It's my distinct pleasure to introduce Richard Thieme.  He's been giving talks here at DEF CON for 19 years.  That's absolutely incredible.  I don't want to embarrass him and tell him what I was doing 19 years ago.  Whenever I go home, certainly being on the old team I was on, I usually missed most of the talks.  I always take time to go back and listen to Richard's talks, and this is going to be great.  He was a guest on coast to coast A.M. which I've listened to since I was a kid.  It is my distinct pleasure to introduce Richard Thieme.  
>> Thank you.  It really has 19 years.  As someone tweeted like a deranged old man, and that was three years ago.  So you accept your destiny.  Josh Corman was a Calvary man.  He said I want to talk to you and pick your brains while we still have you.  People used to not say that.  So you have to do to deal with how you're perceived, and you say I have to tell the whole truth as I know it and see it for what it's worth.  You have one brief span to hold that bright, shining torch, and instead of whining and complaining that the world won't dedicate itself to make you happy, you want it to blaze as brightly as possible, and you want at the end of your life to be all used up because you have expended all the energy you have got.  In doing that, in trying to be of value and people that you come to love, which includes this weird collection of people here at DEFCON.  
So let's get going.  The only way to tell the truth is through fiction.  Where did that come from?  Let's see if we can get this to work.  No.  Keeps doing the same thing.  It is no wonder how complicated things get with one thing leading to another said E.B. White, and he wasn't kidding.  When you set off on a journey to find out what is real, you walk on one side of the strip, and you're convinced there's another side of the strip.  As you come around you know how the strip works.  You find yourself always on the same side.  
My intention is to describe here is what the world since World War II has become.  If you were born during or before World War II, and my hand was the only one that went up.  In this room there are probably a few more, but not many of you might know in a noncontextual way how we have come to live and accept reality for what it - is different than it was before the Cold War, which created post‑modernization and deconstructionism to understand what's going on.  I know we love to say the matrix, but the deeper you go after taking the red pill, the more lavender it becomes, and you have a red and purple pill all the way down.  
We can never get to the bottom of it, because the movie strip brings us to back to where we began.  I'll describe the conditions as I see them, and hope you will not as some people do when I do the talk on UFOs and government how the government responded to UFO phenomena for 60 years by saying I don't want to know that.  That's an essential bubble in which people live their lives by choice because the cognitive dissonance in knowing what is real in our society and nation is too painful, too discordant.  Remember what Nietchze said a long time ago.  When one is confronted with the unknown, the first instinct is to abolish the discomfort and pain.  Any explanation is better than none, because you want to get your head rid of oppressive representations.  One is not particular about how you to get rid of them.  The first one that explains them is the one people grab ahold of.  
The proof of pleasure is a criterion for proof, and they believe a construction of reality which is congruent with their altogether present and previous construction of reality rather than allowing anomalous information in because it causing too much discomfort.  We call that explanation the truth.  
Then when we pass it around to other people we have an agree and consensus and it becomes orthodoxy and even scientific truth.  So let us begin.  
I'm going to talk about mind games, my book I'll do a signing tomorrow.  Of course, I always have a backpack heavier full of books I can carry if someone wants to buy one for a mere $20 before then.  How did I come to write "Mind Games."
I can talk about it now more than I did before Snowden.  Shortly after 9/11, because of the friends and colleagues I made through this organizational structure such as it is, there were some people from the national security agency who were very concerned after 9/11 because the executive order that came from the Bush White House asked them to do things we'd never do because it's contrary to the Constitution and to the law.  They knew I'd write in the '90s about technology would lead and transform not only geopolitical boundaries and the way to behave to those in the new world constructed by the digital transformation, but we had to rethink ethics itself because the religious structures and the way of thinking about the right thing is transformed by the necessity of doing things which prior to 9/11 and prior to World War II, in fact, we found unthinkable because in the construction reality by the prior technology, they couldn't be done.  They could after 9/11.  
They had been contrary to the constitution, and the law as they understood it because that understanding was constructed, as I say, by the framework created by prior technologies, which shapes the context of our lives.  It's the ground in which the figure of our lives is drawn.  
So I began working with some people there ad hoc off‑site for about a decade on how to reframe ethical issues or considerations in light of the brave new world that those executive orders created.  Make no mistake, they came from Bush originally because they had to, but Obama is more Bush than Bush on all of those issues as well as on privacy leaks and punishing whistleblowers, and most of you know that.  It's what you do when you have the power to do it.  
