On Jan Marsalek

Domestic Illegals, Wasps and the Grandfather Wars

I’m sorry I haven’t been writing here for a bit. Tomorrow I am scheduled to appear in a New York City courtroom. Frankly I have been writing my novel and that’s a bit more safe than writing here where I can be sued and lied about. Looking at you $71M judgment!

You see a photo and you wonder about it. Or at least I do. I think a lot about all that went into producing things. Nothing ever is as simple as what you might think it might be.

There’s a photo of Jan Marsalek kissing a woman that I think about often.

Natalya Zlobina and Jan Marsalek, July 6, 2014...

Natalya Zlobina’s slut shamed, of course, and we can’t have “erotic models” loving their country. That won’t do! No, she has to be a honey pot. She can’t love the man she is embracing. She can’t think that what he has done is, in fact, in some sense, honorable and even sexy. No, that won’t do!

In point of fact I see that photo and I see the embrace of a social institution, albeit the GRU which as an American we must necessarily oppose. I see a young man who was, for most of his life, alone and friendless being embraced by a beautiful Russian woman. I see someone being assigned a girlfriend, or something very much approaching that. I see the confidence of a job well done. Jan’s done his grandfather — Hans Maršálek, anti-Nazi activist and Russian spy — proud. He has everything he might want in that moment — all his dreams rendered real and in the flesh. She’s just turned thirty. There’s a chance that he might have children with her. The smiles appear genuine, as does that moment, and it may well have been, at least in the moment.

Is the photograph real? Probably not. OK, definitely not. Fine. I’ll grant that. Or not more real than any of the other nonsense that happens to grace our world. Such a photo has the smack both of reality TV and of pornography and of propaganda but I repeat myself too much. Don’t want to be obvious, OK?

I myself tried recently to recreate that photo with a young woman who I had hoped might be my girlfriend but I didn’t have the right lens and well, you know how that goes. I suspect she was sent to me not to be my wife but to target me. She wouldn’t be the first nor, I suspect, the last. If you love someone you have to hide that love so that no one can use it against you. Sacrifices must be made, are made, will continue to be made.

Around the time that that a photo was taken there was this great book, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014) by Peter Pomerantsev, who got his start, like our President, in reality TV. And I must confess that the staged nature of the Marsalek photo seems a bit Love Island, doesn’t it?

Marsalek is in some real sense a traitor but to whom exactly? Why he’s perpetrated one of the largest financial scams in history, don’t you know. But is it really a scandal if he wanted to harm the German society he was forced to live in as an ethnic Czech? A society that had excluded him at every turn? Or did he hustle a bunch of Nazis? Might we even admire that audacity?

I suspect Jan is what I have come to calling domestic illegals — that is, those of us who are trained not by a formal organization but by family or informal teachers.

We don’t have the right paperwork and yet the training is the same and may, in some real sense, be superior. Could it be that our grandfathers trained us precisely because they had come to believe that the organizations they once served had gone into dangerous grounds? What are organizations if not groups of individuals? It’s not the institution that confers legitimacy but the individuals who confer legitimacy on the institution. How often we forget this…

We venerate the institutions but aren’t institutions just a collection of people who have been formalized? What happens when a society’s organization breaks down because there isn’t the money to keep it propped up? Doesn’t it seem logical that an irregular army might form? Did the Founding Fathers or the Minutemen have the proper paperwork?

Such trained individuals would be hard to detect, hard to stop, and hard to deter. For these domestic illegals the game is an extension of commitments they had made not to the flag or in some SCIF but to their family, to the grandfathers who had raised them. In some cases they may not even know if they were or weren’t official. And who really cares? And in more than a few cases the official organs of government might look the other way in prosecuting them or regularizing them.

They would exist in a kind of unofficial officialdom or official nonofficialdom. Think of it as Shrodinger’s Fed. Their personnel files couldn’t be hacked by the Chinese because they didn’t have any. No, not really. Perhaps this is why our adversaries target those of us with lineage connecting us to the American founding.

