what the government seem to have done.
Speaker 2:Now I have a just a theory.
Speaker 2:That's not how you know, I'm just, it's an idea, it's a sort of a, it's like a pretend right that the CIA and maybe Bush senior, who was ahead of the CIA at the time, that all these so-called suicides and the strange deaths of these people that were going to go up to the committee in 1976, 77 probably had a lot to do with it. And and because what happens four years later? He's vice president, right, or candidate for vice president for Nixon, for Reagan. What happens to Reagan? Not even a year after he's been in he an assassination attempt, right. And who's there waiting in the wings of Reagan dies as Bush senior, right.
Speaker 2:And the the person doing the assassination is this son of a close friend of Bush who were having dinner with each other the night before, something like that. And then what comes into play is this the MK, ultra mind control tactics and sort of creating a Manchurian candidate through brainwashing and all these drugs and whatnot, right, which we'll get into when we read chaos. You know the tech supposedly the technology or the type of operation, that of mind control had been going on for years and if if you kind of just play with the idea that maybe this son had been gone through that sort of program was being used by certain people. Bush senior, maybe in his operators try to get rid of Reagan so he could step on in line and do what he wants to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it didn't work.
Speaker 1:But was Bush the head of this? Let's say let's say this Uh, mind game you want to play here? Was it Bush or the people behind Bush that kind of just propelled him and almost forced him to to take the lead in these events? Um, like Bush, you could argue that Bush didn't even know, let's say, the assassination of assassination attempt of Reagan was going to happen.
Speaker 1:And then it happens, and he realized oh shit, the forces, the dart forces in the CIA are trying to propel me to the top. And he knows what that means. He knows that it doesn't mean he's going to be like the leader. He means he's their guy that they've selected to be put in place Like, like, almost. If you look to you know like Bush senior is a surfer, but the CIA as an organization is the wave.
Speaker 1:The CIA is pushing them towards and at this point in time in your political career, if you're Bush, you just have to ride that wave, and wherever the forces take you, you're going to go. Yeah, um cause when power comes.
Speaker 1:You're in the public eye because Bush didn't get to where he was without some help more specifically his family and when the forces whatever force, that is when power comes calling and it's time for you to kind of sacrifice your personal wants and needs for the. You know you got to pay your dues, and so so be it. Now we've we've set it up where you're going to be the president of the United States and you're going to, once you make president of the United States, you're going to do exactly what we want you to do. It doesn't even have to be said. He kind of just knows that.
Speaker 1:Um and it goes back to what we're talking about here. Then it goes into curves and oh, you don't want to do that. Okay, well, x, y and Z is going to happen, whether it be economic or all of a sudden we're going to start investigating all these businesses, the Bush family, you know things like that.
Speaker 2:Your homo sexual relations Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yale, you got your dumb son George Bush. We got shit on him. You know little Georgie W he snorting cocaine and killing people? No, not killing people, but uh, when he, like the wife did, when he in the drugs and shit.
Speaker 2:Uh, so yeah, but the wife ran over somebody or something. So, but my mom, I know it's.
Speaker 1:I know, I think when it's that level of power, um, you don't get there by yourself. And once you get to that level, whoever got you there is going to come call him to for you to pay. Uh, pay the dues, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I really do think the real sources of power are in the shadows always. I mean, it doesn't at any way benefit them to assume a public persona. In fact it, it would be foolish, I think the smart ones?
Speaker 1:I think they don't have to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, no, I think that's. I think that's more likely, but it's curious that he's always there. He's in Dallas, and when JFK gets a set, you know, these players are always around there. So there's, there's, there's something going on with that right, there's some relationship, I think there. Um, yeah, so back to the art of war.
Speaker 2:you know it's, like you said, known for its psychological warfare kind of created that or helped establish that, and also this issue of soft power, the concept of south of soft power, which is um the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's like you know, using Hollywood, using, you know, basically propaganda, using Hollywood, McDonald's, all these Western corporate things that people adore throughout the world. And that is a way to influence, at the very least influence people, but also coerce people, because yeah.
Speaker 1:Because of its seduction. You know, you, recently, uh, the war in the Ukraine, for example, all these American, or at least Western, stores started shutting down McDonald's left Burger King, you know, all these Western um corporations, if you will, and brands started leaving Russia. That is a power, that was coercion, it's a form of courage. I wouldn't even call it soft power, but I get why they call it that, because they want to separate it from, like, military power. But it's, it's, uh, that's what how I read soft power.
Speaker 2:This guy talks about. Um? Who's his name? Some Mr Nye. Whoever that is, professor Joseph Nye. He's a US National Intelligence Council. Harvard academic. Helped kind of define it, explained more about it. Seduction, he writes, is always more effective than coercion, and many values like democracy, human rights, individual opportunities are deeply seductive. So I guess, whenever we go into certain countries that don't have our values or are unaware of them.
Speaker 2:They can employ soft power, like expose them to these different types of Western values that are seductive, in order to help change, I guess, the minds of the people, or the psychology, or what they want.
