It's my distinct pleasure to introduce Richard Thieme. He's been giving talks here at DEF
CON for 19 years. That's absolutely incredible. I don't want to embarrass him and tell
him what I was doing 19 years ago. Whenever I go home, certainly being on the old team
I was on, I usually missed most of the talks. I always take time to go back and listen to
Richard's talks, and this is going to be great. He was a guest on coast to coast A.M.
which I've listened to since I was a kid. It is my distinct pleasure to introduce Richard
Thieme. >> Thank you. It really has 19 years. As someone tweeted like a deranged old man, and
that was three years ago. So you accept your destiny. Josh Corman was a Calvary man. He said I
want to talk to you and pick your brains while we still have you. People used to not say
that. So you have to do to deal with how you're perceived, and you say I have to tell the whole
truth as I know it and see it for what it's worth. You have one brief span to hold that
bright, shining torch, and instead of whining and complaining that the world won't
dedicate itself to make you happy, you want it to blaze as brightly as possible, and you
want at the end of your life to be all used up because you have expended all the energy you have
got. In doing that, in trying to be of value and people that you come to love, which includes
this weird collection of people here at DEFCON. So let's get going. The only way to tell the
truth is through fiction. Where did that come from? Let's see if we can get this to work. No.
Keeps doing the same thing. It is no wonder how complicated things get with one thing
leading to another said E.B. White, and he wasn't kidding. When you set off on a journey to
find out what is real, you walk on one side of the strip, and you're convinced there's another
side of the strip. As you come around you know how the strip works. You find yourself always
on the same side. My intention is to describe here is what the world since World War II has
become. If you were born during or before World War II, and my hand was the only one that went
up. In this room there are probably a few more, but not many of you might know in a
noncontextual way how we have come to live and accept reality for what it - is different than
it was before the Cold War, which created post‑modernization and deconstructionism to
understand what's going on. I know we love to say the matrix, but the deeper you go after
taking the red pill, the more lavender it becomes, and you have a red and purple pill all
the way down. We can never get to the bottom of it, because the movie strip brings us to back to
where we began. I'll describe the conditions as I see them, and hope you will not as some
people do when I do the talk on UFOs and government how the government responded to UFO
phenomena for 60 years by saying I don't want to know that. That's an essential bubble in
which people live their lives by choice because the cognitive dissonance in knowing what is
real in our society and nation is too painful, too discordant. Remember what Nietchze said a
long time ago. When one is confronted with the unknown, the first instinct is to abolish the
discomfort and pain. Any explanation is better than none, because you want to get your
head rid of oppressive representations. One is not particular about how you to get
rid of them. The first one that explains them is the one people grab ahold of. The proof of
pleasure is a criterion for proof, and they believe a construction of reality which is
congruent with their altogether present and previous construction of reality rather
than allowing anomalous information in because it causing too much discomfort. We
call that explanation the truth. Then when we pass it around to other people we have an agree
and consensus and it becomes orthodoxy and even scientific truth. So let us begin. I'm
going to talk about mind games, my book I'll do a signing tomorrow. Of course, I always
have a backpack heavier full of books I can carry if someone wants to buy one for a mere $20
before then. How did I come to write "Mind Games." I can talk about it now more than I did
before Snowden. Shortly after 9/11, because of the friends and colleagues I made through this
organizational structure such as it is, there were some people from the national security
agency who were very concerned after 9/11 because the executive order that came from the Bush
White House asked them to do things we'd never do because it's contrary to the
Constitution and to the law. They knew I'd write in the '90s about technology would lead and
transform not only geopolitical boundaries and the way to behave to those in the new world
constructed by the digital transformation, but we had to rethink ethics itself because
the religious structures and the way of thinking about the right thing is transformed by the
necessity of doing things which prior to 9/11 and prior to World War II, in fact, we found
unthinkable because in the construction reality by the prior technology, they couldn't
be done. They could after 9/11. They had been contrary to the constitution, and the law as
they understood it because that understanding was constructed, as I say, by the framework
created by prior technologies, which shapes the context of our lives. It's the ground in which
the figure of our lives is drawn. So I began working with some people there ad hoc
off‑site for about a decade on how to reframe ethical issues or considerations in light of the
brave new world that those executive orders created. Make no mistake, they came from Bush
originally because they had to, but Obama is more Bush than Bush on all of those issues as well
as on privacy leaks and punishing whistleblowers, and most of you know that. It's what
