I Blame The Media

My last post about Tom Cruise may have seemed a tad vitriolic to the observant eye. It's nothing personal against him, but rather a frustration with the 'Mission: Impossible' franchise and similar movies. A Swiss friend of mine and I were corresponding about this problem recently and we basically agree it boils down to a problem of 'high expectations', from everyone; our colleagues, our bosses, our contacts, even our enemies.


The following are some serious problems that we agreed on.

1)Face Masks: In these M:I movies and I think in some other ones, like Charlie's Angels, there's people ripping masks off their faces like every ten minutes. Somebody like L.L. Cool J will be talking and walking around and being as black as can be, and then he rips off his face mask and it's Alicia Silverstone from 'Clueless' under there or some such nonsense. It's ridiculous. My biggest problem with this, (and I'm sure I'm gonna get some similar shoutouts from my colleagues) is that nobody in the field believes who we say we are anymore. For instance, this happened recently; I was meeting an important contact of mine right outside the North Korean border, a highly ranked general, close to the Jongster and everything, somebody who is risking their life to talk to me, and he's getting all skittish all of a sudden. "How do I know you're not wearing a mask?" he's asking me now. "You could be Park Doo Sung under there." (I had no idea who he was talking about either.) So I'm like, "Come on, S----, I might also be an under-cover Taepodong missile, if you want to get paranoid." And this is a guy who's met with me multiple times. You can imagine trying to get people to trust you when everyone's watching too many movies and thinks the spy game's like a fucking Broadway production of CATS.

2) Torture Methods, Lack of Trust in: Did you see Mission Impossible: III?(Spoiler Alert!!!) You know that scene when Philip Seymour Hoffman shoots Tom Cruise's wife in front of him? I really liked that scene; it had the ring of truth there that these movies seldom have. I was like, finally, a movie that's getting gritty and realistic about the dangers of this line of work. Nope, as it turns out, Philip Seymour Hoffman just got somebody else to wear a fucking mask (masks again) so that it looked like Tom Cruise's wife. Talk about a cop-out.

But how this affects our work is that now when you're setting up an intimidation scenario, where you want to make someone talk, there's always all these fucking questions now. Like we get this Congolese warlord in for some serious questioning; some life or death questioning because he's been holding some foreign aid workers captive and his people have been eating parts of them (I shit you not!) and we're trying to find out where they are. So we manage to find his two children, who were living in the Sudan at the time, and we're no holds barred at this point, so we point heat at the kids and threaten to blow their heads off if he doesn't give up some information. He just sits there and laughs, and asks us if those are really his children, because he's seen how we Americans always put people in masks and pretend to be other people. And this guy's in the middle of the jungle. "Must be Netflix," runs through my head.

"How do I know those are my kids?" he asks. Like we have this elaborate plan that involves hiring midget actors and using all types of body coloration and disguise and training them so that they cry on cue just like actual scared-to-death children. So we get nowhere with the warlord, and we end up shooting the kids out of pure frustration, and the bastard doesn't even seem to care. Now obviously part of this is just bad parenting, but the influence of these movies on these situations is apparent.

Technology Expectations: People just are expecting way too much from the technology these days. Big surprise, when you've got all these movies acting like the federal government is made of money. Very seldom do I get the equipment I really want when I go out on assignment, and if I'm not getting it, I know everyone else is having a hard time. The tech aspect is a big deal to recruits, who think they'll be working with all kinds of cool toys once they get in. And we do quite honestly drum this aspect up to get people in the door, (much like those military ad campaigns where they pretend that people will learn useful skills for later in life.) But people are always disappointed when they get in the program and learn that it's hard sometimes to just get a simple transponder. I even had to resort to buying my own GPS device, because checking one out of the lab was such a chore. (I'm sure my colleagues have plenty of equipment stories of their own to share.)

And then this stuff doesn't work like it's supposed to. My biggest letdown when it comes to equipment was an assignment in the Ukraine, in the Zhytomyr province. This was back in '94, I believe. For purposes of isolating a divisionist terrorist group in the nearby town, blowing up a bridge on the Teteriv river was called for. For this mission I was travelling light, so the White Ghost and the boys at the lab had come up with a pen bomb; it was actually a miniature nuclear device, basically a miniature A-bomb inside a rather large, unwieldy pen (the pen even wrote). For protection from the radiation, I had to wear a lead pocket-protector, which fit my cover, as I was supposed to be a visiting English professor studying the culture of the region for a book. Anyway, I clicked the thing 10 times, which armed it, and left it on the bridge, and walked away. 20 minutes later, I'm an hour away, and the thing hasn't gone off. And I can't get back because I'm involved in a hostage negotiation situation with a room full of scared nuns. So that was a failure of technology right there. Never retrieved the pen, so somewhere out there there's a kid probably dying of testicular cancer from carrying that thing in his pocket. That is, if he hasn't already stepped on a loose landmine. (A big problem over there.)

This is just the start of the list. Got to run.