Speaker 1:Hollywood is huge and we're going to have a series on that where people love movies. You know, before then they loved drama plays and stuff like that. But now movies, especially young kids, and if you're able to get messages out through Marvel movies, as an example, and you make Agent Zero into a gay man or trans or what have you, those are some of the extremes, but some more of what has become normal is you can start infiltrating, messaging gay, gay rights, human rights. You know, you make Captain America, black things, things of that nature that other countries don't have an issue with, necessarily because maybe they don't have a large black population, as an example. And then you start to sow the seeds that way.
Speaker 1:But then, economically, if a government tries to shut those type of movies down, well, then they get punished. This is where the coercion comes in. Okay, country X, you're not going to accept these movies? Well, now we're going to take away our funding for you or we're going to put sanctions on you, or you know. So the the line between soft power and hard power is not only gray, there is no line, it just kind of washes back and forth. It's used, you know, it's used at different times in different places, but but it is more Deceptive or under the radar than hard power, like I don't think most people realize what kind of power Hollywood or McDonald's has, you know. Now, I think one country that that America has kind of taken a knee to is China. Like a lot of movies and MBA is another example, another large organization that has kind of backed down to China.
Speaker 2:But isn't that more about the commercial market?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because China says well, if you're going to talk shit about, if you're going to call Taiwan a separate country, you're not going to have access to our, our market. And that's big for Hollywood, that's big for for MBA. But here's what China is done with.
Speaker 2:Was that a version of soft?
Speaker 1:Here's what China has done.
Speaker 2:Is that an?
Speaker 1:example with Hollywood. I with Hollywood I'll get to that in a second with is now China has bought up all the fucking studios so they don't have to worry about you know that anymore. Soft power, soft power is kind of a relatively new term. I don't like using it. Soft power I yeah.
Speaker 1:I guess you could argue, put it into this new definition that is soft power. I like to look at that. There is no such thing as hard power or soft power. There's a constant political struggle for power and you can even argue war, like what you're talking about. But what we're talking about now is just another way of war and or power, I should say, of manifesting itself. You could even argue like war is omnipresent. It just looks different by using different types of tools, depending on what type of tool you're using. If you're using a tank and soldiers, that's what we've typically identified as war. But economic warfare is real, legal warfare is real. But war is just like a symptom again for of what struggle for power is, I believe.
Speaker 1:So soft power, I mean it's just, I don't. It's a new, it's a new wave term. I get why they say it. It's interesting to kind of separate that from hard power. But I don't believe you can separate it. I believe it's interconnected. It's good for writing books and things like that, so that's another rabbit hole. Getting into what soft power is could be a whole separate podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, if you take this definition right, like you try to exploit the values of, or tried to try to exploit the values of your enemy, but also try to influence your enemy by giving them seductive things to value, that will help transform them almost in a way. I mean, could you look at China, for example, with Hollywood trying to hey, they're exploiting the greed of the Western companies by saying we're going to cut off this commerce for you.
Speaker 2:If you leave a Chinese criticism in that movie, it's a way of manipulating the West to change their change, the way to change their culture. Because if you, if you start changing the way the movies are or the content of the movies, that has an effect on the culture, right, it's the same. If you so I guess say, hey, apple, google, we're not going to put. We've got this huge potential for for you to make money, we're going to appeal to your greed, we're not going to sell Google here, we're not going to allow you to use it. If you do this. But also you can say, hey, look how we're doing it in China. Google, you have all this.
Speaker 2:If you start censoring your people, twitter, like how we do it, look at the power it can give you. You know, it's like a way to you would say, china is kind of affecting the way, way the American companies are starting to censor their, their country, or use their technology to start censoring their company, which runs counter to the values of what supposedly the US values. But I don't know, just own that, thrown that out there.
Speaker 1:Okay, I mean Bob Bob. I mean soft hard power is using coercion. This includes military power and economic power. So I guess what China does with America with respect to you're not going to gain access or have access anymore to our markets. That's hard power.
Speaker 1:Soft power is the ability to persuade and influence some more propaganda, propaganda and kind of psychological work Using some of the highlights of America, again Hollywood, our values, our culture. You know, equality, even, and inclusivity and all that kind of stuff, and people are attracted that like going back to the seduction piece, to that and want to change their behaviors individually and culturally based off of what America is, or some of the highlights of America. And that's that's very effective as well. You know, especially in places where there's a very rigid hierarchy, stratification, if you're on the lower end of the hierarchy, equality is very appealing, or opportunity is very appealing, social and economic advancement is very appealing because you don't get that in other countries. And so if you can do that, if you can't migrate to the United States, well, trying to change your country into being a mirror of the United States is very appealing, and then the United States gets where they want as well.
Speaker 1:US government.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the internet facilitated a lot of that. You could say with the Arab Spring right, you got the internet, facebook, where they see what's going on in America, how come it's not happening here in Egypt?
Speaker 2:You know let's that's not fair. Let's start trying to do that in Egypt. You know it brings up it. It can kind of influence a foreign nation's culture to cause disruption. You know, in the political system If it's an enemy of yours, if you're the United States, or if you want there to be disruption, let's say it's a militaristic regime that you want to cause turmoil in. Well, the internet was perfect for that social media because your democratic values or the democratic liberal values, they have access to that. Now the people do in Egypt, for example, and so it's going to. It's going to possibly bring about political unrest there or a change, maybe. Ok, so in the next chapter it's called the Roman Empire and the Intervention. This, basically, is a chapter on August Coffee.
Speaker 1:I'll be right back, so keep going.