They were concerned with how to inflect the conversation inside the agency, if it was at all possible, in the direction that took into account what was now happening as a result of the new instructions.  So I worked with them on those issues.  We reflected on it.  I want to say for the record nothing classified was ever shared in those discussions.  I know nothing, nothing classified.  No one said anything that was classified, and if they did, there was no way I knew it was classified.  So I get to stay in America and live my life happily, and I do not have to cow tow to my Russian feeders who over a lifetime know how to give the food, take the food away, and ultimately assimilate you into the long‑term plan they have for you.  So the conversations were about sensitive issues, and the deputy director says you can't discuss what you talk about with you unless you write fiction.  Fiction is the only way to tell the truth.  That rang such a bell for me, because I found in the book The Covert Sphere, there was an academic in Ohio that wrote a whole book on exactly that same thing because post‑World War II fiction is the only way to tell the truth, and it's true for people inside the community as well.  
So I began writing stories I published about 35 and this year I will finish a novel called “Foam" and 20 or more stories reflected in "Mind Games."
Now.  You can't read that.  That's why the challenger went down.  They couldn't read the slide about the O‑ring.  
This is a tweet.  Now, I know a tweet is only 144 characters.  I'm not as stupid as I look, but the top is the tweet.  It says compare this and what he did this.  Many things that Snowden that had outed using proprietary information, and he said compare it with this.  What it's ‑‑ no, that didn't work.  What it's compared with is a long passage that he photographed, and attached to his tweet, which is the words of a dying intelligence agent who said let me tell, in effect, what we do.  He did a point by point comparison of what Snowden outed and what my short story had said.  
When when the short story was published, I got a phone call from a different friend at the agency, and he said it reminds him of Three Days of the Condor.  95% of your story isn't fiction, but you have to know which 95% to have the key to the code.  He was right.  
We agreed that people would think the stuff about Roswell,my little sci‑fi scenarios of aliens crashing their scout ship loaded with computer chips and fiber optics and the like so that humans would build the Internet because they are finding it so boring and tedious to go to cocktail parties in Georgetown to learn everything they could about us.  It was so much easier to give us the means to build the Internet, onto which we project the content of our life and work and souls.  They can just download Earth‑thinking, which was much more convenient.  This is an age of let me tell you what we do.  The story is called "Zero Day Roswell."
It's all the things we do because I know this is what we do.  The story was published in 2006.  Now Tim Melley of the academic I mentioned said this.  When democracy relies on entertainment to provide knowledge of secret affairs, as, in fact, all of the stories one way or another in "mind games" do, there's a blurring of fictional and real operations.  Now, here's an example.  Animal Farm was a full‑length animated film.  I still call them cartoons.  
It was a full‑length film of the George Orwell book ‑made by the CIA through other fronts, and that was typical of what was being done in the 1950s.  It was the suspension of democracy.  A conscious decision by the government to suspend democracy in its actions in order to preserve democracy in its fictional context, I.E., our lives.  In that context the CIA in the '50s and '60s because one of the largest sponsors of art and literature in the world.  They stood up magazines and periodicals.  
I took a course at northwestern, for Stephen Spender and he was the editor of Encounter.  Encounter for 20 years was the leading non‑communist intellectual periodical in Europe.  He claimed at the end ‑‑ his wife said he was so nieve he meant it ‑‑ he said he did not know from the beginning to the end it was a CIA operation, and there were 20 other major periodicals in the world and many others as well as using the periodicals in the media of the world or making movies the CIA published not under their own imprint over 1,000 books.  
In appointed itself a ministry of culture to combat the Soviet ministry of culture.  The way George Cannon put it, one of the formulators of our foreign policy under Eisenhower, and he said we need to act after the 1947 national security act in a way the U.S. can publicly disclaim any responsibility for the covert actions we do, because Eisenhower realized early on, you can read a book called Total Cold War, 600 pages about that.  Eisenhower realized that in the absence of a nuclear exchange, which sane men and women wouldn't have, the only way to fight the Cold War was through propaganda and disinformation.  There was no way to do this disinformation that did not cause blow‑back and did not include all the American people in the false scenarios and creative narratives that came out and through the media into the mind of society without having everybody part of that disinformation campaign.  