you do when you have the power to do it. They were concerned with how to inflect the
conversation inside the agency, if it was at all possible, in the direction that took into
account what was now happening as a result of the new instructions. So I worked with
them on those issues. We reflected on it. I want to say for the record nothing
classified was ever shared in those discussions. I know nothing, nothing classified. No
one said anything that was classified, and if they did, there was no way I knew it was
classified. So I get to stay in America and live my life happily, and I do not have to
cow tow to my Russian feeders who over a lifetime know how to give the food, take the food
away, and ultimately assimilate you into the long‑term plan they have for you. So the
conversations were about sensitive issues, and the deputy director says you can't discuss
what you talk about with you unless you write fiction. Fiction is the only way to tell
the truth. That rang such a bell for me, because I found in the book The Covert Sphere, there
was an academic in Ohio that wrote a whole book on exactly that same thing because
post‑World War II fiction is the only way to tell the truth, and it's true for people inside the
community as well. So I began writing stories I published about 35 and this year I will
finish a novel called "Foam" and 20 or more stories reflected in "Mind Games." Now. You can't
read that. That's why the challenger went down. They couldn't read the slide about
the O‑ring. This is a tweet. Now, I know a tweet is only 144 characters. I'm not as stupid as
I look, but the top is the tweet. It says compare this and what he did this. Many things
that Snowden that had outed using proprietary information, and he said compare it with
this. What it's ‑‑ no, that didn't work. What it's compared with is a long passage that he
photographed, and attached to his tweet, which is the words of a dying intelligence agent who
said let me tell, in effect, what we do. He did a point by point comparison of what Snowden
outed and what my short story had said. When when the short story was published, I got a
phone call from a different friend at the agency, and he said it reminds him of Three
Days of the Condor. 95% of your story isn't fiction, but you have to know which 95% to have
the key to the code. He was right. We agreed that people would think the stuff about
Roswell,my little sci‑fi scenarios of aliens crashing their scout ship loaded with
computer chips and fiber optics and the like so that humans would build the Internet because
they are finding it so boring and tedious to go to cocktail parties in Georgetown to learn
everything they could about us. It was so much easier to give us the means to build the Internet,
onto which we project the content of our life and work and souls. They can just download
Earth‑thinking, which was much more convenient. This is an age of let me tell you what we do.
The story is called "Zero Day Roswell." It's all the things we do because I know this is what
we do. The story was published in 2006. Now Tim Melley of the academic I mentioned said this.
When democracy relies on entertainment to provide knowledge of secret affairs, as,
in fact, all of the stories one way or another in "mind games" do, there's a blurring of
fictional and real operations. Now, here's an example. Animal Farm was a full‑length animated
film. I still call them cartoons. It was a full‑length film of the George Orwell book
‑made by the CIA through other fronts, and that was typical of what was being done in the
1950s. It was the suspension of democracy. A conscious decision by the government to suspend
democracy in its actions in order to preserve democracy in its fictional context, I.E., our
lives. In that context the CIA in the '50s and '60s because one of the largest sponsors of art
and literature in the world. They stood up magazines and periodicals. I took a course at
northwestern, for Stephen Spender and he was the editor of Encounter. Encounter for 20
years was the leading non‑communist intellectual periodical in Europe. He claimed
at the end ‑‑ his wife said he was so nieve he meant it ‑‑ he said he did not know from the
beginning to the end it was a CIA operation, and there were 20 other major periodicals in the
world and many others as well as using the periodicals in the media of the world or making
movies the CIA published not under their own imprint over 1,000 books. In appointed itself
a ministry of culture to combat the Soviet ministry of culture. The way George Cannon put it,
one of the formulators of our foreign policy under Eisenhower, and he said we need to act after
the 1947 national security act in a way the U.S. can publicly disclaim any responsibility for
the covert actions we do, because Eisenhower realized early on, you can read a book
called Total Cold War, 600 pages about that. Eisenhower realized that in the absence of a nuclear
exchange, which sane men and women wouldn't have, the only way to fight the Cold War was
through propaganda and disinformation. There was no way to do this disinformation that
did not cause blow‑back and did not include all the American people in the false scenarios
and creative narratives that came out and through the media into the mind of society without
having everybody part of that disinformation campaign. You couldn't deceive the Soviets
without deceiving the American people, so the American people themselves became subject to the
propaganda campaign we instituted in order to fight the Cold War. I mentioned Cannon. He
was a formulator of that policy. There's also the brothers, John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles.
