Health espionage

"The Central Intelligence Agency has a Medical and Psychological Assessment Cell. It employs or consults with doctors, sociologists, political scientists and cultural anthropologists to examine the conditions of top officials.

In the late fifties and early nineteen sixties, the CIA decided that they had expertise to look more carefully and in a more rigorous, analytical way at the health of foreign leaders in order to help give policy makers some forewarning of a transition in a government, stability of foreign governments, and also looking for potential points of diplomatic leverage.

The concern is not just the illness, it's also the medication that people take while they are ill and how that can compromise their decision-making ability, cognitively and intellectually. So they don’t make the same kind of decisions, their decisions may not be as predictable. They certainly may not be as, quote unquote, rational.

It can be decisively important because it can really change the stability of governments, particularly in authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, where there’s really a limited number of people who have powerful decision-making authority."

More: http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/Medical-Spies-Keep-Watch-on-Leaders-130699748.html

Hiding messages in gene-modified microbes

"Forget invisible ink or lemon juice – spies can now send messages hidden in genetically engineered bacteria. The new method, dubbed steganography by printed arrays of microbes (SPAM), uses a collection of "Escherichia coli" strains modified with fluorescent proteins that glow in a range of seven colours.

Each character of the message is encoded using two colours, creating 49 possible combinations – enough for the alphabet, the figures 0 to 9 and a few other symbols. "You can think of all sorts of secret spy applications," saysDavid Walt, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, who led the research.

The new technique is not the first example of biological encryption – researchers have previously hidden messages in DNA
 – but Walt says his method is easier to use. "If you're out in the field and trying to send a message, you're not going to have access to a DNA synthesiser," he says, whereas you could carry vials of bacteria.

The bacterial code has a much lower information density than DNA, however, which would limit the size of a message. "You probably could send 500 to 1000 symbols on a regular piece of paper," says Walt – enough for a quick mission update, but it probably won't let you smuggle state secrets out of a country."

More: http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/dn20965

Too much of a good thing | LitBash 41

Here's one example of when it may be "too much of a good thing" (on the other hand it's likely a case of not having enough time to read all these wonderful books) - writers who were...

Born this week:

Tryggve Andersen, Norway

Grazia Deledda, Italy

Josef Skvorecky, Czech
"Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism."

Prosper Merimee, France

Miguel de Cervantes, Spain
"Can we ever have too much of a good thing?"

Johan Falkberget, Norway
"It is the result of the good word or the great, not the narrow-minded or petty criticism. These have not yet changed the world one louse's step."

Truman Capote, USA

Graham Greene, UK
"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

Doris Lessing, UK
"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."

Died this week:

Hugh Lofting, UK / USA

Alberto Moravia, Italy
"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand."

Ivan Goncharov, Russia
"It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required."

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brasil

Vladimir Zazubrin, Russia

Joe Bousquet, France

Andre Breton, France
"The man who can't visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot."

John Dos Passos, USA
"The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can."

Elia Kazan, USA

Emile Zola, France
"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."

Shusaku Endo, Japan

Patrick White, Australia
"Possibly all art flowers more readily in silence."

History's unsung spies

"Surely the most eccentric unsung spy was Maxwell Knight, known to his friends as Max or M. Although he did later become well known, it was not as a spymaster. To children growing up in the late Fifties and early Sixties he was Uncle Max, the BBC radio naturalist.

He had always had a passion for fauna; indeed, when he was head of B5(b), an autonomous department within MI5 in the Thirties and Forties, those who worked with him also had to work with his menagerie of animals. He could recite trivia about them endlessly, from the correct method of mounting a llama to the breeding cycle of the laughing hyena. His daily help, Mrs Leather, would complain of the way grass snakes used to flop down the stairs of his flat in Chelsea. He kept them in the bath. He also kept a blue-fronted Amazonian parrot in the kitchen and a Himalayan monkey in the garden. And he was known to have raised a nest of adder eggs in his pyjama pocket. Ian Fleming, who worked in the Department of Naval Intelligence, was fascinated by Knight’s mysterious persona and used him as the model for “M”, James Bond’s boss.

