§5. Notes on Perfidious Albion and the Walrus, January - June 2016
The Cousins Take Exception to an Intruder Into Their Club
The exponential growth of mass surveillance in the first two decades of the 21st century brought the United States into an era of universal criminalization. To the spy agencies, everyone became a potential enemy, to be watched, monitored, tracked for any sign of opposition. The election of a president by actual consent of the governed constituted an existential threat to these and other agencies that had grown accustomed to acting on their own, without direction, popular consent, or Constitutional procedure.
CIA's use of GCHQ to get around a legal restriction on domestic spying may have seemed a natural extension of the long history of cooperation between British and American spies. GCHQ and MI5 excelled in 'human intelligence', their savoir-faire a key link with the European continent, while the American spies had the edge in technology, electronic surveillance, and data collection. They shared a visceral dislike of Donald Trump and his populist incursion into their clubby world.
Accordingly British ex-spy Christopher Steele was retained by the Democrat National Committee (DNC) to perform what is known in the trade as 'opposition research' on the object of their mutual hatred. Steele's payments were laundered through the Perkins Coie law firm and a research firm called Fusion GPS. Matching the indirection of his payments, his fantastical stories were also sourced indirectly. They were invented by the vodka-fueled Igor Danchenko, a Brookings employee and U.S. apparatchik-in-waiting. Assembled into a 'dossier' larded with spook-speak, this Podesta-Clinton brainchild was retailed to the spy agencies, Congressional committees, State Department, newspapers, Internet aggregators, and anyone else of a mind to credit allegations of treason.
To lend verisimilitude to a dossier lacking it, the spy agencies then resurrected an old asset, Stephen Halper, a k a 'The Walrus' (for his wide girth), to entice Trump campaign staffers into compromising Russian association. The staffers didn't take the bait. Nevertheless the spy agencies published their assertions in cooperating media, then cited these publications as evidence of their veracity. This technique of mutual verification and reification later blossomed into a quadraphonic medley comprising the spy agencies and their media outlets, the cloud-dwelling technocracy, and Congressional committees.
Timeline: §5. Perfidious Albion and the Walrus, January - June 2016:
