Funeral in Berlin

I'm pretty sure I haven't seen “Reilly: Ace of Spies.” And as a big Sam Neill fan, I've got to check that one out for sure.

I found it on Acorn TV. They have a free one-week trial. The service itself is a reasonable $5.99/month ($59.99/year). There is a lot of overlap with BritBox but I’ve signed up and I’m going to give it at least a month or two.

Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. Kung. This may actually save some money because I don’t use Apple News+ enough to justify the $9.99/mo. I may cancel that. So I'm not going to chide you for costing me more money.

I’ll give spoilers away, but I urge anyone who likes spy flicks to watch this fresh.

Elie was just about to be made secretary of defense of Syria. But he blew his cover when he sent out an emergency message about an imminent attack on the Kibbutzim. The money that Cohen had funneled to the Ba’ath Party had also gone to some terrorist groups. And they were the ones who were going to do the murdering of the innocent Jewish civilians.

You watch a show like this and you know it takes brass balls to do this kind of undercover work. And Elie is very good at it. Unfortunately, me screaming at the TV “Don’t use the transmitter so much” had no effect. I’ve seen enough old German war films to know that they can triangulate you fairly easily with the right equipment. And with Soviet help, the Syrians now had the right equipment.

This was a pretty reckless and amateurish aspect of his undercover work. You knew going it that it was likely a suicide mission, but were never sure. This man gave his life arguable to save not dozens but perhaps tens of thousands. His intelligence may have tipped the balance in the Six-Day War.

In “The Billion Dollar Spy,” they go through some of the procedures when dealing with a new “agent,” as they call informants. They basically school them in procedures — some they necessarily make up as they go along according to their own creativity and sense of what will work.

One of the earliest things they had Tolkachev (who gave us valuable info on Russian radar) do was send something through the mail to a dummy CIA address in the West. On the front of the letter was a pre-written “Dear Grandpa” sort of letter. On the back they had him use a special carbon paper that produced invisible writing.

I’m not absolutely sure why they did this. But I think they were just trying to gauge the iinformant’s trustworthiness and competence, as well as getting his feet wet. In the case of Tolkachev, apparently he was extraordinarily calm, competent, suitably cautious, and willing. The CIA could tell that the KGB had opened the letter but did not detect the invisible writing.

Tolkachev asked for a camera. He had already provided them with a 61-page notebook of stuff he had written down. But that was time-consuming. His handler (Guilsher) gave him a Molly miniature camera. Soon Tolkachev gave Guilsher five cassettes of exposed eighty-frame film, fifty-six pages of handwritten materials, and four sketches at one of their pre-arranged meeting places.

The camera may have looked something like this.

This first major drop was a treasure-trove, including info on the Sukhoi Su-27 advanced fighter.



One of the first things the CIA apparently wants to find out about an informant is the basic lay of the land such as why they are doing it, how much money they want, do they eventually want out of the country, etc. Tolkachev asked for money but his handler thought it wasn’t the money he wanted, per se, but just the respect for doing what he was doing.

They initially paid him 1000 Rubles a month with a 10,000 bonus for work already done. Tolkachev had told Guilsher that he basically didn’t like the Communists (although he eventually did begin to ask for more money). Tolkachev (who had approached the CIA) revealed to his handler that he had a long-range plan for working with the CIA for at least twelve years. “Tolkachev said his goal was to damage the Soviet Union to the maximum extent possible.”

One of the first things the CIA apparently wants to find out about an informant is the basic lay of the land such as why they are doing it, how much money they want, do they eventually want out of the country, etc

Money is almost always the prime mover for double agents defecting to the US. Ideology is a far second and generally distrusted in the intelligence community when coat dragging for possible defectors. On the other hand, our enemies almost always search for ideology as a top motivator. Kim Philby and the Cambridge five were motivated by their affinity for communism. However, American defectors are mostly motivated by money. 

It seems even in treason Americans and wannabe Americans are and remain capitalists. 

Here’s that excerpt from “The Billion Dollar Spy” that I mentioned. This should be required reading before being able to vote…along with a test to make sure it was comprehended. By the way, he sounds exactly like me or Mr. Kung talking about today’s Kultursmog:

In his long April letter to the CIA, Tolachev wrote disdainfully of Soviet ideology and public life. He said that politics, literature, and philosophy had been “enmeshed for a long time in such an impassable, hypocritical demagoguery” and “ideological empty talk” that he tried to ignore them.

Tolkachev said he hadn’t been to a theater in a long time. Although he enjoyed classics, contemporary Soviet plays were “full of ideological gibberish” It was a common attitude.

On the street, the party’s grand declarations were etched into the concrete facades of Metro stations and factory gates, giant banners of self-congratulations. But to most Soviet citizens of the late 1970s, the promises of a bright communist future were long forgotten. These were the years of stagnation.

The Soviet Union devoted such enormous resources to the arms race that its economy sputtered out only the most shoddy goods for consumers. Shortages were frequent and annoying. People waited in lines for hours to get shoes or a winter coat.

Tolkachev’s high-rise apartment building at 1 Ploshchad Vosstaniya, one of Moscow’s seven distinctive, spired towers, had been constructed in 1955 with four high-ceilinged food shops at the street level, one on each corner for meat, fish, dairy, and bread. Modeled on an elegant turn-of-the-century Russian gastronome in Moscow, the four shops were resplendent with red-and-white inlaid marble, floor-to-ceiling windows, luminescent chandeliers, and mighty central columns. The food had never been bountiful, but in the years after the shops were built it was possible to just walk in and find smoked fish and sausage. By 1979, the stores were in decay, the shelves nearly empty.

Theoretically, the Soviet state provided for almost everything—medical care, schooling, transportation, work. But the system was rotting from within. The shortages forced many people to deal in a vast shadow economy, struggling to survive through friends and connections, always on the lookout for a tin of meat, some good tea, or a delivery of shoes.

One of the ironies of giving Tolachev, or any informer, substantial money is that there was very few places to spend it.

We’re drowning in ideology at the moment.

Yes and no, many on the left here and in Europe seem to be driven by ideology as were  hippies in the 60s. But when you take a hard look at how they use their copious time it is driven by financial rewards for themselves. The hippie generation are now retiring from Fortune 500 companies and passing the golden cup to their children and grandchildren. Who are proving to be just as rapious capitalists as their parents. 

What has changed is the amount of money to be made just running for national public office. Four years ago we had 15 people competing for the GOP nod and this year 24/25 democrats. Like The Mouse That Roared, or The Producers  they have discovered that the road to personal financial success is in not winning . The deck is loaded for the failed candidate who gets to keep donations. How many of the failed candidates on both sides walked away much richer than when they entered the race? I don't know and the records are thin on information but my perception is all of them. 

To a lessor extent the same is true for state offices and even some local elections. 

He persisted and I said something like, "Look, I can't take off my jeans in the middle of the sidewalk and give them to you." He replied that there was no problem, we could go to my hotel and I could change and then give them to him. I then told him that they were the only jeans I had brought so he was out of luck. He reluctantly left.

I was never sure if he really wanted the jeans or was some type of KGB type trying to trap a poor naive' foreigner. I suspect he really wanted the jeans.