Note: Most of the “meat” of this article is hidden away in the many links to other sources rich with facts, figures, and fascinating stories. The article itself just provides a basic overview of spy agencies that I can use for comparison purposes to get a better understanding of ITC groups and the challenges they face… (ITC, of course, being instrumental transcommunication, the use of technology to get in touch with the worlds of spirit.)

I watched two documentaries on Netflix recently, Secrets of Her Majesty’s Secret Service  and  World War II Spy School, that got me thinking about how most nations today have “foreign intelligence” services, or spy agencies, that teach people how to sneak information, lie, fight, torture, destroy, and kill… and I got to wondering….

• Why do nations develop these feisty organizations that flourish on our dark side?
• How significant are they in world affairs? Are they like the body’s immune system, simply protecting a nation from foreign invasion? Or are they more like carriers of disease-bearing germs that they spread around to infect and sicken other nations? Or is it some combination of the two?
• Will there come a time when these savage organizations will become passé and go extinct as we become a more peaceful species? (This question was addressed in the previous article about the United Nations.) And ultimately…
• What, if anything, could an ITC group based on harmony and unity learn from these savage groups that flourish on fear and deception?

Well, first off, I’ve learned from my research, as well as from personal experience in various groups, that noble virtues such as good will, honesty, and trust allow humans to live together and to collaborate in peace indefinitely… while fear, aggression, deception, and other savage motivations add stress to human relationships, causing organizations to bristle and break down.

In other words, noble virtues strengthen human groups and hold them together in harmony, while savage motivations weaken groups and break them down amid chaos.

I’ve found that to be generally true in the long run, although psychologists point out that there are exceptions:

• Stressful, life-and-death situations rife with fear often require authoritarian leadership to keep the peace by wielding fear. Sometimes dictatorial personalities have to fight fire with fire.
• Unruly humans (people divided by incompatible values and beliefs) often require a strong boss who rules by fear until everyone’s generally peaceful and aligned to compatible values, and then noble virtues, or social leadership, can run the show more effectively.

Aside: This second point seems to be the problem today facing European countries that accept crowds of Muslim refugees from Syria (examples  here…  and   here… ). The culture shock stirred up by diverse, incompatible values (of western consumers vs. Islamic survivors in this case) might be ameliorated if western governments could channel the war-torn refugees either into some sort of refugee indoctrination camps, complete with mosques, or at least into Muslim communities within the host countries while assisting the communities in establishing indoctrination programs for the newcomers. Either case might require some authoritarian influences for a while. (Read more about this recent culture shock... )

In any case, savage (authoritarian) leadership under savage conditions is (or at least probably should be) the exception in human culture… a stop-gap measure that lasts only until compatible values have been assimilated by the people. Then, as life becomes more peaceful, it’s time for noble (social) leadership to take over…  imho.

The Birth of Modern Espionage

So… back to the two documentaries that got me wondering about this stuff in the first place:

Apparently Imperial Germany’s SS (Secret Service) created such an imposing force in the years leading up to the First World War by planting spies in other countries 1) to get sensitive information, 2) to spread fear and deception, and 3) to destabilize and weaken governments… that England forged its own secret service to counteract the German threat.

Historically, then, Britain formed its…

• SSB (Secret Service Bureau) in 1909 in preparation for the First World War, and SSB became…
• SIS (Special Intelligence Service) in the 1920s. Then during the Nazi threat of the Second World War in the 1940s British intelligence broadened its focus from intelligence-gathering to sabotage by establishing the…
• SOE (Special Operations Executive), or the “Destruction Department,” whose aim was “to set Europe ablaze.” And today, ever since the growing popularity of Ian Fleming’s James Bond-007 novels in the 1950s, which masterfully blended fact and fiction into their plots, Britain’s foreign intelligence service is most often thought of, with a sense of intrigue, as…
• MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6). (Read more… )

Despite the intimidating names and acronyms, the basic working structure of a foreign intelligence service is pretty simple:

• Officers, or operatives, are part of the agency, and they recruit and “handle” their agents.
• Agents are outside the agency–recruited, employed, and directed by officers. (Read more… )

Officers and agents alike are called spies.

After the Second World War, British intelligence would become the standard for spy agencies everywhere, thanks largely to the popular 007 books… but even moreso to another book familiarly known as the Camp X Training Manual.

The manual was a detailed outline for teaching agents how to kill people in the most effective and gruesome ways, outlining all of the techniques perfected by MI6 over the years. It was written at the outset of the Second World War, largely as a hook to get the Americans to commit to join the war.

