In 2006, as the war in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, a Pentagon employee working on special operations teamed up with a Czech technology entrepreneur who had dabbled in the porn business and devised what they considered an ingenious plan. Knowing that video games played on mobile phones were popular throughout the Middle East, the team wanted to build games that contained positive messages about the United States. But the games weren't just about propaganda. Every download would give the United States a window into the digital comings and goings of whomever was playing it it, a cyber foothold that could allow American spies to potentially track and collect information on thousands of people.
The propaganda/spy campaign was dubbed Native Echo, and it was conceived by Michael Furlong, a colorful civilian employee working for US Special Operations Command, and a company called U-Turn, which was headquartered in Prague and founded by a pro-American Czech national named Jan Obrman, whose parents had fled the Soviets in the 1960s. The idea was to target Middle Eastern teenagers in "high risk/unfriendly areas," and over time to integrate the US messages "into the lifestyle of the targets," ideally to make them more amenable to US armed forces, and to counter the rhetoric of Muslim fundamentalists.
The full account of this previously unreported intelligence operation is found in the new book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by New York Times national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti. The book explores the ways in which the CIA--which before 9/11 had long been out of the business of killing people--and the US military--which had not been the domain of spies--have often changed roles over the past decade. It is filled with characters, like Furlong, who move between the membranes of these two worlds, and find themselves at home in either one.
Mazzetti writes that the first mobile game developed for Native Echo was modeled on the popular Call of Duty series. This new "shooter" game, Iraqi Hero, "took the player on an odyssey through the streets of Baghdad, shooting up insurgents trying to kill civilians in a wave of terrorist attacks," Mazzetti writes. "The goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver the secret plans for an upcoming insurgent attack, plans that had been stolen from a militia group's headquarters."
Native Echo was timed to coincide with the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007. Its "main focus was on combatting the flood of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa," Mazzetti writes.
As an intelligence collection program, Native Echo was both broad and audacious:
"Thousands of people would be sending their mobile-phone numbers and other identifying information to U-Turn, and that information could be stored in military databases and used for complex data-mining operations carried out by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. The spies wouldn't have to go hunting for information; it would come to them."
In order to hide the US role in the scheme, "Furlong convinced [U-Turn's] executives to create an offshore company that could receive Pentagon contracts but not be tied directly to the United States," Mazzetti writes. Obrman set up JD Media Transmission Systems, LLC, incorporated in the Seychelles Islands, in order to receive money transfers from the US through a foreign bank account.
Furlong was a master at working the byzantine procurement bureaucracy to further his covert plans. "Taking advantage of a law that allows firms owned by Native Americas to get a leg up when bidding on government contracts, Furlong arranged for U-Turn to partner with Wyandotte Net Tel, a firm located on a tiny speck of tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma," Mazzetti writes.
U-Turn developed two more games for Native Echo--Oil Tycoon, which challenged players to protect vital pipelines and infrastructure, and City Mayor, in which players became urban planners and rebuilt a fictional city destroyed by terrorists. The team came up with various ways to distribute the games, including by hand via memory cards, which could be sold or given away in markets and bazaars, Mazzetti reports. "The way to get far wider distribution, however, was to post the games on Web sites and blogs frequented by gamers in the Middle East. This allowed [Special Operations Command] to monitor how many people were downloading the games and, more important, who was doing it."
Mazzetti concludes that it's hard to know how far Native Echo went, and even how many companies like U-Turn were hired to create propaganda for the military. Furlong came up with other wild ideas, some of which were never approved. But the relationship between the military and U-Turn blossomed, and it offers a concrete illustration of how the armed forces evolved into a network of spies.
The Way of the Knife is full of stories like this, of people living on the edge between two worlds, frequently not sure how to operate on turf that had long been forbidden. The book is a culmination of Mazzetti's years of reporting on the intersections of the military and the CIA, and it is a forceful, compelling articulation of a new way of war. Mazzetti's reporting has been among some of the most important, in that it has shed light on usually hidden practices, particularly the use of brutal interrogations on terrorist detainees. As the book unfolds, we see how the 9/11 attacks shake the CIA out of their Cold War culture of espionage, and turn the agency into a highly-efficient global killing force.
