Richard Thieme, Mobius

excerpt

Mobius

Author: Richard Thieme
Publisher: Exurban Press
Date: December 30, 2020
Length: 306 pp. (paperback)
ISBN: 1736266306;
978-1736266304

The Mobius Trilogy is the story of an intelligence professional and the unexpected trajectory of his life "inside the fence." It is also a "love story" but definitely not a romance.

Mobius was honored when Susan Hasler, a 21-year veteran of the CIA who worked as an analyst, linguist, and speech writer, included Mobius: A Memoir (volume one) with outstanding works of spy fiction by John Le Carre, W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Alex Finley. The trilogy (Mobius: A Memoir, The Mobius Vector, and Mobius: Out of Time) is available on Amazon or signed from the author.

Best spy books by former intelligence officers, selected by Susan Hasler

Mobius: A Memoir
Excerpt from Chapter One:
Welcome to My World

We are the people behind the curtains. We do our best to make the curtains disappear.

Here's an example: I found myself sitting near an airline pilot in a restaurant in a hotel near the airport in Amsterdam. I think it was an Ibis. The rooms were cramped and the food worse than the frozen pizza I had to eat in a New Zealand bar next to the only motel for miles, down on the South Island where there are more sheep than people. The pilot had been flying routes in the intermountain west, up and down the Wasatch Front, and told me that one day they could see clearly a road being built right into the side of a mountain. A dark shadow on the mountainside looked like an excavation. It was an entrance of some sort. Huh! he thought. What the hell is that? Then, two days later, coming back on the same route, he couldn't see it. From 38,000 feet, there was no road, no access to the mountain. There was nothing, nothing at all. The mountain had been a mountain, then it wasn't a mountain, then it was a mountain again.

He asked fellow pilots and fighter jocks, what was that? Everybody shrugged. Beats me. Who knows? And the always useful, "I dunno."

Lots of shrugging, changing the subject right away -- oh look at the pretty butterfly.

The coin in the palm of my hand disappears while you're watching. Get as close as you like. You'll never see where it goes.

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Mobius: A Memoir
Chapter Two: It Was a Glorious Time

The orientation, the training, the work itself, that was fine, a little tedious at times because the instructors were so anal. They illustrated the joke that an extrovert is someone who stares at your shoes. Some were so high on the spectrum they made Rainman look like the kid next door. But that's the price of genius, I suppose. We do hire lots of "special" people -- not as special as the empaths in the tank in "Minority Report," but still ...

There was lots of memorization, a compulsive attention to the details of tradecraft, and a lot of repetition. We had to practice and practice and practice, I think of Steph Curry shooting a thousand shots a day, until you reach a tipping point -- when you don't have time to think, you do what you have practiced, so it's best to choose wisely what you practice. Like all drills, it got to be more fun toward the end when the results became visible. I especially enjoyed tailing and shaking tails; eluding teams was a challenge and I got pretty good at that. (Don't google "shaking tails," all you get is cats.) Piggytbacking was more fun than driving solo, but I never had to do it, except once, when traffic backed up on the way to Lod. We wound up making a U-turn across a median strip and circling around to a private drive while the second car stayed on the normal road. (A terror threat and a general strike combined to make the exit from the country a bit dicey. So many Jews in America complained, they had to end it right away. Too bad, I thought. I was in a nice hotel in Tel Aviv on the water, on Microsoft's dime, or so the invoice said.)

The real pleasure, though, in those green and salad days derived from informal conversations, water cooler chats, coffee breaks, even standing at urinals reading book jackets - the title, the author's bio, a blurb or two, was all we had time to read, because we were young. We only had time to chat if the guy at the next one was old and had a prostate problem. I remember "Bose-Einstein Condensates" was a title. "Who Paid the Piper?" was another. Once we were on the job, we seldom spoke to one another unless we were read into the same program. Anyone who showed undue interest in something was a red flag. I thought curiosity was the mark of a keen intelligence but they taught me otherwise. Back then, we had nothing to share but opinions, and we were so new at the game, we hadn't learned that opinions per se were worthless, because people without clearances were people without brains. Nothing but fiction and fantasy was stored in their long-term memory. Even later, you had to be read in to have a clue, and most of the time we were read out. And even when we were read in, we might be duped, because the entire program was a dodge. I'll share an example of that later on.

