Cav > Books: crime‎ (69)

"The question that we will be tackling is a more deeply troubling one: “what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the ‘movement’) were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them?” What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray? And what if the harassment these folks were subjected to was largely a stage-managed show designed to give the leaders of the counterculture some much-needed ‘street cred’?
What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?"

"...If, for example, just a few prominent Laurel Canyon musicians happened to come from military/intelligence families, then we could probably safely write that off as an interesting but largely inconsequential aberration.
But if an uncanny number of the leading lights of the Laurel Canyon scene grew up in such an environment, then that is clearly a meaningful pattern. And if a few of the new breed of stars happened to have violent death intrude upon their personal lives, then that would be a tragic but largely inconsequential fact. But when it becomes clear that violent death surrounded the entire scene, with whole families at times dying off under suspicious circumstances, then that again is a distinguishing pattern—and one that has been all but ignored by other chroniclers of the scene."

"Another legend in the nation’s capital depicts Watergate as the greatest political scandal in modern US history. Yet the break-in and its related sundry political crimes pale in comparison to the ’60s assassinations. If one takes the time to dig beyond the falsehoods of crazed lone gunmen and magic bullets, it becomes evident that the facts surrounding the murders of President John F. Kennedy and his brother New York senator Robert F. Kennedy reveal a much greater scandal, one that begs to be explored in depth..."

"This work involves the use of the mosaic theory of intelligence gathering in which pieces of information are combined with other pieces to produce a composite. By connecting the dots, information that has been hidden from the general public for decades can emerge with force, clarity, and meaning.
Some key connections and conclusions herein have never before been published. They represent new knowledge stemming from an analysis of the available forensic evidence and an assessment of the work of several intrepid historians whose books are cited throughout. By following up their persistent investigative efforts and carefully fitting together the many pieces of the puzzle, we have arrived at a better understanding of modern American history..."

"Within weeks of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, a CIA-trained army of twelve hundred exiled anti-Castro paramilitary forces attempted to retake the island of Cuba. In the ensuing debacle at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, the invaders were overwhelmed and soundly defeated by Castro loyalists. President Kennedy had found out about the CIA’s plan to invade Cuba shortly after coming into office in January 1961. Relying on the judgment of the elite in the US intelligence community, he had allowed the ill-conceived plan to move forward. Afterwards, the intelligence planners in charge of the invasion blamed Kennedy for not providing more support, particularly from the air. However, as General Maxwell Taylor has pointed out, even a US air strike would not have affected the outcome, mainly because Cuban antiaircraft batteries were so strong.71 In addition, Kennedy knew an aerial attack clearly would have created even more political problems both at home and abroad. The president felt that he had been grossly misled. As he struggled to negotiate freedom for the prisoners of war, he vowed to break the CIA “into a thousand pieces and scatter (it) to the winds...”

"...Compared with hot-blooded spur-of-themoment murders, the planning and cold calculations involved in murder by poison perfectly fit the legal term malice aforethought. Poisoning requires planning and a knowledge of the victim’s habits. It requires consideration of how the poison will be administered. Some poisons can kill within minutes; others can be given slowly over time, gradually accumulating in the body but still leading inexorably to the victim’s death."

"This book is not a catalog of poisoners and their victims, but rather explores the nature of poisons and how they affect the body at the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels. Each poison kills in its own unique way, and the varied symptoms experienced by the victims often give clues as to the nature of the poison used against them. In a few instances such knowledge has led to appropriate treatment and full recovery. In other cases knowledge of the poison is not of therapeutic benefit, because there is simply no antidote."

"...We make them, live with them, use them, love them, and are sometimes even buried with them, and people continuously find themselves in the midst of tragedy. Cursed objects are those items that have simply been the mute witnesses to more tragedies than other items. They then become devices for remembering those stories and provide opportunities for retelling them."

"This book has grown out of the 16,000 pages of documents that the CIA released to me under the Freedom of Information Act. Without these documents, the best investigative reporting in the world could not have produced a book, and the secrets of CIA mind-control work would have remained buried forever, as the men who knew them had always intended.
From the documentary base, I was able to expand my knowledge through interviews and readings in the behavioral sciences. Nevertheless, the final result is not the whole story of the CIA's attack on the mind. Only a few insiders could have written that, and they choose to remain silent. I have done the best I can to make the book as accurate as possible, but I have been hampered by the refusal of most of the principal characters to be interviewed and by the CIA's destruction in 1973 of many of the key documents..."

"In 1947 the National Security Act created not only the CIA but also the National Security Council—in sum, the command structure for the Cold War. Wartime OSS leaders like William Donovan and Allen Dulles lobbied feverishly for the Act. Officials within the new command structure soon put their fear and their grandiose notions to work. Reacting to the perceived threat, they adopted a ruthless and warlike posture toward anyone they considered an enemy—most especially the Soviet Union.
They took it upon themselves to fight communism and things that might lead to communism everywhere in the world. Few citizens disagreed with them; they appeared to express the sentiments of most Americans in that era, but national security officials still preferred to act in secrecy. A secret study commision under former President Hoover captured the spirit of their call to clandestine warfare:
'It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.'"