Financial Times’s Sam Jones has done quite a good job chronically and discussing Jan Marsalek’s psychology. He even interviews an old Russia hand from Britain who advises the U.K. on the Russian military tactics of suddenness, activeness, and hiddenness.

The very psychological profile of Jan Marsalek would have made him an ideal recruit for the GRU. Jones points out Marsalek’s general “disdain” for a Western world that had neglected his talents. It’s the same contempt you see with Snowden. Or that I saw with Assange. And I suspect that it has more than a few adherents here on Substack and elsewhere. You know the type: those who are dissatisfied with the state of the world and their own place in it.

I have never been among this cohort. No, I am a Romantic — capital R intended — and yes, it’s true that this country hasn’t always loved as much as I have loved it. In that fact it’s got a lot in common with my various exes. Such is life.

I suppose I should confess a thing or two about this Great Game and how much it has meant to me over the years. But this isn’t the time nor is it the place.

You might think, as I do, that we’re still fighting the same wars our grandfathers fought. That the Cold War isn’t so much over as it has mutated. It’s still the grandchildren of the grandfathers once again working together and a part from one another to build and tear down a world order.

Jeux sans frontières indeed.

And while it’s easy to grant that I might have been a Jan Maralek I must confess I am anything but. Sure, I had been investigated for starting a website which permitted all manner of money, some legitimate, some not to go through its coffers. Oh well. Or was it any of the other things they said I did? Or did? I can’t remember. It was a long time ago and much of it is more complicated than it appears.

Peering at that photo of Marsalek, I can see it in his eyes. I do know what it’s like to have a mother who isn’t really around and a father who isn’t altogether present. I know what it’s like to be beaten and brutalized by family and classmates alike. Such is life. Every life has some tragedy in it. And yes, young man, it’s easy to go and destroy the pillars upholding a civilization that seems tailored made to exclude you.

Indeed that same path is what that led me to being abused by the very sort of Russian, — or shall we call them Russian-adjacent — agents who recruited Marsalek.

In my fevered imagination there’s an anti-Jan Marsalek that emerges who seeks not to overturn the world order but to protect it against all its enemies. He would steal the money intended for the violent actions and quietly disrupt the very plots he had been involved in. He would, often at the last minute and at great peril, frustrate the designs of those who would overturn the liberal world order built by his grandfathers in pursuit of their multipolar world. He’d be a trickster and a patriot.

To protect the rules based order you might necessarily need someone who thinks beyond it. Such a person would appear to be an investor. He’d be interested in money but not in a gaudy way. He’d be able to persuade some of the strangest of peoples to come together for the common good. Or he’d needle them until they did the right thing. He’d be persuasive, even ridiculous. Only careful observers would know what he was on about.

Yes, his companies would have complicated pedigrees but eventually the U.S. government would come in and nationalize that which came from his imagination and Rolodex. To build that future he would have had to trick a number of bad actors into helping him. And those associations would hurt his reputation too. Some people might even believe he’s a Nazi. Or something.

Now it’s quite possible that he’d be destroyed by the system he had dedicated himself to protecting. There are worse fates. In fact maybe that’s the best of fates.

Pay attention to the ending of Wasp by Eric Frank Russell, who as you know, wasn’t a member of British military intelligence. No sir! Why "there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in his R.A.F. record to show that he was anything more than a wireless mechanic and radio operator."

You have to be really careful about telling people your favorite novel or film.

Everyone becomes their favorite works.

Or is that favorite songs? I forget. This isn’t my favorite song but it’s certainly one of them.

I think this place is full of spies
I think they're onto me
Didn't anybody, didn't anybody tell you?
Didn't anybody tell you how to gracefully disappear in a room?
I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses, I know

And so, and now I'm sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
And now I'm sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain

I think this place is full of spies
I think I'm ruined
Didn't anybody, didn't anybody tell you?
Didn't anybody tell you this river's full of lost sharks?
I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses, I know

And so, and now I'm sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
And now I'm sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain

And now I'm sorry I missed you
I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way
It went the dull and wicked ordinary way