Reviews for International Spy Museum: Spy File

The average rating for International Spy Museum: Spy File based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-26 00:00:00 Carlos Molina It's hard to know what to say about this book as it's a light-hearted, somewhat mocking look at the various nefarious schemes of the American Military, or at least of some of the specialised recherche departments of Intelligence. However, the subject is deadly serious and what seems funny on the surface - bombarding Iraqi prisoners with an endless loop of the Barney song, 14,000 renditions over three days - really isn't when you consider that this 'information' was probably released deliberately so the media could do a nice, feel-good, hahaha piece and be put off delving deeper, at least for a while. It's an interesting, perhaps even necessary, book for all Americans, and citizens of its allies and satellite countries, who want to know of the less-obvious methods used in the defence of the US and free world. We all know about military offensives, about assassinations and torture, both always denied, but really though, what do we know about psychological warfare? It seems to have developed from the original barmy colonel whose thought-process went something like this: this wall is primarily composed of atoms, and atoms are primarily composed of space. I am primarily composed of atoms, and therefore I should be able to walk right through that wall if I only have the right frame of mind. Result: bruised nose and the development of a new Intelligence unit for the US Military and a new way to divert tax dollars into the hands of the less-than-mentally competent who had such seniority no one could question one or their methods. Including staring at goats. It's a fast read, well-written in a journalistic style with plenty of moments when you'll want to look up from the book and share what you've just read with anyone around. Rewritten 24 July, 2016 on rereading Them: Adventures with Extremists

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-17 00:00:00 Leslie Mcadoo Gordon Some stuff makes, actually, way too much sense for such a lightweight and lighthearted volume: Q: 'People have been so brainwashed by fiction… so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, 'We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.' Actually, we know nothing of this. There's no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don't know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they're not cynical at all.' (c) The rest is better than a lot of sci-fi stuff! I laughed my head off. Totally hilarious account of psychic escapades that either happened or didn't (but got dreamed up by a mass of people anyway!). Entertaining as Remote Viewing of 'goat-related military activity'! Q: The covert nature of the goats was helped by the fact that they had been de-bleated; they were just standing there, their mouths opening and closing, with no bleat coming out. Many of them also had their legs in plaster. This is the story of those goats. (c) Q: Goat Lab, which exists to this day, is secret. (c) Q: Some of them were in there, trying to be psychic, from 1978 until 1995. (c) Okay, I can't help wondering how they distinguished between goats that died from all the stress from being debleated, plastered up and having all the creepy dudes staring at them for hours at a time? Or, as the author put it: Q: Perhaps the master sergeant had been staring at a particularly sickly goat? (c) Q: Defying all known accepted military practice'and indeed, the laws of physics'they believed that a soldier could adopt a cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. (c) Q: General Stubblebine is confounded by his continual failure to walk through his wall. (c) Q: 'Physicists go nuts when I say this!' (c) Q: You have access to animals, right?' 'Uh,' say Special Forces. 'Not really…' (c) Q: Some nights in Arlington, Virginia, after the general's first wife Geraldine had gone to bed, he would lie down on his living-room carpet and try to levitate. (c) Q: I just haven't figured out how my space can fit through that space. I simply kept bumping my nose…. Same with the levitation.' (c) Q: The way I saw it, the truth lay in one of four possible scenarios: It just never happened. A couple of crazy renegades in the higher levels of the US intelligence community had brought in Uri Geller. US intelligence is the repository of incredible secrets, which are kept from us for our own good; one of those secrets is that Uri Geller has psychic powers, which were harnessed during the Cold War. They just hoped he wouldn't go around telling everybody. The US intelligence community was, back then, essentially nuts through and through. (c) Q: For all our cynicism, we apparently still invested the intelligence services with some qualities of rigour and scientific methodology. (c) Q: 'What's a Jedi Warrior?' I asked. 'You're looking at one,' said Glenn. (c) Q: One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one. 'What was the level above that?' I asked. 'Level two,' he said. 'Intuition. Is there some way we can develop you so you make correct decisions? Somebody runs up to you and says, 'There's a fork in the road. Do we turn left or do we turn right?' And you go''Glenn snapped his fingers''We go right!' 'What was the level above that?' I asked. 'Invisibility,' said Glenn. (c) Q: 'By understanding the linkage between observation and reality, you learn to dance with invisibility,' said Glenn. 'If you're not observed, you are invisible. You only exist if someone sees you.' (c) Q: The goats weren't covertly herded into these buildings just so the Jedi Warriors could stare at them. (c) Q: Additionally, several thousand goats are currently being transformed'on a US air force base'into a weird kind of goat⁄spider hybrid. ' (c) I hope they aren't. Or I'm getting huge nightmares. Q: 'Glenn,' I said, 'are goats being stared at once again post-September 11?' (c) Q: Maybe they simply wanted the glory for themselves in the event that staring an enemy to death became a tool in the US military arsenal … (c) Q: Is this the kind of idea that people routinely have in those circles? (c) Q: 'If you have to be by a wall with horizontal brickwork, don't stand vertically,' he'd tell his Green Beret trainees. 