I spoke with Mazzetti yesterday as he was heading off to New York to begin a book tour. He said that he began working after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and that the first few months of writing were filled with some anxiety, since his journalism beat was now the hottest around. Lots of his competitors were writing books and long magazine articles about the raid. But Mazzetti said that he wanted to write something broader, to show how the long arc of the war on terror has fundamentally changed how the US fights.
"I covered the Pentagon for five years, and then I have been covering the intelligence world since 2006," Mazzetti said. "And really, I realized that I was kind of covering the same beat. The lines that existed before 9/11, where the military did this and the spies did that, really have blurred."
Mazzetti said he's glad to be back at the Times after a 15-month book leave. He had missed the collegiality of an office. Writing a book is solitary business. But in the midst of the project, Mazzetti and his wife, Lindsay, welcomed Max, their first child.
"I can't wait until he is old enough to read this book," Mazzetti writes in his acknowledgments. "I cherish the memories of the mornings we spent together during the first few months, and of the smiles he delivered when I came home at the end of particularly frustrating days of book writing. They put things in perspective."
Margaret M Stewart/shutterstock.com
“Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition.” --Monty Python
When the ships were sunk and the dead counted, this much was clear: The most expensive war game in history had not gone according to plan.
In July 2002, the U.S. armed forces staged a quarter-billion-dollar simulation of a war with a rogue Middle Eastern country in the Persian Gulf. Coming so close to a real war with Iraq, military planners hoped the exercise would be especially instructive. The game was played using some real people and equipment, but it was made more convincing through the application of Hollywood-style computer animation. Commanders watched on screens as huge numbers of troops prepared for battle, and as aircraft and ships deployed in the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. side, or Blue Team, had spent months studying their adversary, the Red Team, They knew the size of Red’s land, sea, and air forces. Where all its command and control systems were located. They knew all the weak spots in its national infrastructure--the power grid, national communications systems. And because the Blue leaders believed they’d accounted for Red’s every possible move on the battlefield, they expected to defeat the enemy in short order.
But on the first day of the game, Red failed to respond to Blue’s demand for immediate and unconditional surrender. Unbeknownst to Blue, the Red commander had sent attack orders to his forces through unusual means, including motorcycle couriers, calls shouted from minarets, and World War II-era light signals. They were all modes of communication that Blue had never accounted for. Why would Red use them when he had satellites and telephones?
Expecting a quick end to the battle, the Blue fleet instead found itself surrounded by a swarm of small, seemingly innocuous Red boats. Without warning, the small boats let loose a devastating volley of cruise missiles at the Blue fleet, which, never having anticipated such an aggressive move, was helpless to respond. Some of the boats were loaded with explosives and rammed into their gargantuan adversaries. By the end of the attack, several Blue vessels sat at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Had this been a real expertise, it’s estimated that 20,000 U.S. forces would be dead.
The story of Millennium Challenge is one of the most frequently cited modern examples of an ancient maxim of warfare: Know your enemy. Blue’s commanders failed in large part because they evinced a profound lack of empathy. They had never anticipated that Red would act so different than them. They had not put themselves in the minds of a devious and desperate dictator who, knowing he was outmatched in a head-to-head fight, would resort to asymmetric tactics--and some centuries old ones, at that. Millennium Challenge became an object lesson in the dangers of not thinking like your enemy, and of the potential gains of doing so.
The lessons of that war game seem especially poignant now, as tensions mount with North Korea and the United States attempts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We are reminded that U.S. intelligence about its adversaries is limited, and often not very good. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “after a high-visibility display of military power aimed at deterring North Korean provocations, the White House is dialing back the aggressive posture amid fears that it could inadvertently trigger an even deeper crisis.” A previously devised “playbook” of escalating displays of force was apparently based on a set of assumptions about North Korea’s behavior that might not be panning out.
"The concern was that we were heightening the prospect of misperceptions on the part of the North Koreans, and that that could lead to miscalculations," a senior administration official told the newspaper.
“Officials said the U.S. didn't believe North Korea had any imminent plans to take military action in response to the exercises,” the Journal reported. “Rather, the shift reflects concerns within the administration that the North, caught off guard, could do something rash, contrary to intelligence assessments showing that it is unlikely to respond militarily to the U.S. show of force.” [Emphasis mine.]