The stories we heard transmitted foundational lore, the binding ties of the tribe, and helped me understand where I had landed. Some took obvious delight in my ignorance, which I discovered was pretty much absolute. It was like being hazed when you pledged a frat. Most were willing to mentor but one or two were pricks. Norm Tsiolkovsky thought he was a comic and I learned to expect his punch line, he said it so often, he would shake his head as if you were stupid beyond comprehension, then pause and grin and say, “You mean you didn't even suspect? Nicky, Nicky, jeez, you better learn how we think, little guy.” Assholes are everywhere, in my experience. We were tickled when he was booted a few years later; that level of arrogance often brings a guy down. The ego has to be just big enough to make you think you an do an impossible job, but no bigger. I relished every anecdote, every true or false memory, because they were threads in a weave, fitting me for a bespoke suit of attitudes, opinions, a way of thinking about the world, and above all, our elite status held close. There just aren't many Jedis in the world.

They told us about the Golden Age. Oh, it was a glorious time. Today it's like that, too, in a way, we do much of the same stuff, but we can't let on, so the glow we see if we learn of a transcendently clever caper is like the shine when Travolta opens the case in "Pulp Fiction." You can't look directly at the light. It would just upset you anyway.

That golden age was mythical but that didn't mean it wasn't real. Myths make reality. The stories they told us may have been unclassified, most of them, or compartmented so low that nobody gave a damn, but it was all part of an informal initiation. After a while I internalized the myths so when I left the building after sitting all day at a desk in a cubicle farm in a large gray office with more than a dozen other desks, connected to more gray offices, my eyes bleary from staring at the screen, my finger sore from clicking mice on a couple of computers (there were several on my desk, one connected to the net after they killed the stupid rule preventing that which wound up keeping people from networking with anyone, and another connected inside, a third beside my desk that was air-gapped and a fourth was -- never mind, you don't need to know). I would go to some rathole restaurant like the China Sea, one of my favorites, over on Annapolis, or stop in a bar for a drink and be surrounded by people who knew next to nothing and believed their beliefs. They certainly knew nothing of the waters in which I was swimming all day every day with glee like a kid on vacation at the beach. They were like people who lived on land and never even waded in the surf, while I was diving in deep waters and I learned to move freely between the land and the sea. I could speak the dialect of the tribe on land if need be, keeping up with the memes that streamed through the networked brains of the innocent collective, and I could free-dive to a hundred feet and explore hidden caves. I learned to be “all things to all people,” me and the Apostle Paul, the prototype for social engineering. All around me were men and women who followed "the news" on their watches or read magazines online and thought they were "well-informed." I loved the feeling of floating above the crowd, looking down. They resembled a seething mass like the floor of a cave I remember in Malaysia, ten miles out of Kuala Lumpur, covered with centipedes feeding on guano. The floor writhed and gleamed like a living thing. People in the herd, the crowd, the humplings who were everywhere, looked like another species. On monitors they looked like little dots that moved around and occasionally touched one another. But every dot was the top of a huge pyramid of data collected from everywhere which we could assemble with a click.

My colleagues bound me to the tribe with their words. The images they transmitted were as stylized as saints in a stained glass window. I learned of heroes and traitors, which directors were loved and which were hated -- and why. I learned about that later from experience when a mission in which I played a minor role was attacked in public by clueless journos, and there we had to sit, we can't hit back, we can't open our mouths, we just have to take it. I learned not to mind, everybody takes a beating once in a while, but I also learned, if the director has our backs, it makes all the difference They have to defend and protect us in the world “out there.” That determined the strength of our loyalty to him or her, so we followed their lead or quietly resisted, undermining their objectives with passive resistance. We weren't much different from other government serfs in that, knowing we'd still be there when this or that appointed toon or tool would revolve out through the door and a new one would arrive with a smile on a fool's mission if he thought the position conferred power in and of itself. He had better learn fast and he had better do the work.

But if one of them threw us under the bus - well, you don't want to live with someone having to taste your food. I remember a time the director walked into an all-hands meeting at the main auditorium and everyone stood and turned their backs. That's how we vote. We circle the wagons and he can't shatter the loyalty we few, we happy few, have to our clan. We are bound more tightly to one another than bishops hiding pedophile peers and protecting a pedophile pope. If they ignore their obligation to speak on our behalf, it's only a mater of time until they're celebrated in a faux ceremony, media releases speak in glowing terms of their tenure, and they're gone.