Speaker 2:OK, it's about the Roman Empire. After Caesar pretty much takes power and establishes the Roman Empire, which lasts whatever. 500, 400 years, talks about August Augustus, he was still. The Romans were relying on these seers and fortune tellers and all those people to help them come up with strategies or before their military operations. But what August Augustus does is he starts setting up this guard because of what happened to his uncle. Julius Caesar realizes there's real threats there. He could be killed. He starts wearing steel what do you call those She'll? What's it called uniform or whatever To protect himself. When he goes in the Senate no one can come up to him. They have to come up one by one.
Speaker 2:He has this sort of secret service around him and there's this establishment of something called the Praetorian Guard and the Praetorian Guard founded by Augustus, as opposed to the elite core which enjoyed better paying conditions than the rest of the army. They protected him from a safsa nation or overthrow a pretenders of the throne. But as with any sort of protective service like you could even say the Secret Service or FBI, cia, military, even, a lot of times if there's going to be an overthrow of the King or the Emperor or the President, oftentimes it comes from those very entities. In fact, andrew says About three quarters of emperors were either assassinated or overthrown by pretenders to their thrones. And where does he say the major, heavy majority came from that Praetorian Guard. For example, members of the guard were involved in the assassination of Caligula, who was an emperor after Augustus. The guard was also implicated in the intrigues which preceded the accessions of both Claudius and Nero. So long as emperors could not rely on the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard, they could never be certain of their own security.
Speaker 2:It goes to that thing, liza. Okay, so you have someone protecting you. How do you know to trust those people? Well, you have to have. Maybe people watch those people. Then how do you know to trust those people? Not only that, the people guarding you have access to you. They have the keys to all your little protective spaces. They know you're aware of us at all times. They know you're coming to and fro. So it's sort of a weak spot, I think. Although they're protecting you, they're also leaving you very vulnerable.
Speaker 1:You're in a constant state of paranoia. If you lax at any time, like the great Caesar did, then you get slashed by the people that you thought you could trust. You know Etubrutae. Again, historians are arguing whether he ever said that, but the fact of the matter is Brutus, one of Caesar's confidants, ended up being one of his biggest backstabbers, literally.
Speaker 2:But what do you make of this Praetorian Guard that a lot of the overthows of the emperors came from?
Speaker 1:They had something to do with it. They got too much power. They had a lot of power, yeah, and you could argue, some CIA, maybe that Praetorian Guard now is. They had a lot of power and basically decision making authority on who was going to be the emperor and not, and so Same with military regimes Like okay, when Mubarak got overthrown in Egypt, who?
Speaker 2:and then the mother Muslim brotherhood came up, and then the people who ultimately ended up with the power was the military regime Right.
Speaker 1:Yes, but if you're, if you're someone like Stalin or others, like now, if you have a sense of history.
Speaker 1:This is why you see grand purges, especially at the military level, because they understand and appreciate how easily power could fall in the hands of the military, because they are probably the primary tool of power, and if they get too full of themselves or you know, we saw it with Truman and MacArthur, where you got a little bit too you forget where you come from and who's in control. There's that constant tension. So you get purges, military purges, violent ones, like Stalin, but also nonviolent ones. That Obama did in his first in his reign got rid of what he deemed as political enemies within the military and purged them. This is common military practice or, I'm sorry, a political practice.
Speaker 2:Well, kennedy got rid of all those CIA people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when he realized he couldn't trust them Exactly, and so, yeah, it's not only military, but it's all organs of, or instruments of power within the government.
Speaker 2:If you're well and the FBI had something to do with getting rid of.
Speaker 2:Nixon because deep throat was FBI, right? Yes, he was. He was FBI informant or what's the word. He was an FBI person influencing. I mean, I think there was someone, something in the FBI was. The FBI was with Kissinger, right or no? Sorry, hoover, Hoover died right before Nixon got ousted, right, I don't know. Fbi had a hard on for Nixon, obviously, and so they wanted him out, right? Why did they care about Watergate, if you think about it? They probably knew, obviously they knew, but they wanted him out. So it's like this. It's like again, it's an example of this supposed part or in guard type entity the FBI in this case that wanted to change politics, the political structure, the leadership, that got his ass out using the media and all of that.
Speaker 1:And you can argue. Well, you can argue more recently with Trump when he said he wants to drain the swamp to include the intelligence. And if the I went, senator Schumer stated on live TV Trump, better be careful, because the intelligence has six ways to Sunday to you know, damage you or something paraphrasing Sure enough he gets in. You got the Pistos. You got all these other unhint, all this other propaganda coming out and a large portion of the American public fell for it.
Speaker 2:You got the IRS scrutiny and everything. The media outlets publishing all these smear pieces, not to mention the media itself, was being used 24 seven to try to get a sway public opinion to get him out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so Schumer the smart politicians.
Speaker 2:But then the Mueller report comes out, says nothing.
Speaker 1:The smart politicians like Schumer know with the power brokers within Washington DC and know not to mess with them or at least to work with them. Trump, it seems, crossed the Rubicon with no army At least Caesar had an army and Trump turned around and he got. He got swarmed, he got the political. Where Caesar got the literal assassination, trump got the political assassination, minus all the power and accomplishments of Caesar. And so what did Trump gain by this Long term? Short term, he got president, but he had, he was a president with, again, no power.
