- 05 Jan 2017 19:41
#14759444
The CIA, in the heady days of the mid-twentieth century, was a principle funding source of many writers, artists, political theorists, as well as political figures both in the US and abroad.
The term that came to be used to describe such people is 'agent of influence.' They were not usually direct employees of the CIA, and there was typically no obvious quid pro quo for money received. The CIA was able to exert leverage over such agents simply by virtue of the fact that they had become economically dependent on their funding. An agent of influence is simply an influential individual whose independence has been compromised by economic interest.
A famous example is George Plimpton, the editor of the highly influential (in intellectual circles) Paris Review. Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T.C. Boyle, Edward P. Jones and Rick Moody published their first stories in the Review; Jack Kerouac, Jim Carroll, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides all had important early stories in its pages. George Plimpton was a CIA agent of influence, and the Paris Review was, at least in part, part of his cover.
The important thing to realize about such individuals is that they are compromised. No matter how valuable the work is they do, you can never be quite certain who is speaking on any individual occasion. Is it the artist/editor/critic speaking, or is it the agent of influence speaking?
There have been numerous agents of influence in business, as well. Prescott Bush and Fred Koch had business interests in Nazi Germany, and Armand Hammer in the Soviet Union. This is not in every case a bad thing. Agents of influence can, in certain cases, expose the mainstream public to points of view they wouldn't hear from the usual media sources. The problem occurs when an agent's sponsor has interests in conflict with the agent's nominal home nation. It is all too easy for such an agent to rationalize to himself that his actions are motivated by nationalism when they are motivated by personal financial interest.
And this brings us to Donald J. Trump, a longstanding agent of influence for Russia. Trump's Russia connection commenced when US banks got tired of being stiffed by Trump and refused to lend him more money. Trump made up this deficit partially by attracting credulous investors in the private sector, but that didn't get him a sufficient credit line for his ambitious plans.
Enter the Russians. They have a long history of cultivating western businessmen dating back to the days of the Soviet Union. By 2008, Donald Trump Jr. (VP for Development for The Trump Organization) told attendees at a real estate conference in New York City that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Of the estimated $650M of Trump debt, the Russian share is not exactly known, but it is in the hundreds of millions at a minimum.
At the very least, Trump's personal exposure to a withdrawal of Russian favor severely limits his options in dealing with them. So when Trump expresses a blanket dismissal, for example, of Russian involvement in hacking in the US, we have to ask this question:
Is this Donald Trump nationalist speaking or is it Donald Trump agent of influence speaking?
The fact is we can never know. The only thing we know for sure is that his independence is compromised.
The term that came to be used to describe such people is 'agent of influence.' They were not usually direct employees of the CIA, and there was typically no obvious quid pro quo for money received. The CIA was able to exert leverage over such agents simply by virtue of the fact that they had become economically dependent on their funding. An agent of influence is simply an influential individual whose independence has been compromised by economic interest.
A famous example is George Plimpton, the editor of the highly influential (in intellectual circles) Paris Review. Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T.C. Boyle, Edward P. Jones and Rick Moody published their first stories in the Review; Jack Kerouac, Jim Carroll, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides all had important early stories in its pages. George Plimpton was a CIA agent of influence, and the Paris Review was, at least in part, part of his cover.
The important thing to realize about such individuals is that they are compromised. No matter how valuable the work is they do, you can never be quite certain who is speaking on any individual occasion. Is it the artist/editor/critic speaking, or is it the agent of influence speaking?
There have been numerous agents of influence in business, as well. Prescott Bush and Fred Koch had business interests in Nazi Germany, and Armand Hammer in the Soviet Union. This is not in every case a bad thing. Agents of influence can, in certain cases, expose the mainstream public to points of view they wouldn't hear from the usual media sources. The problem occurs when an agent's sponsor has interests in conflict with the agent's nominal home nation. It is all too easy for such an agent to rationalize to himself that his actions are motivated by nationalism when they are motivated by personal financial interest.
And this brings us to Donald J. Trump, a longstanding agent of influence for Russia. Trump's Russia connection commenced when US banks got tired of being stiffed by Trump and refused to lend him more money. Trump made up this deficit partially by attracting credulous investors in the private sector, but that didn't get him a sufficient credit line for his ambitious plans.
Enter the Russians. They have a long history of cultivating western businessmen dating back to the days of the Soviet Union. By 2008, Donald Trump Jr. (VP for Development for The Trump Organization) told attendees at a real estate conference in New York City that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Of the estimated $650M of Trump debt, the Russian share is not exactly known, but it is in the hundreds of millions at a minimum.
At the very least, Trump's personal exposure to a withdrawal of Russian favor severely limits his options in dealing with them. So when Trump expresses a blanket dismissal, for example, of Russian involvement in hacking in the US, we have to ask this question:
Is this Donald Trump nationalist speaking or is it Donald Trump agent of influence speaking?
The fact is we can never know. The only thing we know for sure is that his independence is compromised.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci