After that it was 24, which seemed to capture the attention of many, as I recalled reading about Jack Bauer in Maureen Dowd's Op-Ed columns. The show offered a way for viewers to fantasize about how we combated terrorism. We needed some such relief in the aftermath of 9/11. Evidently the show capitalized on ethos after that event, plus in the first season, which in some ways was remarkably low-tech, the show dramatized the possibilities of invasive surveillance via security cameras connected to the Internet. It was eerie in this way, both for then and as a foreboding of things to come. While I'm representing these shows as being viewed sequentially, I must have watched some of the West Wing in the same time period as I watched 24, as for the latter I eventually watched the shows live, though I also got DVDs of the series and watched them repeatedly as well. Not surprisingly, some of the actors in 24 had also appeared in the West Wing. I suppose the talent pool from which one casts such shows is limited and viewers of both forgive such overlap, though I think actors we haven't seen before are more effective than those we are familiar with, because then we don't project what we think we know about the person from prior roles the person has played. For a short period of time I watched a few episodes of Designated Survivor, which featured Kiefer Sutherland in the lead role. Apart from some other aspects of the show that I found unappealing, it was very difficult to consider Jack Bauer as a character expressing such reticence and ambivalence. I can understand why Sutherland would want to play such a character, but as a fan I still wanted him to be Jack Bauer.
The next show I'll mention is The Hour, perhaps more obscure to American viewers because it was a BBC production. My friend Deanna recommended it - the closest thing to The West Wing, she claimed. So I took her up on the suggestion. It was an intriguing show, taking the issues out of the present by going back to the 1950s for its setting, and then looking at the perspective of the press and their adversarial relationship to the powers that be. This time I started with the DVDs, as it wasn't yet being aired online and had already been shown, so no chance to view it on the air. It readily can be viewed now via Amazon Prime, but I seem to recall a while back it being free while now there is a charge per episode. Also, there were only two seasons and only six episodes per season. Yet the story is quite compelling as there is a narrative that runs longitudinally throughout each season and that builds to a a dramatic climax.
The last show I'll mention and the one I've viewed most recently is Homeland. During the first and second seasons the show seemed to have two leads - Brody, the former POW who returns home to a hero's welcome, while he actually has been turned into an agent of the terrorists who held him in captivity, and Carrie, the CIA officer whose skepticism at the outset lets her discover Brody's true colors yet also falls in love with him so the two have an affair. In the third season Brody is killed off and by then it was clear that Carrie was the sole star of the show. She is something of a genius for doing spy work, her bipolar disease part and parcel of the intensity and instinct she demonstrates for the work. In this respect she is like other genius characters, Vincent Van Gogh who clearly suffered many manic episodes, the cause of which have been widely speculated upon, and John Nash, who had schizophrenia, are probably the best known among them. As a consequence, Carrie is able to see things clearly that others in the CIA miss or gloss over. Yet her mania and her intensity sometimes get her too far in front of the evidence, so she too makes errors by jumping to conclusions that can't be sustained.
Each of these shows share some common elements. Carrie's intensity is paralleled in the Josh Lyman character in the West Wing, the Jack Bauer character in 24 who has already been mentioned, and the Freddie Lyon character in The Hour. Apart from the intensity they share an ethical rightness about their work, yet are willing to take quite unorthodox means to achieve their ends. You might describe the style as "all in," borrowing a term from Texas Hold'em poker. Other people would be more measured and circumspect, but not these characters. The shows also share that a happy ending doesn't always occur and that sometimes the main character does seem to win, but the personal costs are so high as to be disastrous.
In what follows I'm going to focus on Homeland Season 7 the last season that's been fully aired. (Season 8, which will be the last season of the show is due to air this fall.) At this point Carrie is former CIA and doesn't have an obvious employer, but she suspects nefarious activity from within the White House and with good reason. With the help of her usual teammates, she begins an illegal but important surveillance effort targeted at the President's Chief of Staff. She then encounters a disaffected FBI agent, seemingly by chance, and after a rough start they begin a partnership. In the previous season she also had a relationship with an FBI agent that started badly, but then proved productive. So this seemed to be following the same script, though it wasn't, because this time around the FBI agent was a plant, working for a foreign government.
