Section 31: Archonology Redux

The first actual book we will be looking at in this series is Miles Copeland’s A Game of Nations.

It is long out of print and physical copies can often go for hundreds of dollars. But, putting it delicately, in this particular instance Google is your friend.

At first glance it may appear surprising that the Cairo section chief for the CIA wrote a tell all book about his experiences in the Middle East but there you have it. This is probably the easiest read of the books will be looking at. It's almost gossipy in the mid 20th century patrician way. Normals like you or I may name drop in a clunky fashion. Miles does that thing where he references a person or their behaviour as if you already know about it. Makes for an exciting read.

Given that he was Cairo section chief, the book deals mostly with Nasser but Miles repeatedly mentions that the same process or mode of engagement is used for any foreign leader in Africa, the Middle East or Asia. Nasser is the 'template example'. It's not clear to me how much of this book is a limited hangout. I am under no illusions that Miles almost certainly left out all the exciting stuff with piano wires and frozen poisoned darts that comes with running a CIA outpost. For instance, before he died, Copeland admitted to Engdahl that he smuggled the Muslim Brotherhood leadership out of Egypt after their failed assassination attempt on President Nasser and into Saudi Arabia. Another day, another breezy reorganisation of the political shape of the Middle East.

This book strikes me instead as one written by a believer in the process and the project, at a time when there were no credible alternatives. It is racist as the day is long, with the very hottest of takes regarding the character and nature of the 'Afro-Asiatics' - literally a racial class that has never existed. It is a potent peek into the mentality of the men who not only have the arrogance to attempt running the world, but who see it as a game. Some of the books we will look at in this series are so confident in the cause and the goals of the Atlanticists that they just lay it all out. No need for whistleblowers or thumb drives snuck out of the country. Just "this is what we're doing, these are the effects, and we are going to win."

With each of the books under examination, we will pull out two or three main points that we can then assemble at the end of the series. This will be followed up with secondary insights and disclosures to build out a higher resolution image.

A Game of Nations: Main Points

1. Historical analysis is always wrong because mainstream historians fail to understand intelligence analysis. That is straight out of the mouth of an actual spy who wrote an actual history book. This is also why we begin our book series with it. Return to this statement often.
2. Crypto-diplomacy: the expansion of the Liberal imperium - i.e. the Bretton Woods system- only looks effortless or preordained. In the background there are hundreds of men like Copeland, 'crypto-diplomats', doing all the killing and bribing and threatening and collapsing countries and swapping out elected leaders that make the imperium look like a triumphant march of history. They are the stage crew of the Bretton Woods system.
3. There really is a working group - satirised as iron Mountain- that scenario plans and games world events. The goal is simply to win. The Atlanticists do not think in terms of right and wrong, or good guys and bad guys. There is just power and advantage. There is only winning.
4. The technocratic, transhumanist agenda of the Atlanticists was in full swing by the early 60s.

Best believe we will return to this. But for now, the secondary points.

A Game of Nations: Secondary Points

• In situations where the secondary or tertiary powers in Eurasia are squabbling, the Atlanticists will send out what Secretary Dulles called 'a great white father'. Which may sound astoundingly dated until you realise it was only a couple of years ago that Tony Blair was sent into the Middle East to broker some sort of Arab Israeli peace. Tony. Fucking. Blair.
• Pan-Arab nationalism was a CIA project. President Nasser was initially supposed to be its leader. The project failed and was abandoned.
• It was openly decided that America would literally become the 'world police' or Pax Britannica after World War II.
• Coups and student demonstrations were regularly used even back then to overthrow governments. (Arab Spring.)
• Leaders are selected and replaced entirely by Western decree.

• The obsession with 'bringing democracy and elections' to the Middle East was in large part because it works better as a testing ground for social manipulation and ease in hijacking political processes. Advertising practices from Madison Avenue were deployed in cities and countries that have no experience with advertising to get a 'clean' experiment on the Impact of political advertising for one candidate or another. There is absolutely no allegiance to the idea of free and fair democratic elections. At all.
• Copeland cites Bertrand Russell as a guiding light in this "pragmatic practice".
• The West has absolutely no problem using terror or terrorists. The CIA conceals this fact because Americans find it distasteful.

