Sport of Kings

I am the Post-Service Media Placement Coordinator at the Central Intelligence Agency. Office of Technical Service, Building 2A, third floor, end of the hall past the vending machines that only take coins minted before 2004. My job title has changed four times. After the Church Committee we became "Interagency Communications Liaison." After Iran-Contra, "Public Narrative Continuity." After 9/11, "Strategic Transparency." After Snowden, "Community Outreach & Alumni Relations." The job never changed. The job is putting our people on television and making sure the polymer holds under studio lighting. The face is from Jonna's program. She built it in the eighties. Demonstrated one for President Bush in the Oval Office, February 4th, 1993. He said "Show me." She said "I'm already wearing it." The President of the United States could not tell. That was the point. If the President cannot tell, you cannot tell. We have been issuing them to retirees since 1996. Three expressions come standard: Concerned Patriot, Measured Authority, and Reluctant Hawk. Bob chose Measured Authority. The polymer is the same compound we used in Moscow in 1986. It was good enough to fool the KGB at a distance of four feet in winter lighting. It was not designed for high-definition broadcast television. But you were not supposed to have high-definition broadcast television. That was not in the original timeline. People think Operation Mockingbird ended. It did not end. It got a dental plan. In 1977, we had to recruit journalists. Coerce them. Maintain cover. Burn assets when they got sloppy. Carl Bernstein found four hundred of them and published it in Rolling Stone and we spent eleven months on remediation. Remediation did not mean we stopped. Remediation meant we made it look like we stopped. The Church Committee published a report. The report said we would stop. We did not stop. We restructured. Now they apply through a portal. John Brennan submitted his CNN contributor application sixteen days before his last day as Director. I processed it myself. His media training was three sessions. Most of them need fewer. By the time they reach my office they have been speaking to cameras for thirty years. The only difference is the chyron. The chyron used to say "CIA Director." Now it says "CNN National Security Analyst." The mouth says the same words. The words come from the same building. The pipeline has placement agreements with all three networks. Fox gets the military branch — flag officers, Vice Admirals, SEALs. Strong jaw. Prominent brow. Command presence. We match phenotype to audience psychographic. CNN gets the analysts — GS-15 and above, Langley proper, preferably someone who can say "sources and methods" without blinking. MSNBC gets the overflow. We do not optimize for MSNBC. Seventeen former intelligence officials currently hold active television contracts. I placed eleven of them. The network logos on their chyrons cost less annually than a single foreign station chief. The return on investment is incalculable because the return is not measured in dollars. The return is measured in what you believe. Bob's face was fitted in 2017. He was supposed to be National Security Advisor. The White House fell through. He called it a "shit sandwich." Direct quote. It was in the Washington Post. We had already done the molding. OTS does not issue refunds. OTS does not issue apologies. OTS issues faces and the faces go on television and the television goes into your home and you believe the face is a person and the person is telling you what is happening in the world. That is the product. The product is your belief. The face is the delivery mechanism. Anderson's intake was different. He came in as a summer intern in '89. Yale pipeline. We earmarked him for output, not field. He was never going to run assets in Mogadishu. He was going to be the asset that runs in your living room every night at eight. The face is his own. The words were always ours. The internship program has a 340% return on investment measured against traditional recruitment, which requires safe houses and cash drops and extraction protocols and occasionally someone dies. Anderson required a recommendation letter. No one has ever died from a recommendation letter. This is why the program expanded. The face is a known problem. OTS designed the current polymer for field conditions — six hours in a Karachi safe house, a brush pass in humidity, one meeting in a poorly ventilated embassy annex. Not fourteen minutes under 5600K LED panel arrays in a Manhattan broadcast studio. The compound was rated for incandescent. Nobody at OTS anticipated 4K resolution because in 1987 we were still convincing the KGB that a man in a wig was a different man. The technology outran us. Your cameras got better. Our faces did not. I filed nine procurement requests for a polymer upgrade. Form TS-7712. The ninth one referenced the first eight. Nobody responded. The people who approve TS-7712s are on television now. They are wearing the faces I requisitioned for them. They will not approve the replacement faces because the replacement faces would acknowledge the current faces and the current faces are classified and they are classified because acknowledging them would require Legal to review the separation package NDA and Legal spent four years drafting the exclusion clause that allows the faces to appear on television in the first place and they will not reopen it. This is how the system protects itself. Not through conspiracy. Through paperwork. Through seventeen people who cannot fix the thing because fixing the thing requires admitting the thing and admitting the thing is a different form and no one has the clearance to sign both forms. The people on the forums have gotten close. Closer than the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is remarkable because the Senate Intelligence Committee has a $2.3 million annual oversight budget and the people on the forums have a screen recording of a Fox News broadcast and two hours of free time. I filed a containment memo in 2021. It was denied. The stated reason was "public dismissal is more cost-effective than active suppression." Meaning: if the correct answer comes from someone the public has pre-decided not to take seriously, the correct answer functions identically to a wrong answer. We did not invent that principle. We observed it. We have relied on it since 1974. It has never failed. The people who are right are also the people you will never believe. That is not a coincidence. That is the program working as designed. MKUltra got declassified because someone forgot to shred a box in a basement in 1977. One box. Seven thousand pages. Twenty years of non-consensual experimentation on American citizens entered the public record because a filing clerk made a mistake. The face program will never get declassified because no one has ever written it down. I am the documentation. There is no box to forget. There is no filing clerk. There is me, a polymer budget, and seventeen mouths on television saying what we need them to say. My retirement is in nine months. My replacement has not been hired. The posting is on USAJobs. It has been on USAJobs for four years. The clearance requirement is TS/SCI with a full-scope polygraph and "familiarity with broadcast media technical standards." Fourteen people have applied. All fourteen failed the polygraph. Not because they lied. Because they did not believe the questions were real. The questions are real. The faces are real. The program is real. You are watching it right now. Bob is on Fox right now. The polymer is separating slightly above the left ear. I can see it. You cannot see it unless you know. Blaire saw it. That is fine. Blaire cannot issue a subpoena. Blaire cannot convene a hearing. Blaire can post and the post will travel and the people who see it will say "haha he does look weird" and then they will change the channel and the next channel will have another one of our faces and the face will tell them what is happening in the world and they will believe it because the mouth moves and the mouth is confident and the confidence is the product. The program does not have a name. It has never had a name. Named things can be investigated. Named things appear in FOIA requests. Named things get found in basements by filing clerks who do not know what they are shredding. We learned that from MKUltra. We learned that from Mockingbird. The lesson was not "stop." The lesson was "stop writing it down." I am writing it down now. You are reading it. Tomorrow you will not be sure this was real. That is also the program. Not the forgetting. The not being sure. The not being sure is the only thing we have ever needed from you.