You couldn't deceive the Soviets without deceiving the American people, so the American people themselves became subject to the propaganda campaign we instituted in order to fight the Cold War.  I mentioned Cannon.  He was a formulator of that policy.  There's also the brothers, John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles.  John worked in tandem to create the kind of world they did, and they first overthrow the Iran over the behest of the British who were afraid their oil interests would be nationalized by a democratically elected head of government.  Then we did our bends in Guatemala, and to do that Eisenhower caught on Eddie Bearnaise, the father of spin to do it properly.  The whole religious system was used.  Priests said the lies to promulgate from the parish to the faithful to fear him so they would support the overthrow of a democratically elected government.  
So the Cold War became a war fought through symbols, words, propaganda and still we have a military presence one way or another in about 150 countries.  So we are still creating the same kind of fictions that we began to do then.  It began under Eisenhower, Cannon sponsored it.  He said they fought up with unreality and irrationalism.  Can we combat?  The answer is no.  They lie and we have to lie.  That's the method of exchange, the shaping of the mind of society in the globe and in our country as well.  The problem was when you do that in a nation that is now governed by compartalization, one of the my friends said you know more about the big picture of standing back because you talk to so many different people and know how to connect the dots.  I'm constrained.  He only recently found out a program he worked on that stood up for one purpose had a completely different covert purpose, and none of the people working on the program knew what that ultimate real intention and aim of that program was for about 20 years because they did not have a need to know.  Therefore, people inside the IC are often subjected to the same propaganda and narratives that we are because they can't go elsewhere inside the IC to ask what the truth is.  Out here we kind of can, but we can only express it without fear of jail or exile in fiction.  
So let's look at an example.  The Search for the Manchurian candidate.  You're familiar with brainwashing as a concept, correct?  We all know what brainwashing is.  It's terrible, and it's to be feared.  We fall into the clutches of evil‑doers or use drugs to bombard our brains, and pretty soon we do what they said.  The Manchurian Candidate was then turned into a movie with Frank Sinatra.  Brainwashing became part of the fabric of our understanding of what the Chinese and the Russians would do our poor guys if they were caught and subjected to it.  
Let's look at where brainwashing came from.  It came from a guy named Edward Hunter who had contracts with the CIA.  He was an agent of the CIA as he revealed.  He invented the concept of brainwashing as part of a propaganda campaign to mobilize support for the massive military buildup in the early 1950s.  Dulles at state believed in what he read about brainwashing.  
How could Dulles buy that from his own agent?  I'll give you another example of that in a minute of how easily that can happen thanks to secretary of state Hague and what he showed us.  So they believed about brainwashing what we came to believe about it.  We were in a panic about it, and we needed to find out how it worked so we began experimenting on North Korean prisoners in the same insidious ways we said they were experimenting on us because like the digital world, if anything anywhere is a threat, you have to control the whole world.  That's the rationale of our cyber thinking right now, and our terroristic thinking right now.  Our intention in dealing with brainwashing was to fuel anxiety about communism and it's methods.  Meanwhile, inside, of necessity given what we thought they were doing to us, we needed to find out how these methods worked.  The programs that we instituted, things like BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTRA. We only know about the programs because they ordered all references destroyed like Indiana Jones in the warehouse.  He forgot one box.  There was one box of 50,000 financial documents which enabled us to connect the dots on what we were doing and what the programs were about, and that's the only reason we know about it.  
When I asked the lead historian, what can you and I discuss historically with the assumption by using the same words we actually mean the same events, he laughed and he said, anything up until World War II.  He wasn't kidding.  It was kind of a joke, but he was saying that when this world OSS morphing into CIA, it was like listening to a symphony with a lot of dead spaces.  There was a lot of maintained secrecy, and it's hard to connect a dot to a non‑dot.  
Artichoke and MK-ULTRA were horrific.  A guy was head of the psychiatric association and we did it in Canada and Montreal, so we had plausible deniability.  Do what you must, but keep my fingerprints off it as president.  The things that Cameron were did were horrific.  He wiped peoples minds as much as humanly possible and tried to reprogram and repattern.  In never worked.  Why?  Because the Russian and the Chinese did not have any exotic techniques.  When they turned people against us, it was through the time‑honored techniques of brutality and interrogation used with the cultures of Chinese and Russian and the way they did things always.  There was nothing secret or spooky about it, but these movies and these books put that into our brains as a reality.  
