Fantastic Metropolis

Shades of Dionysus and the Maenads? Is it me, or was the idea of our best and brightest spies insisting on a series of laws and regulations that they violated with impunity just a little… well, transgressive? Engaging in sex rituals (even as observers) and all sorts of mind-altering behavior, it is as if the whole CIA had read Liber AL and The Book of Thelema and decided that they were excellent blueprints on how to run a secret agency. Was this born of OSS’s experiences in World War II? Did Donovan’s boys run into the mechanism of Nazi occultism full-bore, and require some expert British advice? During the Cold War, while the CIA was experimenting with every drug it could get its hands on as well as ways to alter the human consciousness (including playing the subjects own voice back, electrical shock, and sensory or sleep deprivation) the Soviets were gambling on psychotronics. Did it work? Did the CIA need a mystical edge to combat the mental menace of the KGB? Is that why they violated their own strictures by (as an example) steadily increasing doses of LSD that they were secretly giving to black patients at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital? (Note: this is a clear violation of the Nuremberg consent decision so important to Donovan himself.)

Imagine, if you will, how much stress the CIA agent is under, especially in a world where the line between reality and fantasy has cracked. The Primordial Matter has been created and destroyed and then created again (atomic fusion, the opposite of fission, generating one element where there had been two), millions dead at the hands of black suited madmen who believed themselves to be a race of people that didn’t even exist and who aimed telescopes at the sky because they were convinced that we live on the inside of the Earth (and yet, who almost won a war unlike any ever fought before, and were years ahead in many of the sciences… Were they getting help? Who from? How could they believe the universe to be made of solid rock and develop the V2 at the same time?), and then for decades locked in a shadow war with an enemy who commands the same world-destroying power as we do… not to mention Keel’s ultraterrestrials possibly pulling strings everywhere, infiltrating the minds of US citizens… is anyone’s will their own?

Look, if you will, at the case of James Jesus Angleton (yes, the name makes it easier to ponder…), who spent his life looking for moles. He suspected the President of the United States and was convinced there was a mole in the CIA at least as high up as himself. He shredded everything, and spent years hunting for Sasha, his hypothetical Soviet adversary, but never came up with anything. One of his colleagues, George Eastbrooks, meanwhile claimed to have made people exhibit multiple personalities for military intelligence reasons, and a model named Candy Jones claimed to have been one of those people, programmed to act as a CIA agent. Is it possible Angleton had inadvertently made himself one as well? Was Sasha really Angleton all along, able to spy on the man with impunity because he was the man? The extreme paranoia Angleton displayed all his life, combined with the odd sex and drugs carnival that the CIA seems to have been, certainly makes it seem possible. For that matter, Angleton seems to be some sort of chaos magnet… conspiracy swirls around him. He may or may not have founded the P2 conspiracy in Rome, he certainly suspected Tito of being a Soviet agent, he creeped out even other CIA agents and he was eventually fired for illegal activities… from an agency that introduced hundreds of college students to LSD without their knowledge. He transgressed so heavily, his sanity seems to have shattered, yet that didn’t hurt his effectiveness at all.