• Copeland goes into some detail describing the complicity of academia in this process.

Boldly Going Where Bretton Would

Consider the adequate-if-limited description of the Bretton Woods system in the first installment of the series.

It has not escaped the attention of even grosser nerds than me that Star Trek Discovery could otherwise be called Star Trek Section 31.

For those of you who prefer regular sex to understanding the minutiae of the Star Trek universe, let me explain Section 31.

Section 31 was the name of an officially-nonexistent and autonomous clandestine organization which claimed to protect the security interests of United Earth and, later, the United Federation of Planets. Loosely speaking, it was Starfleet's black-ops division, operating separately from and usually without the knowledge of Starfleet Intelligence (though it often recruited members of Starfleet Intelligence). Section 31 was also somewhat comparable to the Romulan Tal Shiar or Cardassian Obsidian Order – unlike these other organizations, however, Section 31's very existence was a deeply buried secret, known only to a handful of people beyond its own membership. [More.]

In many respects, Section 31 is one of Star Trek's more remarkable creations. As you all know, the Roddenberry/Stevens conception of Star Trek is very much a postwar artefact. It is the confident, modernist, poverty-free, exploration of a universe of increasing peace and justice. The Federation is quite literally the postwar Bretton Woods arrangement on its best day.

Neither Stevens nor Roddenberry seemed especially interested in exploring the implications of this idea -probably too interested in actual space and High Strangeness- but every other franchise has done a decent job of interrogating the problems with this worldview in its own way. Before we continue, I just want to point out that in almost every instance I consider this exploration to be 'simply' good creative decisions rather than tale-telling (particularly after Leslie Stevens left, and excluding some of the mega weirdness of TNG and DS9.)

Beginning with The Next Generation and its films, we have Alfre Woodard exposing the pompous hypocrisy of the Liberal/Centrist suspicion of money and the superiority of what we'd call today a digital universal basic income. I cut two sequences together for you here:

The Borg, in general, is Next Gen's creative response to the Liberal Imperium because it is the Bretton Woods system taken to its natural conclusion. As Venom is to Spiderman or Magneto is to Professor Xavier, the Borg are the shadow version of the Federation -which is why they are their greatest threat. They are an expansionist, technocratic culture that agglomerates smaller cultures to itself and expects to be thanked for it. Both genuinely believe they are improving the galaxy by making it more like themselves.

Yes, the Borg ended up being somewhat overused, but it is a remarkably sophisticated depiction of 'exploration as imperialism'. Bretton Woods could easily be described as 'your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own' -particularly if 'biological distinctiveness' refers to the natural resources of the countries absorbed into the Liberal Imperium to be harvested by western corporations.

Deep Space Nine is -as Chris Knowles described a few years ago- the story of what happens when the US/Atlanticist military encounters ancient, extradimensional god-beings and the far-reaching ontological implications of such a contact event. (So it's a documentary, basically.) DS9 is the first franchise to introduce us to Section 31 by name.

We find out it is a centuries-old, secret, ungoverned, black ops apparatus with the one goal of keeping the Federation system safe and operational. It unilaterally decides what is a threat to the Federation way of life and eliminates it. It is Miles Copeland's crypto-diplomacy in space. The very existence of Section 31 demonstrates that -like the Liberal Imperium itself- the Federation has no special destiny. Its victory is not forgone. It requires Section 31 to exist because the galaxy doesn't match the Federation's public beliefs about how it should work. And there is simply no Liberal Imperium without crypto-diplomacy. The quotation from the above Memory Alpha page, from Odo, neatly sums it up.

"Interesting, isn't it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31's tactics, but when they need the dirty work done, they look the other way. It's a tidy little arrangement, wouldn't you say?"

DS9 also introduces us to secret military programmes designed to destroy cultures the Federation has an official policy of reaching peaceful agreements with. We'll return to this.

Voyager -you might immediately think- gets a pass from all this stuff because the ship was in a whole other quadrant of the galaxy as the Federation was collapsing under the weight of its own paranoid, militarised implications and the blatant lies and war crimes it uses to prop itself up. (Remind you of anywhen?)