So the fiction created even more of a fiction, and the search for what did not exist led to our establishment of COOBAR, Counter Intellegence Operation manual, which simulated brainwashing we anticipated would be done to us and subjected our people to it to prepare them for what they thought they would do to us when we were captured.  In fact, that manual turned into our offensive manual for interrogation and the SEAR program.  
"The Unit" is a TV program, and the episode 8 says they participate in a training drill and treated as prisoners of war.  It pushes them to medical and physical limits when their lives are in danger.  People watched that program on television and believed it because fiction promulgated the lie at a higher level of reinforcement.  It wasn't that successful in the series, but it nevertheless seeped into the minds of society.  
Then after 9/11 when we were going to interrogate prisoners and torture them ‑‑ I don't mean water boards, which is the go to poster boy for torture.  I'm talking about ‘oops deaths’ as an interrogation.  Where you work a little too hard and say, oops, he's gone.  You call in a doctor to falsify the death certificate and say he died of natural causes documented by Steve Miles in his concern about doctors used in contrary in Nuremberg to monitor torture and improve on it.  The result came from going point by point through thousands of documents unearthed by the ACLU about who was where when an interrogation took place and how it was done, a subject which I talked to the bioethics at the AMA about exploring a little more, and he refused.  He said if there's enough groundswell of support for looking at that, we will, but that's not our concern.  
It isn't our concern, but the irony is that manual then became the template for how we interrogated and tortured people all down the moebius strip when that pseudojournalist working for the CIA created the notion of brainwashing and it began the long journey in my minds.  Someone in in room is saying, I don't want to know that.  I don't want to know that.  I would rather do away with the discomfort of knowing because if the world you're describing is real, how do I know what is real?  Then the world tilts and it's like riding the old rotor in Chicago.  Therefore as Nietzsche said you said you want adopt reality that makes you feel better.  My explanation to how the government responded to the UFO phenomenon is full of that kind of response.  
Okay.  So that's what happened with brainwashing.  Now, I said I would tell you how it is that we come to know that we can deceive ourselves because we need to know.  What you look at is the Soviet submarine, the K‑129 was a nuclear submarine, and it went down.  We wanted to retrieve it.  We didn't want the Soviets to know we were retrieving it.  
Now, along the assumptions I spelled outed, this is what we did.  This is the Hughes Glomar Explorer built by sun ship to secretly lift a sunken submarine.  This wasn't the only project.  This was through Howard Hughes.  People have retired and are dying and they want to say something.  The burden of not ever telling the truth about your own life and your own reality someone told you the other day about their grandfather or father who was in the NSA and what it did for his marriage to disappear for four months at a time and come back and be able to say nothing.  Or as a friend of NSA said the other day kind of chuckling, a young man was coming into the agency and just got his clearances and his parents that worked there were very concerned.  Why?  He didn't know they worked at NSA, and they had lived with the family lie all their lives.  Do you see the very basis, if you look at privacy and the lack of it does to intimacy or lack of truth telling does to the possibility of trust, you have those examples throughout the intelligence community where people are bound to people only to one another in the agency but not to anyone that matters in their lives except through lies.  The only way they can tell the truth is through fiction.  But never the whole classified reality.  
I got a call from a gentleman who was stood up by the CIA to create a proprietary for a group like Hughes' group that was going to build a deep sea diving submersible to let us go get that submarine back up.  Why do it two times in why do it three times?  One, because you can like the dog in the joke that I wrote with Pete, and two, because when you put people in competition with each other in genuine ways, it's going to spur creativity.  Both of these organizations did good deep sea dives exploration and work.  They made money.  They were successful, but the covert purpose for which they really existed was to create something to bring back up the submarine.  You know how we had meetings about that and this is where you say to me, all people can't keep secrets, yes, they can.  The meetings take place deep undergrounds in bunkers and people go way down.  We would have our conversations, come up, and the meeting never happened.  There are no records.  There are no notes.  If you use the freedom of information act as friends in Interpol and FBI said you won't get what you want know because they learned how to game the system and use code to put them in a different file that has a different name you will never know.  Therefore, your request won't be honored with the documents you seek.  If a few turn up, it costs a lot of money for copying.