Which they did.

Camp X, built just north of the USA near Toronto in 1941, was used to teach Americans and Canadians how to be spies in the MI6 tradition. Besides learning the best ways to kill, they learned how to go behind enemy lines to get intel and to conduct guerrilla warfare… especially how to destroy enemy transport. Some of the original students said later that Camp X wasn’t looking for typical soldiers for typical military training, but instead recruited “PhDs who could win bar fights”… bright, tough young men who could think on their feet and improvise. They were taught to “fight dirty and strike first to kill.”

In 1942 the Brits helped the Americans form the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which would later become the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).

The Americans set up seven new spy-training camps near Washington D.C., and some of the top students of Camp X were reassigned as instructors to start teaching a veritable army of top American spies the art of collecting intel, killing, torturing, and blowing things up… and the US intelligence service was off and running.

By the closing years of the War, a covert army of intensively trained British, American, and Canadian spies were sneaking around behind enemy lines, extracting information from the enemy, bombing trains, and fighting throughout Europe and Asia… having a crippling effect on the German and Japanese war machine.

The Cold War

The Camp X Training Manual was essentially the complete idiot’s guide on how to partake in the ultimate in human savagery, and it played an important role in ending the Second World War.

At that point in world history, everything probably would have been fine if, having vanquished Hitler’s war machine, the Allies (America, Soviet Union, Britain, France, and a host of other countries) had agreed that the savagery built into countries’ spy agencies had served its purpose, and it was now time to move it to the back burner… to enter a new era of trust and good will… but that doesn’t seem to be how human nature works.

The noble side of humanity tried to do just that by forging the United Nations, a platform of peace and unity for the world. But the savage side of humanity continued to bristle and surge like an undercurrent of fear in many countries, especially in the Soviet Union and the United States, so spy agencies began to grow and to perfect their toxic skills.

The Camp X Training Manual was coauthored by two top MI6 spies, Paul Dehn and Kim Philby, and probably was given to the KGB by Philby, who was a double agent for the Soviet Union, as we’ll explore later under “Personalities.”

So… that savage seed, the training manual, which was so important in ending the Second World War, was then propagated internationally, becoming the savage core of the American CIA, the Soviet KGB, and probably many other secret spy agencies of other countries as well.

(Glimpse the world’s many spy agencies… )

After the Second World War, then, the noble work of the UN would often be undercut, obstructed, and shredded by the big countries, especially the Americans and the Soviets, during their more savage moments… and the inciting force in many of those savage moments was the spy agency of each country—the CIA and the KGB. (Read more  here…  and   here…  and   here… )

Spy Agencies Up Close and Personal

As we take a more structured look at spy agencies, we’ll give a little extra attention to the CIA, which has become the most powerful and deadly of the group, especially since the 9/11 attack in New York City. Spy agency activity is typically shrouded in secrecy, but documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 give us a rare look into the inner workings of the CIA, especially in the area of funding.

Mission and Motivation

A spy agency’s mission is to defend and protect the security of its host country. It has a pretty simple worldview consisting of the state with all of its economic and security interests on one hand, and, on the other hand, harmful forces in world society that threaten the state. As such, a spy agency has to be a rather contentious organization, and its members have to include some contentious people who can battle those dangerous outside forces.

To support the agency mission, spy handlers have to know when to tell the truth and when to lie. They can flip an inner switch that makes them either trustworthy  or  deceptive… either empathetic  or  sociopathic… depending on the situation. There’s a lot of dirty work and manipulation in the spy business.

Since 9/11 (2001), the CIA has been undergoing a transformation similar to the one that changed British intelligence during the early Hitler threat of the Second World War… a change of focus from espionage (spying) to sabotage (blowing things up, torturing and killing people), recent articles in the Washington Post would suggest. A surge in CIA resources “funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center.”

At the same time, according to Business Insider, the agency built a “Global Response Staff, which hired former U.S. commandos and began collaborating with U.S. Special Operations teams on capture/kill missions in addition to training and deploying a 3,000-member Afghan paramilitary force.”

In effect, in this 21^st Century, the CIA has taken on the task of becoming one of the most powerful, savage forces in the world under the guise of protecting the security and economic interests of the USA.

What does that suggest about the mission of an ITC group?