Speaker 2:Mm, hmm, I don't know if you thought still trying to people like fucking stand up and start a revolution or whatever.
Speaker 1:If that's the case, he he misread, horribly, misread the people. I don't know. If that's the case, I don't know. Maybe he overestimated his power of persuasion, maybe he overestimated the you know, the soundness of political democracy. Who knows?
Speaker 2:So back quickly to this chapter about the Roman Empire, one of the reasons why they were their intelligence was bad was because they had this concept of the intervention, the subhuman basically.
Speaker 2:And so all these foreigners, the Goths, the Huns and all these other people, they said basically, pride. These people are fucking scum. Why do we have to learn about them? We're Romans, you know, we're gods. Basically, these guys are, these are our piss ants, which led them vulnerable. It kind of this chapter kind of shows how, if you have a disrespect for your, your who you consider to be powerless or subhuman or what have you, that's going to leave you vulnerable, it's better to know about them, better to have constant knowledge and information pumping in about these people, just so you'll have an in case you know, so you won't be taken by surprise. So, for example, the Huns come, attila, that mean motherfucker, comes and starts coming in and all of a sudden he's starting to come into Europe and the Romans are like who the fuck's this guy? What are the Huns? I've never heard of them before. Fuck them Right. Um, but they just so happens that they kind of got lucky, because I guess Attila the Hun died pretty soon thereafter, before he could actually start doing shit in Europe and, uh, his sons Attila's the Hun's son started fighting over each other, um, to get control of that, that um organization, whatever it was the Mongolians which led to a further disintegration. Which made me think, like, if you can, if you can come, somehow destabilize a leader, a strong leader like that, in one of your enemies or a nation or whatever, and somehow get the groups that are underneath that leader, that you know are there, if you're aware of it, that are that hate each other or whatever. You can exploit that, get rid of the leader and then have them go at it and then, um, hopefully, the nation will fall apart or or, you know, will at least become weaker, the integrity will become weaker. It made me think of, like, maybe the intervention this could go into our uh podcasts where we support the elite maybe going into Iraq and Afghanistan and disrupting everything there was beneficial Because you destabilize it and then cause them to fight each other. Or you could look at it, the what's happening now with the American, american culture we're fighting each other. We have no co, we don't have that cohesion or split which is beneficial to somebody. You know whoever our enemies are.
Speaker 2:Um, the guy has a chapter on Islam and how I guess Muhammad was big on sort of deception, using disguises, psychological warfare or iconoclasm, which is kind of you could say kind of like a propaganda thing going and eliminate all the statues or rep or sort of artistic representations of your enemies, idols or or uh, whatever they worship. Get rid of them. That's a method of of uh. I guess he valued that. He knew that there was something valuable within these idols or these artistic representations of your enemy, enemy's religion that's important. To get rid of them, um, and put up your own, like the akab, kaaba or whatever it's called kabah Um, what, what else with him? Intelligence collection was big disinformation, to use a lot of disinformation. I think one of the more interesting sections on how the Islamic contributed to intelligence is you know how Baghdad was? It's called the House of Wisdom. It used to be. This huge. Baghdad was a huge city that had a lot of the philosophical, technological advances right.
Speaker 2:Mathematics for example physics.
Speaker 2:Not only that, it helped carry the Greek and Roman philosophies and thought and sciences Aristotle being a huge one through the dark ages and into the Renaissance. It kind of protected them in a way. Not only that, but it expanded on their fundamental ideas with mathematics, for example. This guy named Al Kindi he was a leading philosopher and mathematician in the Baghdad at the time I guess it was 800 to 873 after AD he innovated with this code in cryptography, which is again disguising your message in a code so that your enemies can't decipher it. But then he also came up with a way to a systematic scientific way of deciphering coded messages that you receive. He came up with this idea called the frequency discovered, the frequency principle. What this means is with English the main most commonly used letter is E, followed by the letter T and on down the line of the alphabet. So if you get a message and you can somehow figure out what's the most commonly used symbol, that might stand for the letter that's most often used in whatever language. I guess that was never done before. It's much more complex than that because the codes were much more complex. It's not that simple, but that's an example. He came up with that type of they call it crypt analysis, which would grow and become more complex and more used throughout time, specifically with the Renaissance and on down to what you've got now, which is computer code and all of that hacking, all of that type of technology.
Speaker 2:A couple more things before we end here. The inquisitions, and we're big on interrogation techniques. So you've got the Spanish Inquisition, you've got these crusades. Not only there was a crusade that was more an internal crusade to try to route out heretics, so they would the papacy and the Catholic Church, the Dominicans, which was a group of the church that was strictly kind of meant to handle these types of interrogations. All these different types of methods and psychological, can help come up with the theoretical basis and the, I guess, the practice of interrogation, which is something that intelligence agencies is a huge part of it right Now.
Speaker 2:Intelligence agencies now. So they helped lay the Dominican friars, helped kind of formulate a foundation of that and that, ultimately, what you're there after is for information. They want information on whatever's going on in the town or whatever crime they see, right, right, the Spanish Inquisition was thus the first major state controlled agency dedicated to counter subversion, a significant milestone in the emergence of the security service of modern authoritarian regimes. Now, I mean that was religious right, because they were looking for heretics who were Protestants, a lot of them coming up with. They wanted to route out the threats to the Catholic church. I mean this guy's implying okay, in one state, nations like Soviet Stalin, soviet Nazis and all them, they do the same things. Does the US have a version of that? What threats are they seeing right now?
