The Anti-Library
How we delete history and really burn books
In the near future we will have a discussion about the collective works of filmmaker Christopher Nolan and how they represent a lot more than mere moviemaking, entertaining though they are.
Indeed I think each Nolan movie is a timely message from the Anglo-American alliance to its supporters, of which I count myself a full and equal member. We don’t talk about all the ways in which Her Majesty’s government influences our politics though the evidence for it is all around us even (or perhaps especially) in children’s books.
The BBC is the obvious example of British cultural power but it is by no means the only sort and as British friends of mine were growing up they tell me that some of the more patriotic Brits believed that Rule Britannia would give way to Cool Britannia and that which Britain had lost territorially they would regain once more. They would build a sort of empire of the mind. “Do you really believe that the British Empire really ended?” they’d say. And I’d wonder. Has it? Do empires ever really fall if they live on and if people still act in their name?
An American friend of mine was keen to remind me that during the coronavirus the only two industries Britain protected were film and sport. Above all else the British took pride in their dominance in genetics. If it weren’t for the British we’d probably still believe some other crazy stuff.
The first of Chris Nolan’s earliest films is Memento. It’s based on a short story by Nolan’s younger brother Jonathan who was then a student at Georgetown, the sort of epicenter of the deep state at the time.
The Nolans went on to dominate British-American filmmaking and science fiction, especially if you include Lisa Joy, Jonathan’s wife, and one of the show runners behind Westworld. One wonders about the role of Elon Musk’s on again and off again wife Talulah Riley, herself the daughter of Doug Milburn, formerly head of the UK’s National Crime Squad.
Memento (2000) is an ambitious sort of thing, the kind of films that aren’t really made nowadays. It’s daring. It takes Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) seriously, especially as Locke pondered a political existence formed by shared experiences and memory. For what it’s worth I do agree that experience can be a great teacher and maybe even of the best of teachers though I am more influenced by E. O. Wilson and Sociobiology — no blank slatist here!
If you lose your memories do you also lose your soul? And are you in some sense beastial? Or godlike? How does the state form collective memories but through libraries and archives? And now, with the advent of the internet (where seemingly nothing is ever forgotten but nothing is ever truly permanent) have we in some sense entered into a new world? Is it better to forget some things selectively? How? Who gets to decide? The Europeans even have a right to be forgotten — something I don’t want. I want a right of rebuttal!
How we collectively organize information is called library sciences and it’s a topic that however unsexy keeps coming up. This order imposed upon an increasingly information rich world…
We’ve already discussed prominent librarians and their children and grandchildren and how the Internet itself was really built from librarian’s point of view in our discussions both of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and 23andMe’s cofounder Anne Wojcicki.
Archives are a source of tremendous power and one of the first things I did when I came to Washington D.C. was become a member of the Library of Congress.
What is a search engine but a better way of better accessing a library or index?
First you build the database then the search engine. And the State always has a compelling interest in both the data collection and the search engine’s well maintenance. It cannot ignore this responsibility.
I believe that there will one day be a world where you can point your phone, take a picture, and be told exactly what that picture is. A world where your phone becomes the remote. (We shall pursue this in more detail when I take on the metaverse and how it is evil.)
It’s not always so easy to build a database, to be sure. And while software may be eating the world some areas are getting consumed first. Biology is now being turned into zeros and ones.
It’s not so easy to turn all of biology into zeros and ones. It’s probabilistic not deterministic and has serious limitation.
Still, facial recognition proves what’s possible in a world where all data is organized. And I don’t think it coincidental that the show Person of Interest is also in the Nolan oeuvre. (It, along with David Brin’s Transparent Society, influenced me when coming up with Clearview.)
But what if you delete the libraries? What if you edit the search engines? Could you erase history itself? History is, of course, written by the victors. What does it mean to win if you erase your opponent from every existing in the record in the first place? What if you bar him permanently from your libraries? There’s an opportunity to mention the Ministry of Truth from 1984.
Counterintelligence means deletion.
Apropos of counterintel, The Intercept published an interesting piece by Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost. By way of background Morley wrote a pretty good accounting of James Jesus Angleton’s stint as director of counterintelligence for CIA. It reads like a spy novel though it’s at least purporting to be real.
(You recall the Intercept, don’t you? That publication funded by Pierre Omidyar, whose family’s ties to the intelligence community never quite get any attention?)