He led that project, and within a few weeks, just weeks before it was finished, he had to leave and move on something else.  When he saw someone they had worked during the project, it went down.  Part of it fell back down and part came up.  What we received from that information is still classified, and he asked his colleague and friend, so what did we find when we down?  He said, I'm sorry, you're on a need to know because you're not on the project anymore.  So he like me and all of us had to wait 20 years for the whole project to be declassified.  Like MK ultra.  I refer to Susan Hassler in the notes on the disk hou received.  She wrote two great books worth reading, intelligence, how the agency's alien got there.  The second book is about project MK Ultra and how they tested drugs on people and did to people.  She can only talk about it now because it's distant in time and no longer a threat.  That's a thing you have to do, is just wait.  Wait until it's no longer potent, and then you can tell more of the truth and it doesn't matter anymore.  Susan's first book in the review of "Intelligence" on your disk and on the Amazon site is there was enough white, hot anger in this book to steam a skunk.  She was so angry over the politicization during the Bush administration.  Post‑9/11 she worked with a cadre of people to connected dots.  Even someone working on the project might not even know what it's about or where it winds up.  That's unless somebody writes a story about it, the Manchurian Candidate.  They're committed to strategic fictions, simulations and deceptions.  The mind of society must become confused about what is real and rely on post‑modern deconstruction in a futile attempt on what is happening in the wilderness.  I remember sitting in the rain with a friend from NSA and told him what I thought was going on.  He said, noticing my symptoms of secondary trauma, which were very real and predictable from the conversations I was having with people including those that tortured and were tortured, he said you know enough to know what's not true, but you can't necessarily connect all of the dots to know what is true.  You have to learn to live with that ambiguity and anxiety in your constant need‑to‑know machine effort to find out what was real in your life.  When I was growing up seeking what was real and acting on it is what we were called to do as human beings.  I didn't know it would undermine that very project and make it impossible to complain, which is why I saw the red pill turns into a lavender pill.  
The most effective way of doing this kind of propaganda is not just to lie.  It is to provide a mixture of truth, half‑truths, and lies.  That's the best propaganda, and that's the most effective, because it can connect like children's blocks plugging into one an other with the schemes and narratives already in our heads snapping in place like those beads.  If it connects to what we already believe is true and sounds like that, we will build the module up in our minds and believe it is true.  So this can get us in a real, real mess.  Let me give you an example.  There's Alexander Hague.  Secretary of state.  This is where it began in a small Italian newspaper where a piece of really great investigative reporting revealed that the KGB during the Cold War was sponsoring terrorism all over the world and supporting groups.  That small story caught the attention of an author and journalist who wrote a piece about it for "The New York Times" and also wrote a book about it.  That came to the attention of Alexander Hague who was secretary of state.  He became very, very alarmed and held a press conference in which he demanded that the CIA explore this revelation to encounter the nefarious and insidious work of the KGB in this way.  The directive of the CIA said we'll get right on it, and six months later the result came back, we've explored that, and you don't have to worry about that particular thing.  Why?  Because the story in the Italian newspaper was a CIA plant in the first place.  
In other words, it was just propaganda to smear the Soviets but it was picked up by other own journalists who didn't know any better and turned into a book that went to the secretary of state and became an alarming consideration.  The CIA could not tell them the truth.  
Well, finding out what is true is not easy.  You know the story of the gnome in the woods.  He went to find the gold.  He has to tell the truth.  Which is the tree under which the gold is buried.  The gnome pointed.  He tied a scarf around the tree, and you have to promise not to remove the scarf.  The gnome promised he wouldn't.  He kept his promise.  He didn't remove the scarf but tied one around every tree in the forest.  This is what it becomes like to find the gold, of the truth.  In the book last year, UFOs and historic inquiry, it's in over 50 university libraries now.  Yale, university of Chicago and university of Basil in Switzerland.  Why?  It's bulletproof.  We only use documents over half a century our team of nine unearthed to show how it responded in light of national security concerns.  Even though we promulgate that information, it will be forgotten as soon as we said it.  In the draft in the '60s it turned young people into the streets.  It didn't reach into the lives of normal middle class Americans like the depression did in the '30s, and there's motivated forgetting.  We have the experience or we hear the words, and then we don't remember it.  The machinery of deception and cover of illusions, misdirection and distraction and if necessary ridicule or silence by authoritative voices, it just reinforces that fact.  So this is from the UFO story as we told it last year.  