There were sacred places, too, everywhere in the world where we had worked, and there were few places we hadn't been. I think we were in every country in the world except a few shithole countries, not in Africa, those mattered, but ones into which we could not gain easy access. There were only a few of those, and we flew false flags or intercepted enemies and allies who were in. We can't announce the details of our missions, obviously, we have to use an indoor voice to whisper of the glories that have passed. Then the mention of a name or a place or a mission will cause us to pause, recall our sacred trust, and genuflect inside our heads. Later, of course, I heard other stories that also made me pause, but for different reasons. Back then, they weren't ready to tell me those and I wasn't ready to hear. I would have covered my ears and gone wah-wah-wah. I would have thought it was whining by guys who didn't have the balls to do the job. I wanted to hear nothing but the positive, eliminate the negative.

But oh, that Golden Age! Our people were all over the place. It was before Church and Pike, before Schlesinger and Turner gave away the company jewels and Congress decided to take us on and start a war they couldn't win. I mean, they revolved in and out, while we stayed put. I was astonished by all the magnificent capers we had done. I felt like Jodie Foster when she said with wonder, looking at the universe, “I had no idea.” The bow-shock of my trajectory through the invisible shield that divided the outside from the inside blunted the impact of TMI arriving at speed. I felt as if a plasma glowed around my head as if particles of incoming data ionized and my brain exploded, trying to sync with the stream. I blinked in the dazzling light of my expanding understanding, I grew giddy, I was learning so much so fast, as they filled me in on the wonderful things we had done and changed the picture in my head of what was real, every day, every day. The light made the darkness in which I had walked, in which most others walk, even more striking. And I was just getting started.

So yes, yes indeed, it really was a glorious time. There was Johnny Roselli, and Santo Trafficante, and Sam Giancana, and Frank Costello, and Gene Pope, and Sulzberger and Luce, and Artichoke, and Bluebird, Mockingbird and MK Ultra, and MK Naomi, and MK Delta, and the Navy's Subproject 54 carried out with our help and denied, denied, and JMWave and “Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc.,” Don Cameron and Bill Sargant and Don Hebb, and ZR/Rifle, Azorian and Gold, Merlin and Stargate, there was Celotex and Butane, SRPointer and Redface, Ober and MHChaos (we called Ober “Dickie Four-face” because he wore so many masks under his mask, sometimes two or three, he was like a villain in Dick Tracy. He was even more duplicitous than Angleton, his mentor.) We gloated over Farouk, Al-Quwatli, Trujillo, Lumumba, Diem, Allende, Torres, Sihanouk, Sukarno, Goulart, Gadaffi, Aristide, Noriega, the FMLN, and the Health Alternative Committee, we celebrated Mossedagh and Arbenz, two of our prototype missions, and Papandreau (that one spawned a funny quote, our ambassador complained that the coup was "a rape of democracy", and Maury, the station chief, said, "Oh yeah? How can you rape a whore?"), we interfered in so many elections I lost count, friends and allies, enemies, alike, and we couldn't believe how many ways we fucked up killing Castro. We killed some pigs, flying low over the island, turning pork into poison, but that didn't make up for the fuck-ups. We had more reporters on the payroll than spies in China, for God's sake, and all the major publishers inked agreements to be "patriotic." They killed stories, changed stories, made up stories, everything, and all it took was a telephone call.

I came a little late to the party, Our early post-war work was already magnificent history by the time I arrived. Billions of dollars a year were moving through the agencies. We had friends and relatives all over the world. After the war we often had to destroy democracy to save it, but what the hell, everything has a price. We gained the respect of friend and foe alike. There was no percentage in screwing with us, given what we did when they tried, like whistleblowers, right? We hung their bodies from cranes like at Camp Dora so they dripped on prisoners coming to work (the rest of us, that is). If someone went at us, we hit them back so hard they never did it again. But if you played ball, like the rocket man at that same camp, the Wizard of Peenemunde, you became an American hero. Paperclip was a wet dream. The NAZIs we brought over fueled so much subsequent success, their orgasmic fountains when they celebrated themselves sprayed the sky like fireworks.

So let them try to hurt us by leaking our escapades. See what happens, dipshits. The Italians indicted a bunch of our guys, the Emirates put up pictures of the whole Israeli crew. So what did that accomplish? If anything, it made people know they had better respect us, or else. You wouldn't work for Mossad after seeing the details of that cool caper? You wouldn't want to put on a wig and carry a tennis racket and happily kill some son of a bitch in his hotel? With Israelis, everything is self-defense, like we have a "Defense" Department. The worse that can happen, we have to be contrite for a day in public, do a Uriah Heep. say "We can do better,” then get back to work, laughing in the elevator.

People remember, see, that a complex plot was carried out with style and nothing happened to the perps, except they lived to fight another day, under other names, in other countries.