John worked in tandem to create the kind of world they did, and they first overthrow the Iran
over the behest of the British who were afraid their oil interests would be nationalized
by a democratically elected head of government. Then we did our bends in Guatemala, and to do
that Eisenhower caught on Eddie Bearnaise, the father of spin to do it properly. The whole
religious system was used. Priests said the lies to promulgate from the parish to
the faithful to fear him so they would support the overthrow of a democratically elected
government. So the Cold War became a war fought through symbols, words, propaganda and
still we have a military presence one way or another in about 150 countries. So we are
still creating the same kind of fictions that we began to do then. It began under Eisenhower,
Cannon sponsored it. He said they fought up with unreality and irrationalism. Can we
combat? The answer is no. They lie and we have to lie. That's the method of exchange, the
shaping of the mind of society in the globe and in our country as well. The problem was when
you do that in a nation that is now governed by compartalization, one of the my
friends said you know more about the big picture of standing back because you talk to so many
different people and know how to connect the dots. I'm constrained. He only recently
found out a program he worked on that stood up for one purpose had a completely different
covert purpose, and none of the people working on the program knew what that ultimate real
intention and aim of that program was for about 20 years because they did not have a need
to know. Therefore, people inside the IC are often subjected to the same propaganda
and narratives that we are because they can't go elsewhere inside the IC to ask what the
truth is. Out here we kind of can, but we can only express it without fear of jail or exile in
fiction. So let's look at an example. The Search for the Manchurian candidate. You're
familiar with brainwashing as a concept, correct? We all know what brainwashing is. It's
terrible, and it's to be feared. We fall into the clutches of evil‑doers or use drugs to
bombard our brains, and pretty soon we do what they said. The Manchurian Candidate was then
turned into a movie with Frank Sinatra. Brainwashing became part of the fabric of our
understanding of what the Chinese and the Russians would do our poor guys if they were
caught and subjected to it. Let's look at where brainwashing came from. It came from a guy
named Edward Hunter who had contracts with the CIA. He was an agent of the CIA as he
revealed. He invented the concept of brainwashing as part of a propaganda campaign to
mobilize support for the massive military buildup in the early 1950s. Dulles at state believed
in what he read about brainwashing. How could Dulles buy that from his own agent?
I'll give you another example of that in a minute of how easily that can happen thanks to
secretary of state Hague and what he showed us. So they believed about brainwashing what
we came to believe about it. We were in a panic about it, and we needed to find out how it worked
so we began experimenting on North Korean prisoners in the same insidious ways we said they
were experimenting on us because like the digital world, if anything anywhere is a threat,
you have to control the whole world. That's the rationale of our cyber thinking right now,
and our terroristic thinking right now. Our intention in dealing with brainwashing was to
fuel anxiety about communism and it's methods. Meanwhile, inside, of necessity given what we
thought they were doing to us, we needed to find out how these methods worked. The programs
that we instituted, things like BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTRA. We only know about the programs
because they ordered all references destroyed like Indiana Jones in the warehouse.
