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22 June 2014 Review of The Director: A Novel, by David Ignatius
Antidote to Migraine of Edward Snowden Tedium Cryptome David Ignatius has written the summer's best antidote to the migraine of the Edward Snowden tedium by Glenn Greenwald, and yet again demonstrates why spy fiction is superior to spy non-fiction (best understood as excreable fiction). Wonderful story telling in this "family jewel" revelation of the sclerotic CIA, NSA, all the TLAs, dumbed-down by stultifying bureacracy, too much money and too little accountability, infighting, sloth, job over-security, fear of failure, obedience to inept authority assured by overly-protective, ever-apologetic, legal counsel. Framed by a deftly choreographed battles between the CIA old guard suits and its disheveled new hires, including new Director, who is a hybrid of the two, the INTs against the ANTs, the cold-blooded killers and obsessive secretkeepers against the hackers and leakers. Sounds contemporary, no? Ignatius introduces James Morris, aka "Pownzor," CIA hacker, and Ramona Kyle, wealthy, stealthy manipulator: "James Morris spent one more day in Las Vegas. He wanted to see an old friend from Stanford named Ramona Kyle. She was speaking at DEF CON, too, on civil liberties and the Internet. Morris sat in the audience for her talk. She spoke so fast, the other panelists had trouble keeping up with her. She was a wiry, intense woman, a passionate intelligence packed into a tiny frame. Her hair was tumbling red curls, like Orphan Annie. When it came time for questions, several attendees with neat haircuts asked about investments. She was something of a cult figure in the venture capital world. She had joined a fund out of Stanford, and discovered start-ups in Budapest, Mumbai, São Paolo, Santiago— all the places, she liked to say, that produced chess champions and didn’t have their own investment banks yet. Sometimes she created the companies on her own, bringing people together in a coffee shop in Rio or a bar in Dubai. Eventually she started her own venture fund, and the money flowed so fast she stopped counting it— and started thinking about more serious things. Kyle had a knack for making money, and people wanted to know her secrets even at this hacker’s conference. But she waved off business questions. They bored her. She wanted to talk about the surveillance state, the threat to liberties, the new information order of the world. A questioner asked her if it was true what was rumored in the chat rooms, that she was the biggest secret funder of WikiLeaks. How many of these pretentious, rich cyber-meddlers do you know? Besides Bezos and Omidyar? Then Kyle on DC: "Ramona Kyle didn’t visit Washington very often. It made her feel ill, physically, to be there: cramps in her stomach and sometimes a migraine that didn’t ease until she had left the city. Washington represented everything that she thought was wrong about where America had headed over the decades she had been alive. Each year, it became more remote and arrogant. Its rituals and institutions were for show. Members of Congress pretended to oversee the executive branch; the courts performed the rites of judicial review; presidents reported each January about how they had enlarged life, liberty and happiness. It was like a victory parade in a people’s democratic republic. Any connection with reality was disappearing. The truth was that America was losing touch more every year with the values the founders had cherished." How many of these libertarian-conceited oligarchs do you know? This is a superb story for the era of "unauthorized-disclosure terrorism," insider and outsider leakers and hackers going at it to attain dominance of the information planet -- the globalist industry of excellent and execreable political theatrics. Read this with pleasure, enjoy the summer, avoid non-fiction in newspapers, in books, on TV, at lectures, at your job, inside Skull and Bones.
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