Anyway here’s Morley:
I received a phone call from a Los Angeles area code. Half expecting a robocall, I tapped the green icon.
“I’ve heard you are interested in a man named Cleve Cram,” the caller said in a British accent. “Is that so?”
Was I ever. I had just sent in final changes to the manuscript of “The Ghost,” my biography of Angleton. I thought of Cleve Cram the way a fisherman thinks of the Big One that got away. I had focused on Cram in 2015, as soon as I started to research “The Ghost.” He had written an article, published in an open-source CIA journal, about the literature of counterintelligence, which gave some insight into his classified conclusions about Angleton. To learn more, I sought out his personal papers, more than a dozen cartons of correspondence and other documents that his family had donated to Georgetown University Library after his death in 1999. The library’s finding aid indicated that the bequest contained a wealth of material on Angleton.
But I was too late. The CIA had quietly re-possessed Cram’s papers in 2014. I was told that representatives of the agency had informed the library that the CIA needed to review the material for classified information. All that had been publicly available vanished into the CIA’s archives. By withdrawing the Cram papers from view, the agency effectively shaped my narrative of Angleton’s career. Without Cram’s well-informed perspective, my account of Angleton would necessarily be less precise and probably less critical. I wrote about the experience for The Intercept in April 2016.
The caller said his name was William Tyrer. He had read my article. He told me he had visited the Georgetown library a few years earlier, while developing a screenplay about a mole in Britain’s MI-5. He had gone through the Cram papers, photographed several hundred pages of material, and become fascinated by the man. “He’s like an American George Smiley, no?” Tyrer said.
I agreed and said I would be most interested to see what he had found. He questioned me closely about my views on Angleton, Cram, and the CIA, and said he would be in touch. A quick web search revealed that Tyrer is a British-American movie producer, the man behind “Memento,” a brilliant and unforgettable backward-running thriller, the cult favorite “Donnie Darko,” and scores of other movies. He was a serious man and a credible source. A few days later, Tyrer started emailing me 50 pages of material about Angleton that he had found in Cram’s personal papers.
The Cleveland Cram File, portions of which are published here for the first time, contains a sample of the primary source materials that the veteran CIA official used to write his Angleton study. The documents were photographed in Georgetown University’s Booth Family Center for Special Collections. A Georgetown archivist did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment; the CIA also declined to comment.
Who was the mole that Angleton was hunting?
I suspect it was Director Colby who was not forthcoming about his time in South Vietnam and his contacts there. Here’s the assessment.
The only known Soviet espionage agent permanently based inside South Vietnam during the war was a Frenchman who treated tuberculosis patients and mingled freely with U.S. and Vietnamese officials. The “French doctor case,” one of the conflict’s most intriguing spy tales, has been mentioned in many publications, including John Sullivan’s Of Spies and Lies, John Prados’ Lost Crusader, Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior and Joseph Trento’s The Secret History of the CIA. Additionally, a fictional character clearly based on the French doctor appears in Arnaud de Borchgrave’s 1981 spy novel, The Spike.
But such accounts have provided only vague information about the case. They focus primarily on suspicions James Angleton, the legendary chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, harbored about William Colby, the CIA’s Saigon station chief in the 1960s and later the agency’s director.
Was Colby a spy? He was a Nixonite who worked with the media and Congress to disband some of the more successful domestic spying operations through the Church committee.
Pay attention when Israeli influence agents like Eric Weinstein are calling for a second Church committee.
True to form Colby worked to essentially gut our spying capabilities and wrecked the institutional memory of CIA. He was fired and replaced by none other than George H. W. Bush — the only CIA director to become Vice President and then President.
But questions remain about Angleton and Colby and what was really going on and how much the Brits really know.
In his 20 years as head of the agency’s CI staff, Angleton had destroyed or damaged the careers of dozens of loyal agency officers in his obsessive search for a high-level Soviet mole inside the CIA who, by all available evidence, did not then exist.
Or did he exist after all? What if Colby — the director of the CIA — was that very spy? And what if the characterization of Colby by Angleton was right?
I suspect we don’t really know how close we came to losing the Cold War. As counter-corruption advisor to Congress Paul Massaro says, “The Cold War is over. The gangsters won.”
Gangsters do not build libraries and this is precisely why Donald Trump hasn’t participated in the National Archives Act.
In the words of Martin Lomasney, an old West End political boss from Boston, is best remembered for his warning to young politicians everywhere — “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink”.