He forgot one box. There was one box of 50,000 financial documents which enabled us to
connect the dots on what we were doing and what the programs were about, and that's the only
reason we know about it. When I asked the lead historian, what can you and I discuss
historically with the assumption by using the same words we actually mean the same events,
he laughed and he said, anything up until World War II. He wasn't kidding. It was kind of a joke,
but he was saying that when this world OSS morphing into CIA, it was like listening to a symphony
with a lot of dead spaces. There was a lot of maintained secrecy, and it's hard to connect a dot
to a non‑dot. Artichoke and MK-ULTRA were horrific. A guy was head of the psychiatric
association and we did it in Canada and Montreal, so we had plausible deniability. Do what
you must, but keep my fingerprints off it as president. The things that
Cameron were did were horrific. He wiped peoples minds as much as humanly possible and tried to
reprogram and repattern. In never worked. Why? Because the Russian and the Chinese did not
have any exotic techniques. When they turned people against us, it was through the time‑honored
techniques of brutality and interrogation used with the cultures of Chinese and Russian
and the way they did things always. There was nothing secret or spooky about it, but these
movies and these books put that into our brains as a reality. So the fiction created even more of
a fiction, and the search for what did not exist led to our establishment of COOBAR, Counter
Intellegence Operation manual, which simulated brainwashing we anticipated would be done to us
and subjected our people to it to prepare them for what they thought they would do to us when
we were captured. In fact, that manual turned into our offensive manual for interrogation and the
SEAR program. "The Unit" is a TV program, and the episode 8 says they participate in a training
drill and treated as prisoners of war. It pushes them to medical and physical limits when
their lives are in danger. People watched that program on television and believed it
because fiction promulgated the lie at a higher level of reinforcement. It wasn't that
successful in the series, but it nevertheless seeped into the minds of society. Then after
9/11 when we were going to interrogate prisoners and torture them ‑‑ I don't mean
water boards, which is the go to poster boy for torture. I'm talking about 'oops deaths' as
an interrogation. Where you work a little too hard and say, oops, he's gone. You call in a doctor
to falsify the death certificate and say he died of natural causes documented by Steve Miles
in his concern about doctors used in contrary in Nuremberg to monitor torture and improve on
it. The result came from going point by point through thousands of documents unearthed by the
ACLU about who was where when an interrogation took place and how it was done, a subject which I
talked to the bioethics at the AMA about exploring a little more, and he refused. He said if
there's enough groundswell of support for looking at that, we will, but that's not our
concern. It isn't our concern, but the irony is that manual then became the template for how
we interrogated and tortured people all down the moebius strip when that pseudojournalist
working for the CIA created the notion of brainwashing and it began the long journey in my
minds. Someone in in room is saying, I don't want to know that. I don't want to know that.
I would rather do away with the discomfort of knowing because if the world you're describing is
real, how do I know what is real? Then the world tilts and it's like riding the old rotor
in Chicago. Therefore as Nietzsche said you said you want adopt reality that makes you
feel better. My explanation to how the government responded to the UFO phenomenon is full of
that kind of response. Okay. So that's what happened with brainwashing. Now, I said I
would tell you how it is that we come to know that we can deceive ourselves because we need to
know. What you look at is the Soviet submarine, the K‑129 was a nuclear submarine, and it went
down. We wanted to retrieve it. We didn't want the Soviets to know we were retrieving it. Now,
along the assumptions I spelled outed, this is what we did. This is the Hughes Glomar Explorer
built by sun ship to secretly lift a sunken submarine. This wasn't the only project. This
was through Howard Hughes. People have retired and are dying and they want to say
something. The burden of not ever telling the truth about your own life and your own
reality someone told you the other day about their grandfather or father who was in
the NSA and what it did for his marriage to disappear for four months at a time and come back
and be able to say nothing. Or as a friend of NSA said the other day kind of chuckling, a
young man was coming into the agency and just got his clearances and his parents that
worked there were very concerned. Why? He didn't know they worked at NSA, and they had
lived with the family lie all their lives. Do you see the very basis, if you look at privacy
and the lack of it does to intimacy or lack of truth telling does to the possibility
of trust, you have those examples throughout the intelligence community where
people are bound to people only to one another in the agency but not to anyone that matters in
their lives except through lies. The only way they can tell the truth is through fiction. But
never the whole classified reality. I got a call from a gentleman who was stood up by
the CIA to create a proprietary for a group like Hughes' group that was going to build a deep
sea diving submersible to let us go get that submarine back up. Why do it two times in why do it
three times? One, because you can like the dog in the joke that I wrote with Pete, and two,
because when you put people in competition with each other in genuine ways, it's going to spur
creativity. Both of these organizations did good deep sea dives exploration and work. They
made money. They were successful, but the covert purpose for which they really
existed was to create something to bring back up the submarine. You know how we had meetings
about that and this is where you say to me, all people can't keep secrets, yes, they can. The
meetings take place deep undergrounds in bunkers and people go way down. We would
have our conversations, come up, and the meeting never happened. There are no records. There are
no notes. If you use the freedom of information act as friends in Interpol and FBI said you won't