But it is precisely that distance that allowed it to explore the same Bretton Woods/Liberal Imperium territory. Janeway's journey is about answering the question of whether the premises of the Federation are beliefs or whether they are rules.

With no one around to enforce them, does she still stick to them? And the occasional episodes (one with Andy Dick was the bummest of notes) set back in the Alpha Quadrant show a Federation at further and further variances from the beliefs that guide Voyager. This is to such an extent that by the time Janeway gets her crew home, Voyager is basically the last 'real' Federation ship left in the galaxy. It is explicitly her morality that gets them home and it demonstrates that there is some value in Liberal expansionism -something I personally believe- but it has all too often been a cover story for Empire, per A Game of Nations. (I rewatched Voyager at the beginning of the year. It's better than I remembered, Andy Dick notwithstanding.)

Enterprise seems -on the surface- another unlikely candidate given it is set before the formation of the Federation. But it is in Enterprise that we see Section 31 predates it, most notably in an episode to do with the weaponisation of viruses and their cures, alarmingly enough.

There are two additional things that make it relevant in a macro sense.

1. Both Enterprise and Star Trek Discovery -but especially Enterprise- have more story arcs to do with the manipulation of time. It ramped up somewhat in the last couple of series of Voyager but Enterprise really turns on it. I expect Discovery to eventually build on it.
2. Archonologically, it is significant that Earth's 'first contact species', the Vulcans, are highly manipulative and profoundly suspicious in Enterprise. The show exposes that the Vulcans also have secret military projects masquerading as science projects, they ration out useful technologies to the humans in an unbelievably paternal sense.

Point two becomes interesting because the Vulcans are clearly the British in the Star Trek universe. Just as the Klingons are Russians, the Romulans are Chinese, the Ferengi are (stonkingly Anti-Semitic depictions of) Diaspora Jews. I think the Cardassians are Israelis, making the Bajorans Palestinians. But you can also swap out any technocratic occupation of an analogue culture for geostrategic reasons. Chinese occupation of Tibet would also work, for instance.

So Section 31 evolves in a world where the 'space British' are doing the same thing, and it learns some of its tricks from them, as well as to some extent justifying its independence because of them. That is -beat by beat- the story of the formation of the US intelligence industry. Copeland says as much, in fact.

Multidimensional Intelligence Agencies

If you've watched the films set in JJ Abrams's alternate universe, you will know that Section 31 exists there also. At this point, we'll play a game all Trek nerds play. It is called "If I were a showrunner".

1. Consider the possibility that Ambassador Spock joins Section 31 sometime after The Next Generation, and his subsequent machinations in that role are what sent the villain from the first reboot, Nero, back in time to kill Kirk, as well as sending Spock himself. Which is to say, consider the possibility he deliberately set up an alternate universe for Section 31. At the very least, it would provide an explanation for why Spock helped alterna-Spock defeat alterna-Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, against all his moral principles. (But we learn from Copeland that these are disregarded by crypto-diplomats, anyway.)
2. This would also go some way to explaining the increasing 'time cop' and 'temporal war' motifs in Enterprise and Voyager. Section 31 would need to be multidimensional to continue doing its crypto-diplomatic job.
3. Discovery is set between the original series and Enterprise. There is no mention of the spore drive anywhere else in all the franchises that come after it in the timeline. And the drive itself is a secret project. "If I were a showrunner" I would explain this by absorbing it into Section 31 so that no one ever knows about it, as well as providing a significant technological advantage for the spy agency. (Which it would be, and might actually be in real life, in some form.)

At this point you have the creative opportunity to origami-fold all the franchises in together and really, really interrogate what the Federation 'means'. This is why Discovery has been called Star Trek Section 31.

It would also give you the best -presumably accidental- fictional depiction of the last two centuries of Atlanticist spy craft ever put to celluloid. And in that vein, I'd just like to mention that the first Section 31 agent ever introduced in the series, in Deep Space Nine, is called Luther Sloan.

'Lucifer of Sloane Square'. Sloane Square; the stomping ground of wealthy, British bloodline families. In London, where a secret Section 31 facility was bombed in Star Trek Into Darkness.

Might be time for this post series to jump the pond.