"If the schemes of these scientists to control the mind had met with more success, they would be much less amusing. But so far, at least, the human spirit has apparently kept winning. That—if anything—is the saving grace of the mind-control campaign."

"...It’s a sprawling underworld of crooks and fixers wielding extraordinary power and handling vast quantities of money, most of whom operate way beyond the reach of any police or law-enforcement agency.
At the centre of it all is a small team of highly ambitious hackers seemingly capable of penetrating their targets with unsettling stealth. Most of the victims in this book had no idea they were under attack until it was too late – their money gone, their data leaked and their computers trashed.
To understand North Korea’s alleged hacking campaigns is to understand the modern world of crime. It’s bewilderingly swift, knows no borders and relies on a shadowy network of accomplices. These digital offensives are perhaps the biggest threat to our ever-growing online existence..."

"The country is trapped in a financial death spiral triggered by a damaging series of events that has unfolded over the course of its relatively short history and accelerated rapidly in the last three decades. At one point North Korea ran so short of money that it failed in its most basic duty to its people, millions of whom are believed to have starved to death thanks to economic mismanagement and dogmatic adherence to ideological goals.
Simultaneously, its pursuit of nuclear weapons saw it hit with international sanctions – all of which will be explored in the following chapters. The net result is that one of the poorest countries in the world has little chance of making money legitimately. According to many experts, North Korea has instead turned to crime, in the past experimenting with forgery, smuggling and even crystal-meth production, before finally discovering a far more reliable and lucrative form of income: computer hacking."

"Mexico seemed to have gotten numb to murder. Between 2007 and 2014, drug cartels and the security forces fighting them had killed more than eighty-three thousand people, according to a count by Mexico’s government intelligence agency."

"In this book, I attempt to make better sense of these hybrid criminal organizations by tracking a path through the new battlefields of the Americas. Traveling across the continent, I focus on four crime families: the Red Commando in Brazil, the Shower Posse in Jamaica, the Mara Salvatrucha in Central America, and the Knights Templar in Mexico. They are puzzling postmodern networks that mix gangs, mafias, death squads, religious cults, and urban guerrillas."

"Suppose that someone has been convicted of a crime—shoplifting, possession of heroin, assault, or armed robbery. What is the sentence likely to be?
The answer should not depend on the particular judge to whom the case happens to be assigned, on whether it is hot or cold outside, or on whether a local sports team won the day before. It would be outrageous if three similar people, convicted of the same crime, received radically different penalties:
probation for one, two years in jail for another, and ten years in jail for another. And yet that outrage can be found in many nations—not only in the distant past but also today..."

"The harsh imposition of Wilhelmian law and threats of Prussian discipline kept the anarchistic urban-swamp in check. But in 1919, with the Kaiser gone and a democratic constitution about to be proclaimed in Weimar, those legal strictures basically expired. The tapped-down moral restraints of bratty Berlin suddenly burst at the seams. The once quaintly roguish German metropolis was now an open city—open for sex. Or, as its many provincial detractors decried, “a new Hell on earth.”

"For most German families, trade—either in heirlooms or stolen merchandise—earned subsistence to endure the month or week. But eventually these items became scarce or obsolete. Only foodstuffs mattered.
The profiteering and theft of them were abetted by a distracted government, intent on victories in the field. Those poor souls without food sources or connections had just one other commodity to haul to the public market: sex.
At first, young war brides, branded “strawwidows,” offered their carnal services to the available males of Berlin, then it was the provincial youth of both sexes, and finally the children of bourgeois families. Prostitution lost its exact meaning when tens of thousands were involved in complex sex attachments, all of a commercial nature. The vaguely Wilhelmian underpinning of middle-class Berlin slowly cracked and, over time, collapsed."

"The Great Inflation complicated Berlin’s sexual folkways but did not really alter them. The so-called moral collapse had already occurred. Erotic amusements, prostitution, and narcotics were all readily available before the inflationary madness. But now the purveyors of commercial sex and other decadent offerings had a more acute economic incentive. Berlin was suddenly inundated with hard-currency tourists, looking for Jazz Age bargains. Swedes, Dutch, French, and detested hordes of Turks and Japanese flocked to the open city. Their modest assets in the form of kronen, guilders, francs, lira, and yen metamorphosed the plucky foreigners into multimillionaires the moment they disembarked at the Stettiner Bahnhof.
In postwar Paris, a traveler could engage the services of a streetwalker for five or six dollars; but during the Inflation in Berlin, five dollars could buy a month’s worth of carnal delights. The most exquisite blowjob or kinky dalliance with a 15-year-old never cost more than 30 cents, or 65 million 1923 marks. The widows of famous Wehrmacht generals rented their bodies and bedrooms for a few precious kronen. Even upright bourgeois couples exhibited themselves in marital embrace for a solid hour if anyone was interested in that kind of theatre..."