Speaker 1:What threats are the United States seeing right now? Okay, well internally internally. Well, that's the obvious one is any Trump supporter is a, at the very least, a deplorable who needs reeducation, worst case, a terrorist who needs death or imprisonment. That is the threat to the regime.
Speaker 2:Are they using torture, like the Spanish Inquisition did?
Speaker 1:Well, you could argue what's happened in J6, those folks imprisoned for lengthy periods of time, some with that trial. You could argue that is torture, but not torture in the sense that like physical, like inflicting physical pain on one who knows.
Speaker 2:Well, I think, their methods of interrogation. I think interrogation they don't need it as much, because interrogation was way to get information right, to get names, for example, of the town's folk who said whatever about the church and who, therefore, you need to go get them. Well, now with the internet and their access to all our private information or private communications, our locations to through GPS, they don't really need to interrogate, they just need to go through your data Right, at least not for our location, but they can go through our data with respect to what we're saying as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also you know video data of the. Okay, so on your phone you have face identification, right? Well, they have a video of you at the protest or the violent overtake of the Capitol. Link those two up and whatever database you have and they're that. You don't need interrogation to get that. You know, you have it through technology, right? So it's like I don't know the Spanish and position things like that interrogation was important. Now, maybe in terms of if it was that bad, you know you had you interrogate this guy at January 6th. What have you tell me about? You know other people around you that weren't there at January 6th are there. You know who else are you running around with, and so let's say you're from Wisconsin. Tell me more about you know that types of interrogation to get more information that that maybe you don't have on through their cell phone data, right, you know? Do you want to keep going or are you about done?
Speaker 1:Well, let's see where we at we're at it to almost two hours. I say about 10 more minutes.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, he covers Venice, the rise of Western intelligence. The main thing is, like I said earlier, it's about the trade routes these locations started that were almost lucky or whatever, for whatever went in terms of intelligence and the craft of intelligence grew in certain areas that that were advent I don't know how to phrase it were advantageous. So Venice, for example, was a trading port, so it had all that type of environment, allowed the craft of intelligence to kind of develop and foster. I found it interesting back in the day, back in the day, venice, half the people wore masks around, like you know, the Venice mask that you see was common and that that that what that facility is you could overhear.
Speaker 2:people didn't know who you are, your identification was hidden. It allowed you to snoop and hear things. It just that whole identity factor was erased, which provided certain opportunities to information.
Speaker 2:The printing press was big. So once the printing press started, of course information could be dispersed more often. And also, with Venice, this idea of ambassadors, diplomacy. So diplomacy was started on the rise where you would have agents in foreign countries report back to you and they would be perfect, basically spies or intelligence gatherers, because sometimes you would have an ambassador or a diplomat over in, let's say, germany for 15 years. So they learn the country, they learn the land, they start making relationships there and they can report information back to you.
Speaker 2:So what separated some, the West, particularly versus other countries, I want to say like early Russia, is that in certain countries they did not allow the printing press, so that eliminated like access to information right there. It would be like us, you know, making it to where we could use the internet, even our government not being able to use the internet, so it shuts down that whole, that whole access to information. But also other countries did not want, did not allow people from their country to be overseas for any length of time as ambassadors, so they'd have to come back immediately, you know they couldn't like live over there, which eliminated that outlet or avenue for information about that foreign culture. The West, they operated differently. They were more willing to, for example, for one, use the printing press and freely.
Speaker 2:I guess, and then also to have foreign diplomats live overseas for a long, extended period of time. I think he uses a lot of the countries that were against. That were it was religious reasons. So that's the main thing with Venice and that period time period. Okay, here's the part of the Aztecs I want, because during this time of Venice also was the age of discovery, which was when Spain, france, dutch and everybody went over to the New World right, and he talks about Spain sending Cortes over to the Aztecs.
Speaker 2:And what Cortes learned is that the Aztecs had far more experience of espionage than Cortes had. Spies had higher status in Mesoamerica than in medieval Europe. Even Among the Aztecs they were considered minor nobility. Spies who were caught in hostile territory face prolonged and gruesome execution further evidence of the significance of their role in Mesoamerican Mesoamerica, believing that their empire covered most of the world. However, the Aztecs had no concept of foreign espionage which went beyond their immediate neighbors. They barely were aware even of the existence of South America and, until the arrival of Cortes, entirely unaware that over the previous generation, spain had taken over most of the islands in the Caribbean. So, although they had this highly intricate sense of espionage, they were narrow. Their information was narrow, in the sense they didn't know what was going on next door, if that makes spatial wise. Spatially wise.
Speaker 2:Had Cortes's expedition come under attack at this stage, it would have been overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Aztecs forces. Montezuma's failure to attack led, within two years of his own death over the empire Crucial, to Cortes's decisive defeat of a much stronger opponent. So the Aztecs were stronger than the forces that Cortes had. I guess he only had like 800. And of course the Aztecs had way more. But Cortes had like secret information, I guess from certain people in the Aztecs, so he preempted an attack on them which helped lead to his winning.