Military planners don’t like to be caught by surprise. As it happened, the ones who planned Millennium Challenge were so chagrined by Red’s audacious and hugely successful attack that they reset the game. The Blue ships were magically floated back to the surface. The dead were brought back to life. And as the game played on for another two weeks, the Red Team was barred from engaging in any more unexpected tactics. The Red commander quit the game in protest. The Blue Team, playing with the rules in its favor, won round two in a rout.
The military is fond of its war games, and for good reason. Even when the outcome is unpredictable--or in the case of Millennium Challenge, undesirable--the play itself is instructive. When properly constructed, war games convince players that the stakes are real. Even when played sitting around a table using rudimentary set pieces--pieces of paper, toy planes and ships--players somehow see past the artifice and behave as if the scenario were real.
“Gaming’s transformative power grows out of its particular connections to storytelling,” write Peter Perla and ED McGrady, two game designers, in a paper published by the Naval War College. A good game creates the kind of willing suspension of disbelief you experience when you watch an engrossing movie or read a page-turning book. But since play is not a passive experience, gaming heightens that sense of belief. “Gaming, as a story-living experience, engages the human brain, and hence the human being participating in a game, in ways more akin to real-life experience than to reading a novel or watching a video," Perla and McGrady write.
The effects of games linger after the play has finished. The authors recall a bioterrorism war game run by the White House in 1998 that so impressed President Clinton he asked Congress to increase the counterterrorism budget by $294 million to defend the nation from weaponized pathogens. The President had been primed for the plausibility of a bio-attack by a fictional account he’d been reading in Richard Preston’s novel The Cobra Event. (Preston is also the author of a non-fiction book on disease outbreaks, Hotzone, that is all the more terrifying because it’s true.)
The key to a successful game is that it not only seem real, but that it present the players with an adversary that they would probably never imagine, an event that is “at odds with how you see the world,” write Perla and McGrady. The crazed scientist who builds a deadly virus. The rogue commander who uses suicidal tactics. Absent this surprise, “it is unlikely that any game architecture could present an effective, realistic scenario...”
Of course, in Millennium Challenge, the Blue Team faced just such an enemy. Did they learn from that experience? A year later, U.S. forces easily defeated the military of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But then, for the next eight years, they found themselves locked in an asymmetric war with insurgents, for which no one had planned. Blue did not think like Red.
Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio are teaming up for a new biopic about former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
Deadline reports:
"Gorbachev serves as a consultant on the project, which captures the dissolution of the USSR through his eyes. ... The movie, written by former Hell On Wheels showrunner John Shiban and executive produced by DiCaprio, Jennifer Killoran, Hanks, Goetzman and Industry Entertainment’s Keith Addis, stems from DiCaprio’s relationship with Gorbachev. The two met when the Russian Nobel Peace Prize winner appeared in DiCaprio’s environmental movie The 11th Hour."
Also of note, former Washington Post Moscow bureau chief David Hoffman will be serving as a consultant on the film. Hoffman's tremendous book Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, which won the Pulitzer Prize, would be essential material for anyone making a film about the Soviet Union in Gorbachev's time. It's good to hear that Hoffman will be involved with the production.
In the 12 years I've been writing about intelligence, I've heard from more practitioners of the craft than I can remember that women make better spies than men. Better analysts, too. And I don't just hear this from women. Indeed, I think I've heard more male intelligence officers say that their female colleagues' "intuition" and "patience" makes them particularly well suited to the painstaking job of cultivating sources or making sense of fragments of information. The thinking goes that there's something about the way women solve problems versus the way men do it, and something about the way women listen, observe, and even nurture other people that often yields better results.
The evidence to support this theory is, as far as I know, entirely anecdotal. But I've always found it compelling. I recall talking years ago with Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA unit tracking Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks, that women made up the bulk of his analytic team, and that he thought they'd done a superb job. Was there something about their gender that predisposed them to being better at this kind of work than men? Scheuer seemed to think there was.