I'm just pointing out that this was used as an example of cover and deception.  This is what the CIA decided in 1953 after UFO sightings over Washington.  The reports are a matter of national security.  Military personnel should be trained in the operation.  That policy really has never stopped.  Study them.  Learn what we can about the technology.  Do not allow our enemies to learn what we know about the technology or even believe they exist, and so out of necessity the citizens of the United States ridiculed and debunked and rejected were treated as if they were enemies.  That's what he said when he finally gave up, the astronomer.  He said the public was, in fact, placed in the role of the enemy against him counterespionage tactics must be employed.  I thought people that took an interest in UFOs and wanted to know about them were treated as enemies.  It's not just about that but everything Snowden did as well.  
Do you know who that is?  Somebody tell me who that is.  Thank you.  Everybody knows who Jack Bauer is.  If I showed you Hague and asked that question, very few would know who it was.  But you know who Jack Bauer is.  Listen to this quote now from justice Scalia citing "24." as relevant background for jurisprudence.
This is a quote.  Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles.  He saved hundreds of thousands of lives.  Recalling season 2 where his rough interrogation actions saved California, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.  Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?  He challenged his fellow judges and said the criminal law is against him and doesn't matter.  Is there any jury in America that will convict Jack Bauer?  I don't think so.  So the question this wonderful jurist concluded is whether we believe in absolutes.  His decision, obviously, was to believe them.  
Well, the Earth‑to‑Scalia communication was, Jack Bauer doesn't exist.  It's fiction.  The way the program was promulgated through the program "24 ‑‑" Robbie Graham is doing a wonderful book on UFOs, but it's how they manipulated and managed that program, which I just mentioned in passing to debunk the citizenry.  We're going to debunked media, and it's all documented if I have time to again ‑‑ I'll say something right now.  "Space Wars."
I couldn't get people to listen could impair our satellite functions significantly, and he was told by a director in Hollywood and told me this.  You make one mistake from the podium in what you say is true, you're ridiculed and your reputation is destroyed.  Through the various wrap‑around reinforcing outlets of media, the mouthpieces that are used, you will no longer have credibility.  If you make it fiction, he said, it's mind candy.  Here in Hollywood we've done that about things for a long, long times.  Mind candy goes down easily, and they take it for what it is.  So he wrote a novel called "Space Wars" to get the point across.  It also keeps him safe.  I don't want to go there.  
Well, all right, I'll go there.  Okay.  You know who that is, right?  More of you would recognize Dustin Hoffman playing Carl Bernstein.  Look at the face and posture.  This is what it looks like to be a lean and hungry reporter who wants to do investigative reporting.  Flash forward to this.  I asked him about the article he wrote for "Rolling Stone" in 1978, about 20,000 words and he documented all the journalists, media, CBS, time life, Cronkite, back at the ‑‑ they wanted to use Arthur got free and use Walter Cronkite to debunk it.  You showed how the journalists and media were lock step from the '50s and '60s now, what did you say about that now?  To my astonishment he said the boys from CIA don't have time for that now.  This is lean and hungry.  This is what he looked like when he said this.  400 pounds later there's a significant suggestion you have become assimilated by the very powers against which you so hungrily pursued the truth at one time.  We'll go back to that in a moment.   
What did we do with UFOs in TV.  There was a comic strip called Steve Canyon turned into a tv program and it had a single serious episode on UFOs.  I have to find out what's happening.  The Air Force took the script and rewrote it.  Instead of saying as canyon did in the first script, the person making the report is a solid citizen.  Instead, they changed it so he was having skepticism and said it wasn't worth investigating and he got that point across.  You don't have to take my word for it.  Charles Lewis just wrote a book called "935 Lies," and he talks about his experience in journalism working at CBS on "60 Minutes."
Every time they prepare a piece about someone think with Don Hewitt or other executives at CBS, they were told not to touch it.  If anyone with suggest influence and power.  When he worked with Aldridge, he killed a tough story on tobacco because Philip Morris was in the process of engaging in a lawsuit at the time.  I talked before about Jean Pope at national inquirer in 1952 was doing psychological operations for the CIA and invented the National Enquirer in '63.  The money came from frank Costello and the Mafia to sustain it all the time in the red.  When he died, the eulogy at his funeral was delivered by the Secretary of Defense at the time.  So I'm not making this up.  Let me quote from the 1991 task for report compiled by the CIA director.  The newly appointed openness task force.  