Indeed, the nefarious work inside the White House turns out to be an illusion, and what is really going on is information warfare provoked by the Russians. This includes fake news of the most provocative kind, homicide that is made to look like a heart attack, and the planting of an agent as the Chief of Staff's girlfriend with the aim that she could ultimately betray him while under oath. In the last episode, the National Security Director and former mentor to Carrie, Saul Berenson, arranges for a team to travel to Russia, to negotiate with their counterparts there about the recent course of events. This is a cover for an attempted extraction plan of the female agent who had been pretending to be the Chief of Staff's girlfriend, who had been under sequester before giving testimony to a Senate committee, but was rescued by her Russian comrades, allowing her to escape back to the home country. Unfortunately for the Americans, the Senator who had ordered the sequester leaked the information of the extraction plan to the Russians, so the plan failed.
The last episode of the season is a plan B, figured from scratch by Carrie on the fly, but something that seemed to come to her without too much effort. They enlist a partner from among their Russian counterparts whom they had been negotiating with, an old time General who had an extraordinary amount of wealth, hundreds of millions of dollars, located in U.S. controlled financial institutions. They are able to freeze these assets and tell the general he will only get them back if the help them get the female agent. The General pursues this with a vigor by enlisting a seeming army of those who report to him to find this woman. It looks like an inquisition and the American team is able to capture it live on camera and stream it on the Internet. In effect, the American team was giving the Russians a big dose of their own medicine, even while this itself was a cover for a second extraction plan, which worked, though Carrie paid a huge price as a consequence as she was captured by the Russians.
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Let's take a break from TV and look at some history that all of us know about, then try to connect the two, and ultimately bring that back to the present. It is a peculiar aspect of intelligence operations that the most successful ones mainly remain hidden from view. It is the failures that get exposed and then become part of history. For example, what do we know about CIA involvement (if any) in the Ukraine prior to it expressing interest in joining NATO and the European Union. Consider this paragraph from a Tom Friedman column published in December 2014. Writing about Putin, Friedman says:
He bet almost his whole economy on oil and gas that only can be exploited long-term at the risk of disruptive climate change; he underestimated the degree to which technological innovation has enabled America to produce more oil, gas, renewable energy and greater efficiency, all at the same time, helping to undermine crude prices; he talked himself into believing that Ukrainians toppled their corrupt leaders only because the C.I.A. told them to — not because of the enduring human quest to realize a better future for their kids; and he underestimated how integrated and interdependent Russia is with the global markets and how deeply sanctions, over time, would bite him.
Does Friedman actually have inside information about the CIA here as he is writing his piece, or is he shooting from the hip and speculating about it. Who knows? (I hope his editors know, but that doesn't help the rest of us.) There are, of course, Web sites that assert the CIA did actually produce the coup in Ukraine. But I, for one, have no way to determine whether those sites are trustworthy or are Fake News. I can't find such information from among sources I already am aware of and might rely upon.
The one intelligence operation that we're all aware of and are confident in it happening is the Watergate break-in. Here is an early article by Bernstein and Woodward (perhaps their first on Watergate) that ties the break-in to a vast conspiracy aimed at sabotaging Democratic candidates. The date of publication is October 10, 1972, not quite a month before the election. It had minimal impact on that as Nixon "won" in a landslide. But it did set the stage for the investigations that followed in the spring. I want to make note of this particular paragraph
“Intelligence work” is normal during a campaign and is said to be carried out by both political parties. But federal investigators said what they uncovered being done by the Nixon forces is unprecedented in scope and intensity.
I wish they had elaborated on the normal intelligence work and what that is about. Would any of this normal activity make ordinary voters queasy if they learned about it happening? And would this work be done by typical campaign staff members? Or would the campaigns hire former FBI, CIA, and NSA operatives to complete this work. That would be useful to know.