Another former intelligence officer shed more light on this idea when he recounted his own experiences tracking terrorist groups for the Army. Erik Kleinsmith, whom I write about in my book, liked to rate analysts using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which assigns people to one of 16 personality types depending on how they process information and make decisions. Kleinsmith thought the best analysts excelled at "sensing"; they tended to solve problems by relying on what they could see and touch in the physical world, on facts. Kleinsmith was a sensor, according to Myers-Briggs, as were most of the analysts on his team—who were mostly women.
Certainly the CIA leadership believes a woman is qualified to lead analysts. Fran P. Moore is the current director of intelligence for the agency, overseeing all its analytical work. And right now, the CIA director, John Brennan, is considering whether to put a woman in charge of the National Clandestine Service, the operational side of the agency. She is now acting in the role. (Her name has not been revealed publicly.) And filmmakers have turned to women as protagonists in spy stories, including Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty, and the upcoming documentary Manhunt, based on the book by Peter Bergen about the hunt for bin Laden.
Women intelligence officers I've heard from don't dispute that their gender gives them some practical advantages, even if they can't put their finger on precisely why. Three former CIA officers took up the discussion this week on the New America Foundation's "In the Tank" podcast. Valerie Plame Wilson, Nada Bakos, and Lindsay Moran, who all had exciting, challenging, and even historic careers in the spy business, thought being a woman gave them a leg up in certain respects.
As a female case officer, "you are less threatening," said Wilson, who was a CIA operations officer for 20 years. "And without going too far over the top, I do think women are more intuitive and much more cognizant of body language, picking up signals, and things that are really important to reading potential recruits."
"There's a lot of patience involved with following some of the issues," said Bakos, who was a CIA targeting officer and helped track Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, work that relied on a fusion of intelligence gathering and analysis, in concert with special forces. "I think women are probably a little bit more patient at pulling the threads and piecing some of this together."
"I was not a mother when I was a spy," said Moran, who was a CIA case officer from 1998 to 2003. "But I realized later when I did become a mother that that maternal instinct kind of plays into it, too. The foreign agents you recruit, you're really taking care of them in a way. . . . You're kind of like a psychiatrist or a therapist to them. You're listening to them. I think women are conditioned from a very young age to sit back and listen in a way that men aren't."
Moran noted an obvious disadvantage for women in the field: Most of the people they're trying to persuade to spy for the US are men. Men they're meeting with in parked cars, or in hotel rooms. "You have to walk a vey fine line between flattering that person . . . [and] at the same time making it clear you're never going to sleep with them."
Of course, the United States hasn't had a woman at the helm of the CIA. Tara Maller, the host of the New America Foundation podcast, has a list of reasons a woman should get the job. I like reason eight: "Plenty of women are qualified for this role." That should be the determining factor. But isn't it interesting to think about what a woman might bring to this job that a man might not? We've had plenty of time to consider the inverse. I suspect, given recent events, that we're soon going to find out what a female director can do.
The Washington Post is short-listing the possible candidates to replace Robert Mueller as FBI Director, after he ends his tenure this summer. At the top of the list, says the paper, is Lisa Monaco, who recently ran the National Security Division at the Justice Department, was Mueller's longest-serving chief of staff, and is now at the White House in CIA Director John Brennan's old job.
The list could probably stop at Monaco, given how improbable the other people on it are. Putting aside Monaco's legitimate credentials, and the fact that her name has indeed been making the rounds over the past few months--I've heard it from the lips of FBI watchers and former Justice Department officials--the other people on this list are not likely to want the job or be able to easily sail through confirmation.
Let's take them one at a time.
Merrick Garland is an esteemed jurist, chief of the U.S. Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit, and widely seen as a potential nominee for the Supreme Court. Why on earth would he give that up to be the FBI Director? Garland has also been out of the game, on the executive branch side, for a long time. He took his seat on the bench in 1997. The Justice Department he worked in during the Oklahoma City bombing and the Unabomber investigation was a very different place than it is now. He is also, perhaps, too closely associated in the eyes of many experts with the he culture of the department pre-9/11, when intelligence and law enforcement operations were separated by statute, mistrust, and misunderstanding.