Speaker 2:But it says Cortes owed much of his intelligence to La Malinche, one of 20 slave women who was indigenous to Mexico, to the Aztecs, probably in their late teens or 20s, given him by a local kakike soon after his arrival in Mexico. Malinche, who spoke both Nahuatl the language of the Aztecs, and Mayan, acted as interpreter in Cortes's dealings with the Aztecs and local tribes and had accompanied him wherever he went. Her language skills were the great beginning of our successes. Cortes said. So I mean it shows like, if you have it shows the importance of knowledge of language right In intelligence, a knowledge of a native, having some sort of native Azure as one of your operatives is very important, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it goes back to the and then it also human intelligence we were talking about earlier, Someone who knows the lay of the land, knows the atmospherics, the culture, the personalities, the inner relationships and so forth.
Speaker 2:In the land. Yeah, and then what Cortes did that was all successful is Aztecs, in their fight for supremacy, made a lot of enemies, right, and what Cortes does is he starts going to those enemies and says, hey, basically we want to overthrow that guy, you want to join our force, you want to join up with us. So one group called the Tlaxcala and another group called Chalula and so forth basically helped them. It looks like they formed an alliance with all their people who hated them, to help overthrow them.
Speaker 1:So again that that access to information about it's an art of war type of thing Know your enemies, know your enemies, enemies, and that way you can exploit that conflict going on over there, right, yes, to your advantage, I think, cortes learned quickly that the Aztecs were hated in Mesoamerica I mean, they had been the, the fact of superpower for quite some time and treated, you know, a lot of these other tribes or other civilizations, I don't know what you'd call them other other peoples with contempt and required them to pay tribute both in human capital but then also riches and gold.
Speaker 1:So they see this outsider as we've talked about, come in and they see an opportunity to kind of break the hierarchy or turn the hierarchy up side down. What some of these tribes failed to, I guess they failed in their foresight that they're only replacing one hierarchy or one God with another, or one superpower with another, and you could argue it wasn't worse or better. So, but that's again, that's another discussion. But to focus on information, as this guy, andrew, christopher Andrew, talks about not only intel but action on that. Intel is key.
Speaker 1:And so he was able to perceive that this, you know, this Aztec empire had some cracks, major cracks that he could exploit, and so he formed his own alliances before even stepped foot into notes to loan and so. But the Aztecs had intel as well. They didn't. It doesn't seem that they acted on it as they should have. They sent their emissaries to Cortez and tried to play Kate him with gold and all this kind of stuff, but what maybe they should have done was try to solidify, you know, some of their tributaries with promises of power and gold and all that shit.
Speaker 2:Well, I think they also thought they prophecies that said that the Spaniards were not only gods but also like them. They were somehow related.
Speaker 1:Well, the God, the white God, suppose, the Ketzel, ketzel Kultul, the God of war, I believe was supposed, is supposed to return Somewhere along the line. He was supposed to be a white man, blue eye, blue on hair type of thing, maybe not blue eyed, but, and the story goes that they mistaken Cortez as the return of the God Other. Some historians argue that this was a made up story by the Spanish. Who knows?
Speaker 2:Yeah, because a lot of this comes from Diaz Castillo Diaz, one of the not missionaries, but one of Cortez's underlings recorder, like a historian.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, what we know about the Aztecs, much of what we know, is through the interpretation of Spanish historians and writers and priests and shit like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which they're going to make it, the Spanish look better. Yeah, another thing is the smallpox this was just, I guess, a happy accident If you're on the Spanish side or Cortez's side that killed at least a third of the population of Tenochtitlan. I mean that, right alone would demoralize any but any culture. So, but that made me think of the effect of biological warfare, if you could. I mean obviously the Spanish didn't know that that would happen, but I mean now we know that that's beneficial, right, if you can, somehow Biological warfare.
Speaker 1:I mean, would you?
Speaker 2:say yeah. Would you say biological warfare is an aspect of intelligence? No, because it's. I mean, it's science-based right, technological, I don't know what is it then no, I think biological warfare is a weapon of war.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's intelligence at all. Now you can use intelligence to use biological warfare in the most effective way possible. Like you know where the tribes are.
Speaker 2:Now the means. What about coming?
Speaker 1:up the means of distributing smallpox in blankets, let's say, is an act of deception. You're giving these Indians blankets, allegedly if I can infect it with smallpox.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Now, I mean, you could say that what about?
Speaker 2:let's say COVID was an operation right, just pretend. Would intelligence be a factor in the fact of like? How can we distribute it? How can? What kind of psychological effect will it have on people? What severity do we need to release this in? How can we go about using the media and exploit the cracks in the CDC or the chain of command, or you know? Is that part of intelligence? Like how you go about using the biological weapon? Maybe, if your intention is not to kill everybody, it's like to, maybe like a psychological warfare.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a psychological warfare.
Speaker 2:Aspect of psychological warfare?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you scare the shit out of people and so they put masks on, take the vaccine, self-quarantine themselves, get people at each other's throats. That's psychological, definitely psychological warfare, for sure.
Speaker 2:Hmm, um, okay, I think we'll continue. Next up podcast he talks, he gets into Ivan the terrible origins of Russian state security.