If we view mankind today as a global community, then spy agencies and militaries would be like the bad boys and bullies from the various neighborhoods. They’re like kids who like to beat up other kids and play with matches and firecrackers in the shed. They know what they’re doing is wrong and dangerous. They know that despite their sneaking around they’re eventually going to get found out. They know they can probably postpone the consequences by lying with conviction and by portraying their victim as s deserving creep who “started it”… but ultimately they know there’ll be consequences from the powers that be.

We all kind of know that the “powers that be” include not just worldly forces such as the media, public opinion, watchdog groups, other countries, the United Nations… but also invisible forces. We sometimes equate those invisible forces with vague concepts like conscience or karma, but they’re really much more than that.

In fact, we all know at some level deep within, that in the bigger picture, there really are no secrets. Secrecy and deception are bizarre illusions of this dense material world. There are invisible, spiritual forces of every ilk around us (and sometimes even inside us) who see and know everything about us. They know we’re noble-savage creatures living in a noble-savage world, and they observe us with fascination as we live out our petty dramas here on Earth, oblivious to “them,” the invisible forces flourishing around us. Various spiritual forces invest themselves in the affairs of our world for various reasons.

1. At one end of the spiritual spectrum are ethereal guides (popularly called “angels”) who watch patiently, encouraging the peacemakers, resting with the weary, and embracing the sick and lonely. They know that a lifetime on Earth is but a single lesson in a vast education for the soul, and they’re not quick to judge anyone. (Read more… )
2. At the other end of the spectrum are the tormenting, invisible slimeballs who move in and out of world, stirring things up among us clueless meatballs. There’s no respect or empathy in these relationships. The troubled souls inhabit a sort of shadow world of Earth and get a morbid buzz from whispering taunts and ill advice to swindlers, addicts, manipulators, false prophets, and murderers. (Read more… )
3. And between those two extremes are many other types of spiritual influences of mostly good intention. In particular, there are the many departed souls… of beloved family members… of healing spirits… of brilliant men and women from the fields of art, music, science, medicine… and many of these spirits of good will move in close to people on Earth to offer inspiration and support. (Read more… )

ITC groups have to foster a resonant field of trust and good will amongst themselves in orders to sustain contact with the entities of #3 above, and they’ll probably need support from the #1 entities as well, ethereal beings, who can offer guidance and protection against the #2 entities.

It’s those #2 entities that can disrupt and cripple an ITC contact bridge by stirring up animosities. I suspect they’re also the main spirit entities that support the more unsavory personalities within spy agencies.

Personalities and Egos

This is where spy agencies get really fascinating. The personalities who rise to the surface in a spy agency include not just the best and brightest and most assertive (as in many organizations), but also sometimes the most eccentric, or the most savage. Some examples from recent history:

Mansfield Cumming, a British naval officer, was the first director of Britain’s spy agency. When holding meetings in his office or interviewing job applicants, he’d stab his wooden leg with his pocket knife or letter opener to observe reactions. Cumming wrote his correspondence in green ink and signed with his last initial “C”… two traditions that are still in practice today by the chief of MI6, who’s often called “C.”

James Bond, the fictional spy in Ian Fleming’s 007 novels, is the personification of MI6, a sort of officer and agent rolled into one, who reports directly to “M,” a fictional MI6 chief. (Fleming cleverly used the first initial, “M,” of Mansfield Cumming to represent the head of MI6.) James Bond is a flamboyant center of attention, whereas most real spies avoid the limelight, walk the shadows, and try to blend in unnoticed.

Sidney Reilly, ace of spies, spoke 7 languages. He was fearless, liked gambling and women, was a persuasive conman, and a master of deception. He was the first collector of intel for MI6.

Pat Bayly, Canadian genius inventor and head of Camp X communications, created the Rockex Machine for coding-decoding war messages among the Allies. It was the first digital machine for encryption, was the best codec device of the war, and remained effective and in use for 40 years. Rockex gave the Allies a big edge in the War and provided secure strategizing for the Allied invasion of Europe.

Guy Artois, a French Canadian trainee at Camp X, was considered by some to be the perfect spy. Instructors noted that Artois “is a restless, impulsive, intensely active man. He has enthusiasm, self-confidence, and is practical and sharp-witted.” After graduating from Camp X, he became famous among spies for rallying the French Resistance into disabling much of the German war machine.