"Ilya Ehrenburg, the Russian writer, remembered going to a flat in a respectable neighborhood during the Inflation and discussing Dostoyevsky with the excited middle-class residents. After a glassful of lemonade mixed with spirits, the staid Berliners brought out their young, nubile daughters, who promptly executed a striptease before the shocked eyes of their celebrated guest."

"A sense of superiority is not an incidental happenstance, for superiority has been essential to getting intellectuals where they are. They are in fact often very superior within the narrow band of human concerns with which they deal. But so too are not only chess grandmasters and musical prodigies but also computer software engineers, professional athletes and people in many mundane occupations whose complexities can only be appreciated by those who have had to master them.
The fatal misstep of many among the intelligentsia is in generalizing from their mastery of a certain kind of knowledge to a general wisdom in the affairs of the world—which is to say, in the affairs of other people, whose knowledge of their own affairs is far greater than what any given intellectual can hope to have. It has been said that a fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him..."

"...Similarly, many of the intelligentsia express not only surprise but outrage at the number of shots fired by the police in some confrontation with a criminal, even if many of these intellectuals have never fired a gun in their lives, much less faced life-and-death dangers requiring split-second decisions. Seldom, if ever, do the intelligentsia find it necessary to seek out any information on the accuracy of pistols when fired under stress, before venting their feelings and demanding changes. In reality, a study by the New York City Police Department found that, even within a range of only six feet, just over half the shots fired by police missed completely. At distances from 16 to 25 yards—less than the distance from first base to second base on a baseball diamond—only 14 percent of the shots hit..."

"...The two visions differ fundamentally, not only in how they see the world but also in how those who believe in these visions see themselves. If you happen to believe in free markets, judicial restraint, traditional values and other features of the tragic vision, then you are just someone who believes in free markets, judicial restraint and traditional values. There is no personal
exaltation resulting from those beliefs. But to be for “social justice” and “saving the environment,” or to be “anti-war” is more than just a set of beliefs about empirical facts. This vision puts you on a higher moral plane as someone concerned and compassionate, someone who is for peace in the world, a defender of the downtrodden, and someone who wants to preserve the beauty of nature and save the planet from being polluted by others less caring. In short, one vision makes you somebody special and the other vision does not. These visions are not symmetrical..."
"...Because the vision of the anointed is a vision of themselves as well as a vision of the world, when they are defending that vision they are not simply defending a set of hypotheses about external events, they are in a sense defending their very souls—and the zeal and even ruthlessness with which they defend their vision are not surprising under these circumstances. But for people with opposite views, who may for example believe that most things work out better if left to free markets, traditions, families, etc., these are just a set of hypotheses about external events, and there is no such huge personal ego stake in whether those hypotheses are confirmed by empirical evidence. Obviously everyone would prefer to be proved right rather than proved wrong, but the point here is that there are no such comparable ego stakes involved among believers in the tragic vision.
This difference may help explain a striking pattern that goes back at least two centuries—the greater tendency of those with the vision of the anointed to see those they disagree with as enemies who are morally lacking. While there are individual variations in this, as with most things, there are nevertheless general patterns, which many have noticed, both in our times and in earlier centuries. For example, a contemporary account has noted: Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil..."

"Here, as in many other situations, the intelligentsia’s effect on the course of events did not depend upon their convincing the holders of power. All they had to do was convince enough of the public so that the holders of power became fearful of losing that power if they went against the prevailing vision—pacifism, in this case. If Baldwin had lost power, he would have lost it to those who would turn the pacifist vision into a reality potentially disastrous to the country. Britain, after all, narrowly escaped being invaded and conquered in 1940, and only because of a belated development of its interceptor fighter planes that shot down German bombers during the aerial blitz that was intended to prepare the way for the invasion force being mobilized across the English Channel. Had the pacifists in the Labor Party come to power in 1933, it is by no means clear that this narrow margin of survival would have been in place..."

"...They have romanticized cultures that have left people mired in poverty, violence, disease and chaos, while trashing cultures that have led the world in prosperity, medical advances and law and order..."
"...To condemn their country’s enemies would be to be like the masses but to condemn their own society itself sets the anointed apart as moral exemplars and incisive minds—at least to like-minded peers. Given the incentives and constraints, it is hard to see how they could do otherwise, when whatever significance that they might have in the larger society so often depends on their criticisms of that society and their claims to have special “solutions” to whatever they define as its “problems....”

"...To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature.
(The tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.) Able to swim for miles and kill an animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fifty or a hundred yards before consuming it..."

"In the course of five hectic months, I had provided British intelligence with a manual of jihad unrivalled in its detail. I was told some time later that the services regarded my information as gold dust as they grappled with a new threat on which they had little solid information and within which they had precisely zero sources.
While the Americans were ratcheting up their surveillance of al- Qaeda by ‘national technical means’ (in other words electronic eavesdropping) the British were much stronger in human intelligence. What I provided added a great deal to the very basic picture of al-Qaeda they had. My information was ending up – regularly – at Number 10 Downing Street. And much of it was being passed on to the American cousins (suitably amended to try to keep the source protected) where on occasion it was included in the president’s daily intelligence briefing."