get what you want know because they learned how to game the system and use code to put them
in a different file that has a different name you will never know. Therefore, your request
won't be honored with the documents you seek. If a few turn up, it costs a lot of money
for copying. He led that project, and within a few weeks, just weeks before it was
finished, he had to leave and move on something else. When he saw someone they had worked
during the project, it went down. Part of it fell back down and part came up. What we
received from that information is still classified, and he asked his colleague and friend,
so what did we find when we down? He said, I'm sorry, you're on a need to know because you're
not on the project anymore. So he like me and all of us had to wait 20 years for the whole
project to be declassified. Like MK ultra. I refer to Susan Hassler in the notes on the disk
hou received. She wrote two great books worth reading, intelligence, how the agency's
alien got there. The second book is about project MK Ultra and how they tested drugs on people
and did to people. She can only talk about it now because it's distant in time and no longer a
threat. That's a thing you have to do, is just wait. Wait until it's no longer potent, and then
you can tell more of the truth and it doesn't matter anymore. Susan's first book in the review
of "Intelligence" on your disk and on the Amazon site is there was enough white, hot anger in
this book to steam a skunk. She was so angry over the politicization during the Bush
administration. Post‑9/11 she worked with a cadre of people to connected dots. Even someone
working on the project might not even know what it's about or where it winds up. That's unless
somebody writes a story about it, the Manchurian Candidate. They're committed to strategic
fictions, simulations and deceptions. The mind of society must become confused about what
is real and rely on post‑modern deconstruction in a futile attempt on what is happening in
the wilderness. I remember sitting in the rain with a friend from NSA and told him
what I thought was going on. He said, noticing my symptoms of secondary trauma, which were
very real and predictable from the conversations I was having with people including those that
tortured and were tortured, he said you know enough to know what's not true, but you can't
necessarily connect all of the dots to know what is true. You have to learn to live with that
ambiguity and anxiety in your constant need‑to‑know machine effort to find out what was real
in your life. When I was growing up seeking what was real and acting on it is what we were
called to do as human beings. I didn't know it would undermine that very project and make it
impossible to complain, which is why I saw the red pill turns into a lavender pill. The most
effective way of doing this kind of propaganda is not just to lie. It is to provide a mixture
of truth, half‑truths, and lies. That's the best propaganda, and that's the most effective,
because it can connect like children's blocks plugging into one an other with the schemes
and narratives already in our heads snapping in place like those beads. If it connects to
what we already believe is true and sounds like that, we will build the module up in our minds
and believe it is true. So this can get us in a real, real mess. Let me give you an example.
There's Alexander Hague. Secretary of state. This is where it began in a small
Italian newspaper where a piece of really great investigative reporting revealed that the KGB
during the Cold War was sponsoring terrorism all over the world and supporting groups.
That small story caught the attention of an author and journalist who wrote a piece
about it for "The New York Times" and also wrote a book about it. That came to the
attention of Alexander Hague who was secretary of state. He became very, very alarmed and
held a press conference in which he demanded that the CIA explore this revelation to encounter the
nefarious and insidious work of the KGB in this way. The directive of the CIA said we'll
get right on it, and six months later the result came back, we've explored that, and you
don't have to worry about that particular thing. Why? Because the story in the Italian
newspaper was a CIA plant in the first place. In other words, it was just propaganda to smear the
Soviets but it was picked up by other own journalists who didn't know any better and turned into
a book that went to the secretary of state and became an alarming consideration. The CIA
could not tell them the truth. Well, finding out what is true is not easy. You know the story
of the gnome in the woods. He went to find the gold. He has to tell the truth. Which is the
tree under which the gold is buried. The gnome pointed. He tied a scarf around the tree,
and you have to promise not to remove the scarf. The gnome promised he wouldn't. He kept
his promise. He didn't remove the scarf but tied one around every tree in the forest. This
is what it becomes like to find the gold, of the truth. In the book last year, UFOs and
historic inquiry, it's in over 50 university libraries now. Yale, university of Chicago and
university of Basil in Switzerland. Why? It's bulletproof. We only use
documents over half a century our team of nine unearthed to show how it responded in light
of national security concerns. Even though we promulgate that information, it will be
forgotten as soon as we said it. In the draft in the '60s it turned young people into the
streets. It didn't reach into the lives of normal middle class Americans like the depression
did in the '30s, and there's motivated forgetting. We have the experience or we hear the
words, and then we don't remember it. The machinery of deception and cover of
illusions, misdirection and distraction and if necessary ridicule or silence by
authoritative voices, it just reinforces that fact. So this is from the UFO story as we told it
last year. I'm just pointing out that this was used as an example of cover and deception. This is
what the CIA decided in 1953 after UFO sightings over Washington. The reports are a
matter of national security. Military personnel should be trained in the operation. That
policy really has never stopped. Study them. Learn what we can about the technology. Do not
allow our enemies to learn what we know about the technology or even believe they exist, and so
out of necessity the citizens of the United States ridiculed and debunked and rejected were
treated as if they were enemies. That's what he said when he finally gave up, the astronomer.