Kim Philby was a British double-agent. MI6 recruited exclusively from the upper class. There were no background checks, since the British elite were assumed to be trustworthy. In the 1930s Soviet Russia’s KGB began to recruit Englishmen willing to betray their country, young idealists like college student Philby, who viewed iron-fisted fascism in Mussolini’s Italy and in Hitler’s Germany as a perverted outgrowth of capitalism and saw communism as the best alternative. That sentiment helped Philby view the KBG as a positive force in the world, so he agreed to rise in the ranks of MI6 and over the years to share some of its greatest secrets with the Soviets. When the CIA and MI6 hatched a secret plan to invade Soviet-held Albania and overthrow the puppet government, Philby notified the Soviets in advance, the coup was foiled by a ready Albanian army, and the invading spies were rounded up and some were executed. Before being exposed for counterespionage in the 1960s, Philby fled England and was received by Moscow… not as a hero but as a suspicious outsider who’d been of some service to the Soviet Union. He died in 1988, a drunk and broken man.

Meanwhile, counterspies were flowing in the other direction too.

Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and dissident, defected to London in 1969, where a decade later he was poked in the leg (probably by a Bulgarian spy, codename Picadilly) with a special KGB spy umbrella, that injected a pinhead-size pellet of ricin poison into his body, killing him within days… escalating international espionage to a new era of “license to kill on foreign soil.”

Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet spy, was like Kim Philby’s alter ego. He viewed Soviet communism as an anti-human perversion of socialism and saw democracy as the best alternative. Getting assigned to the Soviet embassy in London gave Gordievsky the opportunity to share Soviet secrets with his MI6 handler, John Scarlett. As a double agent, Gordievsky may have saved the world… literally, as explained in the next paragraph.

Ronald Reagan, the charismatic, rabblerousing US President, took the world to the brink of Nuclear War in the early 1980s when he accused the Soviet Union of being an “evil empire” that would wind up “on the ash heap of history,” and then launched a joint US-NATO exercise off the coast of Europe to simulate a response to a Soviet nuclear attack. The sudden warmongering put the Soviet military on high “readiness” alert. Essentially, the American finger, courtesy of Reagan, compelled the Soviet finger to move to the Launch button, ready to send atomic missiles across the Atlantic at the first sign of aggression by the US-NATO fleet. Agent Gordievsky, working at the embassy in London at the time, happened to see the top-secret Soviet order to launch nukes when necessary and immediately notified his MI6 handler, John Scarlett, who immediately contacted English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who immediately contacted Reagan. The NATO exercise pulled back, the Soviets relaxed… and the world breathed a sigh of relief. (Well, that’s close to, but not exactly, what really happened….) A few years later, Reagan tried a subtler approach. During a speech in West Berlin (1987) at the Brandenburg Gate next to the Berlin Wall, he pleaded, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The intelligence community was well aware that removing the historic wall between East and West, between communism and capitalism, between socialism and democracy, was already part of Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev’s plan for domestic reforms, and the wall came down a couple of years later, in 1989… not because of Reagan, but because it seemed the right thing to do at that point in history.

William (Wild Bill) Donovan was the head of America’s first centralized intelligence agency, OSS, which he patterned after MI6 starting in 1942. Donovan once said that “in a global and totalitarian war, intelligence must be global and totalitarian,” and he was willing and eager to try just about anything, from the wicked to the weird… from assassinations of foreign leaders, to airdrops of pictures of succulent food onto German cities to try to incite an uprising of hungry Germans against Hitler.

Edward Lansdale, an OSS and CIA operative, tortured and killed communists in the Philippines and looted Japanese gold right after the Second World War, and then during the Cold War headed the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and, according to some amateur historians, probably headed the assassination of John F Kennedy as well. Lansdale is described by some as among the most unsavory of spies.

From all of this we can glean some useful insights for ITC research.

A wide range of personality types are recruited into spy agencies, from colorful leaders, to geniuses with a noble sense of purpose, to psychopaths with a savage bent for murder and mayhem. Observing the work of the most unsavory of these characters—those who like to sabotage, lie, cheat, steal, kill, and destroy—can give us a sense of the kinds of personalities and egos that, once they’ve died, get pulled into that dark and troubled shadow spirit world that blankets the Earth like an invisible storm cloud (the #2 spirit entities mentioned earlier). The troubled spirits of that realm present one of the biggest obstacles to ITC by sabotaging communication bridges, deceiving researchers, destroying human relationships, and otherwise wielding negative influences in order to disturb the contact field, which is kept clean and strong through resonance of attitudes of trust and good will among research colleagues on Earth.