But for all his eccentricity he was an effective spymaster. As early as 1927, the bisexual Knight had been put in charge of infiltrating the Communist Party of Great Britain. To this end he recruited Tom Driberg, the (homosexual) writer and future MP, and ordered him to join the Communist Party while at Oxford. He also infiltrated the British Union of Fascists and developed a rather sinister fascination with the occult which he shared with his friends Dennis Wheatley and Aleister Crowley.

When war broke out he recruited an astrologer as an MI5 agent and sent him to Germany to infiltrate the occult court of Rudolf Hess. The agent is said to have briefed Hess that the Duke of Hamilton was prepared to meet him to act as a peace negotiator between the German government and the British. Hess’s fateful flight to Scotland followed in 1941.

With the war against the Nazis over, Knight became increasingly obsessed with the Soviet Union, specifically with the idea that a communist spy ring had infiltrated MI5. But his colleagues no longer took him seriously – indeed, they ignored the numerous reports he wrote on the subject. Knight was by then regarded as paranoid and unstable and, even though his theory was proved right in 1951 when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the Soviet Union, his reputation within the service never recovered. He left MI5 a few years later and embarked upon a successful second career as a naturalist on radio and television. He soon became a household name and was awarded an OBE. In 1967 he published How to Keep an Elephant, a guide to keeping off-beat pets. The following year he wrote a sequel: How to Keep a Gorilla."

More: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/8749894/Double-O-Who-Meet-historys-unsung-spies.html

What is to be done with the CIA

"The simple but unworkable solution would be to abolish the Clandestine Service.  (The CIA can’t do its job, but is adept at managing the U.S. news media and Congress so that their budget is never cut but always increased—to fight Communists, terrorists, or other imaginary enemies.)  A better way would be to keep them out of the State Department entirely, giving them tourist or official passports for use while conducting their nefarious activities abroad.  If the spooks want to think of themselves as a secret intelligence service beholden to no one and no thing, then make them that way.  Let them hide in plain sight, “under non-official cover”, as James A. Everett did during his career operating inside U.S. firms in Scandinavia and elsewhere. "

More: http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/08/17/crime-really-does-pay-but-only-if-you-work-for-the-cia/

What is Life without Reading

"without reading, there can be no learning; without learning, there can be no sense of a larger world; without the sense of a larger world, there can be no ardor to find it; without ardor, where is joy?

Without reading, there can be no learning. The humanities are essentially a reading practice. It is no accident that we say we “read” music, or that we “read” visual import. The arts (music, art, literature, theater), because they offer themselves to be “read,” generate many of the humanities—musicology, art history, literary commentary, dramatic interpretation. Through language, spoken or written, we investigate, describe, and interpret the world. The arts are, in their own realm, silent with respect to language; amply showing forth their being, they are nonetheless not self-descriptive or self-interpreting. There can be no future for the humanities—and I include philosophy and history—if there are no human beings acquainted with reading in its emotionally deepest and intellectually most extensive forms. And learning depends on reading as a practice of immersion in thought and feeling."

Source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/reading-is-elemental

Omnipresence of spies and informants

On the occasion of last month's 50th anniversary of construction of the Berlin Wall the press published pieces on the omnipresence of spies and snitches for dictatorial regimes, such as that of East Germany's, taking aim at Stasi. Its spies and informants penetrated every aspect of society, from professional groups to the bedrooms:

"Just to have an idea of the magnitude of interference, the Stasi used a network of informants in a ration of one in ninety East German citizens."

To illustrate the pervasive nature of Stasi's spy network, the Washington Post quoted the Cold War bureau chief of Associated Press, who doubled as a spy for U.S. intelligence...

Ah, the pervasiveness of spies and informants in dictatorial countries!

Source: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/israel-goodwill/2011/aug/15/berlin-wall-and-stasi-most-powerful-espionage-serv/