He said the public was, in fact, placed in the role of the enemy against him counterespionage
tactics must be employed. I thought people that took an interest in UFOs and wanted to
know about them were treated as enemies. It's not just about that but everything Snowden did
as well. Do you know who that is? Somebody tell me who that is. Thank you. Everybody knows
who Jack Bauer is. If I showed you Hague and asked that question, very few would know
who it was. But you know who Jack Bauer is. Listen to this quote now from justice Scalia
citing "24." as relevant background for jurisprudence. This is a quote. Jack Bauer
saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Recalling season 2 where his
rough interrogation actions saved California, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the
sand. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? He challenged his fellow judges and said the
criminal law is against him and doesn't matter. Is there any jury in America that will
convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so. So the question this wonderful jurist concluded is
whether we believe in absolutes. His decision, obviously, was to believe them. Well, the
Earth‑to‑Scalia communication was, Jack Bauer doesn't exist. It's fiction. The way the
program was promulgated through the program "24 ‑‑" Robbie Graham is doing a wonderful book
on UFOs, but it's how they manipulated and managed that program, which I just mentioned
in passing to debunk the citizenry. We're going to debunked media, and it's all
documented if I have time to again ‑‑ I'll say something right now. "Space Wars." I
couldn't get people to listen could impair our satellite functions significantly, and he
was told by a director in Hollywood and told me this. You make one mistake from the podium
in what you say is true, you're ridiculed and your reputation is destroyed. Through the various
wrap‑around reinforcing outlets of media, the mouthpieces that are used, you will no longer
have credibility. If you make it fiction, he said, it's mind candy. Here in Hollywood we've
done that about things for a long, long times. Mind candy goes down easily, and they take
it for what it is. So he wrote a novel called "Space Wars" to get the point across. It also keeps
him safe. I don't want to go there. Well, all right, I'll go there. Okay. You know who that
is, right? More of you would recognize Dustin Hoffman playing Carl Bernstein. Look at the face
and posture. This is what it looks like to be a lean and hungry reporter who wants to do
investigative reporting. Flash forward to this. I asked him about the article he wrote for
"Rolling Stone" in 1978, about 20,000 words and he documented all the journalists, media, CBS,
time life, Cronkite, back at the ‑‑ they wanted to use Arthur got free and use Walter Cronkite
to debunk it. You showed how the journalists and media were lock step from the '50s and '60s now,
what did you say about that now? To my astonishment he said the boys from CIA don't have time
for that now. This is lean and hungry. This is what he looked like when he said this. 400
pounds later there's a significant suggestion you have become assimilated by the very
powers against which you so hungrily pursued the truth at one time. We'll go back to that
in a moment. What did we do with UFOs in TV. There was a comic strip called Steve Canyon turned
into a tv program and it had a single serious episode on UFOs. I have to find out what's
happening. The Air Force took the script and rewrote it. Instead of saying as canyon did
in the first script, the person making the report is a solid citizen. Instead, they changed
it so he was having skepticism and said it wasn't worth investigating and he got that
point across. You don't have to take my word for it. Charles Lewis just wrote a book called
"935 Lies," and he talks about his experience in journalism working at CBS on "60 Minutes."