James Comey, who was deputy attorney general to John Ashcroft, is, by my read, greatly enjoying his life in the private sector and the benefits that go with it. He has recently worked for defense contractor Lockheed Martin, the high-profile hedge fund Bridgewater, and recently took a seat on the board of directors of HSBC Holdings. Comey cares deeply about national security and counterterrorism issues, but he can exert a lot of influence in those areas from his private perch, which brings him into proximity with decision makers in business and in government. Also, I think that Republicans would see him as too liberal, and Democrats would see him as too conservative. (A testament to his intellectual honesty, perhaps, but not likely to make him a shoe in for Senate confirmation.) And PS--Did you catch the part about him working for a defense contractor and a hedge fund? Optics problems abound here, fairly or not.
Patrick Fitzgerald's name gets trotted out whenever there's a vacancy in a senior Justice post. I think people toss it onto every short list just to make it look longer. His political baggage as the prosecutor of Scooter Libby is enough to kill his chances.
Neil MacBride, maybe in five years or so. He needs more seasoning. If he's truly on a short list, and not just thrown in artificially, he's a longshot.
For good measure, or maybe for levity, the Post also quotes the national executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, Jim Pasco, who suggests the White House consider Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who used to be the D.C. Police Chief and who has never held a federal position, or Ray Kelly, the New York Police Commissioner. Who is 71 years old.
It's worth noting that Garland, Comey, and Fitzgerald also surfaced on a short list reported in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, along with Ken Wainstein, Michael Mason, John Pistole, and Jamie Gorelick, whose names aren't surfacing now. (Although, I know some non-partisan experts who think highly of Wainstein and have mentioned he'd be a good candidate.)
And missing from the Post's article are some names that seem more plausible than the ones reported. For instance, how about David Kris? I doubt he's interested in returning to Washington from his corporate counsel job in Seattle, but he's got more obvious credentials in the operational aspects of law enforcement and intelligence than many of the candidates on the current list. For that matter, why not Fran Townsend? Granted, she's a Republican, and probably quite content in private practice and working as an on-air analyst for CNN. But if we're talking about plausible candidates here, you have to look to people who have done substantial work of the kind that will consume much of the FBI Director's attention.
Monaco really fits that bill more than anyone on the list, in terms of her recent experience and its depth. Also, nominating her would allow President Obama to make history; a woman has never led the FBI. As I noted last week, after Obama picked Julia Pearson to run the Secret Service, the tide has obviously turned in favor of more women in top security positions. Even if Monaco doesn't get the nod for the FBI, a woman eventually will, and not, I think, in the distant future.
There will be an historic burial at Arlington National Cemetery tomorrow. The first Swiss man will be laid to rest in ground normally reserved for American military veterans.
René Joyeuse, who was born in Zurich in 1920, helped gather intelligence for Allied Forces during World War II. Joyeuse reportedly escaped to the U.S. as war broke out in Europe, but he returned and joined the French Resistance. The OSS, the precursor to the CIA, recruited him as an agent. He eventually moved back to the U.S. and with his wife raised two sons.
Caitlin Gibson wrote a really nice feature about Arlington Cemetery for us a few years ago. As she noted, most of the recent burials have been reserved for veterans of World War II and their spouses. Active-duty casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for only a handful of burials each month. More than 330,000 Americans have been laid to rest at the cemetery, which covers 624 acres.
The folks at the OSS Society alerted us to Joyeuse's story. Incidentally they throw a hell of a party every year to celebrate the history of the nation's first human intelligence service. I went to the last one, where one of several gin martini toasts was offered to the French Reisstance. Another fun fact: Also in attendance that night...David Petraeus and a then lesser-known biographer named Paula Broadwell.
Ken Anderson and Ben Wittes, two good friends of Dead Drop, are embarking on an intriguing and from my perspective quite welcome new project. They're writing a book that will pull together all the significant speeches Obama administration officials have given on national security law, and then "weave it all back together, creating a synthetic account of the administration’s views that is worth more collectively than the sum of its parts."
Called Speaking the Law, it will be "a kind of handbook on the framework for counterterrorism," using administration officials' own words as the foundation. "Consider it the White Paper the administration has never issued," say Ken and Ben.
I suspect Obama administration officials themselves will be among this book's most avid readers, given the authors' premise, and that journalists and scholars will find it useful as well:
"There is a myth that the administration has had little to say on the subject of its counterterrorism authorities, especially targeted killing and drones--largely because it has declined to release publicly its Office of Legal Counsel targeted killing memoranda. Part of the point of Speaking the Law is to show how wrong this myth really is. The administration has actually said a huge amount. It’s just that it has said a great deal of it orally, and has broken up its utterances among a number of different statements."