Speaker 2:In this one he makes a lot of comparisons to Stalin, ivan the Terribles reign, and Stalin and Russia. I guess in In Ivan the terrible came up with this First organized secret service in Russia called the oprich Nikki. He dressed them all in black, black horses and each one on their horse would carry a dead head of a dog, which was a symbol for rooting out, sniffing out conspirators, and then also a black broom, which symbolized sweeping away the conspirators once they were found. And the guy just kind of makes comparisons, how symbolic symbols are used in intelligence services and the forces, for example. And then he links up with like the nazis used the death head on the s s uniforms as a sort of uh let. There's symbols wrapped up in that. Not only that, but there's scare tactics. You know the use of uniforms In these agencies. The FBI doesn't have an agent as a uniform, right, it's the all in black, men in black with the sunglasses, sort of scary looking. Um.
Speaker 2:And then it gets into Elizabeth, the first Walls and ham and the rise of English intelligence. I think we should reserve that for next time. I'm very interesting. I've read a book called the watchers it, which it gets into details. One of the main kind of things I learned from that book and from this chapter, chapter 10 in the secret world, is that If you have a country or a nation that is being attacked on all sides, right and from within, and because Elizabeth was Protestant- and all her court was Protestants.
Speaker 2:They were facing attack from the Catholics in the country, which was, I think it was like 50 cat who want, who looked at her as a legitimate usurper of the crown. They wanted Mary Queen of scots who was Catholic. But then you've got Roman papacy, who were against you, spanish government or who were Catholic, france was Catholic.
Speaker 2:You've got a prime situation, then, for A possibility of that government, elizabeth, for example, who is being highly pressured. You've you've got an opportunity for that, that government to almost be forced to come up with a Increasingly strong intelligence center, if that makes sense. And so what happened in her case and and the Elizabeth's court, uh, was that they developed, in a great Sense of crypto, cryptography, codes, analysis of codes, deciphering codes, um, because if you're being pressured on all sides and you're constantly under threat of being overthrown, you funnel all your energy into ways to defend yourself, right, and one of those being intelligence. So they developed a high, acute sense of Interceptions of messages, spies and other areas. They would use Catholics, or they would send out these people from England posing, as you know, future Catholics who want to be converted, and blah, blah, blah. Have them go for years, be converted, meet all these other Catholics, learn all about them, in whatever area, and then, of course, send those messages back.
Speaker 2:Um, and then also, uh, record keeping. They had a A very a strong sense that record keeping, messages, filing everything, documentation, um. Never before, it seems like, had there been um an intelligence entity like that that had had all that record keeping and then it allowed them also to, over time, they could be patient, wait Rate for the right moment and when you've had all because they had a legal system too where they had to if they needed to, for example, kill Mary queen of scots which they couldn't just do outright, they had to have good evidence Well, they could wait, be patient, have all this evidence, start building up and then, when you got the right thing, you could Cut her head off and legally be justified to do it. So that's good thing to talk, I think, a good way to end today. Any lasting thoughts? Mr Agent zero, what's your name? Agent?
Speaker 1:zero is a? Uh, so the name popped up to me. I am trying to say what am I gonna call myself today? What's my alias? And agent zero just popped in. I'm not. I am not a what would you call it? A superhero guy? Um, I know of them the classic superman, spider man and so forth.
Speaker 1:But I looked up agent zero and this guy has a complex history. He was born in like west germany. He was a spy for west germany, um, and then he was affiliated with cia. They did some, um, weird biological DNA changes to him. He became half man, half mutant. Um, he was married at one time, found out his, his wife was a spy, so he had a killer and so he had issues with women, um, and then he joined the other side. He contemplated suicide, all kinds of issues. He had special powers where he could absorb energy, um, and you know falls and stuff like that. He had healing power, um. By this thought he was fitting, since we were talking about intelligence, to call myself Agent zero. He also goes by the name of maverick and I think his name is christopher. Nord was his birth name. So very, uh, I didn't know these characters got so much depth to him. So there you have it the fuck.
Speaker 2:And this is a comic book guy.
Speaker 1:This is a yeah, marvel character, relatively new one, though. 90 came in early 90s, 90s, oh, okay. Yeah, agent zero 007 yeah, he was a spy. What about?
Speaker 2:James Bond 007. They were saying. I was reading something where Elizabeth, the first or the second right the one who just died. She flew in by a parachute at the olympic games set in london with james bond 007 and uh, why the fuck did she?
Speaker 1:do that. That was a spoof. That was like a double, though, wouldn't that? That wasn't really her.
Speaker 2:No, but it's, it's weird, it's like it's like a fusion of fiction and fact. I mean the fiction being james bond and the fact being she's a queen At an olympics. I don't know what is it just? Oh, we're being, we're being fine.
Speaker 1:Well, they have to get you know these opening ceremonies. They have to uh, they have to get in all the kind of iconic ness of that country, of that particular country, and james bond is is one of them.
Speaker 2:Because he symbolizes the mi6 or whatever they are. He symbolizes like. Well, I know, first of all he's a cultural icon, but but he's a symbol of england's intelligence and sees uh-huh, which means, I mean, is that, is that a message to foreign countries?
Speaker 1:No, is it just Just a silly? Yeah silly entertainment thing.