I was delighted with the subtle ways we changed thinking by inserting beliefs into the mind of society. The interface for doing that was immense. Think of the Inquirer like millions of little billboards at the end of every checkout line, showing headlines to people who don't even realize they're reading them. But they are, they take it in. The Inquirer, now that's a story, Gene Pope was at the agency doing psychological ops the year before he started it. He didn't make money for years, but the cash he needed found its way into his hands, mostly through Frank Costello in New York. When we wanted to kill a story, we made sure they covered it. No one else would touch it after that.

Like I keep trying to say, nothing is what it seems. Are you with me yet?

Sure, we did do some crazy shit, but everyone makes mistakes. We experimented with drugs and drove people nuts and some jumped out the window, so sure, things don't always work. What did Edison say, every failed filament was one step closer to his goal? We tried to speed up aging, produce symptoms of diseases in ways we could reverse, erase memory and create amnesia before and after events, create confusion, paralyze people - if someone could think it up, it seems, we would try it. I was dazzled by our ingenuity, creativity, wild imaginations, technological prowess, and underpinning everything, the out-and-out absence of any scruples, real accountability, or punishment for fucking up. Hide the details of a disaster in a classified server and hey, you're good to go.

After the hearings, after the Church Circus and the Pike Show, after the required display of outrage and indignation had faded from memory, when Congressfolk moved on to other ways of displaying their great work on behalf of “the people,” the public thought we were done with all that stuff. That was silly, wasn't it? Just change the name of a program you don't like and run it under a different moniker. TIA for example. We still had to do what we had to do as required by reality, which we define correctly as what others do or try to do or will if they can do to us.

We learned form our mistakes. After Viet Nam, for example, I heard a four star say to the press, "That's that. You snatched defeat from the jaws of impending victory. You will never do that again. You will never televise another war. Nothing but caskets draped in flags, interviews with the parents of dead heroes, trumpets and fanfares, rituals and rites. You want to cover a war, we will Stockholm-Syndrome your asses with embedding, and after sucking our tits for information we disseminate to taste, after you come to love us like your mothers, then you can write your fucking stories."

I think of a guy who always attended Bilderberg meetings. He said after one in the seventies, after the demonstrations, the riots, the burning cities, the assassinations, "We must ensure that the excesses of democracy never reach this pitch again." And they never have.

We do something similar with media, but because we cover the world, we have to be more subtle. We feed tidbits to reporters from the few majors left and they bay and yap and snap for more. Have you ever seen one dance on his hind legs and turn in a circle to get a reward? I have.

Our immense global enterprise with all its multitudinous interlocking parts would look if you tried to make a picture of it like we dropped a million pick-up-stix. Oh, the complexity -- our structure, wheels within wheels, looks like a galactic cluster, like Laniakea, say. Try to get your mind around that graphic. You can't. You're left saying "billions and billions" as if it's a meaningful phrase. A place marker for "WTF?"

We often use obfuscation inside too. There are plenty of operations, I'd say most if not all, which no one but those on the team should know exist. If we can't raise the level of a clearance to keep out the critics and nitpickers, the crybaby whiners, we'll give a general presentation in the name of transparency and disclosure and show slides like this:

An audience will stare for a minute and pretend it makes sense. If everyone is confused, we did our job. “That was pretty helpful,” they'll tell one another, and if someone says it's bullshit, group-think laughter shuts him down, he will never get promoted, conversations will stop when he approaches, he will find himself shunted off to a job where you had to show up, yes, but the work is irrelevant, he won't be fired but he'll quit from boredom or despair or maybe even kill himself. A head on the city gate, he will become, Game of Thrones-like, or real historical example-like, so someone else will think twice before saying something silly. Just look at the slide, nod as if you understand, and say nothing of substance. After the talk, compliment the speaker, making sure he knows your name. Tell him how helpful he was, one hand on his arm, the other hand out to shake his. Seal the deal.

There was a long corridor we all walked down before we branched off to our offices, interrupted by crossing hallways, dozens of them, and it put us into a trance to walk what seemed like forever down that passageway past hundreds of doors that looked the same, so they didn't register, you see, except as door-shaped blips (door blip, door blip, door blip, door), unless we knew what was happening behind, say, 4F67, and if we weren't read into the program, we had no idea. Those offices were blank spaces in our maps of reality. It was like driving on the only road around some tropical island with palms trees all around, one tree like another (tree blip, tree blip, tree blip, tree), driving past a blur of foliage, an opaque green mass, like a Cezanne landscape that you didn't have the time or inclination to bring into focus, so we counted the hallways crossed and knew for example to turn right at seventeen, trailing our fingers along a railing down the hall, sleep-walking toward our cubefarm in an altered state, off into rainman space without even knowing it until we came out wherever we were headed, saw the door to our office, keyed in a ten digit code if we had to, made a statement for a voice print or looked into the camera's eye, pressed our finger to a slot, whatever they requested, and went in. They removed the railing during some decorating scheme, replacing old beige paint with new beige paint, and the wall was discolored black from the friction of our fingers as we passed. That was the only evidence that we had been there, that dark stripe, and that's all you will ever see of our passing through your lives, because, because, because of the magical things we does. Because we disappear like the clay men in a Flash Gordon serial I used to watch when I came home from school to an empty apartment, entranced by how they disappeared into the wall. I would sit there eating eskimo pies and watch the clay men stumble in and out of the visible world.