Spiritual workers on Earth often wonder why so many troubled spirits cause problems for us on Earth….  This is probably one reason: Psychopaths carry their grim urges along with them when they die, and are unable to ascend to the beautiful paradise world because they do not resonate with trust and good will that prevail in those lighter spirit communities. Their savage motivations hold them near the Earth instead… where they get into all sorts of mischief.

Management and Direction

Spy agencies view the world as a dangerous place, and so they fight fire with fire. Decisions are usually made in response to their fear of savage forces in the world… which must be met with equal or greater savage force. There’s not much place for ethical debate in a spy agency. As “Wild Bill” Donovan said, “intelligence must be global and totalitarian.”

So, when CIA director John Brennan decided last March that it was time for spring cleaning the agency, he was limited in his makeover options. It’s clear that he won’t be able to transform the CIA into a noble organization that fosters trust and good will in the world. His aim will be to reshape the beast into a more effective structure… if that. CIA employees traditionally resist change, and many are apparently hoping that the next CIA director, Brennan’s replacement to be hired maybe as early as next year, will scrap the makeover plans and leave things alone.

What an ITC group could learn from spy agency management is all about perception.

If we see the world as a hostile place, then we become a defensive, hostile person. If we see the world as a beautiful, loving place, then we become a trusting, loving person. (Read more… )

The same is true with our organizations and groups. When the management structure of a spy agency views the world as a hostile place, the world gradually becomes more and more of a hostile place for that agency and its host country.

If the members of an ITC group can envision the world as a loving, wonderful place, then the world becomes more and more of a wonderful place for the group and its members. This principle is especially important for an ITC group, which works closely and directly with the worlds of spirit. Thoughts and intentions are nearly omnipotent in shaping the lives and subtle structures within the worlds of spirit.

On Earth, with its dense structures and energies, the world-shaping process powered by the mind is subtler and more gradual… but it happens for sure.

So the key for a successful ITC group is to sustain thoughts and attitudes that resonate with the lighter, brighter worlds of spirit… attitudes of trust and good will that keep the contact field clear and stable.

Misdirection plays a big part in spy agency management. When reading reports of spy agency activities and interviews of agency officials, it’s not always easy to tell what’s true and what’s propaganda. Much of what we Americans hear from the CIA about Middle East enemies and terrorists, for example, is probably false, or at least was initially… until the dogged US perception of a hostile Muslim culture began to shape that hostile force.

Since the 1970s, US issues with the Middle East have always been about oil, first and foremost. Other concerns (Israel, women’s rights…) have been small in comparison to America’s heavy dependence on Mideast oil.

Here are links to a couple of articles, spun largely from spy agency minds, about the troubles between the USA and the Middle East:

• A New York Times article speaks authoritatively on the USA’s dangerous dependence on Mideast oil and the need for a comprehensive strategy to reduce American reliance. It’s coauthored by two US intelligence officials.
• A Der Spiegel interview with another US intelligence official admits that the US was largely responsible for the creation of the militant “terrorist” group IS, or Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or DAESH), which coalesced as a reaction to the US war on Iraq.

Both of these articles have a lot of good information… but how much is fact, and how much is propaganda intended to protect US security and economic interests?

Hard to say. But I do know that sometimes a serial, secret misbehaver, when caught in his latest antic, will use the “Aw shucks, I guess I really did something dumb” defense. And sometimes they’ll get away with it… and the misbehavior will resume. I’m not suggesting that any of these three fellows would perpetrate that sort of deception, but the many sources I’ve researched for this article lead me to believe that spy agency management will readily use that sort of deception if it’ll support the agency mission.

Funding

Funding of the CIA was brought to light a couple of years ago by secret documents released by Edward Snowden to the Washington Post. I won’t go into the vast details of spy agency funding in this article (other than to say that the CIA suddenly got the lion’s share of US funding for intelligence work after the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers), but here are links to some well-researched, insightful articles for those interested:

• Washington Post’s analysis of the “Black Budget.
• Business Insider’s simplified interpretation of that analysis.
• Martin Grandjean’s excellent charts and graphs.

Conclusion

To conclude, the CIA today has become the strongest and most savage spy agency in the world. For some Americans that’s a point of pride. For others, like me, it’s a cause for concern. The CIA has America (and much of the world) hiding behind a growing wall of fear, mistrust and hatred.

For the greater safety of America and the world…

Uncle Sam, tear down this wall.

.

Also in this series (What an ITC Group Could Learn From Other Groups)…

1 intro   –  2 Prologue   –  3 Saturday Night Live   –  4 The United Nations   –  5 Spy agencies  –  6 Disney  –  7 Religion  –