Flash Purposes and Pocket Litter

The documents "are not utilized in themselves"
   Is the official word per the agency,
They are used for flash purposes and pocket litter
Entire identities created out of whole cloth,
   Cover for operatives, the memo emphasizes,
The agents never actually charge credit card purchases

Alias document is the term of art,
   Worthy of the expense and effort
To create fake birth certificates,
   Driver's licenses and so forth
Strict controls are in place,
   They merely corroborate identifying documents
The burden of intelligence services
   Who carry out the dirty work of government

Sufficient audit trail.
   Rest assured, we follow rules and regulations
Believable stories we manage to create,
   The essence of misdirection
In bureaucratic prose
   That elevates deeds from their squalid ground
We lay out a potted history
   Of this organ of the executive branch

In tradecraft and intelligence,
   Forgery is a core competency
Pay no attention to occasional slips,
   We manufacture our own reality
The art of understatement,
   Prima facie law violations
Comes with the territory,
   Essential to underlie the fiction

We may traffic in the dark arts,
   But we are the good shepherds
Take us at our word,
   Our budgets are not unlimited
While technically accurate,
  We prefer not to mention blood and sin,
And always leave unspoken
  The source and extent of our funding

Obfuscation is our daily bread,
   We invented plausible deniability
Dabbling in drugs for creative financing
   And even run banana republics
Come to think of it, it is a singular virtue
   of this delayed disclosure
That it could, in itself,
  Serve as flash purposes and pocket litter

Spy, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Spying Glass by Horace Andy
• I am a spy by Billy Porter
• Spy in the house of love by Was (Not Was)
• Spy's Spice (Mon Espionne) by United Future Organization
• Spying Glass by Massive Attack
• Nobody Does it Better by Carly Simon
  The Spy Who Loved Me is my most watched film for whatever reason
• Diamonds are Forever by Shirley Bassey
  The finances of those said to be CIA adjacent would make for a great dissertation topic. I've always wondered about the dark underbelly of the agency. The fortunes of the Dulles family and others are intriguing let alone the Bush crew.
• I Spy (Spying Glass) by Massive Attack and Mad Professor

After reading through the bureaucratic trail spawned by the CIA'S family jewels (pdf), those papers that were deemed so dangerous they were buried in for years. Classified skeletons and sanitized misdeeds, a few short phrases concealing a mountain of crime.

File under: misdirection, CIA, strategy, spy, crime, history, USA, politics, culture, observation, language, rogues, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log. April 15, 2022