The authors are publishing the chapters serially online, and then the Hoover Institution will put out a hardcover version when all the work is finished. The introduction and first chapter are available now.
“Juche” is one of the key philosophical pillars underlying the North Korean national ideology. It roughly translates to “self-reliance,” and it is invoked by the country’s leaders to justify its state-centered policies and to set the North Korean people culturally apart from the rest of the world.
Juche Strong, a new documentary by DC-filmmaker Rob Montz, explores the origins of this idea and the broader North Korean propaganda apparatus. The film will premiere in DC tomorrow, and it will be screened at the Cato Institute on April 11.
Montz’s thesis is provocative and perhaps not one you’ve heard before to explain why North Korea behaves in ways that seem utterly counterproductive, and that have isolated it from much of the world. While Montz doesn’t paper over or disregard the extraordinary, organized tools of state oppression that North Korea’s ruling family deploys to keep its grip on power--cutting off its people from information, forcing its citizens into labor camps, and a cult-like demand for loyalty--he finds that there’s something deeper at work that keeps North Korea alive, and that keeps more North Koreans from fleeing their country.
It is the juche idea, the self-reinforcing message that North Koreans are fundamentally superior, that has captured the imagination of its people for generations. “North Korea has in some way perfected the tools of ideological control,” Montz explained when we sat down recently to discuss the film. “Those tools can kind of look silly from the outside, but if you peer into them they have an internal logic if you’ve grown up in that environment.”
Montz traveled to North Korea and interviewed a wide range of experts in order to understand how the people see themselves. He says despite the often comical depictions of the regime as detached from reality and on the brink of demise, it is “significantly more resilient than even the experts give it credit for.” Montz was by no means an expert when he started making the film a few years ago. Initially, he set out to tell a story about North Korea’s competition in the 2010 World Cup; it was the first time time the country had played in the tournament since 1966. But as Montz dug deeper into North Korean history and began to confront his own preconceptions about its society, the story changed. Here are some experts from our conversation.
What was your perception of North Korea when you started making the film?
I suffered from a lot of the misconceptions that this film is now specifically designed to combat. The media portrays North Koreans as automatons. Mindless followers. I see them repeatedly being scrubbed of their humanity. And [the conclusion] is that either this regime is colossally silly--and I can assure you that was very prominently in place during this recent Dennis Rodman fiasco--or it’s this place continues to exist purely because of oppression. It’s a purely totalitarian state and the only way it maintains social order only is through the gun and the jack boot.
The more I dug into it, I found that their nuclear program does matter. Their relationship with China does matter. The labor camps do matter as the maintenance of control. But another equally important pillar is the national ideology.
So this is juche. Where did it come from?
When Kim Il-Sung takes over in the 50s, he’s staring at people who have just relieved themselves of 40 years of incredibly brutal Japanese control. Then they go through the Korean War. This is a people primed to the idea that foreigners are not to be trusted,and that we need to figure out a way to operate completely independent of foreign influence.
Additionally, the Korean peninsula has centuries of acute xenophobia embedded in its culture. The idea is that you meld those two together and make it a founding philosophical principle of the regime. How much of it was a conscious crafting of a specific narrative or an organic expression of the culture, I don’t know. It’s got to be a little bit of both. But if you’re staring at a people that have just had a horrid experience with imperial control, it’s really smart to make a centerpiece of your propaganda that we are a self-reliant people that doesn’t depend on anyone else.
How do they view South Koreans?
I think they view them as brothers who are being misled or oppressed by a sort of idiot government. Coming down from the Juche Tower in Pyongyang, I asked a man in his 30s if he thought he’d see reunification in his lifetime. And he said yes. I think he’s indicative of most North Koreans; they think reunification is inevitable. Obviously that doesn't accord with the facts at all. It seems so silly to us. But that has always been an essential part of the sell to the North Korean people.
How much is communist ideology a part of the North Korean national ideology, of juche?