Speaker 2:Like you could. You could have had something else. That's a british like austin powers, or I mean he's not that as famous, but yeah, uh, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think it's dumb, but james bond is Uh has lasted the test of time, if you will. Austin powers was a quick three-year run, or whatever. Yeah, and plus it's more Horistocratic than austin powers? A goofball, crappy comedy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's cool, he's cool, he's. He's like a god almost. He never fucking dies. Well, he did died. In this last one, he's gonna be replaced by a black lesbian. Did you know that?
Speaker 1:I stopped watching, yeah, I stopped even paying attention to that kind of stuff, because it goes back to what we were talking about the soft power. Yeah, and so it's. It's become, instead of subtle, entertaining propaganda, it's become just in your face, bad Propaganda.
Speaker 2:Well, if you look at it, uh, both james bond and queen elizabeth the second died, yeah, not shortly after. It's the death of the old britain england, for sure. James bond 007, you know that was created by ean fleming, who was early one of the early british intelligence Agents. He was actually, he actually worked for british intelligence. Did you know that? Who's that?
Speaker 1:Ian Fleming author of james bond series.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, yeah, my last words. Intelligence is a very ancient thing, um, it's only In modern history it's become kind of formalized and become bureaucratic and man, you know, in this managerial state that we are in now, where it's become Its own entity, separate from state statecraft as a whole, and so the history of it Can go way back, and so we, we're gonna do what a couple more episodes of this very dense Could be a very dense topic, but necessary.
Speaker 2:Because I think, as it's shown the evolution Intelligence comes from the peripheral and starts starting to Enter the center of of power, I think, or the what do you want to call it? Its role becomes more Pronounced as the ages go on.
Speaker 1:Well, it's always, I mean, like with the world it intelligence has always been a part of. I think it's become informal to formal.
Speaker 2:Even you mean how about organized?
Speaker 1:Perhaps even organized.
Speaker 2:Yes, more, more organized.
Speaker 1:Because you could argue back in the day when we were hunters and gatherers, we we use, utilize intelligence For hunting, on what the animals, where the animals are, where they're going, what uh routes they use to migrate or to feed? Um, what's their temperament, what's their behavior, what's their defense mechanisms? Um, you know, do they? Pack animals that like zebras and shit where they use deception, or buffalo, where they they are in mass as well.
Speaker 2:So intelligence has been around for Since the beginning of Time well, it's funny how you say that this one when he's discussing Islam and intelligence. Leo the sixth, I guess he was like a pope or whatever he was he was talking about. Warfare is like hunting, and I think intelligence is the same, lying in weight. It was what he talks about. Yeah, stalking you know, observing, looking, collecting, your the information about that and you know about the whatever you're like, the animal you're hunting. Exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 1:And animals use deception all the time. They check they can change the color of their their skin, for example, or they use Um, there's a snake ink turkey or something like that's rattler, its tail looks like a spider. So when Rats or what have you come up to? Attack what they think is a spider, it's really the tail of a viper, um.
Speaker 2:The butterfly that wings look like owls.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the butterfly that looks like Owl eyes. You know, birds will lay eggs and another bird's Nest and that bird thinks it's their egg. You'll kill that, kill or get rid of the mom's eggs and then put their eggs in there. Um, I mean, there's all kinds of brilliant deception that the um, that nature, uses to defend itself and to Um Deceive pray. Camouflage camouflage the schools of fish Getting these large balls. So when sharks are attacking, and it's it, it's hard and they have reflection on their scales.
Speaker 1:It's hard for a shark to pick or pin down or target one fish because it looks like one giant ball. Zebras do the same. Um, when you know the lion is looking at the, the zebra herd, it's hard to distinguish one from the rest of the crowd. It just looks like one big wave to them, and that's. That's a part of deception as well. So but, also. I mean just natural intelligence gathering animals do that too. Patterns you?
Speaker 1:know, over and over again. Patterns like when the the deer On the serengeti planes come to drink in the water. The algae are Waiting for them because they know they're gonna come. That's recognizing pattern patterns, um, so it's a very deep and interesting Thing to talk about information gathering, recognizing patterns, acting on those patterns. Um, it's only now or recently that it's become, like you said, more organized, more formal and more of a way for science or observers to discuss it, by Cutting it out of nature and then putting it in its own little place and you can kind of observe it, talk about it, write about it as its own separate entity and then also look at the world through that lens.
Speaker 2:Um, so that's what we're doing today. I mean one thing I think it's evolved to become more prominent and more important is because, like we live in the information age, you know that old trope, that old saying Informations all around us, data, big data, has become more important than ever and your, your intelligence systems, need to be, need to fit that trend right. I mean, I would even say, um, computer technology and all of that. It requires your intelligence, uh system to be, to evolve and to be up to date on all that.
Speaker 2:A computer intelligence, you know, ai, mastering, how to come up with the right you know, machine learning, all of that, uh, as a way to take advantage of your enemies, uh, systems, I don't know, and I think, like you were talking about the intelligence communities, have almost usurped power over time. Um, but I mean, of course there's, maybe there's entities above those intelligence communities that are directing it Through money or through what have you.
Speaker 1:All right, well, we'll continue this book next week For la malentche Yo soy ahint Zero day. Ahint ahint day zero. No, mom is way no mom, no matches until next time, my friend.
