version

Well-known member
Oh right. The idea being that spy networks and so on might (but then again, might not) have been wound down after the end of the USSR, I suppose.

The phrase used in the article is "hibernated".

Padraig wrote a great post years ago about the 1990s as the "brief, true, Pax Americana", with the USSR gone and 9/11 still in the future, how this was the time that American paranoia turned inwards, towards its own government, in a way it hadn't before outside of some probably fairly fringe circles on the far left and far right*, and how this was all expressed so beautifully in The X-Files, which was the genesis of the idea of the "deep state" taken up much later by QAnon.

De Palma's Mission: Impossible comes to mind too.

Another interesting one's Frankenheimer's Ronin from '98. You've got a bunch of out of work spies etc due to the end of the Cold War and it's opened up a market for mercenaries, hence "Ronin". Great car chases too.

 

luka

Well-known member
You get some people who dismiss the Gladio stuff as conspiracy theory then these guys are saying actually it was real and good and we should do it again / continue doing it.

😂




:cautious:
Craner
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
While I'm glad to live in a country where journalists can criticise the government without getting gunned down in broad daylight, shit like this makes me wonder if the UK isn't in fact the most corrupt country going:

 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Kincora was a honey trap by British intell designed to get info on habits of various visitors, Mi5 were all over it. They wanted compromising info on nonces from all sides but they actively enabled and profited from it too

Grim as fuck
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I just met a colleague in real life for the first time, and went to a small reunion of his old friends, located in the suburbs around the Pentagon, appropriately called Pentagon City. Met a couple guys there who worked at In-Q-Tel, which I only just learned about a couple weeks ago, and which I thought was a VC organ of the CIA. Turns out it’s an independent nonprofit that works with a variety of intelligence bodies, to invest in national security technology that otherwise wouldn’t receive capital if left at the whim of private VC firms seeking ROI. Not unlike DARPA and IARPA, but in this case it’s a private nonprofit, whereas I think those two are formally within the executive branch. Could be wrong though.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
It’s an interesting example of mission-driven venture capital, because you normally think of VC being about ROI. Would be interesting to learn more about the funding situation for In-Q-Tel.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Pentagon City used to have a mall linked via yellow line to King St in old town, decent Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris. So many shady cunts getting off and on, culture of shaded glasses, uniforms everywhere. Very concretey zone. You could get metro drivers who‘d do the stop announcements in a semi-exaggerated tone at times which I wish there was an audio record of

Lovely run down the Potomac at times though, bypassing grieving families and tourists off and on at Arlington cemetery and Reagan’s constant flow of planes. Heavy onerous presence inside and outside the beltway, masses of battlefields and historical layering, the main slave key drop and distribution hub at the bottom of old town’s nobility-themed parallel streets, Quantico, Langley, Andrews. So much incredible music for size with D.C., a riot of a city if you get into its guts. If you’re ever in the capital this is a superb gaff

 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I like how Stan's read us going on about Pynchon and Burroughs and control systems and the CIA and everything else and his response is he wants in.
Burroughs himself wore that suit all the time. Imagine if he actually entered the bureaucracy
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
No doubt but synchronous too, not a prevalent name and if you think of one before the other an indirect goal has been reached
 
Top