It’s not about trying to find some sense of solidarity with the rest of the global working class. It’s about a clean break between the North Korean people and everyone else. They actually eliminated the word communism from their constitution. They used to have statues of Lenin and Marx on their main square. Those have been recently removed. It’s been a gradual, concerted effort to eliminate any notion that some other country had anything to do with the philosophical ideology of the country and its ability to be independent in the first place.
It doesn’t do it justice to just talk about it as a communist state. It’s a unique fusion, but not in a silly way. It has earned the right to be taken seriously, and I only see people think of it as a nuclear-touting, bipolar, wantonly self destructive rogue state.
I’d like the regime to disappear. I want North Korea to have freedom. But you can’t have a hope of achieving true reform if you don’t have a basic understanding of how the country operates.
How did you manage to get into the country?
Getting into North Korea is incredibly simple. There are tour companies. Go on Kayak.com. Drop $1,300 on a flight. The tour group meets up with you. I brought a laptop and a camera. You’re allowed to film there.They don’t want you filming civilians or army personnel, but it’s not difficult to take covert shots of people.
But they restrict your movements. You have a minder.
Absolutely. For instance, they took us through the subway. We briefly chatted with some North Korean kids on their way to school. They seemed obviously afraid of us. You’re not supposed to film them. But if you just turn on the camera and close the viewfinder, you can take pictures. That’s how I got some of the shots inside the subway system.
How do North Korea’s current provocations fit within its ideological playbook?
I think this is just a regime that has already demonstrated being astonishingly adept at self-preservation. For decades, they’ve done a very good job of playing the international community to continue to accrue power and to continue to exist as a country. I think it’s incredibly unlikely they’d do things that are suicidal. I have zero fear of a missile strike from North Korea [on the United States]. That is all done for internal PR purposes. None of it indicates a genuine military strategy. The nuclear tests, breaking agreements, I don’t think that will have any influence on their behavior, and I don’t think it represents a genuine threat to the Western world.
Why did you decide to make a film in the first place?
I knew that I wanted to learn how to make films, but I hated the idea of going to school and accruing debt. And they don’t teach you all the business aspects of film. I’d rather take two years, make a film myself, make a lot of mistakes, but come out of it with $1,000 in credit card debt and also a first hand experience of every single aspect of the filmmaking process.
I’m a fellow at a non-profit called the Moving Picture Institute. They gave me about $10,000 to make this film. They also were a fiscal crowd sponsors for a crowd sourcing campaign and put me in touch with a lot of DC filmmakers.
President Obama has tapped a new director of the Secret Service. And she will be the first woman director in the 148-year history of the elite law enforcement agency.
Julia Pierson has been with the Secret Service more than 30 years. She was a police officer in Orlando before she joined the agency, in 1983. She ran the Miami field office, which is one of the most prestigious. And she was most recently the chief of staff at headquarters in Washington.
Pierson’s name had come up in conversations I had recently with Secret Service agents about who might replace Sullivan, but she didn’t seem to be the odds-on favorite.
The appointment of a woman is historic. But it is also politically significant, coming one year after a major sex scandal, which I write about in the current issue of the magazine, that battered the agency’s public image and exposed a culture of male agents behaving badly.
Revelations that Secret Service agents had hired prostitutes during a presidential trip to Cartagena, Colombia, shook the agency in two fundamental ways, and Pierson is going to have to address both of them.
First, and most obviously, it was a political and public relations disaster. In an instant, the image of the stoic, suit-clad, shades-wearing agent—the vast majority of whom are men—was replaced with a carousing, drunken, unhinged party animal. We learned that the unofficial motto among married agents on foreign trips was “wheels up, rings off.” We heard about self-styled “rock stars without guitars” who were not above using their elite status to pick up women in bars. The 13 men implicated in Cartagena humiliated the agency and their ultimate boss, President Obama. Nine of them lost their jobs.
But there was a second, harder-to-discern set of consequences to the Cartagena affair. For many agents, the bigger disgrace lay in how the Secret Service's leaders handled the misbehavior and the intense media and congressional scrutiny that followed. The agents in question were subjected to intense, some of them say improper, interrogations, which included polygraph exams, threats of losing their security clearances, and instructions not to cooperate with an independent investigation by the Homeland Security Department. When the agents' misdeeds became public, as the result of a press leak, senior officials insisted that the bad behavior was aberrant, and not part of a pattern of sexual indiscretion on trips.