Regarding the break-in itself, there was one former CIA operative involved among the 5 who were arrested, James W. McCord Jr. (I found this site helpful simply to recall the names of those involved in Watergate. Forty years ago, many of them were household names, but some of that familiarity fades with time.) Two other, more familiar, names were soon connected to the burglars. They were E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative who later worked as a consultant for Charles Colson, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent and then Finance Counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President. So here is an example of former CIA and FBI agents working hand in hand on an illegal intelligence operation, making Homeland Season 7 seem like deja vu, which in some sense it is.
Viewed from now, I would like to know during the aftermath of the Watergate episode what it would have taken to rule the Presidential election in 1972 null and void. Here's a piece by Robert Reich that argues this should happen for the election of 2016. I don't believe the matter ever came up at the time of Watergate, so I will speculate here about why that was. First there was the Agnew resignation, on matters unrelated to Watergate. That lessened the legacy after Nixon's resignation. Then, the parties were less far apart then. It is instructive to observe that Roe v. Wade was decided early in 2003 while Chief Justice Burger presided. Burger was a Nixon appointment. So, if remedies are taken in sequence and ruling the election null and void is the last step in the sequence, with impeachment an earlier step, then it seems that Nixon's resignation brought a halt to all of that.
Getting back to Reich's argument, if he is making more than a mere rhetorical case, one wonders how it would happen. Would the Supreme Court decide the matter? If so, would Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh weigh in on the matter, or would they be required to recuse themselves, as they were appointed after the 2016 election? (Reich argues they would need to recuse themselves, but would they agree?) Indeed, if such recusal were required and the other Justices found that the election should be annulled (likely by a 4-3 vote) what would that say about all the judicial appointments made? Sensing the various dilemmas that arise here, one wonders what previous steps would have to be taken to bring the matter to the Supreme Court. The Constitution doesn't speak to this directly.
Now I'd like to talk about one other event that was near contemporaneous with Watergate. This is the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. While the U.S. clearly preferred Pinochet to Allende, the role of the CIA in deposing Allende is unclear, though I will say that I believe the CIA was the driver of the coup, basing that belief more on what I heard about at that time, when I was in college, and a few years later, when I was in graduate school, than on any look at more direct evidence. My sense of things is that then the CIA was quite good at exercising political upheaval, where it suited U.S. foreign policy. The Watergate break-in, then, was a consequence of that expertise taken too far and applied to domestic politics. Unfortunately, the lesson we exported to the rest of the world is that exercising political upheaval is an effective way to undermine one's adversaries. The Russian interference in our domestic politics is our chickens coming home to roost. Homeland Season 7 makes that case very well.
* * * * *
Now I want to take a different angle and imagine that I'm a Democratic Party strategist. Looking at the pace at which things are going, regarding impeachment, regarding the various Southern states passing their repressive anti-abortion laws, even assuming a big Democratic victory in 2020, what should be made of all those judicial appointments that have occurred since Trump became President? Should they be viewed as collateral damage - it's a shame they happened but there's nothing that can be done about them now? Or should they be viewed as intolerable, because Reich is correct and the 2016 election should be annulled? If the latter, but if it is recognized that going through proper channels is very unlikely to deliver the desired results in a reasonable timeframe, would more unorthodox approaches then be entertained? Would any of those unorthodox approaches look like something that came out of Homeland Season 7?
As I've watched this TV series, these questions have been in the back of my head. Sometimes, they move to the front of my head as I think about matters while away from the TV. I can't be the only one thinking this way. But resorting to such a solution, if it exists, requires a hardball mentality that I associate with the Republicans, not with the Democrats. Democrats really want to trust the system and believe that things will work themselves out for the best if that trust is there. Yet it's getting harder and harder to maintain that belief. I'd rather believe there are some hardball types among Democratic Party strategists who are working on this. If so, I hope evidence of this work becomes visible to the rest of us, and soon.
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