The Decadent Worker

“At the end of 1961,” writes E. Howard Hunt in Undercover, “Dulles was forced to ‘retire,’ and Richard Bissell followed. He was succeeded, not by Tracy Barnes, but by Richard Helms, untainted by the Bay of Pigs.

“After a considerable bureaucratic struggle Barnes established the Domestic Operations Division and appointed me its chief of covert action. The new division accepted both personnel and projects unwanted elsewhere within CIA, and those covert-action projects that came to me were almost entirely concerned with publishing and publications. We subsidized “significant’ books, for example, The New Class, by Milovan Djilas, one of a number of Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., titles so supported; ran a couple of news services — one based in Washington’s National Press Building — even subsidizing the printing and distribution of a well-known series of travel books. The work was not particularly demanding, and at the end of the day, I still had sufficient energy to write fiction at home.”

As a former buddy of Lee Harvey Oswald, writing a noval based on a man who may have gone to Russia at CIA instigation, I would have been within the field of Hunt’s official attention at that time. I find it hard to believe that he would not at least have known about me, if he was not, as I’m inclined to suspect, traveling to New Orleans on an occasional weekend to give me his personal attention, using the name of a man he wanted to implicate in the JFK assassination plot: one Gary Kirstein… (p. 154)

Witness Richard Nixon’s sweating in the Watergate tapes about E. Howard Hunt’s power to make public further crimes, linked somehow in Nixon’s mind with ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing,’ in which Nixon obviously felt himself to be implicated. That’s dealt with in some of the science-fiction Slim is talking about and it is also going to happen in the real world. Someday there will be individuals with microphones planted in their heads so that many people can hear what is going on in their lives. And they will be centers of invisible governments, that everyone equipt to listen will belong to — like big houses with one person at the center of every one of them. What do you think of that idea?”

I thought it both bizarre and impossible, but I did not want to say as much to them. “Yeah, that sounds like a pretty clever way to resist the government.” (p. 157)

“Kerry, what do you think of various organizations in the intelligence community joining forces for recruiting purposes, by implanting listening devices on individuals and observing their behavior until who they should work for is decided on the basis of what kind of people they are?”

Again, I expressed agreement with what seemed both irrelevant and unlikely… (p. 158) — Kerry Wendell Thornley, The Dreadlock Recollections, (c) 1984

LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Totalitarianism: Where every aspect of the individual’s life except community business is the business of the community.

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