I want to do that, I thought when I was five or six. And now to my astonishment I can.

Did watching them disappear into the walls of the cave plant a seed that grew into my vocation? Or did I, like everyone, select a number of dots from the thousands of dots managed by my brain - incidents, attributes, events, wishes, dreams, memories “real” and invented, inputs from everything, all the sensory data that we filter out - and connect them into a sequence that I call “me” or “where I come from” or “my memories” or “my unique history?” As long as my brain believes the story, more or less, what's the harm, even when you know you're making it up? And when your friend sinks into Alzheimer's and you watch his memories disappear, and who he thought he was vanish - what does it matter in the long run? Who cares how you styled your biography or denied this or minimized that -- I mean, I guess we all die and get recycled. Energy comes out of a black hole and returns to our "universe," but it sure doesn't look like it did when it went in. Whatever form it might have had, it hasn't got it any more. So does it matter what went in? Or what came out? Or who is who? What is an identity but a marker for a temporary structure we momentarily use in a context that seems to make sense, while we know deep down that everything is transitory and passing? It is a label on a phase, the pretense that a verb is a noun, one we invest with an illusion of stability and permanence because we must. We call it sanity, reality. But those who know that's bullshit, really do know.

I used to think we were individual entities, self-contained, with boundaries, “selves” if you will, but now I think we are brilliantly persistent illusions, self-consciousness looking into the modular mirrors that constitute our parts, and we kludge the multiple images into a big picture. I think we are each an aperture through which we look inside and out at the world, connected in relationships that we call society which frame the thinkable at the time. Then society looks inside and out at the world, often unsure which is which. Is a photon "external" to the eye it impinges different from what travels to the brain? Provincialism is endless. Even on the coasts, make that especially on the coasts, provincialism is endless.

I am getting abstract again, aren't I? Sorry! It's a defensive ploy that I learned when academic success became my substitute for love. "A" grades made up for the daze in a maze that I called life. No one was there, most of the time, except ghosts, which always means grief. And grief never ends. My friend Kenneth went home to watch TV and his brother found him the next day, the TV still on, dead in his chair. One more hole in my life that will never be filled. One more anchor lost to the sea. No wonder we dream up schemes to modulate our grief or pretend that we don't end. We are spacetime-bound in a brief life, pretending to be a self. My work was a way to escape my knowledge of that fact. It was also a way to dominate, manipulate, deceive myself by deceiving others. To that work I brought my awareness that selves were projections which, artfully crafted, others took at face value. Which is what I had to do to stay sane and which was precisely what the work required. I was a perfect recruit, and that's what Dr. Lessing saw, watching me for four years. That guaranteed acceptance into the system and success, but it also guaranteed, when I broke, that the impact would be worse, much worse, than if I had I seen myself clearly from the beginning, when it mattered, when I had choices, or thought I did. We are only undeceived of that which, once we know it, we can endure knowing.

Grief, grief at what I lost, which I know I never had, but I thought I did, that's all we can ever do, think we have what goes liquid when we try to close our fists around it and keep it, grief from the loss of so many colleagues, friends, and family, permeates my consciousness. I miss deeply the friends who have died, the colleagues who have disappeared, the places I loved, the times of life I thought would never end. At a certain age, one cannot blame a person for drinking a little more, if it helps him get to sleep. The nightmares of his past guard the door like Cerberus at the gates of hell and anything that gets him through, I say, more power to him.

I feel the tide of grief like black water surging onto the shore. Let me go back to the story. The story is more important. And if I don't, you won't keep reading, there had better be some fun along the way. Humanity can not bear very much reality. And I, alas, am human, too. So let me ease into a different genre, entertainment fiction, and distract you from your burdens and your cares. As she distracted me for many years.

Let me entertain you. Let me make you smile.

Let me tell you about Penny.

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