'In a tree, try to look like a tree. In open spaces, fold up like a rock. Between buildings, look like a connecting pipe. If you need to pass along a featureless white wall, use a reversible piece of cloth. Hold up a white square in front of you as you move. Think black. That is the nothingness.' (c) Q: Who would have believed that the soldier who helped inspire the jingle had such a fabulous idea of what 'All You Can Be' might include? (c) Q: The conclusion'in the words of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman of the Killology Research Group'was: 'there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98 per cent of all men insane, and the other 2 per cent were crazy when they got there'.) (c) Q: It got so paranoid that UFO speakers would start by asking all the government spies to stand up and identify themselves. (c) Q: The first line read, 'The US army doesn't really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.' A disclaimer at the bottom read, '[This] does not comprise an official position by the military as of now.' This was Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. … In Jim Channon's First Earth Battalion, the new battlefield uniform would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs to enhance night vision and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit 'indigenous music and words of peace'. Soldiers would carry with them into hostile countries 'symbolic animals' such as baby lambs. These would be cradled in the soldiers' arms. The soldiers would learn to greet people with 'sparkly eyes'. Then they would gently place the lambs on the ground and give the enemy 'an automatic hug'. (c) Q: … fall in love with everyone, sense plant auras, organize a tree plant with kids, attain the power to pass through objects such as walls, bend metal with their minds, walk on fire, calculate faster than a computer, stop their own hearts with no ill effects, see into the future, have out-of-body experiences, live off nature for twenty days, be 90%+ a vegetarian, have the ability to massage and cleanse the colon, stop using mindless cliches, stay out alone at night, and be able to hear and see other people's thoughts. Now all Jim had to do was sell these ideas to the military. (c) Q: Nowadays he does for corporations what he did for the army: he makes their employees believe they can walk through walls and change the world, and he does it by making those things sound ordinary. (c) Q: 'First of all, they wouldn't call it a meditation retreat, because retreat is a no-no word in the army. So it was called a meditation encampment. And it was hugely unsuccessful.' (c) Q: Then there are the Race-Specific Stink Bomb and the Chameleon Camouflage Suit, neither of which has got off the ground yet, because nobody can work out how to invent them. (c) Q: 'We're great friends. We used to have metal-bending parties together.' (c) Q: 'Last week I killed my hamster.' 'Just by staring at it?' I asked. 'Yes,' confirmed Guy. ... 'So you knew it was a healthy hamster,' I said. 'Yes,' said Guy. 'And then you started staring,' I said. 'Three days,' sighed Guy. 'You must hate hamsters,' I said. … Guy jumped in his car and went off to find his home video of the hamster being stared to death. (c) Q: 'get those Martian ships under NATO command. Get those Martians in through the proper immigration processes.' (c) Q: 'Our most effective products are the ones which link an unfulfilled need on their part with a desired behaviour on our part,' he said. There was a silence. 'And weapons of mass destruction were not used on American forces,' the specialist added, 'so this leaflet may very well have been effective.' 'Do you really…?' I started. 'Oh, nothing,' I said. (c) Q: Then Pete turned the music up loud and told me a secret, which I couldn't hear a word of, so he turned the music back down and told me it again. (c) Q: This man seemed to have verified one of the world's most enduring and least plausible conspiracy theories. For me, the idea that the government would surreptitiously zap heads with subliminal sounds and remotely alter moods was on a par with the idea that they were concealing UFOs in military hangars and transforming themselves into twelve-foot lizards. This conspiracy theory has persisted because it contains all the crucial ingredients'the hidden hand of big government teaming up with Machiavellian scientists to take over our minds like body snatchers. … There is a very strong chance, given the history of the goat staring and the wall walking and so on, that they blasted Jamal with silent sounds and it just didn't work.(c) Q: Midway through the siege'in the middle of March 1993'the sounds of Tibetan Buddhist chants, screeching bagpipes, crying seagulls, helicopter rotor blades, dentist drills, sirens, dying rabbits, a train and Nancy Sinatra's 'These Boots Are Made for Walking' began to blast into the church. It was the FBI, in this instance, who did the blasting. There were seventy-nine members of David Koresh's congregation in there, including twenty- five children (twenty-seven if you count the unborn ones). Some of the parishioners put cotton wool in their ears, a luxury that was later unavailable to Jamal at Guantanamo and the prisoners inside the shipping containers in al-Qa'im. Others apparently tried to enjoy it by ironically pretending it was a disco. … Clive Doyle is one of the very few survivors of the fire that ended the siege. … 'Sometimes,' said Clive Doyle, 'I think that the FBI were just like idiots, and it was just chaos out there.' (с) Q: The CIA also told the Olsons that in 1953 they created an MK-ULTRA brothel in New York City, where they spiked the customers' drinks with LSD. They placed an agent called George White behind a one-way mirror where he moulded, and passed up the chain of command, little models made out of pipe cleaners. The models represented the sexual positions considered, by the observant George White, to be the most effective in releasing a flow of information. When George White left the CIA his letter of resignation read, in part, 'I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun…Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?' (c) Q: What a brilliant cover story, he thought. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what's the best rock to hide something under? It's the rock called failure. (c) Q: Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death. (с)