Mark Sullivan, then the agency’s director, did his best Capt. Renault; he was “shocked, shocked!” to find that his agents were hiring hookers when they should have been protecting the President. In testimony before Congress, Sullivan said, “I never one time had any supervisor or any other agent tell me that this type of behavior is condoned.” But that statement, and others from Sullivan’s lieutenants in the press, strained credulity. To believe that the Cartagena affair was unique, you’d also have to believe that this group of men—not all of whom knew one another—broke into separate groups and independently got the idea, for the first time ever, to go out looking for prostitutes in a foreign city.
The fact is, such late-night outings aren’t all that unusual. Some of the men in Cartagena had hired hookers on the road before. At least one had had long-distance affairs with women he’d met in bars while traveling with two Presidents. And all of them could believe, based on prior experience, that while the Secret Service didn’t expressly condone womanizing and solicitation, it didn’t go out of its way to stamp out such behavior, either.
The agency’s leadership has fallen in the eyes of many agents. They feel betrayed by the brass, whom they see as tossing lower-level employees under the bus in order to deflect attention from problems at the top. Sullivan was already on thin ice after the notorious Gate Crashers incident during a White House dinner. And some of his inner circle had had their own tawdry affairs.
The last straw, for some I talked to, came when the Secret Service required all its employees to go through mandatory “ethics” training. These were courses held in the Washington area, at which attendees were lectured on the right and wrong way to behave on a trip. And it was made clear that one-night stands, as as well as longer-term extramarital affairs, were off limits.
That message was especially tough to swallow coming from A.T. Smith, the deputy director of the Secret Service, who spoke at some of these training sessions. It is widely known among the agency’s ranks, and it was publicly reported more than a decade ago, that when Smith was in charge of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s security detail, he was having an affair with President Clinton’s cousin, who worked in the White House scheduling office, and whom he took to numerous White House social events. The Secret Service’s own training manuals specifically warned against adultery because it was a compromising relationship, one that put an agent at risk of extortion. For some agents, to hear Smith give a lecture on the danger’s of sexual indiscretion epitomized how out-of-touch, and arrogant, the Secret Service leadership had become.
Any new director—regardless of gender—would have to address this residual animosity and attempt to heal the rift that was exposed, and aggravated, by the Cartagena scandal. It remains to be seen what kind of leader Pierson will be and how she’ll be received; she is, after all, part of senior management. And by no means should we assume that Pierson’s gender alone will give her any more credibility with agents.
But putting a woman in charge sends an immediate signal that the Secret Service wants to change the image of a globe-trotting gaggle of man-boys. The White House surely wants this, too. And it would have been harder to pull it off had the President tapped a man to succeed Sullivan. Not impossible, but harder.
Stepping back from scandal, let’s also put this appointment in its historic perspective. The Secret Service is one of the country’s most powerful law enforcement agencies. Now that a woman is in charge, can we really expect to wait that long before a woman becomes director of the FBI? A woman is already in charge of another elite organization, the US Marshals Service.
The tide is turning in the intelligence community and the military, as well. Two of the nation’s biggest intelligence agencies are now run by women, as is the Defense Department’s R&D organization. And with the integration of women into military combat positions, the day will come when we see a female chair of the joint chiefs of staff.
Pierson has her work cut out for her. But her achievement must also be viewed through the lens of momentous change in the leadership and the culture of some of the country’s most important institutions.
Illustration by Gluekit.
A year ago, revelations that Secret Service agents had hired prostitutes during a presidential trip to Cartagena, Colombia, triggered the most embarrassing incident in the 148-year-old agency’s history. Was it a one-time incident or part of a pattern of agents behaving badly?
That's the question I tackle in a feature story in the current issue of the magazine. The truth is, such late-night outings aren’t all that unusual. Some of the men in Cartagena had hired hookers on the road before. At least one had had long-distance affairs with women he’d met in bars while traveling with two Presidents. And all of them could believe, based on prior experience, that while the Secret Service's top leaders didn’t expressly condone womanizing and solicitation, they didn’t go out of their way to stamp out such behavior, either.
