Mike Baker and the Temple of Doom

CNN was interviewing someone named Mike Baker who was identified as “a former CIA covert operations officer.” The interview was about the United States beginning to fly surveillance missions over Syria, as a prelude to bombing ISIS positions. The problem with Mike Baker was that he looked like he’d come out of central casting. He had a chiseled face and the spikey gelled hair of a seasoned actor in the kind of movies where Navy Seals successfully emerge with grateful hostages. If only the footage from Iraq and Syria had been out takes from some film where everything worked out happily ever after. Mike Baker was as unreal as the footage was real. But the question is how someone like Baker was ever a covert operative. His appearance which was about as covert as the name of the company he was identified as running--Diligence. If I were ISIS and I saw him on the street, he’d be a goner. He looked and talked with such poise and confidence that you wondered if he actually had done a stint in Hollywood before joining the CIA or created his role at the Actor’s Studio. Everything was rational including his point that something more would be required than bombing to root ISIS out of Syria. And what would that something be perchance? Troops on the ground? Another private contractor named Blackwater had run into their fair share of problems for murdering civilians in Iraq (“Blackwater Shootings, ‘Murder,’ Iraq says,” NYT, 10/8/07, but maybe Diligence LLC could provide that extra something in a more constrained and humane way. You could just imagine Mike Baker in his camouflage outfit, his face blackened with grease leading his team out of a chopper. You could see them disappearing into the smoldering remnants of some ancient civilization ISIS had just destroyed, like say Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

From Russia with Love

Classic rock and oldies stations still proliferate, and so, apparently, do cold war spies. Just when a new generation of John Le Carrés was getting set to produce novels about the revaluation of the Renminbi, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps with the lethal capacity to destroy countries like Iceland and Ireland, the FBI discovers a good old fashioned spy ring, replete with everything from suburban couples to a vampish real estate agent who used Facebook as a cover for espionage. “Much of the ring’s activity…took place in and around New York,” the Times reported (“In Ordinary Lives, U.S. Sees the Work of Russian Agents,” NYT, 6/29/10). “The alleged agents were spotted in a bookstore in Lower Manhattan, a bench near the entrance to Central Park and a restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens.” The question naturally arises: under what conditions does an agent go so deeply under cover that he or she is no longer a spy? If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck—surely this is one of the first laws of espionage learned at War College. Apparently, these spies were so much a part of the American fabric that neighbors were shocked to find out that the Murphys of Montclair, N.J. were Russkies, or that 28-year-old Anna Chapman, or Anya as she called herself on Facebook, was a latter-day Colonel Rosa Klebb, the murderous agent played by Lotte Lenya in From Russia with Love whose secret weapon is a venom-tipped blade in the toe of her orthopedic shoe. Furthermore, what were these agents doing that was so different from what ordinary citizens like you or I do? “The alleged agents were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy toward Iran, C.I.A. leadership, Congressional politics…” explained the Times. Aren’t these the same things most patriotic Americans want to know about?

The Baggage We All Carry

Let’s talk about why Faisal Shahzad got on Air Emirates when he was supposed to be on the no-fly list. Actually, there isn’t much to talk about. Most seasoned fliers can probably provide the answers to the questions that international security services, from the CIA to the Mossad, will be asking in the days ahead, though the answers are likely to be more anecdotal than statistical. Ask how many parents of toddlers who have ordered the chicken nuggets happy meal on the flight to Frankfurt have received instead a series of kosher or vegetarian selections, including the none too happy-making hummus and baba ganoush platter. Or, let’s discuss communications regarding another star-crossed flight, the Northwest Airlines plane carrying passengers to Detroit on Christmas Day. And what about the earlier blunder allowing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to get on a KLM flight in Lagos in the first place? By the way, Faisal’s and Umar’s fathers could join the same support group in that they are both prominent citizens, one a banker and one a former high ranking Air Force officer, in their respective countries. They would inevitably have something to offer in a discussion about how lives of privilege lead to Taliban membership. Come to think of it, it would make a great Oprah. But we are digressing. Any investigation that deals with why people who shouldn’t are getting on planes must go back to asking the question of why certain pieces of luggage are not getting on planes when they should.  Why have so many of us found that our luggage has inadvertently made it onto an unintentional no-fly list? Let’s talk about checking a bag from Kennedy to Nice with a stopover in Paris. Let’s talk about the valiant Alitalia baggage personnel in Florence who located said bag as it was refused entrance to yet another country. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars,” but in the baggage we carry. Discover all the lost bags that never made it on planes and you’ll find the explanation for all the terrorists who did. And what about the baggage we all carry around even when we’re not flying?