Every time they prepare a piece about someone think with Don Hewitt or other executives at
CBS, they were told not to touch it. If anyone with suggest influence and power. When he
worked with Aldridge, he killed a tough story on tobacco because Philip Morris was in the process
of engaging in a lawsuit at the time. I talked before about Jean Pope at national inquirer in
1952 was doing psychological operations for the CIA and invented the National Enquirer
in '63. The money came from frank Costello and the Mafia to sustain it all the time in the
red. When he died, the eulogy at his funeral was delivered by the Secretary of Defense at the
time. So I'm not making this up. Let me quote from the 1991 task for report compiled by the CIA
director. The newly appointed openness task force. It says, and I'm quoting now, in '91, the
CIA has relations with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and
television network in the nation. They have turned intelligence failure stories
into intelligence success stories. It contributed to the accuracy of countless others as
we consider accuracy. It reveals that the CIA has persuaded reporters to postpone, change,
hold or scrap stories that could adversely affect national securities interests as we
constituted. So, let's see. It's almost time, so I'm going to bring this to a conclusion by
pointing out that strip is serious. In this book "Mind Games" there's a 0-Day Roswell
story. There's one called "break memory" about how the masters of society moderate the media and
work on hackers at the end and the quote from the intelligence agent is we're not amateurs. We
do this for a living. You don't want to spend your life to the corner of he can foreign embassy
and in solitary being tortured. You don't want to live in Russia without any hope of getting out.
You want to take seriously what this is. I have two stories in here, versions of each other
Northward Into the Night which reveal in one story two layers and another three layers. I have
one called more than a dream about an encounter with it and I have Incident at Wolf Cove that
shows the events on the psyche of a human being. It's all in here. It's the only way to tell
the truth. It's the only way a spy novelist, a Frenchman, can tell the truth. You may not know
his name. I'm just going to throw out that he wrote an astonishing story about Libya,
and what would happen there three months before ‑‑ three months before it happened. He
did a novel about Syria and the assassination in Lebanon, and he named all the names and the
names were accurate. People go to him and read him, even though they say they don't because it's
pulpfiction, but it's always accurate. He was invited to dinner with the minister of
Defense of France. He said why did you ask me? It's clear you and I have exactly the same
sources. He's not even read here. Only one book is in English translation. I think I
put in the bibliography the spy novelist who knows too much. You can't read it, but if you want
it, give me your card afterwards or connect with me at thiemeworks.com and I'll be glad
to respond with anything you want to know. I always say I belong to this community and the
seeking of truth. It's the true hacker ethos and the hacker heart. It is a lot like the
game. The guy came into the western town to play and went to saloon and watched the roulette
for a while, and he said this game is crooked. I know, but it's the only game in town. You
may not be able to play to win, but you got to play or else the red pill isn't a lavender pill
but it's a blue pill and you holding on. So connecting with one another in stealthy,
appropriate ways to discover the truth, in order to strategize to find a way in little ways to act
on it in any way that might make a difference. That's really the heart of the hacker ethos. I
have a couple of minutes, and there's no Q and A room anymore. I'll take Q and A up there at
the bar or wherever I see you. If you have a question now ‑‑ got a question back there? Are
you just waving at me? Anybody have a question? Yes. ( Inaudible question ) >> I'm
familiar with the book. My thoughts on ‑‑ ( Inaudible question ) >> That's possible.
That's all I can say, is that's possible. There's different scenarios. I learned during the
research for the UFO book unless we nail it town and make it bulletproof, all you can say is
that's interesting. That's all I can say. Anybody else? Question? Where? ( Inaudible question ) >>
When my friends, the Deputy Director for Homeland Defense at the NSA said to me directly, you
can't talk about what we talked about with you. Then he paused and he said, unless you start
writing fiction. Fiction is the only way to tell the truth. That's a literal translation of
a conversation we had personally. I returned to writing short stories. I
published 35 of them and I'm about to finish a novel. Mind games is about four kinds of
nonconsensual reality. Intelligence work, hackers, encounters with alien
civilizations and deep states of consciousness and what we see and experience when we genuinely
have the courage to explore the psychic connections between us and who we are as a composite
organism. There's four kinds of stories and that's when I did it. What he was saying made
sense, and we took very deadly seriously the almost failed effort to inflect the
conversation inside. We know how it hasn't happened, but there are words inside in policy that
suggest people do something along the lines we suggested that this is a huge issue. When
your task is to defend and protect Americans, you understand it and put everything
else on the back burner. When you go to the White House and they hand you the briefing, any
human being says what you can do to stop these? When they say do this, this and this. You say do
it. Do anything humanly possible to stop that. Questions later? Okay. Thank you very, very much.
I appreciate it. ( Applause )