It says, and I'm quoting now, in '91, the CIA has relations with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and television network in the nation.  They have turned intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories.  It contributed to the accuracy of countless others as we consider accuracy.  It reveals that the CIA has persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold or scrap stories that could adversely affect national securities interests as we constituted.  
So, let's see.  It's almost time, so I'm going to bring this to a conclusion by pointing out that strip is serious.  In this book "Mind Games" there's a 0-Day Roswell story.  There's one called "break memory" about how the masters of society moderate the media and work on hackers at the end and the quote from the intelligence agent is we're not amateurs.  We do this for a living.  You don't want to spend your life to the corner of he can foreign embassy and in solitary being tortured.  You don't want to live in Russia without any hope of getting out.  You want to take seriously what this is.  
I have two stories in here, versions of each other Northward Into the Night which reveal in one story two layers and another three layers.
I have one called more than a dream about an encounter with it and I have Incident at Wolf Cove that shows the events on the psyche of a human being.  It's all in here.  It's the only way to tell the truth.  
It's the only way a spy novelist, a Frenchman, can tell the truth.  You may not know his name.  I'm just going to throw out that he wrote an astonishing story about Libya, and what would happen there three months before  ‑‑ three months before it happened.  He did a novel about Syria and the assassination in Lebanon, and he named all the names and the names were accurate.  People go to him and read him, even though they say they don't because it's pulpfiction, but it's always accurate.  He was invited to dinner with the minister of Defense of France.  He said why did you ask me?  It's clear you and I have exactly the same sources.  He's not even read here.  Only one book is in English translation.  I think I put in the bibliography the spy novelist who knows too much.  You can't read it, but if you want it, give me your card afterwards or connect with me at thiemeworks.com and I'll be glad to respond with anything you want to know.  I always say I belong to this community and the seeking of truth.  It's the true hacker ethos and the hacker heart.  It is a lot like the game.  The guy came into the western town to play and went to saloon and watched the roulette for a while, and he said this game is crooked.  I know, but it's the only game in town.  You may not be able to play to win, but you got to play or else the red pill isn't a lavender pill but it's a blue pill and you holding on.  So connecting with one another in stealthy, appropriate ways to discover the truth, in order to strategize to find a way in little ways to act on it in any way that might make a difference.  That's really the heart of the hacker ethos.  I have a couple of minutes, and there's no Q and A room anymore.  I'll take Q and A up there at the bar or wherever I see you.  If you have a question now ‑‑ got a question back there?  Are you just waving at me?  Anybody have a question?  Yes.  
( Inaudible question ) 
>> I'm familiar with the book.  My thoughts on ‑‑ 
( Inaudible question ) 
>> That's possible.  That's all I can say, is that's possible.  There's different scenarios.  I learned during the research for the UFO book unless we nail it town and make it bulletproof, all you can say is that's interesting.  That's all I can say.  Anybody else?  Question?  Where?  
( Inaudible question ) 
>> When my friends, the Deputy Director for Homeland Defense at the NSA said to me directly, you can't talk about what we talked about with you.  Then he paused and he said, unless you start writing fiction.  Fiction is the only way to tell the truth.  That's a literal translation of a conversation we had personally.  I returned to writing short stories.  I published 35 of them and I'm about to finish a novel.  Mind games is about four kinds of nonconsensual reality.  Intelligence work, hackers, encounters with alien civilizations and deep states of consciousness and what we see and experience when we genuinely have the courage to explore the psychic connections between us and who we are as a composite organism.  There's four kinds of stories and that's when I did it.  What he was saying made sense, and we took very deadly seriously the almost failed effort to inflect the conversation inside.  We know how it hasn't happened, but there are words inside in policy that suggest people do something along the lines we suggested that this is a huge issue.  When your task is to defend and protect Americans, you understand it and put everything else on the back burner.  When you go to the White House and they hand you the briefing, any human being says what you can do to stop these?  When they say do this, this and this.  You say do it.  Do anything humanly possible to stop that.  Questions later?  Okay.  Thank you very, very much.  I appreciate it.  
( Applause )